The main thing is that between lossy and lossless you have a factor of about 10. So if you are using your iPod today with lossy files and you decide to go lossless you either have to get a 10x bigger iPod with 10x the serial bandwidth and 10x the battery life or you have to put up with your entire digital music experience being 10x slower.
I knew your numbers were rubbish and I was about to take you for task for pulling them out of thin air when it occurred to me how simple it would be to import a CD and get the actual numbers. They are:
AIFF 734 MB ALAC 329 MB 256k AAC 133 MB
Where oh where is a factor of ten hiding in these numbers? It must have disappeared down the rabbit hole with the rest of your numbers. I don't believe for even a moment your claim that battery life would be reduced by a factor of ten without needing a test to reach that skeptical conclusion.
The only reasonable objective reason for promoting one of the various current lossy standards (other than nostalgia for the 90's) is a vendor seeking to attain the nirvana of format lock-in. It pains me to sound like an old fogey but what happened to the quest for the best possible audio experience? When I was a youngster a rite of passage was spending a ridiculous amount of money buying a high fidelity system that completely dominated the wretched audio system your parents used. Doesn't anybody smoke pot anymore? Where has the appreciation of the best possible audio gone?
Insightful? Hah! It is remarkable how people will try to argue the virtue of the impediments they are forced to deal with. We are all familiar with Moore's Law and how it affects digital technology over time. Back in the early to mid 90's mp3 was a crucial enabling technology for getting digital music off the capital intensively produced pressed CD's onto other digital media. If you go back to the 80's, when the audio CD was introduced (and none of the other CD standards existed)they had perfect copy protection. It would cost you about $10,000 for the hard drive space used by one audio CD. Forget about how much comparable silicon storage would cost, you couldn't afford it. Recall that the first Mac (in 1984) came with 64 kilobytes of RAM for the good reason that memory was damned expensive.
Now fast forward to 2007 and look at hard drive prices. Half a terabyte of hard drive space is less than $200. So an entire totally uncompressed audio CD would take the space which costs a grand total of less than a quarter. But like people who grew up during the Great Depression there are still people who talk about the cost of storage space as though we were still living in the 90's. The costs of disk space and network bandwidth are essentially zero. That is why the CD replication business (i.e. members of the RIAA) are in such grave danger economically.
Consumers may be irrational but the vendors suffer from no such problem. They are fixated on the goal of owning the data format that comes after audio CD. That is what this whole topic is about (AAC vs wma). That both main contenders are incontestibly inferior to the previous 2 channel 16 bit 44.1 kHz sampled digital audio is evident because they decode to that standard after thowing away various amounts of the original signal.
Please understand I am not unalterably opposed to any lossy compression. It is just that the sights have been set so low in the current contest. I have heard the unreleased DVD-Audio version of "Dark Side of the Moon" and the quality of the audio is absolutely stunning. Instead of 600 MB it occupies a DVD with about 3.5 GB but that includes more than one copy of the audio at different resolutions. If you took the highest quality audio from that and compressed it to a more modest size that would provide a more exciting alternative to the mediocre formats that are currently offered. Until then I am staying with lossless audio because I know how to count.
despite whatever people may think of their [Sony's] sales practices or DRM attempts
I think we should all be eternally grateful for Sony's maladroit attempt at copy protection. They did one heck of a job of inadvertantly raising the issue of what the media cartels are about to attempt. Their nasty little rootkit was just a do-it-yourself implementation of the Trusted Computing initiative. Just about everyone was up in arms about Sony's attempt to take control of your computer but that is exactly what is planned by the people promoting Trusted Computing. Effectively a rootkit on every PC.
I think it is fine that people have increased opportunity to chat with each other with various gadgets. On the other hand it seems absurd to equate that with technological leadership. I don't see why there is anything to investigate other than the quality of a nation's research universities and the availability of capital to create new enterprises. How many great research universities are there in all of the first six countries listed? Even if you combine all of them they are dwarfed by California, Texas or Massachusetts individually. Of course this is mainly an historical anomaly which will change to a less radical distribution over time but it will not be the result of teenagers texting each other in pursuit of getting laid.
