That usually ends up getting used...
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
...when the veracity of the individual comes into question. I know I'd be at least inclined to throw that one out if accused of trying to steal things, i.e. I'm trying to defraud them. At that stage, yes, it's not much good, but there's often times little to salvage at that point.
I don't know whether to be sick or thoroughly pissed off. The man ought to be suing for more than 90k over that BS. Just like Cherian should be suing the crap out of them over his abuse at their hands.
I've been following the whole sordid GeForce debacle because a close friend of mine was one of the thousands that they've screwed. The more I see, the more apalled I am at them, and the "Better Business Bureau".
Cheap Discs - An MP3 CD player can hold many times more music and for $0.10 per disc. You're paying for miniaturization there in the case of the flash cartriges.
Quality players - An MP3 CD player can do much the same thing and the solid state units don't have moving parts and are MUCH smaller.
Good sound reproduction - depends on the music; side by side listening produced virtually no difference between 128kbit and the 74 minute mode on a Minidisc player.
Holds 74 minutes - nice, but if you're downsampling, you're definitely down in the same area as the MP3 players and for length of play you can't beat the MP3 CD units. Up to 10 hours of play on ONE CD mix.
Using analog output - ANYTHING can do that.
Can erase and reuse discs, or delete an unwanted track- If I use CD-RW's the MP3 CD player can match that except for the easy single deletion and the solid state units can do the same things as the Minidisc player.
Player costs the saem as a MP3 player (32-64mb devices)- an MP3 CD player can be bought for as little as $60.
The sound quality of the CDs was better than vinyl discs and they tended to be more durable and far more portable than LP's and 45's. In this case, you get less quality, no easy ability to copy to any of the standard formats (Casette doesn't exist in cars much anymore, but you will find CD and MP3 players...), and is being fronted by the media companies and one tech company.
This is Sony's minidisc all over again. (And don't believe that Sony didn't try to force the issue with the format either- they did.)
The Open Source page that you link to has the CVS access info and it seems they're hosting it for now. What's cool is that it seems they're working with the community to make full-function Audigy drivers for Linux.
It doesn't need but ONE access point done up right to handle a neighborhood. Access points can be done without LinkSys (or other vendors, for that matter) access point to do it either- a PrismII card with the right drivers or the Sputnik software package will produce an access point. And many of the PrismII cards seem to have an external antenna jack.
No, Joe Internet couldn't do an access point- but he DOESN'T need to. All it takes is one tech-geek in a neighborhood to start up the wan access. And, since it's easy enough and cheap enough for most of that crowd to do it, it's going to happen.
On the "Decks" server, ricochet is turned on and Laser is your best friend and your worst enemy (as you can indescriminately torch off friend, foe, and yourself with a badly placed shot...)- I usually can rack up 10 or so kills if I'm on a low ping night there with the laser. If you're on an arena that doesn't have ricochet turned on and has a LOT of obstacles- Laser's mostly useless as it takes too long to recharge.
Differing standards. The one that is used in "digital" cable (When it's digital- in many places they slapped a couple of digital channels in on top of the analog feeds and slapped an "interactive" television front-end on all of it...) and in direct broadcast satellite is called DVB. The one that is used for HDTV/SDTV digital broadcast is called ATSC and it uses slightly differing packet types and a different modulation scheme to send it's signals.
"It's not so much about profit in itself, but about control, because control guarantees profit."
In their (RIAA, MPAA, etc...) minds, maybe. It doesn't always guarantee profit. At some point the control stifles profit because people end up looking elsewhere for cheaper/better things because the control provides too much hassle, etc. That's about to occur with them here.
I know if I couldn't get a CD to play in my player and I wanted (That's the key word there- I probably wouldn't WANT it after finding out the disc was copy protected- it presumes I'm a thief and I don't choose to do business with someone that will willingly assume I'm so without proof to the fact.) the music to be playable, etc. I'd be walking out and getting the cheapest walkman I could find (if I already didn't have one...) and rig it up to my soundcard on my PC and re-encode the entire disc, chop up the sound into songs and then burn a playable disc. It's not hard at all to do this, Radio Shack and other places sell patch cables that will do this whole thing nicely and you can often listen to the disc while you're encoding it.
It's telling that the entire CD showed up on Kazza shortly after it shipped.
But, all CD-ROM drives are REDBOOK compliant (they also work as audio players, hence the little analog jack in the BACK of the drive on most drives.)- you're not using ISO-9660 in any case for an audio disc, ISO-9660 is a data-only specification (I can tell you've never tried to do anything fancy with a CD-ROM drive before, or you'd KNOW that distinction...).
