I'm pretty sure that the person asking the question was interested in software to work with musical scores, not audio recordings. So while Pro Tools, Reason, etc., are all pretty cool, they're not relevant.
My father is a composer, and a bit of a computer-phobe (hey, he's 74!) and despite that, over the years he's really come to depend on Finale. To understand how important a tool like this is to a composer, I can't get him to use email or a web browser, but Finale turned him into a regular computer user. It's so important that I can't get him running MacOS X until they port Finale. Heck, he bought an iBook last week because he was worried that if he waited he could only buy Mac's that wouldn't boot into MacOS 9, so he couldn't run Finale. Heck, he almost sprang for the 17" PowerBook just to see two pages of score side by side (until he saw the price difference...).
Yes, Finale runs under Classic. But (you've gotta love this) you can't *install* it under Classic -- you have to boot into MacOS 9 in order to install Finale, then you can switch back to MacOS X and run it under Classic. Sure, they're promising a MacOS X native version in a month or two. It might even happen.
Given what he went through to learn Finale (years of phone calls, etc.), I can't imagine him switching to another program. It'd be easier to get him to switch operating systems or platforms than Finale...
There are some wonderful bits of understatement in this document:
"Although debate already rages about whether there is a digital first sale defense for the transmission of a copyrighted work when the sender's work disappears, any argument that a bona fide purchaser of a copyrighted work (such as a CD) can share P2P copies of that work with many others is not likely to be successful."
"Given recent press coverage, congressional hearings, and Internet chat, students could find it difficult to prove that they were unaware that file sharing was infringement."
"Colleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct. Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation."
And of course the footnote on the first page: "Paper prepared by Michael J. Remington, Esq., Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP, Washington, DC, for the Education Task Force of the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities. It may be reproduced, distributed, and shared without permission for personal and noncommercial use."
The point I was making is that a paper trail on an electronic voting system doesn't prove anything, because there's no assurance that there's a relationship between the vote recorded internally and the vote printed on the paper receipt. This could be addressed by printing a receipt in duplicate (as in, an impact printer on multi-level 'carbon' paper, like credit card receipts) where one paper strip goes into a secure box, and one paper strip goes to the voters. then you could audit a machine by matching the paper tape against the reported total.
Oddly, none of the systems for sale support this (that I know of).
You mean the sore losers who called for a recount as provided for in Florida law (Democrats) or the sore losers who opposed the recount in Florida "on principle" while demanding (and getting) a recount in North Dacota (Republicans)?
"We've had software running tons of mission critical applications, like financial institutions, and people don't seem to be ultra wary of using the ATM" -- that's not because ATM's are secure, it's because the banks absorb the cost of fraud in ATM's (which occurs regularly) as the cost of doing business, and avoids publicity.
"My voting district already uses a computer touch-screen system and I am not aware of any polling problems where people were unwilling to use the electronic machines." That doesn't mean that there weren't problems -- it means that you're not aware of any. The lack of any means of an independent audit (which makes it nearly impossible to detect polling problems, and impossible to prove them) is the biggest problem with the systems.
Personally, I can't see why we don't stick with making pencil marks on paper and OCR scanning them. OCR is cheap to implement, is (historically) far more accurate than the alternatives, has all voting verified by the voters (all bad ballots are rejected immediately, so they can be corrected), and is auditable. Tally the votes by human beings using telephones, with appropriate cross-checks, and you're done.
Touchscreens are more expensive, more error prone, and can't (as sold) be independently audited or verified.
My point wasn't that open source isn't winning the debate, it was that it should _still_ win the debate even if MS takes a more effective approach towards promoting its products.
As for ownership of IP, it depends on where they work, or on specific employment or consulting contracts (tons of MS "employees" are actually consultants, whose independent work MS cannot claim). In California, for example, a company cannot claim ownership over IP created by an employee on their own time, not using any IP or resources provided by the employer.