This article is nothing more than an attempt to affect government regulatory policy for consumer electronic products and services. These matters have their own importance but it has very little to do with technological leadership. If you want to get a picture of meaningful penetration of internet access (relating to technological leadership) take a look at the distribution of nodes for Folding@Home: Folding@Home
over-the-air ATSC is actually MPEG-compressed also
Right, it is a given that HD content is compressed. I suspect he was alluding to the claim that cable TV providers are in the business of providing as wide a variety as possible. The "excessive" bandwidth demands of full HD, even when compressed is about 20 Mbps so some are believed to be guilty of "shaping" the compression to allow for more channels. I don't know if the claims are true but John Malone, a well known cable mogul, has made statements in the past about limiting the bandwidth to be made available for HD. So the question isn't about compression per se, but rather about the degree of compression.
Re:This whole article is an embarrassment to Slash
on
AppleTV Hits the Streets
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The AppleTV was designed by the makers of ElGato's EyeTV
Whoa, where did you get that from? I know that Apple bought another German computer/video company that did DVD authoring software but I've heard nothing about Munich based ElGato making a similar move to Cupertino. In fact I'm pretty sure they didn't. In any case the EyeTV line of products is mainly about tuners which AppleTV quite prominently does not have. There was a disappointing little product that ElGato sold, called EyeHome, that was like an NTSC version of the AppleTV but it appeared to be just a repackaged box also sold by Hauppauge called MediaMVP. The interface software was bush league and the performance was not quite good enough even for NTSC.
Don't misunderstand, I think the EyeTV tuner products and software are fantastic. All those pining for PVR capability for the Mac should get an EyeTV product (they have tuners made for several markets besides the US) instead of or in addition to AppleTV. In my opinion AppleTV would be worthwhile if it included tight integration with EyeTV (e.g. no conversion process at all) but I can see Apple is playing the format lock out game like everyone else.
Nonsense, I have an older machine so I'm not just blowing smoke like some undoubtedly are. It's a 450 MHz G4 tower that I've had for longer than I've had my PC. I wouldn't dispute that recent OS's really need at least 1 GB of memory but contrary to some rumors it is both easy and cheap to update memory on my Mac. Those of us whose memory extends beyond OS X can easily remember that this property of system updates improving performance of existing Macs predates OS X by over a decade. I don't know if it was intentional or just a by-product but you can't wave away 20 years of experience so easily. If you mean that there are Macs old enough that you can't install the current OS that is true. Currently you probably have to be using at least a G4. Anyone with a Mac Plus or Quadra 660 can just forget about it. But there are a lot of G4, G5 and Intel Macs out there that continue to improve as new system software is delivered.
Patents, shmatents, I'm talking about the RIAA trying to sue off the market any attempt at a personal media player.
Well, that's different. The tech world is so awash in lawsuits (and Diamond Rio [Creative] did press a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple claiming they invented what Apple and others had been using for over a decade) that without careful phrasing you can blunder into disagreements that aren't really there. My apologies. To tell the truth I'm not even certain it was the makers of Diamond Rio who made that patent claim. Except for stalwarts like Apple and Microsoft, others keep morphing from one corporate entity to another.
OSX has been getting slower over the last couple of years
Well, you blew any credibility you might have had with that. Anyone with real Mac experience knows that they want those updates because Macs always improve with new versions of the OS. If you want to use new features you may not be pleased with the performance of those new features but my experience is that you always get better overall responsiveness.
Having used AppleWorks and Lotus 123 on the Apple II series
What are you talking about? There was never Lotus 123 for the Apple II computer. The first Lotus product for Apple was the extremely lame Lotus Jazz for the early Mac (probably the Mac Plus). It was a dismal failure and I don't recall any further attempt in the Mac market by Lotus. On the other hand Lotus 123 was very capable on the PC despite Microsoft's periodic attempts to break it with their updates so Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet could eventually prevail.
anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition
Wow, you are just spewing misinformation and lies today. I remember that bullshit Diamond Rio patent. There was prior art all over the place for hierarchical lists used for navigation. It could be found in the Mac OS X at that time and it goes back at least to the late 80's when it was used by Nextstep which is what evolved into Mac OS X. The economics of patent litigation makes settling an attractive option but it does not change the reality that any honest tech observer knows Diamond Rio did not invent the use of hierachical lists for navigation.
