"As I was saying, the main reasons not to use AAC are: it's not as good as Ogg at the same bitrate, and it's patented, so your choice of players is far more limited."
While Ogg is a cool thing, and I have hope that it catches on, currently it's supported by almost no consumer devices. AAC, on the other hand, is supported by the most popular MP3 player (iPod). Of course ACC is already on anything that can play MPEG4 (i.e. any decent Wintel PC, Macintosh, or UNIX machine with MPlayer installed, some DVD players).
"iMusic does treat me like a criminal by imposing DRM, was my point. If I were to buy from iMusic, I'd either have to break DRM (illegal), or I have to convert the AAC file to something else through analog (probably legal since there is no circumvention). And since iMusic, so far is the only reason to use AAC, I don't see any reason to use AAC at all."
You can, of course, easily convert the AAC music into WAV files by "burning" them to a disk image (i.e. no reason to actually burn a CD), and re-import them as MP3's. All legal. Just don't share them!:-)
I've been running 10.3 for a few weeks, and I think that they've passed MacOS 8 by a mile.
Expose is wonderful - it's astoundingly better than any other method of managing large numbers of windows. After using it, I have no idea how I ever got work done on a UNIX machine without it. Also, the OS is far more responsive than 10.2 -- MacOS X is now at least as responsive as 9 (without crashing, etc.). Also, the new Finder's guiding users towards the standard directories for things (home directory, applications, documents, etc.) allow MacOS X to support multiple users and networked filesystems while coming back to MacOS classic's simple-feeling filesystem. Networking on Windows networks is easier than it is on a PC. The development tools kick butt -- way better than the old MacOS 9-era tools (sorry, CodeWarrior). Using a digital camera is painless. No INIT's or CDEV's to conflict -- imagine never again needing to reboot, renaming system extensions, over and over again until your system is stable. I can run anything I can run on a UNIX server on my 12" G4 PowerBook. Sure, I have fond memories of MacOS 7/8/9, but the reality is that _everything_ is better now.
I used the original web browser on the NeXT. It wasn't terribly useful, but it was clearly the start of something huge.
Things it did: - Showed text pages with text links and a little bit of formatting (bold and italics, headers). - Clicking on a linked word/phrase opened a new window showing the definition (or whatever). So you ended up with zillions of little windows (unless you held down some modifier key).
Things it didn't do: - Graphics. - Form fields. - Dynamically generated pages (no CGI's). - Complex layout (no tables, etc.).
But because it was easy to author documents, and to implement HTML, it rapidly exploded. Form fields and CGI's allowed you to use the web as a front-end to real applications.
Actually, most of Apple's work on "BSD" consists of code improvements to a huge number of other projects (e.g. gcc, apache, BSD), which is released back to the "upstream" projects under those project's licenses. The code I see under the APSL is code that that is Mac-specific and thus doesn't belong in any upstream project. Of course, the changes to upstream projects are also packaged into the APSL'd Darwin release, but you can always go back to the source project...
Duff, the combination of "You are a liar. BitTorrent users would never illegally pirate software or other media." with "Also, since I started using BitTorrent to download movies, I now go to the movie theater more often." made me LOL. You have mastered irony.
Why do you say "the RIAA will destroy any alternate distribution channel, regardless of content carried"? While you could speculate that they might want to, I've never heard of the RIAA doing anything (in the context of file sharing) to anyone who wasn't sharing music copyrighted by one of the major record labels (i.e. the companies that pay for the RIAA). There are several web sites that legitimately share music (e.g. Grateful Dead concert recordings, independent musicians) using BitTorrent (or straight web downloads) and I've not heard of any RIAA moves to shut them down. Are you speculating, or do you know something I don't?
The issue, IMO, isn't that the web site author should control how the page renders for the user, it's that _only_ the site author and the user should be able to control how the page renders, not third parties. For example, I'd say that it would be wrong for an ISP to rewrite web pages to insert their own advertisements into all web pages browsed by their customers. I'd I'd say that it's wrong for third party software to modify my view of the internet without my very explicit permission.
