Can you mount it as a filesystem (as you can a USB Mass Storage device like the Archos Jukebox) and copy files to it, or are you at the mercy of proprietary software?
This is not a minor nit-picking point; if the only way I have of accessing a device is to click through menus on a piece of software that comes with it, I won't buy it. For one, it makes automating things with scripts more difficult.
Secondly, software written specifically to accompany hardware tends to often be shoddy, poorly-designed and bug-ridden. I once had a 640x480 camera which didn't follow any standards and required special software (consisting of a jury-rigged TWAIN driver which treated the serial interface on the camera as a dial-up modem to a TCP/IP network running a proprietary protocol of some sort). The software was awkward to use and badly designed, the dialogs were in broken English (think "All Your Base"), and the software didn't run on anything other than Windows 9.x and MacOS 8/9 (no NT, no OSX, and don't even think about Linux, even with WINE or VMWare). As you can imagine, downloading photos from the damned thing was a headache.
If the only way of getting MP3s onto (or off) the Karma is using the Java applet, then that is an unacceptable single point of failure. OTOH, if it has a SMB/NFS server, it would be very nice indeed. (If it has only a FTP server onboard, it would be usable, though somewhat awkward.)
Apparently New Order's "Blue Monday" was sequenced using an Apple II. I wonder if they used this system.
Also, I wonder whether Apple had any trouble from the Beatles company when they tried marketing it. (Was that before or after the agreement that Apple Computer could keep their name as long as they stayed out of anything music-related?)
"Satisfy her with your 20" king kong schlong with a the new PEN1S C,HIP!!. No need to take pills. Also works as hair restorer and lets you play "backups" on your PlayStation 3".
Keep in mind that a lot of those involved in the higher-end spam operations (or giving them protection for a cut of the takings) are Eastern European gangsters, known for their ruthlessness. Do you fancy your chances against the mafiya?
Yes, users have the right to not send a Referer: header. By the same token, the owner of a HTTP server has the right to refuse service to anyone not providing a Referer header. Just like there's no law against not wearing shoes, but restaurants are within their rights to deny service to anyone who's not wearing a pair.
99% of all browsers support the Referer header, and it has become part of the standard expected headers. If you disable it in your browser, you can't reasonably expect to not cut yourself off from a large chunk of the web.
LOL, Fisking is a point-by-point refutation of BAD JOURNALISM. Pioneered by a point-by-point dissection of works by the great fictionalist, Robert Fisk.
And more often than not, involves breaking the text up into sub-sentence fragments, interpreting them extra-literally, and copious uses of straw men and various other distortions. Most "fisking" is to political debate what wrestling-match bad-mouthing is to reasoned discussion.
The Archos Jukebox series devices act as USB Mass Storage devices (my Recorder 20 does USB 2.0; newer devices have snap-on FireWire and USB interfaces, I believe). The Apple iPod, meanwhile, acts as the FireWire equivalent.
When I bought my Archos, I specifically chose it for this reason. (It would have been more convenient to buy a locally-distributed Creative Nomad Jukebox, but they use a weird proprietary protocol, putting you at the mercy of proprietary Windows software (which possibly does things to your system without your consent), or flaky reverse-engineered clients permanently in alpha; in either case, if your intended means of using the unit differs from the software designer's, you're SOL.) The convenience of mounting a unit as a disk and copying files to/from it as you see fit is well worth it.
Perhaps Neuros could upgrade firmware giving USB Mass Storage support, though I'm not sure whether this is feasible in software. I believe the Archos uses a hardware USB-IDE interface, which the host computer enables/receives interrupts from.
A while ago, there were warning signs posted at computer swap-meets in Australia, cautioning buyers about a batch of counterfeit Princo CD-Rs. These apparently looked like the originals except they didn't have the "Compact Disc" logo, and they tended to degrade very rapidly (within months).
After 10 years or so, does Flash memory merely lose its contents, or its ability to store data?
It's a sobering thought that many electronic devices made today contain firmware in Flash (ironically enough for easy upgradability and a longer useful life), and are likely to be junk within a decade or two. Don't bother putting your high-end digital camera or DVD player in your will.
Maybe Sony/Philips should have a stern word to EMI then. The "Copy Controlled" discs coming out of their pressing plants (in Australia and Canada, at least) are certainly not Red Book-compliant.
MS Windows XP will become the official National Operating System of Iraq, and end-to-end digital restrictions management will become mandated by law. All digital monitors will have to include Intel TCPA chips to protect the MPAA's intellectual property, and Iraq 2.0 will become the testbed of the mandatory watermark detection mechanisms planned for all A-D converters over a certain sample rate to "close the analog hole".