Do you mean the Motorola ROKR? Nice try but it was designed, built and sold by Motorola last I heard. They have some level of compatibility with iTunes on the Mac and PC but there is another device that is Apple's actual cell phone device called the iPhone. You may have heard of it as there was some coverage in the press for this device that is not scheduled to be available until this summer.
Dvorak was not addressing the issue of whether you have wifi in your home or office. This article was about the campaign by cell phone companies to get municipal wifi systems outlawed using whatever lies and threats that are necessary. That isn't speculation, it is just reporting and he is adding his own analysis of motives and harsh realities.
iTunes' "Convert for iPod" command would do the trick
I agree that this option would be available but if you've ever used it you probably would not be surprised if some might deem it irrelevant. Remember this is most likely to be viewed not on an iPod but on a big screen where any imperfections would be magnified. I've found such converions, even for the video iPod and PSP to be very disappointing. Added to that is the incredibly long time it often takes to do the conversion (hours). On the other hand I've found the quality of avi files with QuickTime Player and the right codecs to be quite impressive. Getting those codecs to install on @TV is probably almost a necessity if it is going to be useful for content besides what you purchase from Apple's iTMS.
More specifically, it would be a real bonus if it were possible to view content captured by a device like the EyeTV tuner for HDTV (made by ElGato) to be easily viewably with @TV. However, it appears that might be strategically viewed as part of the competition (why buy episodes of "The Office" if you can have it record automatically in even higher quality for free?) so I expect a time consuming, quality eviserating conversion to be required. Same thing for DVD's and cable TV. We are likely to have no fewer than five mutually incompatible sources of video programming: OTA HDTV, cable, discs (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray), paid internet downloads and (ahem) unpaid internet downloads. Among these the least viewer hostile source is probably the last option.
I think you might be overlooking the fact that the QuickTime movie player in Apple's new device (let's call it iTV for convenience) won't have access to the divx codec that you install on your Mac. I think you would need to be able to install that codec on the iTV device and if it is a closed box that might not be an option. In other words the claim that iTV can play anything you can play with iTunes means it can play anything that iTunes with an unmodified system can play. I don't know this for a fact but it seems logical unless you can hack your iTV and install codecs on it. When the device ships we will get the answer to this question.
No, the original correction was right. Your correction to the correction was bascially wrong but you did rephrase the original statement so that it was no longer nonsense. The problem was that ultimate was the right word to use but whoever wrote "Apple, the penultimate source of cool", thought that penultimate sounded even cooler but was insufficiently educated to realize that tacking on a syllable can significantly change meaning in this case. Just because learning Latin is no longer required to be considered educated does not mean all dictionaries can be blithely ignored.
He knows that the record companies will not agree to reduced DRM restrictions and so simply passes the legal and media ball to them.
I'm trying to imagine what thought process could be present in your head when this statement is made. Assuming your premise is true how can you find anything objectionable in the conclusion? If the record companies really were adamant in their refusal then how is the letter simple smoke and mirrors ? How would knowing more details of the agreement between Apple and the RIAA change anything if the premise is true?
Remember when the iPod was introduced Apple's idea of copyright protection was a simple message of Don't Steal Music. No scrambling, no encryption or keys. Even with the iTMS the main source of music for iPods is and always has been completely DRM free digital music from CD's. Electronic distribution may be the future and it was probably a wise allocation of resources to differentiate the iPod from other players and as a hedge against that possible future. But make no mistake about it, the iPod is built on a foundation of DRM free media. Extending the DRM free characteristic to the iTMS will make life easier for Apple and its customers. Anyone who thinks the iPod would be an easier competitive target with electronic distribution of DRM free music has simply not been paying attention.
Just because the media companies want a broadcast flag does not mean it exists. They have been shot down each time they have tried to get it mandated. The courts informed the FCC in no uncertain terms that it does not have the authority to create requirements of that sort for consumer electronics or computer companies. It is a red herring. It DOES NOT exist. (It has also been shot down in Congress more than once).
