Bullshit. If distribution costs through digital entertainment are nill, then the artist can actually use the free distribution to promote live performances.
Are you proposing that movies should be performed live or simply that they should go away? Bullshit, indeed.
The advances I had in mind are specifically how unbelievably inexpensive hard drive storage capacity has become. If the bits are fungible, then today's price is down to 50 cents per gigabyte with no concerns about the possible complexity of burning and storing DVD-R media. You just add it to your drive. That puts audio CD's in the price range of a quarter versus $15 to $20 for the commercial product. Similarly for DVD's, even a 10 gigabyte movie requires no more than $5 worth of space.
There are at least two more orders of magnitude improvements that are just a matter of applying known technology and customary competition. So that's 5 cents for a movie and a fraction of a penny for an audio CD. It is just plain brutal for the producer. Proponents of market economies like to extoll the virtues of creative destruction. Well, here it is in spades.
What we have here is a two way slippery slope. Mathematically it is hard to envision but the idea is that we get an unstable condition in both directions. The draconian remedies favored by the recording industry were originally designed to handle cases of commercial copyright infringement. They make more sense in that setting. Allowing its unfettered use in non-commercial cases is a solution that might be worse than the problem.
On the other hand if the court adopts a hands off stance toward personal, non-commercial copyright infringement, the relentless advances of technology could make the production of digital entertainment significantly less profitable. One of the ideas of copyright law is to encourage the activities of production even as it inhibits more widescale consumption.
The judgment one has to make is which alternative is more potentially damaging to society. I think that even in a society where non-commercial file swapping is completely unchecked, the majority will still choose to purchase what they want. But I could certainly be wrong about that. I just think it is lesser risk than allowing powerful entrenched interests an effective veto power over the development of new technology.
To understand how this could be more significant than how people choose to access silly popular entertainment consider the implications for technical competition between societies. Since my undergrad days at Caltech I became aware that the very expensive texts that we used could be purchased for a fraction of the price we paid in many places in Asia including India and China. If we continue to choose the draconian path while other countries assume a more permissive stance, that would (has) set up an experiment between the U.S. and, for instance, China. I'm uncomfortable with the possible result of that sort of experiment.
You really need to get your PC fixed. Seriously - all those crashes and reboots you talk about are not normal. I can run Azerus, firefox, burn a dvd and whatever else with no problems.
That is always a possible reply and it can't be trivially dismissed but here is one concerning multitasking and WinXP that is less easily dismissed. Coming from the Mac I was completely surprised to learn you can only have one process running that uses the video overlay. If two different processes try to display video at the same time the results will vary but they are always bad. For instance a second VLC window will play but the colors are screwed up. If my HDTV program is launched while another program (like VLC) is using the overlay you get a warning message (if you are lucky) and the second program quits. If you are unlucky you get a crash.
This is an unambiguous example of how multitasking for WinXP can be a myth. You are not allowed to have two programs running that use the video overlay. There is no such odd restriction to multitasking of video applications on the Mac.
The other instability problems I have with WinXP might be related to the fact that I use it to do software rendering of HDTV which puts a real stress on the bandwidth of the PCI bus. While that is running it is always a mistake to start moving a 300 meg file across the network (to or from the PC). It may be unrealistic but I expect the OS to handle conditions like that gracefully rather than require a restart.
If one could simply chuckle at your humorous comment, that would be a situation that is better than we have. The comment that set off this entire thread was a snide remark from someone who was at least 5 years out of date.
It isn't as though there are not limitations and annoyances with running OS X just like every other computer OS. What Mac users often find so tedious is that critical remarks are so often from people who really don't know what they are talking about. They don't have any personal knowledge so they repeat garbage that hasn't been true for almost a decade.
Certainly these critics have no obligation to spend time learning what current (or even reasonably recent) reality is. But why do they adopt smug attitudes while displaying their cluelessness? And why even bother to post comments about articles that are clearly of no interest to them? Well, that's all the venom I need to get rid of today and it's still quite early.
Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.
My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.
So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.
More exploits does not necessarily inmply less secure
Read that again and contemplate just how stupid it is. Who cares how secure a system might be if you lived in a parallel universe where Mac OS X is the predominant system? WE DON'T LIVE IN THAT UNIVERSE! The claim that OS X is as sloppy as WinXP is not only not conclusively proved, it is essentially unprovable. On some point about quantum mechanics Dirac has said, "that isn't even wrong".
