Archos provides an iTunes plugin for their line of MP3 and video players. I'm not confident it'll work for iTunes video transfers (but it might), but it works fine for MP3s. Just make sure you make the Windows DRM partition very small, and the USB mode is mass storage.
There are many iTunes plugins as well for any mp3 player that appears as a mass-storage device, and a lot of good MP3 players support mass storage mode (for DRM-free music). I believe the Sandisk Sansa appears as a mass storage device. As do the newer satellite radio receivers (like the XM Inno and the Sirius Stiletto).
Of course if the main purpose was to ensure as many people could test IE7 as possible they'd also make a VMWare compatible image so Mac and Linux users could test. However, ultimately that probably is too much to ask as it'd give Linux and Mac users a free time limited licence for XP, they ultimately want people to develop primarily on Windows so that'd never happen.
Isn't the Virtual PC hard drive image format open (really open - royalty free, do-anything-you-want)? In which case, all VMWare has to do is really just support.vhd files in their drive emulation (and every other piece of software that wants to run the image, e.g., bochs, qemu, plex86, etc). Just like VMWare opened their disk image format, Virtual PC has as well (and I believe the image formats are derived from the original VirtualPC (MacOS) version... so while Virtual PC/Windows and Virtual PC/MacOS (PowerPC) are completely different products, they use compatible formats).
The point was you don't need ID when you pay with Visa, you just need your signature. In fact, it's against Visa's merchant rules for a store to require ID with a purchase: they can ask, but if you refuse, they still have to go through with the transaction. (If they won't let you pay without ID, call (800) VISA-911 and file a complaint.)
Wow. I didn't know that. I guess I shall be calling it soon - EBGames always checks ID for all credit card purchases. (They have a sign, too...) And yes, they take Visa - I only carry a Visa card. Not only that, but they record down the ID presented and the number. I believe that would really be against their rules...
Anyhow, how are merchants supposed to check signatures? If you don't sign the back of the card, they ask you sign right there, so the signature strip on the back is useless for comparisons. I believe the reason for the signature is that it forms a contract - the lines above the line say something to the effect of "I agree to pay the above amount", and forms the first line of defense for the merchant if there's a chargeback (not entirely reliable, but if there's a signed copy...). I can't recall what the purpose of the signature on the back of the card is for, other than maybe indicating that it's a valid instrument for financial transactions?
This is actually a tiny bit different from current UAV/UCAVs. In those, you have someone on the ground controlling a plane in the air, while here, they're talking about a pilot flying not only his own jet, but several others as well. It's a bit easier to secure a short range link than a long-range one, especially when your "wingmen" will stay in relative tight formation. (I suppose it's a current compromise between the fighter jock who wants to pull G's vs. sitting in an office chair.)
It's a nice transition I suppose. UAV/UCAVs are the future since that little bit of meat impacts a huge performance penalty on an aircraft (lowered maneuverability, increased weight, decreased payload/fuel, etc due to G-limits and support equipment).
On the other hand, it might make kamikaze style "bombings" more fun - you and your UAV wingment all auger in together...
I loved the Zuma Deluxe (another PopCap title) trial, and when months later I noticed it for $9.99 at Best Buy, I bought it without a second thought. I'm not sure how many hours I spent playing and enjoying the game, but it was more than enough to justify that particular price. I don't think I would've bought it for $20, but in hindsight it still would have been a good deal. $30 would've been too expensive though.
I played it on my XBox360 (didn't buy it), then when I got an iPod video as a gift, I went nuts and bought it on the iPod. It's already given me many hours of play, not bad for the $5 it cost on the iTunes store. I just wish there was some way to control the wheel sensitivity on the iPod - a tad too sensitive.
If people think for one second that RIAA and MPAA are using their public blocks of IP ranges to bust people, they should think again. There's a false sense of security in running these programs - people continually see blocked IP range hits and think, "Look at all the bad people I've blocked." If you think you're being smart by using peerguardian or protowall, consider that these companies are smarter by using public and spoofed IP addresses. Not to mention, the majority of those the downloaded lists include massive amounts of "safe" peers that are being unnecessarily cut off.
More likely, the investigators behind them use *gasp*, regular broadband and dialup connections from the usual providers! (or forward traffic). It's kinda trivial to set up a bunch of cable/DSL modems in some location and forward their traffic via the corporate block.