"Because users have chosen to install Gator/GAIN on their systems."
This is not even close -- virtually nobody intentionally installs Gator. Gator pays software companies to bundle the Gator installer into other installers with as vague as possible a warning, usually with no option to install the software you want without Gator, and with no means to uninstall it.
There was barely an open source community back in 1982 when the Macintosh was getting implemented (launched in 1984, remember?), so there really wasn't an open source community to participate in. When Jobs started NeXT, he based his OS on UNIX and Mach (relatively open/open source), with a proprietary layer on top that was the world's best development framework. Heck, it's been about 10 years, and it's _still_ the world's best development framework. The guy who came up with Interface Builder was brilliant. Anyway, the point is that whenever there have been good open standards (XML, USB, SCSI, 3.5" floppy disks, 802.11b/g, PCMCIA, OpenGL, TCP/IP, NuBus, OpenFirmware, Mach, etc.) Apple has adopted them (and often driven the specifications). Generally speaking, Apple has only introduced proprietary technologies when they were dramatically better than what was out there (Mac monitor ports that negotiated resolution between the computer and monitor, mice, AppleTalk, ADB) and when a standard emerged that caught up to what Apple had been providing, they've killed off their proprietary technology for the standard every time. The only way that they could be _less_ proprietary is for them to do as PC vendors do, which is to do no R&D and just ship whatever someone else invents. Personally, I'd rather support a company that advances the state of the art in advance of the standards, but which drives those advances into the standards, than a company that advances nothing but cost optimizing trailing edge technology.
I think that what they proposed is pretty reasonable. A signed binary Linux bootloader would allow people to run Linux on their X-Box, without releasing any information that would allow people to bypass the signing process that protects X-Box game sales.
Of course, the "or we'll release an exploit" part isn't as friendly, but that's probably the only way that that feel that they can get a response from Microsoft after (supposedly) being ignored in their attempts to communicate.
No, No, No. FSF suing doesn't show that the GPL is problematic, it shows that it is enforceable. Admittedly every GPL violater so far has backed down before the case has gone to trial, but if the GPL were enforced by a trial that would simple remove whatever perception that "the GPL is problematic legally" people opposed to the GPL have managed to project. I'd say that the fact that the GPL has never been challenged in court shows how effective it is...
As for things being "embroiled in day-to-day lawsuits" you've been following the continual stream of lawsuits MS has been involved in, haven't you?
Actually, it's pretty relevant -- if a processor requires higher clock speed to reach the same performance as another chip, it'll require more power, require a more expensive supporting chipset, require more expensive RAM, generate more heat, etc.
I guess you missed it, but there are several superior audio formats that have been around for years. My favorites are:
SACD: insanely high quality stereo audio. Not many systems can play SACD, but if you're a fanatic who loves classical or jazz, what's buying a new high-end CD player?
DVD-A: essentually a normal DVD with the emphasis on the audio. It's cool getting 5.1 mixes of songs, watching music videos, etc. They play in normal DVD players, so I think that this format might possibly catch on as DVD playes replace CD players.
You can find both in any good music store. But they don't sell too well (relative to regular CD sales) because most people are pretty happy with CD's.
Actually, I've been told exactly the same thing by a number of US patent lawyers. In the US you're liable for greater damages if you violate someone else's patent if you know about it than if you don't. So the last thing any engineer should ever do is admit publicly that they know anything about any patent, because they open their employer up to (IIRC) treble damages. Given how well known this is, I am surprised that it's "news".
I think (unless I misread it) that there's a flaw in the shredding mechanism -- the grouping into clusters of 5 lines before computing the md5 checksum means that if there is identical code in two files, but the positions of the code in the files is shifted by a line, they won't match.
For example:
File 1 contains lines A B C D E.
File 2 contains Q A B C D E W X Y Z.