In our world (the one where we live) more exploits DOES imply less secure. Hell, it might as well be the definition of less secure. Is that point so utterly mysterious?
Is your point that there is a reasonable chance that enough people will change and then they'll be sorry once OS X has 95% of the market? My point is that if your application is supported by OS X and you are tired of dealing with all the exploits for Windows then you have a choice to leave the exploits behind. Your decision is not going to change the nature of the market.
Articles like this one are written to spread FUD. That it is doing its job is apparent in the case of some people when they carry on about "conclusive proof". Just to be clear I think there will be some sort of proof when an exploit has actually been observed. As long as it is just Apple releasing security patches that is not proof of any sort. That is business as usual.
Your idea of conclusive proof is what one might expect from a dilettante. What would you use to describe a proof that actually was conclusive? You don't know (and I don't know) how things would develop if Apple had the sort of market dominance that Windows has. As a matter of fact it does not matter how things would be different since it is not going to happen. If you or everyone you knew were to abandon Windows for OS X it would make no difference in Windows' market dominance. Nothing you do or say will make any difference.
If you truly understand and agree with that assessment then what actually matters to a practical person is the security records that actually exist, not what would be the case in a world that does not and will not exist. Be a man and own up to your decision. You choose a less secure system and are prepared to live with the consequences. Now go scan your system for viruses and clean out the latest batch.
Oh, please, your contortions are ridiculous. Consumer adoption of broadband is no more significant than subscription rates for cable TV. It is almost entirely an entertainment option. If you are looking for important infrastructure issues then you should be looking at things like the deployment of Internet 2 or other advanced networks. How's that doing in China? No, I'm really asking because I don't know. I do know that there are significant numbers of research institutions in the US that are participating.
These attempts to find a pretext for disparaging remarks about the US tell more about the person making the remarks than about their target.
Thanks you for injecting numbers that have some actual relevance to an intelligent discussion. There is a real groupthink idea that everyone simply has to pay to have broadband access regardless of every other factor. If you are a shareholder in a cable or phone company that might qualify as a good idea but not so good if you are interested in the best allocation of your own resources.
Internet access is not some absolute good that reason dictates everyone must maximize. How much downloaded music, porn and wonderfully engaging but empty chatting is really needed? I am somewhat surprised, but pleased, that a significant number of people are effectively saying no to the specific offers of bandwidth at current prices. I think it shows a measure of sanity that people are not willing to squander their money.
As has been pointed out the important number from a development, infrastructure point of view is how many households have an option to install broadband. The specific number who take up the offer is an issue of price versus benefit. Don't forget that it is predominantly an entertainment purchase, not unlike the choice to subscribe to cable TV. In my case I subscribe to broadband but not cable TV. But that is a pricing decision. If cable TV were less expensive I would be likely to subscribe.
Trying to glean some insight into geopolitical trends from this sort of statistic is just nonsense. Much more important would be availability of high quality educational opportunities and capital formation for risky new ventures (e.g. nanotechnology, gene therapy, space elevator, etc). Being able to download pictures of pretty naked ladies is wonderful, but not exactly part of a rational assessment of future economic vitality.
An analogy from a previous era would be the obsession developing countries used to have about capacity for steel production. These statistics were supposed to indicate that the days of US hegemony were numbered. There were French intellectuals back in the fifties and sixties crowing about how China would soon eclipse the US because of this sort of statistic. They were wrong then and they are probably wrong now.
I'll see your 80 meg and raise you 60. On the Apple QuickTime site you can download an H.264 encoded trailer. It should look great on your 60" LCD assuming you have a dual G5 Mac driving it. They claim QuickTime 7 for Windows will be available soon but for now you would need a (high end) Mac. The HD gallery is here
Firefly was so badly mishandled by FOX that I'd like to add at least one more piece of information for those who are not familiar with it. When you hear mainly that it is from the creator of Buffy and Angel you might get the idea that you would only be interested if you enjoyed one of those. I've tried watching both of those series off and on but without success.