No, the safest way is to also block broadband provider's IP ranges. Oh, wait...
Because if everyone had to keep clicking through the checkout process, every transaction would add another 3 or 4 page loads. One click is merely a way to avoid these extra page loads and not bring down the server too often.
That, and it also explains why there's no link in the story - we don't want to slashdot Amazon again, do we?
I've always wondered about the need for sleep. For an animal to allow itself to go into an extremely vulnerable state every day for hours it must have a VERY good reason for doing so. The fact that sleep has been passed along in our genes even in the face of natural selection (sorry creationist museum) shows this. I think we've barely penetrated the real reasons for sleep.
In fact, there are animals that don't appear to sleep, but actually do (dolphins, for example). What they do is sleep half their body and brain at a time. So there's obviously some benefit, as they've evolved the necessity to remain awake, but still get the sleep they need. (Unless it really happens to be some anomaly of evolution (another strike against creationism), like the appendix or spleen, that affects basically the entire population of living creatures). But I would think the dolphins proved otherwise, since they'd be the first to do away completely with sleep.
But a concern is still the long term side effects. By playing with stuff like this, would it lead to mental insanity later on due to paranoia or schizophrenia? We are, after all, playing with the mental state of mind (I'm sure tired muscles still remain tired even after popping the pills, even though the brain says it's fresh). The fact that the miliary trials concluded that it's only useful to about 48 hours wakefulness seems to imply that it doesn't reduce the need for sleep, just reduces the feelings of the need for sleep/sleepiness. We may end up with a population of zombies in a decade or two's time.
Anyhow, when did pill-popping become fashionable? I fear the day where it's "uncool" to not stick some drug in you as part of your daily routine in order to get through the day (as opposed to treating disease). Or the "there's a drug for everything" mentality.
Maybe I am clueless, but that seems a little high... Even if the claimed 500k registered L2Extreme users downloaded the client each 1 time, that would mean it costs them close to $2 to upload the file each time.
It's more like besides the initial download, all the little incremental downloads as well (patches, updates, etc), which were hosted by NCSoft.
It's more akin to some website linking against photos you host on your website - you're stuck with the bills, and they profit. Of course, why NCSoft couldn't push an update, I don't know.
i wonder tho, why was the ps2 so good at playing ps1 games
It's because the PS2 actually included PSX hardware in it. There's a adjunct chip addtached to the Emotion Engine called the IO Processor, which is used to handle all the I/O in the system (controllers, DVD-ROM, sound, etc), very DMA-ish. This I/O processor basically includes the central processing core of the PSX as well - in PSX mode, the Emotion Engine would basically end up (with the Graphics Synthesizer) acting as the graphics chip, while the I/O processor became the main processor. That's why the graphics were "upscaled" a bit, but the games worked quite well provided they didn't do anything funny.
What I find interesting is that in the PS3 teardown photos, there's a chip besides the Cell/BE (Cell Broadband Engine) and RS (Reality Synthesizer), called EE/GS (Emotion Engine/Graphics Synthesizer), which would imply the guts of the PS2 are embedded in the PS3... which should result in a lot of games working. Especially important ones like Guitar Hero.
Unlike the Xbox360, which has NO adjunct x86 processor, and instead relies on the 3 PowerPC cores to emulate the x86 CPU and translate graphics calls to the ATI GPU. Hence why backwards compatitibility is awful on the 360.
ZuneSpam - coming soon to Freshmeat
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 1
Is it me or does the ability to send music and photos wirelessly to the Zune seem to say "SPAM ME"?
I mean, it's only a matter of time before non-Zunes can send music and photos to Zunes, and you know marketers^Wspammers will love the ability to set up a WiFi card and start blasting out music and photos to all Zunes nearby...
(And I'm sure whatever method Zune uses to ensure that you cannot send the same file again to the same Zune to avoid the 3-day 3-play DRM will be used, leading to bunches of people unable to send files at all because everyone's Zune will say "Dupe, not gonna let ya").
Though, it might be fun sitting on the commuter train with a high-poweree wifi card sending images and the like to unsuspecting people.