They're doing something that a straight-up audio player ignores. Now, whether or not a player is REDBOOK compliant or not is up for debate (I'd hold that most of the audio players, not needing the full spec (because they don't display session info, etc.) aren't impacted by it, but since computer players use all the bells and whistles, they get borked by this stuff. Now, I think they're actually claiming that the data is REDBOOK compliant but they're altering the other info. This means the discs aren't REDBOOK compliant because the computer players are conforming to the spec also.
Then it should play in a Yellowbook compliant drive because the compliance is a built-upon, not a replacement. If it's truely compliant, it shouldn't do what's being claimed of them- it might play okay in normal drives, but that doesn't make it compliant.
Considering that Sharp's let the info out sufficient to roll your own distribution (not reccomended for the novice) and that there is people already about working on doing the same- it could be considered superior to the iPaq because you can have all the slots, the keyboard and all that the current iPaq distributions bring to the table. The ONE thing that the Zaurus brings to the table that buying an iPaq doesn't offer is that you don't end up paying for a WinCE license (and thereby making it a little cheaper...)
Since it IS cheaper, has a keyboard built in (no need to buy an external one) with no need for a papoose type dock for slots, etc. I'd say that if it had the same performance and could be done up the same way as the iPaq as far as Linux distributions go, well, the Zaurus wins by leaps and bounds.
They had their hands in a lot of people's cookie jars.
Electric companies. Gas companies. Telecom companies.
Heck, they even were arranging deals with at least one of the big-4 media producers. Don't be at all surprised if the collapse of Enron impacts your rates on a few things.
Numerous people, some from Mozilla.org, have been sending them e-mails and feedbacks from their website telling them about the problem. They've been told this off and on for something like two months now.
Yes, it may not perform as well as xvid, but xvid has a severe drawback, that you should be giving consideration to- patent licenses.
There is not an aspect of MPEG4 (which is what xvid is a codec for...) that is not covered by patents that need to be licensed. Nobody has a royalty free license to any MPEG4 patents for free software implementations so distribution of the codec is violating the patent rights of several companies.
You may not care now, but they're stepping up enforcement efforts of all this stuff and you may well find yourself without a codec or in trouble because you're violating the rights too.
If it was the LGPL, Divx Networks may be in trouble as they have to honor the license grant given to them for the submitted code (LGPL)- it means that they could be sued bu the submitters for Copyright infringement. If it was under a BSD-ish or X11 license, they would be perfectly fine to do what they did. (Legally, that is- right and wrong doesn't even enter into this at this point...)
They're selling the VP4 codec and have a VP5 that's in testing right now. They plan on selling that- if they get an open sourced version of the prior generation out there that can be supported by their newer codecs, that's a win for most people (So long as they provide the decoder for the latest format for free, that is...:-) I'll be posing that question to them on the list. It's great and all, but unless we've got decoders for VP4 and VP5, it's not as good as it could be.
People aren't buying anywhere near as much stuff as they used to. If you have everyone selling at the same price, but have a lower floor, all it'd take is someone to shave into their markup some to undercut the competition and sell a LOT more product (remember, selling product is their goal- so they're going to price things according to how much they think they can gouge out of you...).
What makes more money? One $18 CD with a $12 margin or 3 $10 CD's with a $5 margin... You're more likely to see more purchases with the lower cost; if you can balance things right you can make more money by selling for less.
They're set up so a CD-ROM or DVD drive won't read them right. That means you need to go to that trouble to begin with to copy- they thought about your end-run and crippled it.
In fact, it DOES make sense that things like turn based and realtime strategy games could benefit from being written in Java, if you've got the right JIT behind the JVM running the code. The same could be said of several other genres of game. Now, a FPS or something in that same class would be a very hard sell- not impossible, but currently very improbable.
Largely speaking, dynamic content (i.e. app-server driven websites, like/., Amazon, etc.) don't get cached in servers because there's no clean, easy way to hint expiry as the content goes stale at unpredictable times. Because of this, these content providers tend to set pragma: no-cache in the header and set the expiry time to something in the past to force expiry from the cache as soon as it's served to the requesting client browser.
If you have your browsers all hitting static sites and content, it works very well. It's not so hot to miserable as they hit more dynamic content sites because of what I pointed about above.
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...when the veracity of the individual comes into question. I know I'd be at least inclined to throw that one out if accused of trying to steal things, i.e. I'm trying to defraud them. At that stage, yes, it's not much good, but there's often times little to salvage at that point.