I only bothered to do so because having seen Firefly in the intended order from the DVD's I'm sold on the idea that it is the best sci fi series ever made for TV. I can't say I have a similar opinion of Mr Whedon's other series but Firefly has such superior writing and characters that I can't imagine even trying to make a comparison to the other franchises that I enjoy but do not admire nearly as much.
If you haven't seen the series or only saw a few confusingly presented episodes from the FOX debacle (boy I hope some of the morons responsible for that were fired) rent the episodes in order from your local video store or NetFlix. I'm not saying I can't imagine a better series but when compared to its peers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Babylon 5,... it comes out far ahead.
Nothing to see here except conniving thieves out to bilk the rather unsympathetic likes of the RIAA and MPAA. If the Finsish group had honestly found a way to defeat SHA-1 hashes (used in Bittorrent) they wouldn't bother with penny ante stuff like counterfeit files on a P2P network. The only reasonable explanation for this claim is that they intend to prey on the gullability and possible stupidity of organizations that I mentioned above. I doubt if they (**AA) are as clueless as this scheme would require.
This is at least somewhat equivalent to the less than entirely candid groups who continue to claim they have retrofitted a DRM on red book audio CD's. They use it to get checks from the gullible and technically unsophisticated before their skanky scheme falls apart in the real world. It is just another con game where the greed of the mark is used to separate him from more of his money.
I was around when the original BG came out and I don't know why anyone considers it as anything but embarrassing. It was so bad I almost didn't give the new show a chance but decided to watch because of the actors. I'm pleased that I did and have been quite pleased with their efforts. I suppose it might be a little like the relationship between the original Star Trek and TNG. I still have a fondness for the original series and for most of its run TNG is better and many ways, especially the quality of the acting and writing.
Maybe its a formative thing and you were the right age when the original was shown. I was probably too old by the time the original BG appeared. In any case I would stongly recommend that others who were uninterested in the original BG take a look at the current series, especially since it is now going to be available in HD.
Why are you trolling here? The article isn't about what afroborg finds interesting nor is such an article likely to be written. Nobody cares about your preferences, especially when they are pointlessly interjected in a manner that adds nothing to the discussion. People much smarter than you (and me) are interested in Mac OS X.
Because of a considerable history of having a high price serving as a barrier (going back at least to the Mac IIfx which Harry Anderson suggested was an abbreviation for *ing expensive), it is of interest that Apple has produced a very capable, low cost Mac. Many who might be interested in at least trying OS X might find information on that specific topic interesting and useful. Your unsupported opinions and lame insults, on the other hand, not so interesting. Now, go away.
Did you read the article? It was about the emergence of OS X as the OS of choice among a particular group. If you can't run OS X on the "far more powerful PC" (what a load of crap that is), then it is beside the point. If your goal is to play the latest FPS with the highest frame rate then you have the right idea. But that is a significantly different topic (I also have an Athlon box built for that purpose).
You can have a number of different reasons not to use Mac OS X. Cost is no longer one of them.
Re:I would buy a Mac...
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So you are just itching to buy yet another keyboard, mouse and monitor? With iMacs that force one to acquire the built-in monitor there were complaints about the forced bundling. Now that Apple has an option that doesn't require you to buy a new monitor we still hear nothing but whiny complaints.
For anyone who has owned a computer the cost of upgrading to Mac OS X is no more than $600. The excuse that it costs too much is gone. Find another one.
The copyright owners own the content, period, and get to decide how it's used, by whom, and under what conditions, whether you like it or not.
Have you ever bothered to read anything about actual copyright law? That would be hard to believe based on such a clueless sweeping statement. Perhaps you thought exaggeration would be useful? For example, if someone decided to produce a parody of a work the owner of the copyright would have very limited options available. Similarly if a library purchased and made it available for free what do you imagine a copyright owner could do? Even more specifically to the point there is such a thing as fair use rights. You can't just ignore those with a dismissive wave of your hand. But by all means dismiss anyone who might not agree with you as a lunatic.
I believe the idea is that you don't put it anywhere. The data is stored elsewhere and you just watch it. You would be able to pause, rewind and all the usual TiVo (or more traditionally VCR) features so the stream might be cached locally to make those features easier to provide. They could follow the model used by Audible.com and have the content you purchased available to stream whenever and wherever you might be. If the price were right and you felt comfortable that the provider company would be able to fulfill its function then it might be an attractive option.