The cable industry has made it quite clear through their actions (or lack thereof) they have no intention of supporting in any significant way the Cable Card "standard". It might be better for the consumer but the cable cartel does not care. It will simply expire due to benign (or not so benign) neglect.
On the other hand most of the entertainment people actually choose to watch whether or not they subscribe to cable is on the major broadcast networks and the ATSC standard (which replaced the 50+ year old NTSC) does a great job of delivering all that for a price of $0 per month (i.e. advertiser supported) if you live in or near almost any metroplitan area. For the programs you might enjoy on the premium cable channels (you know, the ones that raise your monthly bill to about $100) you have the option of buying individually on iTMS from Apple in many cases or you can also wait and purchase the DVD's.
Just to be clear after all that verbiage, there is no artificial degrading of the image quality from HD Tuners for either the Mac or WinXP. You can view and record HD video in its full resolution with no need to replace your video card with MPAA mandated quality reduction circuitry. That is something you get only with Vista so far.
When you add an HD tuner or Blu-Ray drive to your Mac you will discover that the rules for HD content protection are the same.
Could you explain how this pertains to HD Tuners on the Mac or PC? So far only Vista includes most of the DRM crud. XP on the PC and current Macs both handle HD Tuners without the need for specially crippled video cards.
What percentage of those hybrids are also mammoth SUV's and similar extravagant vehicles? Just because a vehicle uses hybrid technology does not mean it treads lightly. Also much of California has been set up to make life without intensive use of a car quite challenging. I'd still say that attacking greenhouse gas emissions as a phenomenon best addressed by outlawing incandescent lightbulbs in a state so devoted to the cult of the automobile is more than slightly amusing.
I suppose I should leave it as an issue on which we could agree to disagree. But I'll take another run at it. Other people can look at the same factors and reach a different conclusion (i.e. they could conclude that CFL's still suck too much and choose to continue using incandescents). Attempting to use the police power of the state to force everyone to accept your conclusion is folly on a remarkably grand scale. I doubt this proposal stands a snowball's chance in hell of passing. But the arrogance of the attempt might be dramatically counterproductive. On the other hand forcing the makers of high efficiency lighting devices to improve their products so they can successfully compete with a product that people clearly find preferable is something that markets do very well. Take away that competition and you can expect manufacturers will have other priorities higher than improving the characteristics of CFL's.
You're talking about how environmentally friendly a product is. I'm talking about how much it sucks. I'm more than slightly worried that the mercury issue may make this case less clear than the proponents would like us to believe. But setting that to one side there is a real issue of how much CFL suck for a variety of reasons that have been discussed by many people here. This isn't the first time I've checked into the feasibility of CFL as an option. The first time was almost a decade ago trying to convince my father-in-law they might be a good idea for his apartment building. I suspect they have made real progress over that time making them a better replacement for what people already know and use. I don't think they've made it yet and my suspicion is that the market is probably the best chance we have that as a product they will finally succeed or some other technology, like LED, will step up. Having California legislators pick winners in the market is unwise.
the larger issue here is that California's government thinks it's their duty to restrict people from making purchases it deems unwise. I don't subscribe to the belief that my government knows what's best for me and should be making my decisions. I prefer personal freedom. If companies continue to improve CF bulbs and eventually make them more desirable than incandescents, then incandescent sales will falter without governement intervention. But if the government outlaws incandescents, there will be less motivation for companies to make CF bulbs cheaper and smaller with a more pleasing spectral output. You won't be able to legally buy anything else, so why bother improving them.
Thank you, that is the best comment anyone has presented on this topic. I'm quoting it here to make it marginally more likely to be read. The companies that make CFL are the same evil industrialists as all the others. If the market is not used to force them to make their product better they just won't do it.
support normal indoors living temperatures with zero heat input beyond humans and ordinary applicances far further north than the UK
While you may have other places in Europe in mind and could still be correct even if you don't you might take a look at how far north the UK actually is. Every part of the UK is further north than any part of the continental US (i.e. except Alaska).