I don't know whether to be sick or thoroughly pissed off. The man ought to be suing for more than 90k over that BS. Just like Cherian should be suing the crap out of them over his abuse at their hands.
I've been following the whole sordid GeForce debacle because a close friend of mine was one of the thousands that they've screwed. The more I see, the more apalled I am at them, and the "Better Business Bureau".
Cheap Discs - An MP3 CD player can hold many times more music and for $0.10 per disc. You're paying for miniaturization there in the case of the flash cartriges.
Quality players - An MP3 CD player can do much the same thing and the solid state units don't have moving parts and are MUCH smaller.
Good sound reproduction - depends on the music; side by side listening produced virtually no difference between 128kbit and the 74 minute mode on a Minidisc player.
Holds 74 minutes - nice, but if you're downsampling, you're definitely down in the same area as the MP3 players and for length of play you can't beat the MP3 CD units. Up to 10 hours of play on ONE CD mix.
Using analog output - ANYTHING can do that.
Can erase and reuse discs, or delete an unwanted track- If I use CD-RW's the MP3 CD player can match that except for the easy single deletion and the solid state units can do the same things as the Minidisc player.
Player costs the saem as a MP3 player (32-64mb devices)- an MP3 CD player can be bought for as little as $60.
The sound quality of the CDs was better than vinyl discs and they tended to be more durable and far more portable than LP's and 45's. In this case, you get less quality, no easy ability to copy to any of the standard formats (Casette doesn't exist in cars much anymore, but you will find CD and MP3 players...), and is being fronted by the media companies and one tech company.
This is Sony's minidisc all over again. (And don't believe that Sony didn't try to force the issue with the format either- they did.)
"Directory services - this can be repackaged in a vendor neutral way."
Not likely. There is very little that is "vendor neutral" from MS' offerings.
The Open Source page that you link to has the CVS access info and it seems they're hosting it for now. What's cool is that it seems they're working with the community to make full-function Audigy drivers for Linux.
There's a unspoken "lack of" in the middle of that phrase, otherwise it's an obvious oxymoron.
It doesn't need but ONE access point done up right to handle a neighborhood. Access points can be done without LinkSys (or other vendors, for that matter) access point to do it either- a PrismII card with the right drivers or the Sputnik software package will produce an access point. And many of the PrismII cards seem to have an external antenna jack.
No, Joe Internet couldn't do an access point- but he DOESN'T need to. All it takes is one tech-geek in a neighborhood to start up the wan access. And, since it's easy enough and cheap enough for most of that crowd to do it, it's going to happen.
On the "Decks" server, ricochet is turned on and Laser is your best friend and your worst enemy (as you can indescriminately torch off friend, foe, and yourself with a badly placed shot...)- I usually can rack up 10 or so kills if I'm on a low ping night there with the laser. If you're on an arena that doesn't have ricochet turned on and has a LOT of obstacles- Laser's mostly useless as it takes too long to recharge.
Guided missiles are my preferred one.
Differing standards. The one that is used in "digital" cable (When it's digital- in many places they slapped a couple of digital channels in on top of the analog feeds and slapped an "interactive" television front-end on all of it...) and in direct broadcast satellite is called DVB. The one that is used for HDTV/SDTV digital broadcast is called ATSC and it uses slightly differing packet types and a different modulation scheme to send it's signals.
"It's not so much about profit in itself, but about control, because control guarantees profit."
In their (RIAA, MPAA, etc...) minds, maybe. It doesn't always guarantee profit. At some point the control stifles profit because people end up looking elsewhere for cheaper/better things because the control provides too much hassle, etc. That's about to occur with them here.
I know if I couldn't get a CD to play in my player and I wanted (That's the key word there- I probably wouldn't WANT it after finding out the disc was copy protected- it presumes I'm a thief and I don't choose to do business with someone that will willingly assume I'm so without proof to the fact.) the music to be playable, etc. I'd be walking out and getting the cheapest walkman I could find (if I already didn't have one...) and rig it up to my soundcard on my PC and re-encode the entire disc, chop up the sound into songs and then burn a playable disc. It's not hard at all to do this, Radio Shack and other places sell patch cables that will do this whole thing nicely and you can often listen to the disc while you're encoding it.
It's telling that the entire CD showed up on Kazza shortly after it shipped.
But, all CD-ROM drives are REDBOOK compliant (they also work as audio players, hence the little analog jack in the BACK of the drive on most drives.)- you're not using ISO-9660 in any case for an audio disc, ISO-9660 is a data-only specification (I can tell you've never tried to do anything fancy with a CD-ROM drive before, or you'd KNOW that distinction...).