At this point downloading is a challenge for the network so this sort of conjecture only applies some time in the future.
Apple will give you the option of lossess recordings now. A lot bigger - probably half the size of a corresponding *.wav file, but it is available.
Yes, Apple has graced the scene with another lossless codec. But do they sell any tracks at iTMS which use this codec? As far as I am aware the only online site that might provide this service is AllOfMP3.com. Of course if you purchase the CD you can use iTunes to produce a lossless copy on your hard drive.
DVD's have the advantages of online systems without the associated disadvantages. You can easily rip your DVD's to your local video server and retain the original as a nicely packaged backup. You will be able to browse and play your purchased DVD's online from your local video server and still have your library of physical discs. What's not to like?
Eveything needed for this is in place except for cheap terabyte drives which are inevitable and not very far away. Online distribution and HD-DVD will both be hamstrung by odious DRM and will never get off the ground. For comparison consider the attempts at replacing the CD with SACD and DVD-Audio.
"If Bob owns the US rights, then yes, he can generally preclude imports, even if he just sits on his rights. Copyright holders have no obligation to publish..."
If that statement is actually true (and I don't mean to imply I have reason to believe it is inaccurate) then it illustrates how completely corrupted copyright law has become. The primary motivation for opponents of the copyright provision in the US Constitution (e.g. Jefferson) to accept such a clause was to encourage publication. It is for reasons like this that I hope that proponents of the Creative Commons like Lawrence Lessig are successful in changing the debate. You hate to think about starting from scratch but maybe advancements in technology have changed the terrain enough that it may no longer be useful to eek out some more years from the old framework.
Did you try to check your claim before making the accusation? If Rogue Amoeba uses an iTunes API to add the audio output as a stream to iTunes then iTunes may be doing all the heavy lifting of conversion to lossless audio, the RSA and AES cryptography, etc. It seems entirely possible that they are just doing audio capture as they always have with their main product and letting Apple do the rest of the work.
Checking facts seems like it would be the right thing to do before casting aspersions. Now pardon me while I go off to see if Apple has added a convenient new API call to iTunes.
"No. You can copy all you want for yourself. You can go to the library and photocopy everything. It's legal. In most of the nations anyway. Copyright isn't actually the right to make copies, but the right to publish them."
This aspect of the issue is what has made all of this so contentious. Copyright law for most of its limited existence has been about regulating the behavior of publishers in a manner that is supposed to maximize the distribution of material both old and new. The attempt to extend its reach to consumers rather than limiting it to publishers has been the cause of a great deal of dispute.
Until 1998 there wasn't even a law available for criminal prosecution of copyright infringement if there wasn't money involved (i.e. there were no publishers involved). That is why the case against the MIT student who ran an FTP site was thrown out and why the law was purchased to make users into potential targets.
If the copyright cartels were to back away from their attempt to extend the copyright laws from publishers to consumers they would have much more easily defensible positions in cases like AllOfMP3.com and other potentially illegal publishers. Instead we hear this bullshit about how copying data from RAM to a hard drive constitutes infringement and it is at the perogative of the copyright holder whether this violation is pursued.
Does it really take so much vision to see that pursuit of this sort of extreme position is doomed to failure? The people who wanted to use the law to prohibit the consumption of alcohol probably thought they were right in every important sense.
I would agree with Kirth about copyright law in the past. But as Samuel Clemens said no one is safe while Congress is in session. Watch out for all that new legislation (including abominations like the DMCA).
They should have written an actual Mac OS X application before advertising their project to the public. Even within the constraints of users who don't mind using the Terminal for manipulating and launching processes it is inadequate. In the terminal the first thing it did after using chmod +x to make it executable was come back and request the URL for the project. Say what? There is nothing in the documentation that I could find indicating something like this would be asked. Then after proceeding a bit further it indicated it could not find the choices I had made to the parameters it uses to govern how it will run so it set them to defaults!
I'm supposed to trust these amateurs with my Mac? If they don't have the needed programming knowledge they need to get it and do so before inflicting unnecessary havoc on unsuspecting voluteers. Take a look at Folding@Home or SETI to get an idea of what you need to have done before you ask the public to trust your work.