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The main thing is that between lossy and lossless you have a factor of about 10. So if you are using your iPod today with lossy files and you decide to go lossless you either have to get a 10x bigger iPod with 10x the serial bandwidth and 10x the battery life or you have to put up with your entire digital music experience being 10x slower.
I knew your numbers were rubbish and I was about to take you for task for pulling them out of thin air when it occurred to me how simple it would be to import a CD and get the actual numbers. They are:
AIFF 734 MB
ALAC 329 MB
256k AAC 133 MB
Where oh where is a factor of ten hiding in these numbers? It must have disappeared down the rabbit hole with the rest of your numbers. I don't believe for even a moment your claim that battery life would be reduced by a factor of ten without needing a test to reach that skeptical conclusion.
The only reasonable objective reason for promoting one of the various current lossy standards (other than nostalgia for the 90's) is a vendor seeking to attain the nirvana of format lock-in. It pains me to sound like an old fogey but what happened to the quest for the best possible audio experience? When I was a youngster a rite of passage was spending a ridiculous amount of money buying a high fidelity system that completely dominated the wretched audio system your parents used. Doesn't anybody smoke pot anymore? Where has the appreciation of the best possible audio gone?
Insightful? Hah! It is remarkable how people will try to argue the virtue of the impediments they are forced to deal with. We are all familiar with Moore's Law and how it affects digital technology over time. Back in the early to mid 90's mp3 was a crucial enabling technology for getting digital music off the capital intensively produced pressed CD's onto other digital media. If you go back to the 80's, when the audio CD was introduced (and none of the other CD standards existed)they had perfect copy protection. It would cost you about $10,000 for the hard drive space used by one audio CD. Forget about how much comparable silicon storage would cost, you couldn't afford it. Recall that the first Mac (in 1984) came with 64 kilobytes of RAM for the good reason that memory was damned expensive.
Now fast forward to 2007 and look at hard drive prices. Half a terabyte of hard drive space is less than $200. So an entire totally uncompressed audio CD would take the space which costs a grand total of less than a quarter. But like people who grew up during the Great Depression there are still people who talk about the cost of storage space as though we were still living in the 90's. The costs of disk space and network bandwidth are essentially zero. That is why the CD replication business (i.e. members of the RIAA) are in such grave danger economically.
Consumers may be irrational but the vendors suffer from no such problem. They are fixated on the goal of owning the data format that comes after audio CD. That is what this whole topic is about (AAC vs wma). That both main contenders are incontestibly inferior to the previous 2 channel 16 bit 44.1 kHz sampled digital audio is evident because they decode to that standard after thowing away various amounts of the original signal.
Please understand I am not unalterably opposed to any lossy compression. It is just that the sights have been set so low in the current contest. I have heard the unreleased DVD-Audio version of "Dark Side of the Moon" and the quality of the audio is absolutely stunning. Instead of 600 MB it occupies a DVD with about 3.5 GB but that includes more than one copy of the audio at different resolutions. If you took the highest quality audio from that and compressed it to a more modest size that would provide a more exciting alternative to the mediocre formats that are currently offered. Until then I am staying with lossless audio because I know how to count.
despite whatever people may think of their [Sony's] sales practices or DRM attempts
I think we should all be eternally grateful for Sony's maladroit attempt at copy protection. They did one heck of a job of inadvertantly raising the issue of what the media cartels are about to attempt. Their nasty little rootkit was just a do-it-yourself implementation of the Trusted Computing initiative. Just about everyone was up in arms about Sony's attempt to take control of your computer but that is exactly what is planned by the people promoting Trusted Computing. Effectively a rootkit on every PC.
I think it is fine that people have increased opportunity to chat with each other with various gadgets. On the other hand it seems absurd to equate that with technological leadership. I don't see why there is anything to investigate other than the quality of a nation's research universities and the availability of capital to create new enterprises. How many great research universities are there in all of the first six countries listed? Even if you combine all of them they are dwarfed by California, Texas or Massachusetts individually. Of course this is mainly an historical anomaly which will change to a less radical distribution over time but it will not be the result of teenagers texting each other in pursuit of getting laid.