(This assumes that you can recceive photos and music on a blanket basis - after all, if you have to get near someone to tell them to activate the receive function, you might as well podjack^Wzunejack and do other things while you're close. Otherwise its wireless isn't terribly useful as a social tool if you have to walk up to people first.)
I still enjoy radio allot, and i think its daylight robbery how Apple makes you pay for an FM radio addon!
Anyways regarding this Google thing, my only hope is that audio advertisments never make it to the internet in a big way, that would be horrible.
Yeah, the big problem is it only does FM. I have my iPod. I have my satellite radio. Now, the only thing I really want is AM radio. For music, it's my iPod or satellite. For local news, it's AM radio. I don't give one hoot about FM radio anymore - a vast wasteland of blandness and ads.
Speaking of which, what's happened to Daily WTF? Did the whole world suddenly stop writing bad code three weeks ago, forcing them to switch to this new Dilbert-as-essay format?
More like interesting code snippets have dried up. There aren't very many of them before it starts getting repetitive or boring. Either that or everyone's starting to take breaks... But they do run code ones from time to time, for all the little bits that would never make it otherwise (like popup popourri).
But I suspect the really big WTFs are a rarity, and everything else is smaller. Plus the dilbert-eque ones are fun too (and popular). There's still code ones, too, but it's more general now. Plus it keeps the "Visual Basic SUCKS!" trolls at bay since a large majority of them were in VB... and the 10 posts explaining the wrongfulness of the code (there's a few that say "what's wrong with it?" because the syntax isn't entirely clear).
Could it simply be that the date is a hard concept? You've got months with uneven number of days in them, including one month that can have an extra day added to it based on a somewhat complex concept (every 4 years, except if it's divisible by 100, UNLESS that year also happens to be divisible by 400). Calculating how many days there are between now and some future date, without using magic numbers? Heck, even software in the 90's couldn't get it right that there was a Feb 29, 2000.
Every date math equation I've seen has all sorts of wierd magic numbers in them where it isn't clear how those numbers were obtained. This may work just fine in day to day computations, but oddball bugs in date calculations can lead to some very wierd errors. Look at the C library sometime for the date functions. It's quite impressive.
Perhaps when the shuttles were designed, the inability to schedule across the new year was acceptable to avoid introducing odd bugs in the program to keep the software provably correct. Ground systems, which can be repaired in the middle of a mission easily, can be a little less bug-free, since a miscalculation won't cause the Earth to suddenly veer off course.
You do realize that MUNICIPAL elections are done by however the municipality decides it wants to do the elections? So the X-in-a-circle thing is a Federal and Provincial government thing.
Elections Canada and Elections <Province> mandate the ballot be a simple white circle on black, with the candidate's name in black in a white rectangle beside said circle. Municipal elections are determined by city hall. Last time I did it, we filled out scantron ("mark-sense") like ballots and fed them into the optical scanner. Of course, given Harper's perchant for following lock-step Bush's policies, I expect the next election to have Diebold machines in them by scrapping Elections Canada.
This is unlike the US, where each county decides how it wants to vote. Elections Canada dictates all the standards for seals, boxes, ballots, and even the little shield you stand behind to mark your vote for Federal elections. And of course, the procedure of taking serial numbered ballots and anonymizing them (the serial number is torn off the ballot, and the ballot put in the box, with the serial number tossed into a different collection bin) so it becomes a secret vote.
Although the question arises: why would I do such a thing when the audio output just plane sucks on a phone (my phone at least)?
Two words: Headphones. And plain.
Actually, phones aren't portable music players by default, so their audio DACs are probably quite inferior compared to a portable player. A phone can't afford nice DACs and nice amps to complement them because they take space on the board, cost too much, and take too much power. Especially considering all the audio switching that goes on in a phone. (A phone's power budget is quite low - milliamp range - in order for it last a decent amount of time)
A portable player designed for listening would have higher priority on audio quality than a phone (plus there's more money to invest in better parts), especially since most aren't heavily subsidized and have extra cost pressures of adding a cell module and all that stuff.
I read the previous story and I know that Lik Sang BLAMES sony for putting them out of business. But reselling sony equipment is only a part of the mix of the products that they sold, and they've been stopped from selling products by other manufacturers as well. Couldn't it be possible that Lik Sang is just taking advantage of negative Sony feedback over the past year to send another f-u to Sony? I find it hard to believe they'd be put out of business over this single issue, and the whole time not point any blame at the quasi grey market business that they were operating under.