Anything else and the stinkin' Europeans could steal our hard-won bounty. We won this sucker and damned if we're going to let a bunch of liberal penguinhead hippies undermine the integrity of our future profits.
Linux only doesn't need VST if you believe that (a) companies like Steinberg, Waldorf and Native Instruments are going to start writing LADSPA plugins, or (b) open-source plug-ins can do anything those can do and more. In practice, a look at the state of LADSPA plug-ins (which are mostly DSP textbook code examples and simple hacks) vs. commercial VST plugins (many of which do innovative things) disproves (b).
The good news is that it is possible to run (some) Windows VST plugins under Linux; someone has written a WINE-based VST server, which loads Windows VST plugins and runs audio through them on request from client. Source code for it (and Pd and LADSPA code for accessing it) may be found here.
Btw, I heard a rumour a while ago that Steinberg had a proof-of-concept port of Cubase SX to Linux working a while ago.
EMI have already started putting DRM on all their new CDs in some territories (Australia and apparently Japan), and apparently plan to make this global.
HDCD is a system in which CD players have extra filters/audio enhancement circuitry, which is controlled by a signal steganographically encoded into the LSB of the audio. (The signal is encrypted in such a way that it statistically looks like noise, probably so that freak conditions don't cause audible noise in normal players.)
HDCD was developed by a small company, who were bought out a few years ago by Microsoft. No idea what MSFT want with the HDCD patents (unless it's to keep Real or Apple from implementing it or something).
In the US, it was clean Red Book. In Australia, it was "Copy Controlled (tm)". So I arranged with a US penpal to swap it for a CD of an Australian band who are hard to find in the US.
We should be thankful that Americans are more likely to sue if someone fscks with their rights.:-)
Kurt released a solo album as InSoc a few years ago on goth label Cleopatra. It was the sort of dark, fucked-up take-a-walk-in-my-nightmare industriogoth music that aging synthpop stars (think Gary Numan and Marc Almond) wishing to make a comeback did before electroclash became cool. He also released a CD of pretty bad "dark" remakes of old InSoc songs, with rougher vocals and more industrial stylings, whose only redeeming feature was the old-skool InSoc videos on the CD.
Not sure what has happened since then; for all I know he could have tossed the whole goth thing in and jumped on the electroclash bandwagon doing songs about snorting cocaine with movie stars in limousines or something.
And then there's Yamaha, who make everything from musical instruments (electronic and acoustic) to motorcycles.
Mind you, the Japanese aren't alone in this. Finnish zaibatsu Nokia started off making rubber boots, and still makes all sorts of goods for the Finnish market.
Just be grateful X requests aren't sent in XML. Were X designed today, on today's "fast" hardware, some bright spark would probably decide that the advantages of making everything XML and putting an XML parser in the server outweigh the performance hit of parsing each request (which today's 2.4GHz SMP machines are up to, anyway).
And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.
Aside: how hard would it be to write a DSP algorithm which takes the output of a camera pointed at a TV screen/monitor and cleans it up (removing glare and distortion and correcting colours)? How much information would still be lost in the best case? (I doubt any watermarks would survive it, unless they were based on doing something weird with the raster beam, in which case CRTs would need to be redesigned.) Would it be feasible for such a scheme to exist and automatically and effortlessly bypass end-to-end copy-denial techniques with tolerable loss of quality?
Yes, but how many of the songs in the Top 40 does this apply to? How much of herself does Britney Spears put into her ditties? Or your typical Top-40 "thug" rapper (if bragging about their jewellery and how many people they've killed is "of themselves", that doesn't say much for their depth of personality; and these are the bards of today). And yet that's what shifts the units.
Most people don't care enough about music to want songs which are brilliant or which speak volumes about the human condition or whatever. Most people want pleasant background music which makes them feel good; i.e., commercial-jingle stuff. The production of such sonic wallpaper could probably be streamlined, if not automated, quite easily in much the same way as McDonalds streamlined the food production industry. Yes, McDonalds is junk food, and everybody knows that; yet people keep going.
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Can you mount it as a filesystem (as you can a USB Mass Storage device like the Archos Jukebox) and copy files to it, or are you at the mercy of proprietary software?
This is not a minor nit-picking point; if the only way I have of accessing a device is to click through menus on a piece of software that comes with it, I won't buy it. For one, it makes automating things with scripts more difficult.