This article is nothing more than an attempt to affect government regulatory policy for consumer electronic products and services. These matters have their own importance but it has very little to do with technological leadership. If you want to get a picture of meaningful penetration of internet access (relating to technological leadership) take a look at the distribution of nodes for Folding@Home: Folding@Home
over-the-air ATSC is actually MPEG-compressed also
Right, it is a given that HD content is compressed. I suspect he was alluding to the claim that cable TV providers are in the business of providing as wide a variety as possible. The "excessive" bandwidth demands of full HD, even when compressed is about 20 Mbps so some are believed to be guilty of "shaping" the compression to allow for more channels. I don't know if the claims are true but John Malone, a well known cable mogul, has made statements in the past about limiting the bandwidth to be made available for HD. So the question isn't about compression per se, but rather about the degree of compression.
The AppleTV was designed by the makers of ElGato's EyeTV
Whoa, where did you get that from? I know that Apple bought another German computer/video company that did DVD authoring software but I've heard nothing about Munich based ElGato making a similar move to Cupertino. In fact I'm pretty sure they didn't. In any case the EyeTV line of products is mainly about tuners which AppleTV quite prominently does not have. There was a disappointing little product that ElGato sold, called EyeHome, that was like an NTSC version of the AppleTV but it appeared to be just a repackaged box also sold by Hauppauge called MediaMVP. The interface software was bush league and the performance was not quite good enough even for NTSC.
Don't misunderstand, I think the EyeTV tuner products and software are fantastic. All those pining for PVR capability for the Mac should get an EyeTV product (they have tuners made for several markets besides the US) instead of or in addition to AppleTV. In my opinion AppleTV would be worthwhile if it included tight integration with EyeTV (e.g. no conversion process at all) but I can see Apple is playing the format lock out game like everyone else.
Nonsense, I have an older machine so I'm not just blowing smoke like some undoubtedly are. It's a 450 MHz G4 tower that I've had for longer than I've had my PC. I wouldn't dispute that recent OS's really need at least 1 GB of memory but contrary to some rumors it is both easy and cheap to update memory on my Mac. Those of us whose memory extends beyond OS X can easily remember that this property of system updates improving performance of existing Macs predates OS X by over a decade. I don't know if it was intentional or just a by-product but you can't wave away 20 years of experience so easily. If you mean that there are Macs old enough that you can't install the current OS that is true. Currently you probably have to be using at least a G4. Anyone with a Mac Plus or Quadra 660 can just forget about it. But there are a lot of G4, G5 and Intel Macs out there that continue to improve as new system software is delivered.
Patents, shmatents, I'm talking about the RIAA trying to sue off the market any attempt at a personal media player.
Well, that's different. The tech world is so awash in lawsuits (and Diamond Rio [Creative] did press a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple claiming they invented what Apple and others had been using for over a decade) that without careful phrasing you can blunder into disagreements that aren't really there. My apologies. To tell the truth I'm not even certain it was the makers of Diamond Rio who made that patent claim. Except for stalwarts like Apple and Microsoft, others keep morphing from one corporate entity to another.
OSX has been getting slower over the last couple of years
Well, you blew any credibility you might have had with that. Anyone with real Mac experience knows that they want those updates because Macs always improve with new versions of the OS. If you want to use new features you may not be pleased with the performance of those new features but my experience is that you always get better overall responsiveness.
Having used AppleWorks and Lotus 123 on the Apple II series
What are you talking about? There was never Lotus 123 for the Apple II computer. The first Lotus product for Apple was the extremely lame Lotus Jazz for the early Mac (probably the Mac Plus). It was a dismal failure and I don't recall any further attempt in the Mac market by Lotus. On the other hand Lotus 123 was very capable on the PC despite Microsoft's periodic attempts to break it with their updates so Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet could eventually prevail.
anyone who remembers the lawsuits involving the Diamond Rio knows that the path to iPod's success was oiled with the blood of its competition
Wow, you are just spewing misinformation and lies today. I remember that bullshit Diamond Rio patent. There was prior art all over the place for hierarchical lists used for navigation. It could be found in the Mac OS X at that time and it goes back at least to the late 80's when it was used by Nextstep which is what evolved into Mac OS X. The economics of patent litigation makes settling an attractive option but it does not change the reality that any honest tech observer knows Diamond Rio did not invent the use of hierachical lists for navigation.
this thing is as much a dog as the Apple ROKR!