Try to defend yourself in the many languages and courts of the EU countries. Sony didn't just sue Lik-Sang in UK courts, they sued in nearly ALL EU member courts. The EU is a diverse place, with many different legal traditions and languages. Now take a small retailer like Lik-Sang (they're big, but really, the margins can't be too great on their products). They have to defend themselves not only in UK courts, but in all the other courts as well. Once they lost in the UK, they decided to throw in the towel and leave with money, than leave with lawyers holding the money and bankruptcy.
So even if they intended to make it a big f-u to Sony, Sony helped by filing so many lawsuits, there's no way to defend oneself against the onslaught of court dates, court filings, lawyers, etc. It's like some large company decides to sue you in every state in the US. You'll exhaust significant resources just convincing the judge that the case should be moved. Now turn "state" into "countries" and that magnifies the difficulty and costs.
1 lawsuit - not a big deal. Many lawsuits in different countries, VERY big deal.
The problem with signed binaries is that you either have a list of binaries that are signed, that is hardcoded into the kernel to check (BAD), or all binaries have to be signed (BAD). The only workable alternative is have a list of files and have that file signed.
What MacOS X does, is try to start the application. If it's encrypted, it's decrypted as part of the load process into memory. If not, well, it's not. I'm certain you can replace OS X's encrypted binaries with unencrypted ones of equivalent functionality - it just won't go through the same code path since it doesn't need decryption. This way, during development, the software isn't signed and it's trivial to get working (rather than having to constantly resign it as part of the build process). Once finalized, it's encrypted, and unless the kernel has a bug, it should work the as if it was unencrypted.
Anyhow, when has DRM really stopped anyone determined to break it? Those who are going through the effort to break this are either doing it for fun, or aren't buying a Mac. I can think of one way to grab the decrypted code right out of memory... (requires external hardware). I'm sure someone else creative can figure it out. There are probably another dozen ways to do it without needing external hardware as well.
Which is why between my iPod, XM Satellite Radio, what I miss most is... AM radio!
The iPod covers my music, while XM gives me radio like experience without too much repetition (though I can always choose *another* channel), without the ads and stuff, so they more or less have everything that's on FM already. All that's left is the local news only available on AM radio. Unfortunately, I've not come acorss any AM receivers for iPod...
(Yes, I know of Sirius. But only XM has a channel full of movie soundtracks (Hits Ch. 27 - Cinemagic). Sadly, XM Canada dropped it, making the Canadian offers equivalent. And growing the legions of XM Canada listeners moving to grey market (US-subscribed) reception. Enough so that XM Canada really doesn't bother trying to keep you, even though they shouldn't.)
LAME has a nice set of settings called "presets" that have all the best-quality settings put in them (this was done using suggestions based on r3mix evaluations). There are several of them. Just use --alt-preset or --preset, with "standard", "extreme" or "insane" (in increasing order of quality). This enables VBR, which keeps the files smaller (no need for 320kbps when you don't need it, but gives LAME the flexibility to go to 320kbps). I use Extreme, and it tends to average between 192 to 256kbps. I can't tell the difference, but 128kbps is painful.
I used to use tons of command line options, but now, I just use --alt-preset extreme. Works great.
I seem to recall in the late 80's and through the 90's a removable cartridge drive system known as Bernoulli drives. They had "floppy" media (mylar, though, not foil), The drive would spin up the disk, then insert the heads, which were like hard drive heads - floating over the surface rather than the more standard pressed against the surface (a la Zip/Floppy drives).
Basically, this drive is similar, just in a self-contained format rather than a removable cartridge solution?
Though, bumping the drive while spinning could do a lot of damage from precession of the platters causing the material to warp. Fast spinning disks are miniature gyroscopes.
Slashdot Mirror
Archos provides an iTunes plugin for their line of MP3 and video players. I'm not confident it'll work for iTunes video transfers (but it might), but it works fine for MP3s. Just make sure you make the Windows DRM partition very small, and the USB mode is mass storage.
There are many iTunes plugins as well for any mp3 player that appears as a mass-storage device, and a lot of good MP3 players support mass storage mode (for DRM-free music). I believe the Sandisk Sansa appears as a mass storage device. As do the newer satellite radio receivers (like the XM Inno and the Sirius Stiletto).