My point is that there are people at MS who understand, and even support in some cases, open source projects, but can also make reasonable arguments supporting Microsoft's products. If these people's perspectives become Microsoft's strategy for competing with Linux, it'll be harder to argue against than the "cancer" FUD...
While the limitation could help sell new machines with built in SuperDrives, which I am sure that Apple doesn't mind, my understanding is that the limitation comes from Apple's license for the MPEG2 encoder in iDVD -- they only pay the license fee (and it's apparently considerable) for every Mac with a built in SuperDrive, so they can't (legally) let you use iDVD with any other Mac. Well, I suppose that they could let you use iDVD, but not to actually encode anything in MPEG2, so that's not too useful...
A third party figured out how to get iDVD to work with third party DVD-R drives, and Apple had to stop them (bummer). I think that xlr8yourmac.com has more details.
At least one manufacturer is selling DVD-R drives as an after-market upgrade, with their own bundled DVD authoring software. My mom just ordered one (MSI's drive, pre-installed in an iBook) -- I look forward to trying the software.
I wish I had moderator points. That bit about the Oracle ad is dead on. And you're right -- the only real strength MS has right now is that it doesn't occur to most people that there's any viable alternative -- and in many areas they may be right -- the switching costs (especially the idea of retraining the entire company) mean that Linux is really only viable for most people on "invisible server" applications. So it's easy to move web and database servers to Linux, but you'd be killed for raising the issue of switching from Exchange, much less switching the desktop OS, because that would mean having to explain to 10,000 users why everything changed. Or, perhaps more importantly, risking complete failure by changing something that works acceptably well now in order to save money. Ask any CIO if he wants to save $10M and of course he'll say yes. Ask him if he wants to risk destroying the company's email to do it, and he'll say no. Sure, you can argue that if he's careful/good he could manage the transition, and you'd be right, but there's a non-zero chance of complete failure, and to most CIO's that trumps saving some percentage of his budget (And probably the only part of his budget that people aren't complaining about).
I love competition! It keeps everyone playing hard. Without competition, stagnation sets in.
For a particularly dramatic example, look at the pace of advance in web browsers. Back when MS and NS were engaged in the "browser wars" there were new versions every few weeks, and major functions every few months, and every version created interesting new opportunities to explore. Now that IE has "won" I can't even remember when the last useful capability was added to IE. It's like when NS checked out, the IE team shut down... and we all lost the benefit of those two teams' competiton to bring us better browsers.
I know quite a few Microsoft people who are quite knowledgable about Linux and open source software (some of whom contribute to open source projects in their spare time, etc), who are quite capable of rational discussion on the topic of open vs. closed source, and why it's good for customers to use MS products. If MS starts attacking open source software on rational grounds, they certainly have the resources to do so effectively. And in the world of technology, such an approach might be more successful than their emotion-based attacks.
After all, it's been fairly easy for open source advocates to discredit Microsoft's initial relatively incoherent ramblings; "cancer" and "communism" type name calling did more to discredit MS than their opponents. So while MS' FUD attacks were dangerous because there was a lot of money/press behind them, they were ultimately unproductive.
If MS can make a solid, businesslike case that MS soutions are better than open source that's likely to carry more weight. Imagine, for example, if there were a credible, objective study that showed that (to make up a hypothetical scenario) the total TCO for Windows 2003 as measured in production is lower than Linux, or the application development costs are lower using Windows and the associated frameworks, that'll at least allow them to retain current corporate customers, and perhaps even go back to growing enterprise marketshare.
I think that even though MS competing more effectively makes everyone's else's lives harder, ultimately a shift towards civilized debate is good for the industry. In business settings, Open Source must be able to win on objective, pragmatic merits, not just on principles. Winning on both principles and pragmatics makes open source unstoppable. If the competition reveals weak points in the open source arguments, that's _good_ because that means that they can be addressed, and everyone wins.