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Bullshit. If distribution costs through digital entertainment are nill, then the artist can actually use the free distribution to promote live performances.
Are you proposing that movies should be performed live or simply that they should go away? Bullshit, indeed.
The advances I had in mind are specifically how unbelievably inexpensive hard drive storage capacity has become. If the bits are fungible, then today's price is down to 50 cents per gigabyte with no concerns about the possible complexity of burning and storing DVD-R media. You just add it to your drive. That puts audio CD's in the price range of a quarter versus $15 to $20 for the commercial product. Similarly for DVD's, even a 10 gigabyte movie requires no more than $5 worth of space.
There are at least two more orders of magnitude improvements that are just a matter of applying known technology and customary competition. So that's 5 cents for a movie and a fraction of a penny for an audio CD. It is just plain brutal for the producer. Proponents of market economies like to extoll the virtues of creative destruction. Well, here it is in spades.
What we have here is a two way slippery slope. Mathematically it is hard to envision but the idea is that we get an unstable condition in both directions. The draconian remedies favored by the recording industry were originally designed to handle cases of commercial copyright infringement. They make more sense in that setting. Allowing its unfettered use in non-commercial cases is a solution that might be worse than the problem.
On the other hand if the court adopts a hands off stance toward personal, non-commercial copyright infringement, the relentless advances of technology could make the production of digital entertainment significantly less profitable. One of the ideas of copyright law is to encourage the activities of production even as it inhibits more widescale consumption.
The judgment one has to make is which alternative is more potentially damaging to society. I think that even in a society where non-commercial file swapping is completely unchecked, the majority will still choose to purchase what they want. But I could certainly be wrong about that. I just think it is lesser risk than allowing powerful entrenched interests an effective veto power over the development of new technology.
To understand how this could be more significant than how people choose to access silly popular entertainment consider the implications for technical competition between societies. Since my undergrad days at Caltech I became aware that the very expensive texts that we used could be purchased for a fraction of the price we paid in many places in Asia including India and China. If we continue to choose the draconian path while other countries assume a more permissive stance, that would (has) set up an experiment between the U.S. and, for instance, China. I'm uncomfortable with the possible result of that sort of experiment.
You really need to get your PC fixed. Seriously - all those crashes and reboots you talk about are not normal. I can run Azerus, firefox, burn a dvd and whatever else with no problems.
That is always a possible reply and it can't be trivially dismissed but here is one concerning multitasking and WinXP that is less easily dismissed. Coming from the Mac I was completely surprised to learn you can only have one process running that uses the video overlay. If two different processes try to display video at the same time the results will vary but they are always bad. For instance a second VLC window will play but the colors are screwed up. If my HDTV program is launched while another program (like VLC) is using the overlay you get a warning message (if you are lucky) and the second program quits. If you are unlucky you get a crash.
This is an unambiguous example of how multitasking for WinXP can be a myth. You are not allowed to have two programs running that use the video overlay. There is no such odd restriction to multitasking of video applications on the Mac.
The other instability problems I have with WinXP might be related to the fact that I use it to do software rendering of HDTV which puts a real stress on the bandwidth of the PCI bus. While that is running it is always a mistake to start moving a 300 meg file across the network (to or from the PC). It may be unrealistic but I expect the OS to handle conditions like that gracefully rather than require a restart.
If one could simply chuckle at your humorous comment, that would be a situation that is better than we have. The comment that set off this entire thread was a snide remark from someone who was at least 5 years out of date.
It isn't as though there are not limitations and annoyances with running OS X just like every other computer OS. What Mac users often find so tedious is that critical remarks are so often from people who really don't know what they are talking about. They don't have any personal knowledge so they repeat garbage that hasn't been true for almost a decade.
Certainly these critics have no obligation to spend time learning what current (or even reasonably recent) reality is. But why do they adopt smug attitudes while displaying their cluelessness? And why even bother to post comments about articles that are clearly of no interest to them? Well, that's all the venom I need to get rid of today and it's still quite early.
Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.
My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.
So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.
More exploits does not necessarily inmply less secure
Read that again and contemplate just how stupid it is. Who cares how secure a system might be if you lived in a parallel universe where Mac OS X is the predominant system? WE DON'T LIVE IN THAT UNIVERSE! The claim that OS X is as sloppy as WinXP is not only not conclusively proved, it is essentially unprovable. On some point about quantum mechanics Dirac has said, "that isn't even wrong".