The first MD5 generated from file 1 would be for A B C D E. The first MD5 generated from file 2 would be for Q A B C D, followed by E W X Y Z. So even though the the lines A B C D E are duplicated between the two files, there's no 'match' according to the MD5's. This means that you could duplicate a 100K line file, with a comment at the top, and nothing would match.
So the output of this script, while interesting, wouldn't allow anyone to make precise statements about how the files compared.
The idea of clustering is good (matching individual lines would have too much noise) but perhaps the MD5's could be computed for every line as the start of a cluster of 5 lines? That way the offset wouldn't break the comparison...
The problem wasn't in MS selling software at full price, it was in MS telling schools that if they had donated PC's with Windows on them, but no manual or certificate, that they should _throw the computers out_ because using the donated PC's would be illegal, and MS doesn't sell a version of Windows that can run on older machines that are typically donated (you can't buy Win98 or NT any more...).
Back licensing the school is actually pretty decent of MS, because they eliminate any risk of future hassles.
The amusing part, to me anyway, is that MS completely reversed itself on the topic, presumably because schools realized that if MS wouldn't let them run Windows, rather than throwing the PC's out they could install Linux, and MS realized that they'd rather have schools run free, obsolete versions of Windows than Linux.
If you read the article, you'll see that the school already owns and supports Mac's throughout the school. So they're saying that the cost of supporting more Mac's outweighs getting a free lab full of equipment. Given that they already support Mac's, and Mac's cost less to support than PC's, it's difficult to follow the logic of turning down the free computers. I suspect that it's really some sort of politics, like someone with an out of control ego getting bent that the teacher got free machines that weren't in "the plan."
"The best point made in this article was that the RIAA was stressing that they could NOT contact the users themselves, therefore Verizon had to give up confidential information. By doing this {messaging scare tactic} they invalidated their own arguments, and weakened their position overall...
Not so. They're IMing people at their IP addresses -- they don't know who those people are, just where they happen to be right now. To file a suit to stop someone from sharing music (illegally), they have to know who the person actually is, which is something that only their ISP would know.
No, the real story is that IBM announced that they're going to sell PPC Blades that fit into their x86 blade server. This means that customers can pick between x86 and PPC based completely on price/performance.
I wonder if the 970 runs cooler, and consumes less power, than x86's (as most PPC's do). If so, there's a strong case to be made that the PPC blades will be a lot less expensive to operate, since you can pack them more densely, and spend less on power and AC.
1) "None of this configuration information can be used to identify you.... Windows Update does not collect your name, address, e-mail address, or any other form of personally identifiable information."
This is technically true, but not meaningful. That is, they ship back the PC's GUID, which doesn't directly contain your identity. However, they also collect the same GUID on OS registration, where they also collect your name, address, e-mail address, and so on, so they could easily match the configuration data to your registration data.
2) "This information includes:..." this statement doesn't _exclude_ anything. It just guarantees that they collect the reasonable looking list of information. If they stated "This information is restricted to:..." I'd feel a lot better.
"The configuration information collected is used only to determine the appropriate updates and to generate aggregate statistics."
This is a statement of MS' intent, but since they're allowed to change their usage policies retroactively, with no notice to users (yay US "privacy" laws) this could change. Look at all of the.com's selling user lists for spam. Better not to allow anyone to have data that's easily abused than to rely on their future goodwill.
I used ClearCase to manage web content back in 1994. Worked great! Beat the sh*t out of how most people produce web sites now!
Example: create a view, work in it, and run a web server over it. Validate your changes in the context of the site, including dynamic app's (JSP's, PHP, CGI's, etc.). When it all looks good, commit everything from your view, and automagically (and atomically) the web server sees everything updated.
Slashdot Mirror
"As I was saying, the main reasons not to use AAC are: it's not as good as Ogg at the same bitrate, and it's patented, so your choice of players is far more limited."