Quite a few of the people working on the E10K were from Thinking Machines Corporation. TMC was Danny Hillis' company that introduced massively parallel supercomputing. The first generation machine was a Symbolics workstation coordinating up to 65,536 single-bit CPU's connected by a hypercube network. Each CPU was fairly slow, but there were tons of CPU's and CPU performance was balanced nicely with network throughput (whereas most MPP machines have fast CPU's starved for data). Weird, but also astoundingly fast. Anyway, more relevant to Sun, the last generation machine from TMC was based on UltraSPARC's with custom FPU's (128 MFLOPS per compute node, which was cool at the time). I don't think that there was an upper limit on the number of CPU's, but the biggest I saw (I worked there for a few years) was 4,096 compute notes, and a few hundred storage nodes. Anyway, TMC ended up getting out of the hardware business (check out think.com), and Sun hired quite a few of the engineers (who knew how to build an MPP SPARC-based machine, with compilers, etc.) which rolled into the E10K nicely.
I agree. I've been considering setting up a little side business to pre-build MythTV hardware/software. What doyou think?
I'd agree with your comment -- if you're worried about having to fiddle with things, you should just get a TiVo -- it "just works" while the MythTV is a fair amount of work to set up.
As an aside, MythTV actually does have a web server built in (so you can manage recordings while you're not home, etc.). Don't know about mail, though it might be cool (come to think of it) to have it email you when it records programs.
Actually, I've built a couple of MythTV boxes, and I've been running it on a dedicated box of my own for two months now, and I'll stand by what I said. It's a fantatic project.
Yes, it's not completely consumer ready yet (it should manage disk space better, a change which is in CVS but not a packaged release yet) but it's astoundingly good for anyone who likes fiddling with these sorts of things.
And in building MythTV's, I've found that it's very picky about the TV tuner card (Only the Hauppauge 250 and 350 work constently, so not the card that is in the MSI box reviewed here, nor the WinTV card -- which with a tuner and TV out would be ideal), moderately picky about the TV out/video card (if you want to use hardware decoding, for example, and settings for overscan, etc., are tricky), and the situation with IR blasters is a real mess (i.e. nothing you can buy works consistently, but there are schematics so that you can build your own). Also, finding out that Red Hat doesn't recognise the motherboard ethernet on nForce2 motherboards, so I had to use a slot for ethernet on the otherwise very nice little (MicroATX) M7NCG motherboard I used. (OK, that's not technically MythTV's problem, but...) And then there was that weird problem where playing video's (which launches MPlayer) didn't switch focus back to mythfrontend, so the remote, etc., all died. This was worked around by configuring the system to automatically force focus to wherever the mouse is (which is a hack to force focus back to mythfrontend).
I certainly don't mean to be negative about the project -- it's a fantastic project, and is amazingly good given its youth. It's not quite ready for normal consumers. But for what it is, it's astoundingly good -- it looks very slick, almost always works wonderfully, and is completely open so you can make it do anything you like... I think that in six months, people will be shipping it in products.
I _did_ read the article. I still think it's lame that in a home theatre PC you still can't get TV in/out built in, but have to use up _both_ of your slots to add them. Vendors should build in the things that everyone will use, and for a HTPC tv in/out should be standard...
This looks like pretty hardware (aside from the pathetic lack of TV in/out in a "home theater" PC)... but the million dollar question is whether it will run MythTV (www.mythtv.org), the open source TiVo-like system? MythTV is a fantastic project, but it's pretty picky about the hardware it will run on.
I only made it two pages into the review before the site was slashdotted, so apologies if they documented the software later in the review...
Sure, you can't support every random application that people install on a whim; the spyware bundled into p2p appls, for example, is a nightmare from every perspective. Ditto games.
But (as is the case in the article, where people are running Linux on their desktops) if someone needs a tool to do their jobs, IT's response should be to figure out how to support it, not to complain that it's not supported. And in many companies, the reaction wouldn't have been "OK, let's figure out how to support Linux" it would have been to bad Linux from the workplace because it confused the MCSE's.