In our world (the one where we live) more exploits DOES imply less secure. Hell, it might as well be the definition of less secure. Is that point so utterly mysterious?
Is your point that there is a reasonable chance that enough people will change and then they'll be sorry once OS X has 95% of the market? My point is that if your application is supported by OS X and you are tired of dealing with all the exploits for Windows then you have a choice to leave the exploits behind. Your decision is not going to change the nature of the market.
Articles like this one are written to spread FUD. That it is doing its job is apparent in the case of some people when they carry on about "conclusive proof". Just to be clear I think there will be some sort of proof when an exploit has actually been observed. As long as it is just Apple releasing security patches that is not proof of any sort. That is business as usual.
Your idea of conclusive proof is what one might expect from a dilettante. What would you use to describe a proof that actually was conclusive? You don't know (and I don't know) how things would develop if Apple had the sort of market dominance that Windows has. As a matter of fact it does not matter how things would be different since it is not going to happen. If you or everyone you knew were to abandon Windows for OS X it would make no difference in Windows' market dominance. Nothing you do or say will make any difference.
If you truly understand and agree with that assessment then what actually matters to a practical person is the security records that actually exist, not what would be the case in a world that does not and will not exist. Be a man and own up to your decision. You choose a less secure system and are prepared to live with the consequences. Now go scan your system for viruses and clean out the latest batch.
Oh, please, your contortions are ridiculous. Consumer adoption of broadband is no more significant than subscription rates for cable TV. It is almost entirely an entertainment option. If you are looking for important infrastructure issues then you should be looking at things like the deployment of Internet 2 or other advanced networks. How's that doing in China? No, I'm really asking because I don't know. I do know that there are significant numbers of research institutions in the US that are participating.
These attempts to find a pretext for disparaging remarks about the US tell more about the person making the remarks than about their target.
Thanks you for injecting numbers that have some actual relevance to an intelligent discussion. There is a real groupthink idea that everyone simply has to pay to have broadband access regardless of every other factor. If you are a shareholder in a cable or phone company that might qualify as a good idea but not so good if you are interested in the best allocation of your own resources.
Internet access is not some absolute good that reason dictates everyone must maximize. How much downloaded music, porn and wonderfully engaging but empty chatting is really needed? I am somewhat surprised, but pleased, that a significant number of people are effectively saying no to the specific offers of bandwidth at current prices. I think it shows a measure of sanity that people are not willing to squander their money.
As has been pointed out the important number from a development, infrastructure point of view is how many households have an option to install broadband. The specific number who take up the offer is an issue of price versus benefit. Don't forget that it is predominantly an entertainment purchase, not unlike the choice to subscribe to cable TV. In my case I subscribe to broadband but not cable TV. But that is a pricing decision. If cable TV were less expensive I would be likely to subscribe.
Trying to glean some insight into geopolitical trends from this sort of statistic is just nonsense. Much more important would be availability of high quality educational opportunities and capital formation for risky new ventures (e.g. nanotechnology, gene therapy, space elevator, etc). Being able to download pictures of pretty naked ladies is wonderful, but not exactly part of a rational assessment of future economic vitality.
An analogy from a previous era would be the obsession developing countries used to have about capacity for steel production. These statistics were supposed to indicate that the days of US hegemony were numbered. There were French intellectuals back in the fifties and sixties crowing about how China would soon eclipse the US because of this sort of statistic. They were wrong then and they are probably wrong now.
I'll see your 80 meg and raise you 60. On the Apple QuickTime site you can download an H.264 encoded trailer. It should look great on your 60" LCD assuming you have a dual G5 Mac driving it. They claim QuickTime 7 for Windows will be available soon but for now you would need a (high end) Mac. The HD gallery is here
Firefly was so badly mishandled by FOX that I'd like to add at least one more piece of information for those who are not familiar with it. When you hear mainly that it is from the creator of Buffy and Angel you might get the idea that you would only be interested if you enjoyed one of those. I've tried watching both of those series off and on but without success.
... it comes out far ahead.