:-)
While Ogg is a cool thing, and I have hope that it catches on, currently it's supported by almost no consumer devices. AAC, on the other hand, is supported by the most popular MP3 player (iPod). Of course ACC is already on anything that can play MPEG4 (i.e. any decent Wintel PC, Macintosh, or UNIX machine with MPlayer installed, some DVD players).
"iMusic does treat me like a criminal by imposing DRM, was my point. If I were to buy from iMusic, I'd either have to break DRM (illegal), or I have to convert the AAC file to something else through analog (probably legal since there is no circumvention). And since iMusic, so far is the only reason to use AAC, I don't see any reason to use AAC at all."
You can, of course, easily convert the AAC music into WAV files by "burning" them to a disk image (i.e. no reason to actually burn a CD), and re-import them as MP3's. All legal. Just don't share them!
Perceived audio quality is by definition subjective. Are you saying that you can't perform statistical analysis of subjective data? That's daft.
In the article, it's pretty clear that they're talking about the AAC codec that Apple distributes in QuickTime 6.
I've been running 10.3 for a few weeks, and I think that they've passed MacOS 8 by a mile.
Expose is wonderful - it's astoundingly better than any other method of managing large numbers of windows. After using it, I have no idea how I ever got work done on a UNIX machine without it. Also, the OS is far more responsive than 10.2 -- MacOS X is now at least as responsive as 9 (without crashing, etc.). Also, the new Finder's guiding users towards the standard directories for things (home directory, applications, documents, etc.) allow MacOS X to support multiple users and networked filesystems while coming back to MacOS classic's simple-feeling filesystem. Networking on Windows networks is easier than it is on a PC. The development tools kick butt -- way better than the old MacOS 9-era tools (sorry, CodeWarrior). Using a digital camera is painless. No INIT's or CDEV's to conflict -- imagine never again needing to reboot, renaming system extensions, over and over again until your system is stable. I can run anything I can run on a UNIX server on my 12" G4 PowerBook. Sure, I have fond memories of MacOS 7/8/9, but the reality is that _everything_ is better now.
Wow, that felt good. Thanks.
I used the original web browser on the NeXT. It wasn't terribly useful, but it was clearly the start of something huge.
Things it did:
- Showed text pages with text links and a little bit of formatting (bold and italics, headers).
- Clicking on a linked word/phrase opened a new window showing the definition (or whatever). So you ended up with zillions of little windows (unless you held down some modifier key).
Things it didn't do:
- Graphics.
- Form fields.
- Dynamically generated pages (no CGI's).
- Complex layout (no tables, etc.).
But because it was easy to author documents, and to implement HTML, it rapidly exploded. Form fields and CGI's allowed you to use the web as a front-end to real applications.
Actually, most of Apple's work on "BSD" consists of code improvements to a huge number of other projects (e.g. gcc, apache, BSD), which is released back to the "upstream" projects under those project's licenses. The code I see under the APSL is code that that is Mac-specific and thus doesn't belong in any upstream project. Of course, the changes to upstream projects are also packaged into the APSL'd Darwin release, but you can always go back to the source project...
Duff, the combination of "You are a liar. BitTorrent users would never illegally pirate software or other media." with "Also, since I started using BitTorrent to download movies, I now go to the movie theater more often." made me LOL. You have mastered irony.
Why do you say "the RIAA will destroy any alternate distribution channel, regardless of content carried"? While you could speculate that they might want to, I've never heard of the RIAA doing anything (in the context of file sharing) to anyone who wasn't sharing music copyrighted by one of the major record labels (i.e. the companies that pay for the RIAA). There are several web sites that legitimately share music (e.g. Grateful Dead concert recordings, independent musicians) using BitTorrent (or straight web downloads) and I've not heard of any RIAA moves to shut them down. Are you speculating, or do you know something I don't?
Of course. It was a metaphore intended to dramatize the extremely large number of devices that use TRON, not as a literal financial projection.