Do you mean the Motorola ROKR? Nice try but it was designed, built and sold by Motorola last I heard. They have some level of compatibility with iTunes on the Mac and PC but there is another device that is Apple's actual cell phone device called the iPhone. You may have heard of it as there was some coverage in the press for this device that is not scheduled to be available until this summer.
Dvorak was not addressing the issue of whether you have wifi in your home or office. This article was about the campaign by cell phone companies to get municipal wifi systems outlawed using whatever lies and threats that are necessary. That isn't speculation, it is just reporting and he is adding his own analysis of motives and harsh realities.
iTunes' "Convert for iPod" command would do the trick
I agree that this option would be available but if you've ever used it you probably would not be surprised if some might deem it irrelevant. Remember this is most likely to be viewed not on an iPod but on a big screen where any imperfections would be magnified. I've found such converions, even for the video iPod and PSP to be very disappointing. Added to that is the incredibly long time it often takes to do the conversion (hours). On the other hand I've found the quality of avi files with QuickTime Player and the right codecs to be quite impressive. Getting those codecs to install on @TV is probably almost a necessity if it is going to be useful for content besides what you purchase from Apple's iTMS.
More specifically, it would be a real bonus if it were possible to view content captured by a device like the EyeTV tuner for HDTV (made by ElGato) to be easily viewably with @TV. However, it appears that might be strategically viewed as part of the competition (why buy episodes of "The Office" if you can have it record automatically in even higher quality for free?) so I expect a time consuming, quality eviserating conversion to be required. Same thing for DVD's and cable TV. We are likely to have no fewer than five mutually incompatible sources of video programming: OTA HDTV, cable, discs (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray), paid internet downloads and (ahem) unpaid internet downloads. Among these the least viewer hostile source is probably the last option.
I think you might be overlooking the fact that the QuickTime movie player in Apple's new device (let's call it iTV for convenience) won't have access to the divx codec that you install on your Mac. I think you would need to be able to install that codec on the iTV device and if it is a closed box that might not be an option. In other words the claim that iTV can play anything you can play with iTunes means it can play anything that iTunes with an unmodified system can play. I don't know this for a fact but it seems logical unless you can hack your iTV and install codecs on it. When the device ships we will get the answer to this question.
Oh, I almost forgot to welcome all you newbies to /.
No, the original correction was right. Your correction to the correction was bascially wrong but you did rephrase the original statement so that it was no longer nonsense. The problem was that ultimate was the right word to use but whoever wrote "Apple, the penultimate source of cool", thought that penultimate sounded even cooler but was insufficiently educated to realize that tacking on a syllable can significantly change meaning in this case. Just because learning Latin is no longer required to be considered educated does not mean all dictionaries can be blithely ignored.
He knows that the record companies will not agree to reduced DRM restrictions and so simply passes the legal and media ball to them.
I'm trying to imagine what thought process could be present in your head when this statement is made. Assuming your premise is true how can you find anything objectionable in the conclusion? If the record companies really were adamant in their refusal then how is the letter simple smoke and mirrors ? How would knowing more details of the agreement between Apple and the RIAA change anything if the premise is true?
Remember when the iPod was introduced Apple's idea of copyright protection was a simple message of Don't Steal Music. No scrambling, no encryption or keys. Even with the iTMS the main source of music for iPods is and always has been completely DRM free digital music from CD's. Electronic distribution may be the future and it was probably a wise allocation of resources to differentiate the iPod from other players and as a hedge against that possible future. But make no mistake about it, the iPod is built on a foundation of DRM free media. Extending the DRM free characteristic to the iTMS will make life easier for Apple and its customers. Anyone who thinks the iPod would be an easier competitive target with electronic distribution of DRM free music has simply not been paying attention.
Just because the media companies want a broadcast flag does not mean it exists. They have been shot down each time they have tried to get it mandated. The courts informed the FCC in no uncertain terms that it does not have the authority to create requirements of that sort for consumer electronics or computer companies. It is a red herring. It DOES NOT exist. (It has also been shot down in Congress more than once).