Secondly, software written specifically to accompany hardware tends to often be shoddy, poorly-designed and bug-ridden. I once had a 640x480 camera which didn't follow any standards and required special software (consisting of a jury-rigged TWAIN driver which treated the serial interface on the camera as a dial-up modem to a TCP/IP network running a proprietary protocol of some sort). The software was awkward to use and badly designed, the dialogs were in broken English (think "All Your Base"), and the software didn't run on anything other than Windows 9.x and MacOS 8/9 (no NT, no OSX, and don't even think about Linux, even with WINE or VMWare). As you can imagine, downloading photos from the damned thing was a headache.
If the only way of getting MP3s onto (or off) the Karma is using the Java applet, then that is an unacceptable single point of failure. OTOH, if it has a SMB/NFS server, it would be very nice indeed. (If it has only a FTP server onboard, it would be usable, though somewhat awkward.)
Apparently New Order's "Blue Monday" was sequenced using an Apple II. I wonder if they used this system.
Also, I wonder whether Apple had any trouble from the Beatles company when they tried marketing it. (Was that before or after the agreement that Apple Computer could keep their name as long as they stayed out of anything music-related?)
I can see what the spammers will do with this:
"Satisfy her with your 20" king kong schlong with a the new PEN1S C,HIP!!. No need to take pills. Also works as hair restorer and lets you play "backups" on your PlayStation 3".
Keep in mind that a lot of those involved in the higher-end spam operations (or giving them protection for a cut of the takings) are Eastern European gangsters, known for their ruthlessness. Do you fancy your chances against the mafiya?
Yes, users have the right to not send a Referer: header. By the same token, the owner of a HTTP server has the right to refuse service to anyone not providing a Referer header. Just like there's no law against not wearing shoes, but restaurants are within their rights to deny service to anyone who's not wearing a pair.
99% of all browsers support the Referer header, and it has become part of the standard expected headers. If you disable it in your browser, you can't reasonably expect to not cut yourself off from a large chunk of the web.
"it's ex-liberals".
LOL, Fisking is a point-by-point refutation of BAD JOURNALISM. Pioneered by a point-by-point dissection of works by the great fictionalist, Robert Fisk.
And more often than not, involves breaking the text up into sub-sentence fragments, interpreting them extra-literally, and copious uses of straw men and various other distortions. Most "fisking" is to political debate what wrestling-match bad-mouthing is to reasoned discussion.
The Archos Jukebox series devices act as USB Mass Storage devices (my Recorder 20 does USB 2.0; newer devices have snap-on FireWire and USB interfaces, I believe). The Apple iPod, meanwhile, acts as the FireWire equivalent.
When I bought my Archos, I specifically chose it for this reason. (It would have been more convenient to buy a locally-distributed Creative Nomad Jukebox, but they use a weird proprietary protocol, putting you at the mercy of proprietary Windows software (which possibly does things to your system without your consent), or flaky reverse-engineered clients permanently in alpha; in either case, if your intended means of using the unit differs from the software designer's, you're SOL.) The convenience of mounting a unit as a disk and copying files to/from it as you see fit is well worth it.
Perhaps Neuros could upgrade firmware giving USB Mass Storage support, though I'm not sure whether this is feasible in software. I believe the Archos uses a hardware USB-IDE interface, which the host computer enables/receives interrupts from.
What do you count as archival-quality? Kodak/Mitsui Gold discs? Verbatim Super AZO discs (said to have a 100-year shelf life)?
A while ago, there were warning signs posted at computer swap-meets in Australia, cautioning buyers about a batch of counterfeit Princo CD-Rs. These apparently looked like the originals except they didn't have the "Compact Disc" logo, and they tended to degrade very rapidly (within months).
After 10 years or so, does Flash memory merely lose its contents, or its ability to store data?
It's a sobering thought that many electronic devices made today contain firmware in Flash (ironically enough for easy upgradability and a longer useful life), and are likely to be junk within a decade or two. Don't bother putting your high-end digital camera or DVD player in your will.
Maybe Sony/Philips should have a stern word to EMI then. The "Copy Controlled" discs coming out of their pressing plants (in Australia and Canada, at least) are certainly not Red Book-compliant.
MS Windows XP will become the official National Operating System of Iraq, and end-to-end digital restrictions management will become mandated by law. All digital monitors will have to include Intel TCPA chips to protect the MPAA's intellectual property, and Iraq 2.0 will become the testbed of the mandatory watermark detection mechanisms planned for all A-D converters over a certain sample rate to "close the analog hole".