The article is actually pretty good -- it's a reminder that if people are using a platform, that IT has to support it properly. This is a refreshing change from the traditional IT reponse that if IT hasn't decided to support it, it should be prohibited. I congratulate the author on realizing that IT's job is to facilitate people's jobs, not restricting them to what's convenient for IT. Help desks are always horribly overworked, so it's understandable that they start falling back on blaming users for breaking the rules, and refusing to support anything but the standard application set, instead of thinking more creatively to help users get their jobs done. The irony is that _every_ IT support person has tons of weird software on their machines that would cause them to refuse to support the machine if it were someone else's.
(and I say this as someone who's worked in IT, and managed IT departments, for _years_.)
Keep in mind that the people that the RIAA most want to keep off the p2p networks are also, by definition, the easiest to find on the networks. That is, if you have a broadband connection with 10K popular, copyrighted tracks, you're guaranteed to be highly visible to anyone looking around the p2p network for copyrighted files. So if they can hit 0.1% of the network, but it's the 0.1% that contains the "hardcore" servers, then it'll be far more effective than 0.1%...
Your understanding is what iTMS does -- you can only buy music while in the US (because of licensing issues) but once you own it you can listen to it all you want.
The reason the guy ran into trouble is that he moved out of the US then wiped out his "key" which he can't re-issue because he's not in the US any more.
People have trouble like this all the time when moving internationally. Like if you buy a printer in the US, then move to the UK can you can't buy ink because the model numbers are different, that sort of thing. Annoying, for sure, when you fall between the corporate cracks.
This doesn't make any sense. The iTunes Music Store doesn't provide re-downloading, no matter where you live -- Apple's very clear that once you successfully down the song it's your responsibility to keep it backed up. I suspect that's why they added a backup capability to iTunes.
What does this have to do with being inside or outside the US?
Your claim was that (because it was patented) AAC wasn't as widely available as Ogg. I agree that Ogg _could_ be installed on tons of devices. But right now it isn't, so if you own a device that can play AAC (i.e. anything that can play MPEG4, or an iPod, or one of a couple of new MP3 players that understand AAC). Of course, to really make the point that patented things can be widely used, MP3 is, of course, a patented format, and it's used far more widely than Ogg (or AAC).
I agree that converting from AAC to another compressed format (e.g. MP3's) would result in a loss of quality. Your claim, however, was that you _couldn't_ get Protected AAC music out without breaking the law or re-encoding the analog audio. In fact, you can easily convert from AAC to any other format without either breaking the law or dropping to analog.
So your basic complaint is that you don't know the definitions of the scales, so you're assuming that they might as well be random. Go read http://ff123.net/64test/practice.html (which is where they explained the testing process to the volunteers).
Their scale, btw, is:
5.0 = Imperceptible 4.0 = Perceptible, but not annoying 3.0 = Slightly annoying 2.0 = Annoying 1.0 = Very annoying
Yes, I agree that people will vary in their interpretation of the terms (what's the difference between "annoying" and "very annoying"?), or have other individual aberrations (rank all encodings of the song as great if they like the song) -- but in a large sample size, individual variation is compensated for (which is one reason why sample size matters).
If you couldn't apply statistical techniques to subjective data, opinion polling wouldn't work, and of course it works quite well. You just have to know that you're dealing with subjective data and treat the results accordingly. Rather obviously, a codec rated 4.0 is not "twice as good" as a codec rated 2.0, for example. But it's still valuable to know that with a 98% certainty, people prefer the output of the first codec to the second.
If you want absolute certainty, instead of percentages and approximation, you shouldn't be doing statistics, you should be doing
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that the person asking the question was interested in software to work with musical scores, not audio recordings. So while Pro Tools, Reason, etc., are all pretty cool, they're not relevant.