The cable industry has made it quite clear through their actions (or lack thereof) they have no intention of supporting in any significant way the Cable Card "standard". It might be better for the consumer but the cable cartel does not care. It will simply expire due to benign (or not so benign) neglect.
On the other hand most of the entertainment people actually choose to watch whether or not they subscribe to cable is on the major broadcast networks and the ATSC standard (which replaced the 50+ year old NTSC) does a great job of delivering all that for a price of $0 per month (i.e. advertiser supported) if you live in or near almost any metroplitan area. For the programs you might enjoy on the premium cable channels (you know, the ones that raise your monthly bill to about $100) you have the option of buying individually on iTMS from Apple in many cases or you can also wait and purchase the DVD's.
Just to be clear after all that verbiage, there is no artificial degrading of the image quality from HD Tuners for either the Mac or WinXP. You can view and record HD video in its full resolution with no need to replace your video card with MPAA mandated quality reduction circuitry. That is something you get only with Vista so far.
When you add an HD tuner or Blu-Ray drive to your Mac you will discover that the rules for HD content protection are the same.
Could you explain how this pertains to HD Tuners on the Mac or PC? So far only Vista includes most of the DRM crud. XP on the PC and current Macs both handle HD Tuners without the need for specially crippled video cards.
What percentage of those hybrids are also mammoth SUV's and similar extravagant vehicles? Just because a vehicle uses hybrid technology does not mean it treads lightly. Also much of California has been set up to make life without intensive use of a car quite challenging. I'd still say that attacking greenhouse gas emissions as a phenomenon best addressed by outlawing incandescent lightbulbs in a state so devoted to the cult of the automobile is more than slightly amusing.
I suppose I should leave it as an issue on which we could agree to disagree. But I'll take another run at it. Other people can look at the same factors and reach a different conclusion (i.e. they could conclude that CFL's still suck too much and choose to continue using incandescents). Attempting to use the police power of the state to force everyone to accept your conclusion is folly on a remarkably grand scale. I doubt this proposal stands a snowball's chance in hell of passing. But the arrogance of the attempt might be dramatically counterproductive. On the other hand forcing the makers of high efficiency lighting devices to improve their products so they can successfully compete with a product that people clearly find preferable is something that markets do very well. Take away that competition and you can expect manufacturers will have other priorities higher than improving the characteristics of CFL's.
You're talking about how environmentally friendly a product is. I'm talking about how much it sucks. I'm more than slightly worried that the mercury issue may make this case less clear than the proponents would like us to believe. But setting that to one side there is a real issue of how much CFL suck for a variety of reasons that have been discussed by many people here. This isn't the first time I've checked into the feasibility of CFL as an option. The first time was almost a decade ago trying to convince my father-in-law they might be a good idea for his apartment building. I suspect they have made real progress over that time making them a better replacement for what people already know and use. I don't think they've made it yet and my suspicion is that the market is probably the best chance we have that as a product they will finally succeed or some other technology, like LED, will step up. Having California legislators pick winners in the market is unwise.
the larger issue here is that California's government thinks it's their duty to restrict people from making purchases it deems unwise. I don't subscribe to the belief that my government knows what's best for me and should be making my decisions. I prefer personal freedom. If companies continue to improve CF bulbs and eventually make them more desirable than incandescents, then incandescent sales will falter without governement intervention. But if the government outlaws incandescents, there will be less motivation for companies to make CF bulbs cheaper and smaller with a more pleasing spectral output. You won't be able to legally buy anything else, so why bother improving them.
Thank you, that is the best comment anyone has presented on this topic. I'm quoting it here to make it marginally more likely to be read. The companies that make CFL are the same evil industrialists as all the others. If the market is not used to force them to make their product better they just won't do it.
support normal indoors living temperatures with zero heat input beyond humans and ordinary applicances far further north than the UK
While you may have other places in Europe in mind and could still be correct even if you don't you might take a look at how far north the UK actually is. Every part of the UK is further north than any part of the continental US (i.e. except Alaska).