I only bothered to do so because having seen Firefly in the intended order from the DVD's I'm sold on the idea that it is the best sci fi series ever made for TV. I can't say I have a similar opinion of Mr Whedon's other series but Firefly has such superior writing and characters that I can't imagine even trying to make a comparison to the other franchises that I enjoy but do not admire nearly as much.
If you haven't seen the series or only saw a few confusingly presented episodes from the FOX debacle (boy I hope some of the morons responsible for that were fired) rent the episodes in order from your local video store or NetFlix. I'm not saying I can't imagine a better series but when compared to its peers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, Babylon 5,
Nothing to see here except conniving thieves out to bilk the rather unsympathetic likes of the RIAA and MPAA. If the Finsish group had honestly found a way to defeat SHA-1 hashes (used in Bittorrent) they wouldn't bother with penny ante stuff like counterfeit files on a P2P network. The only reasonable explanation for this claim is that they intend to prey on the gullability and possible stupidity of organizations that I mentioned above. I doubt if they (**AA) are as clueless as this scheme would require.
This is at least somewhat equivalent to the less than entirely candid groups who continue to claim they have retrofitted a DRM on red book audio CD's. They use it to get checks from the gullible and technically unsophisticated before their skanky scheme falls apart in the real world. It is just another con game where the greed of the mark is used to separate him from more of his money.
I was around when the original BG came out and I don't know why anyone considers it as anything but embarrassing. It was so bad I almost didn't give the new show a chance but decided to watch because of the actors. I'm pleased that I did and have been quite pleased with their efforts. I suppose it might be a little like the relationship between the original Star Trek and TNG. I still have a fondness for the original series and for most of its run TNG is better and many ways, especially the quality of the acting and writing.
Maybe its a formative thing and you were the right age when the original was shown. I was probably too old by the time the original BG appeared. In any case I would stongly recommend that others who were uninterested in the original BG take a look at the current series, especially since it is now going to be available in HD.
Why are you trolling here? The article isn't about what afroborg finds interesting nor is such an article likely to be written. Nobody cares about your preferences, especially when they are pointlessly interjected in a manner that adds nothing to the discussion. People much smarter than you (and me) are interested in Mac OS X.
Because of a considerable history of having a high price serving as a barrier (going back at least to the Mac IIfx which Harry Anderson suggested was an abbreviation for *ing expensive), it is of interest that Apple has produced a very capable, low cost Mac. Many who might be interested in at least trying OS X might find information on that specific topic interesting and useful. Your unsupported opinions and lame insults, on the other hand, not so interesting. Now, go away.
Did you read the article? It was about the emergence of OS X as the OS of choice among a particular group. If you can't run OS X on the "far more powerful PC" (what a load of crap that is), then it is beside the point. If your goal is to play the latest FPS with the highest frame rate then you have the right idea. But that is a significantly different topic (I also have an Athlon box built for that purpose).
You can have a number of different reasons not to use Mac OS X. Cost is no longer one of them.
So you are just itching to buy yet another keyboard, mouse and monitor? With iMacs that force one to acquire the built-in monitor there were complaints about the forced bundling. Now that Apple has an option that doesn't require you to buy a new monitor we still hear nothing but whiny complaints.
For anyone who has owned a computer the cost of upgrading to Mac OS X is no more than $600. The excuse that it costs too much is gone. Find another one.
The copyright owners own the content, period, and get to decide how it's used, by whom, and under what conditions, whether you like it or not.
Have you ever bothered to read anything about actual copyright law? That would be hard to believe based on such a clueless sweeping statement. Perhaps you thought exaggeration would be useful? For example, if someone decided to produce a parody of a work the owner of the copyright would have very limited options available. Similarly if a library purchased and made it available for free what do you imagine a copyright owner could do? Even more specifically to the point there is such a thing as fair use rights. You can't just ignore those with a dismissive wave of your hand. But by all means dismiss anyone who might not agree with you as a lunatic.
Where are you going to put it?
I believe the idea is that you don't put it anywhere. The data is stored elsewhere and you just watch it. You would be able to pause, rewind and all the usual TiVo (or more traditionally VCR) features so the stream might be cached locally to make those features easier to provide. They could follow the model used by Audible.com and have the content you purchased available to stream whenever and wherever you might be. If the price were right and you felt comfortable that the provider company would be able to fulfill its function then it might be an attractive option.