My father is a composer, and a bit of a computer-phobe (hey, he's 74!) and despite that, over the years he's really come to depend on Finale. To understand how important a tool like this is to a composer, I can't get him to use email or a web browser, but Finale turned him into a regular computer user. It's so important that I can't get him running MacOS X until they port Finale. Heck, he bought an iBook last week because he was worried that if he waited he could only buy Mac's that wouldn't boot into MacOS 9, so he couldn't run Finale. Heck, he almost sprang for the 17" PowerBook just to see two pages of score side by side (until he saw the price difference...).
Yes, Finale runs under Classic. But (you've gotta love this) you can't *install* it under Classic -- you have to boot into MacOS 9 in order to install Finale, then you can switch back to MacOS X and run it under Classic. Sure, they're promising a MacOS X native version in a month or two. It might even happen.
Given what he went through to learn Finale (years of phone calls, etc.), I can't imagine him switching to another program. It'd be easier to get him to switch operating systems or platforms than Finale...
There are some wonderful bits of understatement in this document:
"Although debate already rages about whether there is a digital first sale defense for the transmission of a copyrighted work when the sender's work disappears, any argument that a bona fide purchaser of a copyrighted work (such as a CD) can share P2P copies of that work with many others is not likely to be successful."
"Given recent press coverage, congressional hearings, and Internet chat, students could find it difficult to prove that they were unaware that file sharing was infringement."
"Colleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct.
Students therefore should not assume that their college or university will accept liability for them or provide them with legal representation."
And of course the footnote on the first page: "Paper prepared by Michael J. Remington, Esq., Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP, Washington, DC, for the Education Task Force of the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities. It may be reproduced, distributed, and shared without permission for personal and noncommercial use."
Man, what a wit!
The point I was making is that a paper trail on an electronic voting system doesn't prove anything, because there's no assurance that there's a relationship between the vote recorded internally and the vote printed on the paper receipt. This could be addressed by printing a receipt in duplicate (as in, an impact printer on multi-level 'carbon' paper, like credit card receipts) where one paper strip goes into a secure box, and one paper strip goes to the voters. then you could audit a machine by matching the paper tape against the reported total.
Oddly, none of the systems for sale support this (that I know of).
There's no guarantee, of course, that the machine stores the same result internally as it prints out.
You mean the sore losers who called for a recount as provided for in Florida law (Democrats) or the sore losers who opposed the recount in Florida "on principle" while demanding (and getting) a recount in North Dacota (Republicans)?
"We've had software running tons of mission critical applications, like financial institutions, and people don't seem to be ultra wary of using the ATM" -- that's not because ATM's are secure, it's because the banks absorb the cost of fraud in ATM's (which occurs regularly) as the cost of doing business, and avoids publicity.
"My voting district already uses a computer touch-screen system and I am not aware of any polling problems where people were unwilling to use the electronic machines." That doesn't mean that there weren't problems -- it means that you're not aware of any. The lack of any means of an independent audit (which makes it nearly impossible to detect polling problems, and impossible to prove them) is the biggest problem with the systems.
Personally, I can't see why we don't stick with making pencil marks on paper and OCR scanning them. OCR is cheap to implement, is (historically) far more accurate than the alternatives, has all voting verified by the voters (all bad ballots are rejected immediately, so they can be corrected), and is auditable. Tally the votes by human beings using telephones, with appropriate cross-checks, and you're done.
Touchscreens are more expensive, more error prone, and can't (as sold) be independently audited or verified.
My point wasn't that open source isn't winning the debate, it was that it should _still_ win the debate even if MS takes a more effective approach towards promoting its products.
As for ownership of IP, it depends on where they work, or on specific employment or consulting contracts (tons of MS "employees" are actually consultants, whose independent work MS cannot claim). In California, for example, a company cannot claim ownership over IP created by an employee on their own time, not using any IP or resources provided by the employer.