They're doing something that a straight-up audio player ignores. Now, whether or not a player is REDBOOK compliant or not is up for debate (I'd hold that most of the audio players, not needing the full spec (because they don't display session info, etc.) aren't impacted by it, but since computer players use all the bells and whistles, they get borked by this stuff. Now, I think they're actually claiming that the data is REDBOOK compliant but they're altering the other info. This means the discs aren't REDBOOK compliant because the computer players are conforming to the spec also.
Then it should play in a Yellowbook compliant drive because the compliance is a built-upon, not a replacement. If it's truely compliant, it shouldn't do what's being claimed of them- it might play okay in normal drives, but that doesn't make it compliant.
Considering that Sharp's let the info out sufficient to roll your own distribution (not reccomended for the novice) and that there is people already about working on doing the same- it could be considered superior to the iPaq because you can have all the slots, the keyboard and all that the current iPaq distributions bring to the table. The ONE thing that the Zaurus brings to the table that buying an iPaq doesn't offer is that you don't end up paying for a WinCE license (and thereby making it a little cheaper...)
Since it IS cheaper, has a keyboard built in (no need to buy an external one) with no need for a papoose type dock for slots, etc. I'd say that if it had the same performance and could be done up the same way as the iPaq as far as Linux distributions go, well, the Zaurus wins by leaps and bounds.
They had their hands in a lot of people's cookie jars.
Electric companies.
Gas companies.
Telecom companies.
Heck, they even were arranging deals with at least one of the big-4 media producers.
Don't be at all surprised if the collapse of Enron impacts your rates on a few things.
Numerous people, some from Mozilla.org, have been sending them e-mails and feedbacks from their website telling them about the problem. They've been told this off and on for something like two months now.
Yes, it may not perform as well as xvid, but xvid has a severe drawback, that you should be giving consideration to- patent licenses.
There is not an aspect of MPEG4 (which is what xvid is a codec for...) that is not covered by patents that need to be licensed. Nobody has a royalty free license to any MPEG4 patents for free software implementations so distribution of the codec is violating the patent rights of several companies.
You may not care now, but they're stepping up enforcement efforts of all this stuff and you may well find yourself without a codec or in trouble because you're violating the rights too.
I can't remember...
If it was the LGPL, Divx Networks may be in trouble as they have to honor the license grant given to them for the submitted code (LGPL)- it means that they could be sued bu the submitters for Copyright infringement. If it was under a BSD-ish or X11 license, they would be perfectly fine to do what they did. (Legally, that is- right and wrong doesn't even enter into this at this point...)
They're selling the VP4 codec and have a VP5 that's in testing right now. They plan on selling that- if they get an open sourced version of the prior generation out there that can be supported by their newer codecs, that's a win for most people (So long as they provide the decoder for the latest format for free, that is... :-) I'll be posing that question to them on the list. It's great and all, but unless we've got decoders for VP4 and VP5, it's not as good as it could be.
People aren't buying anywhere near as much stuff as they used to. If you have everyone selling at the same price, but have a lower floor, all it'd take is someone to shave into their markup some to undercut the competition and sell a LOT more product (remember, selling product is their goal- so they're going to price things according to how much they think they can gouge out of you...).
What makes more money? One $18 CD with a $12 margin or 3 $10 CD's with a $5 margin... You're more likely to see more purchases with the lower cost; if you can balance things right you can make more money by selling for less.
They're set up so a CD-ROM or DVD drive won't read them right. That means you need to go to that trouble to begin with to copy- they thought about your end-run and crippled it.
...that the situation with the MP3 CDs will be the same as the drugs, unfortunately.
...dangerous people. They do unpredictable and sometimes violent things when they twig onto the fact that they've been duped.
In fact, it DOES make sense that things like turn based and realtime strategy games could benefit from being written in Java, if you've got the right JIT behind the JVM running the code. The same could be said of several other genres of game. Now, a FPS or something in that same class would be a very hard sell- not impossible, but currently very improbable.
Largely speaking, dynamic content (i.e. app-server driven websites, like /., Amazon, etc.) don't get cached in servers because there's no clean, easy way to hint expiry as the content goes stale at unpredictable times. Because of this, these content providers tend to set pragma: no-cache in the header and set the expiry time to something in the past to force expiry from the cache as soon as it's served to the requesting client browser.
If you have your browsers all hitting static sites and content, it works very well. It's not so hot to miserable as they hit more dynamic content sites because of what I pointed about above.