The issue, IMO, isn't that the web site author should control how the page renders for the user, it's that _only_ the site author and the user should be able to control how the page renders, not third parties. For example, I'd say that it would be wrong for an ISP to rewrite web pages to insert their own advertisements into all web pages browsed by their customers. I'd I'd say that it's wrong for third party software to modify my view of the internet without my very explicit permission.
"Because users have chosen to install Gator/GAIN on their systems."
This is not even close -- virtually nobody intentionally installs Gator. Gator pays software companies to bundle the Gator installer into other installers with as vague as possible a warning, usually with no option to install the software you want without Gator, and with no means to uninstall it.
There was barely an open source community back in 1982 when the Macintosh was getting implemented (launched in 1984, remember?), so there really wasn't an open source community to participate in. When Jobs started NeXT, he based his OS on UNIX and Mach (relatively open/open source), with a proprietary layer on top that was the world's best development framework. Heck, it's been about 10 years, and it's _still_ the world's best development framework. The guy who came up with Interface Builder was brilliant. Anyway, the point is that whenever there have been good open standards (XML, USB, SCSI, 3.5" floppy disks, 802.11b/g, PCMCIA, OpenGL, TCP/IP, NuBus, OpenFirmware, Mach, etc.) Apple has adopted them (and often driven the specifications). Generally speaking, Apple has only introduced proprietary technologies when they were dramatically better than what was out there (Mac monitor ports that negotiated resolution between the computer and monitor, mice, AppleTalk, ADB) and when a standard emerged that caught up to what Apple had been providing, they've killed off their proprietary technology for the standard every time. The only way that they could be _less_ proprietary is for them to do as PC vendors do, which is to do no R&D and just ship whatever someone else invents. Personally, I'd rather support a company that advances the state of the art in advance of the standards, but which drives those advances into the standards, than a company that advances nothing but cost optimizing trailing edge technology.
I think that what they proposed is pretty reasonable. A signed binary Linux bootloader would allow people to run Linux on their X-Box, without releasing any information that would allow people to bypass the signing process that protects X-Box game sales.
Of course, the "or we'll release an exploit" part isn't as friendly, but that's probably the only way that that feel that they can get a response from Microsoft after (supposedly) being ignored in their attempts to communicate.
No, No, No. FSF suing doesn't show that the GPL is problematic, it shows that it is enforceable. Admittedly every GPL violater so far has backed down before the case has gone to trial, but if the GPL were enforced by a trial that would simple remove whatever perception that "the GPL is problematic legally" people opposed to the GPL have managed to project. I'd say that the fact that the GPL has never been challenged in court shows how effective it is...
As for things being "embroiled in day-to-day lawsuits" you've been following the continual stream of lawsuits MS has been involved in, haven't you?
Actually, it's pretty relevant -- if a processor requires higher clock speed to reach the same performance as another chip, it'll require more power, require a more expensive supporting chipset, require more expensive RAM, generate more heat, etc.
I guess you missed it, but there are several superior audio formats that have been around for years. My favorites are:
SACD: insanely high quality stereo audio. Not many systems can play SACD, but if you're a fanatic who loves classical or jazz, what's buying a new high-end CD player?
DVD-A: essentually a normal DVD with the emphasis on the audio. It's cool getting 5.1 mixes of songs, watching music videos, etc. They play in normal DVD players, so I think that this format might possibly catch on as DVD playes replace CD players.
You can find both in any good music store. But they don't sell too well (relative to regular CD sales) because most people are pretty happy with CD's.
Actually, I've been told exactly the same thing by a number of US patent lawyers. In the US you're liable for greater damages if you violate someone else's patent if you know about it than if you don't. So the last thing any engineer should ever do is admit publicly that they know anything about any patent, because they open their employer up to (IIRC) treble damages. Given how well known this is, I am surprised that it's "news".
I think (unless I misread it) that there's a flaw in the shredding mechanism -- the grouping into clusters of 5 lines before computing the md5 checksum means that if there is identical code in two files, but the positions of the code in the files is shifted by a line, they won't match.