My point is that there are people at MS who understand, and even support in some cases, open source projects, but can also make reasonable arguments supporting Microsoft's products. If these people's perspectives become Microsoft's strategy for competing with Linux, it'll be harder to argue against than the "cancer" FUD...
While the limitation could help sell new machines with built in SuperDrives, which I am sure that Apple doesn't mind, my understanding is that the limitation comes from Apple's license for the MPEG2 encoder in iDVD -- they only pay the license fee (and it's apparently considerable) for every Mac with a built in SuperDrive, so they can't (legally) let you use iDVD with any other Mac. Well, I suppose that they could let you use iDVD, but not to actually encode anything in MPEG2, so that's not too useful...
A third party figured out how to get iDVD to work with third party DVD-R drives, and Apple had to stop them (bummer). I think that xlr8yourmac.com has more details.
At least one manufacturer is selling DVD-R drives as an after-market upgrade, with their own bundled DVD authoring software. My mom just ordered one (MSI's drive, pre-installed in an iBook) -- I look forward to trying the software.
I wish I had moderator points. That bit about the Oracle ad is dead on. And you're right -- the only real strength MS has right now is that it doesn't occur to most people that there's any viable alternative -- and in many areas they may be right -- the switching costs (especially the idea of retraining the entire company) mean that Linux is really only viable for most people on "invisible server" applications. So it's easy to move web and database servers to Linux, but you'd be killed for raising the issue of switching from Exchange, much less switching the desktop OS, because that would mean having to explain to 10,000 users why everything changed. Or, perhaps more importantly, risking complete failure by changing something that works acceptably well now in order to save money. Ask any CIO if he wants to save $10M and of course he'll say yes. Ask him if he wants to risk destroying the company's email to do it, and he'll say no. Sure, you can argue that if he's careful/good he could manage the transition, and you'd be right, but there's a non-zero chance of complete failure, and to most CIO's that trumps saving some percentage of his budget (And probably the only part of his budget that people aren't complaining about).
I love competition! It keeps everyone playing hard. Without competition, stagnation sets in.
For a particularly dramatic example, look at the pace of advance in web browsers. Back when MS and NS were engaged in the "browser wars" there were new versions every few weeks, and major functions every few months, and every version created interesting new opportunities to explore. Now that IE has "won" I can't even remember when the last useful capability was added to IE. It's like when NS checked out, the IE team shut down... and we all lost the benefit of those two teams' competiton to bring us better browsers.
I know quite a few Microsoft people who are quite knowledgable about Linux and open source software (some of whom contribute to open source projects in their spare time, etc), who are quite capable of rational discussion on the topic of open vs. closed source, and why it's good for customers to use MS products. If MS starts attacking open source software on rational grounds, they certainly have the resources to do so effectively. And in the world of technology, such an approach might be more successful than their emotion-based attacks.
After all, it's been fairly easy for open source advocates to discredit Microsoft's initial relatively incoherent ramblings; "cancer" and "communism" type name calling did more to discredit MS than their opponents. So while MS' FUD attacks were dangerous because there was a lot of money/press behind them, they were ultimately unproductive.
If MS can make a solid, businesslike case that MS soutions are better than open source that's likely to carry more weight. Imagine, for example, if there were a credible, objective study that showed that (to make up a hypothetical scenario) the total TCO for Windows 2003 as measured in production is lower than Linux, or the application development costs are lower using Windows and the associated frameworks, that'll at least allow them to retain current corporate customers, and perhaps even go back to growing enterprise marketshare.
I think that even though MS competing more effectively makes everyone's else's lives harder, ultimately a shift towards civilized debate is good for the industry. In business settings, Open Source must be able to win on objective, pragmatic merits, not just on principles. Winning on both principles and pragmatics makes open source unstoppable. If the competition reveals weak points in the open source arguments, that's _good_ because that means that they can be addressed, and everyone wins.