Isn't the Virtual PC hard drive image format open (really open - royalty free, do-anything-you-want)? In which case, all VMWare has to do is really just support
Wow. I didn't know that. I guess I shall be calling it soon - EBGames always checks ID for all credit card purchases. (They have a sign, too...) And yes, they take Visa - I only carry a Visa card. Not only that, but they record down the ID presented and the number. I believe that would really be against their rules...
Anyhow, how are merchants supposed to check signatures? If you don't sign the back of the card, they ask you sign right there, so the signature strip on the back is useless for comparisons. I believe the reason for the signature is that it forms a contract - the lines above the line say something to the effect of "I agree to pay the above amount", and forms the first line of defense for the merchant if there's a chargeback (not entirely reliable, but if there's a signed copy...). I can't recall what the purpose of the signature on the back of the card is for, other than maybe indicating that it's a valid instrument for financial transactions?
This is actually a tiny bit different from current UAV/UCAVs. In those, you have someone on the ground controlling a plane in the air, while here, they're talking about a pilot flying not only his own jet, but several others as well. It's a bit easier to secure a short range link than a long-range one, especially when your "wingmen" will stay in relative tight formation. (I suppose it's a current compromise between the fighter jock who wants to pull G's vs. sitting in an office chair.)
It's a nice transition I suppose. UAV/UCAVs are the future since that little bit of meat impacts a huge performance penalty on an aircraft (lowered maneuverability, increased weight, decreased payload/fuel, etc due to G-limits and support equipment).
On the other hand, it might make kamikaze style "bombings" more fun - you and your UAV wingment all auger in together...
I played it on my XBox360 (didn't buy it), then when I got an iPod video as a gift, I went nuts and bought it on the iPod. It's already given me many hours of play, not bad for the $5 it cost on the iTunes store. I just wish there was some way to control the wheel sensitivity on the iPod - a tad too sensitive.
More likely, the investigators behind them use *gasp*, regular broadband and dialup connections from the usual providers! (or forward traffic). It's kinda trivial to set up a bunch of cable/DSL modems in some location and forward their traffic via the corporate block.
No, the safest way is to also block broadband provider's IP ranges. Oh, wait...
Because if everyone had to keep clicking through the checkout process, every transaction would add another 3 or 4 page loads. One click is merely a way to avoid these extra page loads and not bring down the server too often.
That, and it also explains why there's no link in the story - we don't want to slashdot Amazon again, do we?
In fact, there are animals that don't appear to sleep, but actually do (dolphins, for example). What they do is sleep half their body and brain at a time. So there's obviously some benefit, as they've evolved the necessity to remain awake, but still get the sleep they need. (Unless it really happens to be some anomaly of evolution (another strike against creationism), like the appendix or spleen, that affects basically the entire population of living creatures). But I would think the dolphins proved otherwise, since they'd be the first to do away completely with sleep.
But a concern is still the long term side effects. By playing with stuff like this, would it lead to mental insanity later on due to paranoia or schizophrenia? We are, after all, playing with the mental state of mind (I'm sure tired muscles still remain tired even after popping the pills, even though the brain says it's fresh). The fact that the miliary trials concluded that it's only useful to about 48 hours wakefulness seems to imply that it doesn't reduce the need for sleep, just reduces the feelings of the need for sleep/sleepiness. We may end up with a population of zombies in a decade or two's time.
Anyhow, when did pill-popping become fashionable? I fear the day where it's "uncool" to not stick some drug in you as part of your daily routine in order to get through the day (as opposed to treating disease). Or the "there's a drug for everything" mentality.
It's more like besides the initial download, all the little incremental downloads as well (patches, updates, etc), which were hosted by NCSoft.
It's more akin to some website linking against photos you host on your website - you're stuck with the bills, and they profit. Of course, why NCSoft couldn't push an update, I don't know.
I find the Ars Technica article informative.
It's because the PS2 actually included PSX hardware in it. There's a adjunct chip addtached to the Emotion Engine called the IO Processor, which is used to handle all the I/O in the system (controllers, DVD-ROM, sound, etc), very DMA-ish. This I/O processor basically includes the central processing core of the PSX as well - in PSX mode, the Emotion Engine would basically end up (with the Graphics Synthesizer) acting as the graphics chip, while the I/O processor became the main processor. That's why the graphics were "upscaled" a bit, but the games worked quite well provided they didn't do anything funny.