At this point downloading is a challenge for the network so this sort of conjecture only applies some time in the future.
Apple will give you the option of lossess recordings now. A lot bigger - probably half the size of a corresponding *.wav file, but it is available.
Yes, Apple has graced the scene with another lossless codec. But do they sell any tracks at iTMS which use this codec? As far as I am aware the only online site that might provide this service is AllOfMP3.com. Of course if you purchase the CD you can use iTunes to produce a lossless copy on your hard drive.
DVD's have the advantages of online systems without the associated disadvantages. You can easily rip your DVD's to your local video server and retain the original as a nicely packaged backup. You will be able to browse and play your purchased DVD's online from your local video server and still have your library of physical discs. What's not to like?
Eveything needed for this is in place except for cheap terabyte drives which are inevitable and not very far away. Online distribution and HD-DVD will both be hamstrung by odious DRM and will never get off the ground. For comparison consider the attempts at replacing the CD with SACD and DVD-Audio.
"If Bob owns the US rights, then yes, he can generally preclude imports, even if he just sits on his rights. Copyright holders have no obligation to publish ..."
If that statement is actually true (and I don't mean to imply I have reason to believe it is inaccurate) then it illustrates how completely corrupted copyright law has become. The primary motivation for opponents of the copyright provision in the US Constitution (e.g. Jefferson) to accept such a clause was to encourage publication. It is for reasons like this that I hope that proponents of the Creative Commons like Lawrence Lessig are successful in changing the debate. You hate to think about starting from scratch but maybe advancements in technology have changed the terrain enough that it may no longer be useful to eek out some more years from the old framework.
Did you try to check your claim before making the accusation? If Rogue Amoeba uses an iTunes API to add the audio output as a stream to iTunes then iTunes may be doing all the heavy lifting of conversion to lossless audio, the RSA and AES cryptography, etc. It seems entirely possible that they are just doing audio capture as they always have with their main product and letting Apple do the rest of the work.
Checking facts seems like it would be the right thing to do before casting aspersions. Now pardon me while I go off to see if Apple has added a convenient new API call to iTunes.
"No. You can copy all you want for yourself. You can go to the library and photocopy everything. It's legal. In most of the nations anyway. Copyright isn't actually the right to make copies, but the right to publish them."
This aspect of the issue is what has made all of this so contentious. Copyright law for most of its limited existence has been about regulating the behavior of publishers in a manner that is supposed to maximize the distribution of material both old and new. The attempt to extend its reach to consumers rather than limiting it to publishers has been the cause of a great deal of dispute.
Until 1998 there wasn't even a law available for criminal prosecution of copyright infringement if there wasn't money involved (i.e. there were no publishers involved). That is why the case against the MIT student who ran an FTP site was thrown out and why the law was purchased to make users into potential targets.
If the copyright cartels were to back away from their attempt to extend the copyright laws from publishers to consumers they would have much more easily defensible positions in cases like AllOfMP3.com and other potentially illegal publishers. Instead we hear this bullshit about how copying data from RAM to a hard drive constitutes infringement and it is at the perogative of the copyright holder whether this violation is pursued.
Does it really take so much vision to see that pursuit of this sort of extreme position is doomed to failure? The people who wanted to use the law to prohibit the consumption of alcohol probably thought they were right in every important sense.
I would agree with Kirth about copyright law in the past. But as Samuel Clemens said no one is safe while Congress is in session. Watch out for all that new legislation (including abominations like the DMCA).
They should have written an actual Mac OS X application before advertising their project to the public. Even within the constraints of users who don't mind using the Terminal for manipulating and launching processes it is inadequate. In the terminal the first thing it did after using chmod +x to make it executable was come back and request the URL for the project. Say what? There is nothing in the documentation that I could find indicating something like this would be asked. Then after proceeding a bit further it indicated it could not find the choices I had made to the parameters it uses to govern how it will run so it set them to defaults!
I'm supposed to trust these amateurs with my Mac? If they don't have the needed programming knowledge they need to get it and do so before inflicting unnecessary havoc on unsuspecting voluteers. Take a look at Folding@Home or SETI to get an idea of what you need to have done before you ask the public to trust your work.