Quite a few of the people working on the E10K were from Thinking Machines Corporation. TMC was Danny Hillis' company that introduced massively parallel supercomputing. The first generation machine was a Symbolics workstation coordinating up to 65,536 single-bit CPU's connected by a hypercube network. Each CPU was fairly slow, but there were tons of CPU's and CPU performance was balanced nicely with network throughput (whereas most MPP machines have fast CPU's starved for data). Weird, but also astoundingly fast. Anyway, more relevant to Sun, the last generation machine from TMC was based on UltraSPARC's with custom FPU's (128 MFLOPS per compute node, which was cool at the time). I don't think that there was an upper limit on the number of CPU's, but the biggest I saw (I worked there for a few years) was 4,096 compute notes, and a few hundred storage nodes. Anyway, TMC ended up getting out of the hardware business (check out think.com), and Sun hired quite a few of the engineers (who knew how to build an MPP SPARC-based machine, with compilers, etc.) which rolled into the E10K nicely.
Well, it's not _that_ bad. There's a very good FAQ, so you can get MythTV up and running pretty easily. It's tedious but quite well documented.
I agree. I've been considering setting up a little side business to pre-build MythTV hardware/software. What doyou think?
I'd agree with your comment -- if you're worried about having to fiddle with things, you should just get a TiVo -- it "just works" while the MythTV is a fair amount of work to set up.
As an aside, MythTV actually does have a web server built in (so you can manage recordings while you're not home, etc.). Don't know about mail, though it might be cool (come to think of it) to have it email you when it records programs.
But
Actually, I've built a couple of MythTV boxes, and I've been running it on a dedicated box of my own for two months now, and I'll stand by what I said. It's a fantatic project.
Yes, it's not completely consumer ready yet (it should manage disk space better, a change which is in CVS but not a packaged release yet) but it's astoundingly good for anyone who likes fiddling with these sorts of things.
And in building MythTV's, I've found that it's very picky about the TV tuner card (Only the Hauppauge 250 and 350 work constently, so not the card that is in the MSI box reviewed here, nor the WinTV card -- which with a tuner and TV out would be ideal), moderately picky about the TV out/video card (if you want to use hardware decoding, for example, and settings for overscan, etc., are tricky), and the situation with IR blasters is a real mess (i.e. nothing you can buy works consistently, but there are schematics so that you can build your own). Also, finding out that Red Hat doesn't recognise the motherboard ethernet on nForce2 motherboards, so I had to use a slot for ethernet on the otherwise very nice little (MicroATX) M7NCG motherboard I used. (OK, that's not technically MythTV's problem, but...) And then there was that weird problem where playing video's (which launches MPlayer) didn't switch focus back to mythfrontend, so the remote, etc., all died. This was worked around by configuring the system to automatically force focus to wherever the mouse is (which is a hack to force focus back to mythfrontend).
I certainly don't mean to be negative about the project -- it's a fantastic project, and is amazingly good given its youth. It's not quite ready for normal consumers. But for what it is, it's astoundingly good -- it looks very slick, almost always works wonderfully, and is completely open so you can make it do anything you like... I think that in six months, people will be shipping it in products.
I _did_ read the article. I still think it's lame that in a home theatre PC you still can't get TV in/out built in, but have to use up _both_ of your slots to add them. Vendors should build in the things that everyone will use, and for a HTPC tv in/out should be standard...
This looks like pretty hardware (aside from the pathetic lack of TV in/out in a "home theater" PC) ... but the million dollar question is whether it will run MythTV (www.mythtv.org), the open source TiVo-like system? MythTV is a fantastic project, but it's pretty picky about the hardware it will run on.
I only made it two pages into the review before the site was slashdotted, so apologies if they documented the software later in the review...
Sure, you can't support every random application that people install on a whim; the spyware bundled into p2p appls, for example, is a nightmare from every perspective. Ditto games.