What I find interesting is that in the PS3 teardown photos, there's a chip besides the Cell/BE (Cell Broadband Engine) and RS (Reality Synthesizer), called EE/GS (Emotion Engine/Graphics Synthesizer), which would imply the guts of the PS2 are embedded in the PS3... which should result in a lot of games working. Especially important ones like Guitar Hero.
Unlike the Xbox360, which has NO adjunct x86 processor, and instead relies on the 3 PowerPC cores to emulate the x86 CPU and translate graphics calls to the ATI GPU. Hence why backwards compatitibility is awful on the 360.
Is it me or does the ability to send music and photos wirelessly to the Zune seem to say "SPAM ME"?
I mean, it's only a matter of time before non-Zunes can send music and photos to Zunes, and you know marketers^Wspammers will love the ability to set up a WiFi card and start blasting out music and photos to all Zunes nearby...
(And I'm sure whatever method Zune uses to ensure that you cannot send the same file again to the same Zune to avoid the 3-day 3-play DRM will be used, leading to bunches of people unable to send files at all because everyone's Zune will say "Dupe, not gonna let ya").
Though, it might be fun sitting on the commuter train with a high-poweree wifi card sending images and the like to unsuspecting people.
(This assumes that you can recceive photos and music on a blanket basis - after all, if you have to get near someone to tell them to activate the receive function, you might as well podjack^Wzunejack and do other things while you're close. Otherwise its wireless isn't terribly useful as a social tool if you have to walk up to people first.)
And decided to fix it before people exploit it like they did on the PSP...
Can't have people running Linux on it for free now, can we? Especially of the hundreds of dollars Sony must lose on each PS3.
So is the bug still in the CVS revision of Slash, or was it fixed 5 years ago and Slashdot never applied the patch?
You forgot it will install spyware and have in-game ads, too.
Yeah, the big problem is it only does FM. I have my iPod. I have my satellite radio. Now, the only thing I really want is AM radio. For music, it's my iPod or satellite. For local news, it's AM radio. I don't give one hoot about FM radio anymore - a vast wasteland of blandness and ads.
More like interesting code snippets have dried up. There aren't very many of them before it starts getting repetitive or boring. Either that or everyone's starting to take breaks... But they do run code ones from time to time, for all the little bits that would never make it otherwise (like popup popourri).
But I suspect the really big WTFs are a rarity, and everything else is smaller. Plus the dilbert-eque ones are fun too (and popular). There's still code ones, too, but it's more general now. Plus it keeps the "Visual Basic SUCKS!" trolls at bay since a large majority of them were in VB... and the 10 posts explaining the wrongfulness of the code (there's a few that say "what's wrong with it?" because the syntax isn't entirely clear).
Could it simply be that the date is a hard concept? You've got months with uneven number of days in them, including one month that can have an extra day added to it based on a somewhat complex concept (every 4 years, except if it's divisible by 100, UNLESS that year also happens to be divisible by 400). Calculating how many days there are between now and some future date, without using magic numbers? Heck, even software in the 90's couldn't get it right that there was a Feb 29, 2000.
Every date math equation I've seen has all sorts of wierd magic numbers in them where it isn't clear how those numbers were obtained. This may work just fine in day to day computations, but oddball bugs in date calculations can lead to some very wierd errors. Look at the C library sometime for the date functions. It's quite impressive.
Perhaps when the shuttles were designed, the inability to schedule across the new year was acceptable to avoid introducing odd bugs in the program to keep the software provably correct. Ground systems, which can be repaired in the middle of a mission easily, can be a little less bug-free, since a miscalculation won't cause the Earth to suddenly veer off course.
You do realize that MUNICIPAL elections are done by however the municipality decides it wants to do the elections? So the X-in-a-circle thing is a Federal and Provincial government thing.
Elections Canada and Elections <Province> mandate the ballot be a simple white circle on black, with the candidate's name in black in a white rectangle beside said circle. Municipal elections are determined by city hall. Last time I did it, we filled out scantron ("mark-sense") like ballots and fed them into the optical scanner. Of course, given Harper's perchant for following lock-step Bush's policies, I expect the next election to have Diebold machines in them by scrapping Elections Canada.