For example:
File 1 contains lines A B C D E.
File 2 contains Q A B C D E W X Y Z.
The first MD5 generated from file 1 would be for A B C D E. The first MD5 generated from file 2 would be for Q A B C D, followed by E W X Y Z. So even though the the lines A B C D E are duplicated between the two files, there's no 'match' according to the MD5's. This means that you could duplicate a 100K line file, with a comment at the top, and nothing would match.
So the output of this script, while interesting, wouldn't allow anyone to make precise statements about how the files compared.
The idea of clustering is good (matching individual lines would have too much noise) but perhaps the MD5's could be computed for every line as the start of a cluster of 5 lines? That way the offset wouldn't break the comparison...
The problem wasn't in MS selling software at full price, it was in MS telling schools that if they had donated PC's with Windows on them, but no manual or certificate, that they should _throw the computers out_ because using the donated PC's would be illegal, and MS doesn't sell a version of Windows that can run on older machines that are typically donated (you can't buy Win98 or NT any more...).
Back licensing the school is actually pretty decent of MS, because they eliminate any risk of future hassles.
The amusing part, to me anyway, is that MS completely reversed itself on the topic, presumably because schools realized that if MS wouldn't let them run Windows, rather than throwing the PC's out they could install Linux, and MS realized that they'd rather have schools run free, obsolete versions of Windows than Linux.
If you read the article, you'll see that the school already owns and supports Mac's throughout the school. So they're saying that the cost of supporting more Mac's outweighs getting a free lab full of equipment. Given that they already support Mac's, and Mac's cost less to support than PC's, it's difficult to follow the logic of turning down the free computers. I suspect that it's really some sort of politics, like someone with an out of control ego getting bent that the teacher got free machines that weren't in "the plan."
"The best point made in this article was that the RIAA was stressing that they could NOT contact the users themselves, therefore Verizon had to give up confidential information. By doing this {messaging scare tactic} they invalidated their own arguments, and weakened their position overall...
Not so. They're IMing people at their IP addresses -- they don't know who those people are, just where they happen to be right now. To file a suit to stop someone from sharing music (illegally), they have to know who the person actually is, which is something that only their ISP would know.
Plenty of products shipped with the i860 in them. I remember a compute server from Torque Systems, for example...
No, the real story is that IBM announced that they're going to sell PPC Blades that fit into their x86 blade server. This means that customers can pick between x86 and PPC based completely on price/performance.
I wonder if the 970 runs cooler, and consumes less power, than x86's (as most PPC's do). If so, there's a strong case to be made that the PPC blades will be a lot less expensive to operate, since you can pack them more densely, and spend less on power and AC.
Two obvious problems that I see:
... Windows Update does not collect your name, address, e-mail address, or any other form of personally identifiable information."
..." this statement doesn't _exclude_ anything. It just guarantees that they collect the reasonable looking list of information. If they stated "This information is restricted to: ..." I'd feel a lot better.
.com's selling user lists for spam. Better not to allow anyone to have data that's easily abused than to rely on their future goodwill.
1) "None of this configuration information can be used to identify you.
This is technically true, but not meaningful. That is, they ship back the PC's GUID, which doesn't directly contain your identity. However, they also collect the same GUID on OS registration, where they also collect your name, address, e-mail address, and so on, so they could easily match the configuration data to your registration data.
2) "This information includes:
"The configuration information collected is used only to determine the appropriate updates and to generate aggregate statistics."
This is a statement of MS' intent, but since they're allowed to change their usage policies retroactively, with no notice to users (yay US "privacy" laws) this could change. Look at all of the
I used ClearCase to manage web content back in 1994. Worked great! Beat the sh*t out of how most people produce web sites now!
Example: create a view, work in it, and run a web server over it. Validate your changes in the context of the site, including dynamic app's (JSP's, PHP, CGI's, etc.). When it all looks good, commit everything from your view, and automagically (and atomically) the web server sees everything updated.
Shame it's so horribly expensive...