But (as is the case in the article, where people are running Linux on their desktops) if someone needs a tool to do their jobs, IT's response should be to figure out how to support it, not to complain that it's not supported. And in many companies, the reaction wouldn't have been "OK, let's figure out how to support Linux" it would have been to bad Linux from the workplace because it confused the MCSE's.
Far from suing Apple, Xerox licensed their IP to Apple in return for a chunk of Apple stock.
- LP
The article is actually pretty good -- it's a reminder that if people are using a platform, that IT has to support it properly. This is a refreshing change from the traditional IT reponse that if IT hasn't decided to support it, it should be prohibited. I congratulate the author on realizing that IT's job is to facilitate people's jobs, not restricting them to what's convenient for IT. Help desks are always horribly overworked, so it's understandable that they start falling back on blaming users for breaking the rules, and refusing to support anything but the standard application set, instead of thinking more creatively to help users get their jobs done. The irony is that _every_ IT support person has tons of weird software on their machines that would cause them to refuse to support the machine if it were someone else's.
(and I say this as someone who's worked in IT, and managed IT departments, for _years_.)
Keep in mind that the people that the RIAA most want to keep off the p2p networks are also, by definition, the easiest to find on the networks. That is, if you have a broadband connection with 10K popular, copyrighted tracks, you're guaranteed to be highly visible to anyone looking around the p2p network for copyrighted files. So if they can hit 0.1% of the network, but it's the 0.1% that contains the "hardcore" servers, then it'll be far more effective than 0.1%...
Your understanding is what iTMS does -- you can only buy music while in the US (because of licensing issues) but once you own it you can listen to it all you want.
The reason the guy ran into trouble is that he moved out of the US then wiped out his "key" which he can't re-issue because he's not in the US any more.
People have trouble like this all the time when moving internationally. Like if you buy a printer in the US, then move to the UK can you can't buy ink because the model numbers are different, that sort of thing. Annoying, for sure, when you fall between the corporate cracks.
This doesn't make any sense. The iTunes Music Store doesn't provide re-downloading, no matter where you live -- Apple's very clear that once you successfully down the song it's your responsibility to keep it backed up. I suspect that's why they added a backup capability to iTunes.
What does this have to do with being inside or outside the US?
Your claim was that (because it was patented) AAC wasn't as widely available as Ogg. I agree that Ogg _could_ be installed on tons of devices. But right now it isn't, so if you own a device that can play AAC (i.e. anything that can play MPEG4, or an iPod, or one of a couple of new MP3 players that understand AAC). Of course, to really make the point that patented things can be widely used, MP3 is, of course, a patented format, and it's used far more widely than Ogg (or AAC).
I agree that converting from AAC to another compressed format (e.g. MP3's) would result in a loss of quality. Your claim, however, was that you _couldn't_ get Protected AAC music out without breaking the law or re-encoding the analog audio. In fact, you can easily convert from AAC to any other format without either breaking the law or dropping to analog.
So your basic complaint is that you don't know the definitions of the scales, so you're assuming that they might as well be random. Go read http://ff123.net/64test/practice.html (which is where they explained the testing process to the volunteers).
Their scale, btw, is:
5.0 = Imperceptible
4.0 = Perceptible, but not annoying
3.0 = Slightly annoying
2.0 = Annoying
1.0 = Very annoying
Yes, I agree that people will vary in their interpretation of the terms (what's the difference between "annoying" and "very annoying"?), or have other individual aberrations (rank all encodings of the song as great if they like the song) -- but in a large sample size, individual variation is compensated for (which is one reason why sample size matters).
If you couldn't apply statistical techniques to subjective data, opinion polling wouldn't work, and of course it works quite well. You just have to know that you're dealing with subjective data and treat the results accordingly. Rather obviously, a codec rated 4.0 is not "twice as good" as a codec rated 2.0, for example. But it's still valuable to know that with a 98% certainty, people prefer the output of the first codec to the second.
If you want absolute certainty, instead of percentages and approximation, you shouldn't be doing statistics, you should be doing