Anything else and the stinkin' Europeans could steal our hard-won bounty. We won this sucker and damned if we're going to let a bunch of liberal penguinhead hippies undermine the integrity of our future profits.
Treaties? We don't need no stinkin' treaties. We're America, for cryin' out loud!
Linux only doesn't need VST if you believe that (a) companies like Steinberg, Waldorf and Native Instruments are going to start writing LADSPA plugins, or (b) open-source plug-ins can do anything those can do and more. In practice, a look at the state of LADSPA plug-ins (which are mostly DSP textbook code examples and simple hacks) vs. commercial VST plugins (many of which do innovative things) disproves (b).
The good news is that it is possible to run (some) Windows VST plugins under Linux; someone has written a WINE-based VST server, which loads Windows VST plugins and runs audio through them on request from client. Source code for it (and Pd and LADSPA code for accessing it) may be found here.
Btw, I heard a rumour a while ago that Steinberg had a proof-of-concept port of Cubase SX to Linux working a while ago.
EMI have already started putting DRM on all their new CDs in some territories (Australia and apparently Japan), and apparently plan to make this global.
HDCD is a system in which CD players have extra filters/audio enhancement circuitry, which is controlled by a signal steganographically encoded into the LSB of the audio. (The signal is encrypted in such a way that it statistically looks like noise, probably so that freak conditions don't cause audible noise in normal players.)
HDCD was developed by a small company, who were bought out a few years ago by Microsoft. No idea what MSFT want with the HDCD patents (unless it's to keep Real or Apple from implementing it or something).
In the US, it was clean Red Book. In Australia, it was "Copy Controlled (tm)". So I arranged with a US penpal to swap it for a CD of an Australian band who are hard to find in the US.
:-)
We should be thankful that Americans are more likely to sue if someone fscks with their rights.
Cell-phone interoperability would be a huge boon -- so it would be great if the whole region used one standard.
Exactly. Which is why we need to liberate Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria next, and help them standardise on CDMA.
Btw, what are they using in Afghanistan now?
Kurt released a solo album as InSoc a few years ago on goth label Cleopatra. It was the sort of dark, fucked-up take-a-walk-in-my-nightmare industriogoth music that aging synthpop stars (think Gary Numan and Marc Almond) wishing to make a comeback did before electroclash became cool. He also released a CD of pretty bad "dark" remakes of old InSoc songs, with rougher vocals and more industrial stylings, whose only redeeming feature was the old-skool InSoc videos on the CD.
Not sure what has happened since then; for all I know he could have tossed the whole goth thing in and jumped on the electroclash bandwagon doing songs about snorting cocaine with movie stars in limousines or something.
And then there's Yamaha, who make everything from musical instruments (electronic and acoustic) to motorcycles.
Mind you, the Japanese aren't alone in this. Finnish zaibatsu Nokia started off making rubber boots, and still makes all sorts of goods for the Finnish market.
Just be grateful X requests aren't sent in XML. Were X designed today, on today's "fast" hardware, some bright spark would probably decide that the advantages of making everything XML and putting an XML parser in the server outweigh the performance hit of parsing each request (which today's 2.4GHz SMP machines are up to, anyway).
And then offcourse one can still record the analog output of the tv, monitor or speakers but for many applications it'd be really usefull, however.
Aside: how hard would it be to write a DSP algorithm which takes the output of a camera pointed at a TV screen/monitor and cleans it up (removing glare and distortion and correcting colours)? How much information would still be lost in the best case? (I doubt any watermarks would survive it, unless they were based on doing something weird with the raster beam, in which case CRTs would need to be redesigned.) Would it be feasible for such a scheme to exist and automatically and effortlessly bypass end-to-end copy-denial techniques with tolerable loss of quality?
Don't camgirls with LiveJournals already do something like this?
Yes, but how many of the songs in the Top 40 does this apply to? How much of herself does Britney Spears put into her ditties? Or your typical Top-40 "thug" rapper (if bragging about their jewellery and how many people they've killed is "of themselves", that doesn't say much for their depth of personality; and these are the bards of today). And yet that's what shifts the units.
Most people don't care enough about music to want songs which are brilliant or which speak volumes about the human condition or whatever. Most people want pleasant background music which makes them feel good; i.e., commercial-jingle stuff. The production of such sonic wallpaper could probably be streamlined, if not automated, quite easily in much the same way as McDonalds streamlined the food production industry. Yes, McDonalds is junk food, and everybody knows that; yet people keep going.