This is unlike the US, where each county decides how it wants to vote. Elections Canada dictates all the standards for seals, boxes, ballots, and even the little shield you stand behind to mark your vote for Federal elections. And of course, the procedure of taking serial numbered ballots and anonymizing them (the serial number is torn off the ballot, and the ballot put in the box, with the serial number tossed into a different collection bin) so it becomes a secret vote.
Or is it something that HBO will remove in short order?
Actually, phones aren't portable music players by default, so their audio DACs are probably quite inferior compared to a portable player. A phone can't afford nice DACs and nice amps to complement them because they take space on the board, cost too much, and take too much power. Especially considering all the audio switching that goes on in a phone. (A phone's power budget is quite low - milliamp range - in order for it last a decent amount of time)
A portable player designed for listening would have higher priority on audio quality than a phone (plus there's more money to invest in better parts), especially since most aren't heavily subsidized and have extra cost pressures of adding a cell module and all that stuff.
Try to defend yourself in the many languages and courts of the EU countries. Sony didn't just sue Lik-Sang in UK courts, they sued in nearly ALL EU member courts. The EU is a diverse place, with many different legal traditions and languages. Now take a small retailer like Lik-Sang (they're big, but really, the margins can't be too great on their products). They have to defend themselves not only in UK courts, but in all the other courts as well. Once they lost in the UK, they decided to throw in the towel and leave with money, than leave with lawyers holding the money and bankruptcy.
So even if they intended to make it a big f-u to Sony, Sony helped by filing so many lawsuits, there's no way to defend oneself against the onslaught of court dates, court filings, lawyers, etc. It's like some large company decides to sue you in every state in the US. You'll exhaust significant resources just convincing the judge that the case should be moved. Now turn "state" into "countries" and that magnifies the difficulty and costs.
1 lawsuit - not a big deal. Many lawsuits in different countries, VERY big deal.
The problem with signed binaries is that you either have a list of binaries that are signed, that is hardcoded into the kernel to check (BAD), or all binaries have to be signed (BAD). The only workable alternative is have a list of files and have that file signed.
What MacOS X does, is try to start the application. If it's encrypted, it's decrypted as part of the load process into memory. If not, well, it's not. I'm certain you can replace OS X's encrypted binaries with unencrypted ones of equivalent functionality - it just won't go through the same code path since it doesn't need decryption. This way, during development, the software isn't signed and it's trivial to get working (rather than having to constantly resign it as part of the build process). Once finalized, it's encrypted, and unless the kernel has a bug, it should work the as if it was unencrypted.
Anyhow, when has DRM really stopped anyone determined to break it? Those who are going through the effort to break this are either doing it for fun, or aren't buying a Mac. I can think of one way to grab the decrypted code right out of memory... (requires external hardware). I'm sure someone else creative can figure it out. There are probably another dozen ways to do it without needing external hardware as well.
Which is why between my iPod, XM Satellite Radio, what I miss most is... AM radio!
The iPod covers my music, while XM gives me radio like experience without too much repetition (though I can always choose *another* channel), without the ads and stuff, so they more or less have everything that's on FM already. All that's left is the local news only available on AM radio. Unfortunately, I've not come acorss any AM receivers for iPod...
(Yes, I know of Sirius. But only XM has a channel full of movie soundtracks (Hits Ch. 27 - Cinemagic). Sadly, XM Canada dropped it, making the Canadian offers equivalent. And growing the legions of XM Canada listeners moving to grey market (US-subscribed) reception. Enough so that XM Canada really doesn't bother trying to keep you, even though they shouldn't.)
LAME has a nice set of settings called "presets" that have all the best-quality settings put in them (this was done using suggestions based on r3mix evaluations). There are several of them. Just use --alt-preset or --preset, with "standard", "extreme" or "insane" (in increasing order of quality). This enables VBR, which keeps the files smaller (no need for 320kbps when you don't need it, but gives LAME the flexibility to go to 320kbps). I use Extreme, and it tends to average between 192 to 256kbps. I can't tell the difference, but 128kbps is painful.
I used to use tons of command line options, but now, I just use --alt-preset extreme. Works great.
I seem to recall in the late 80's and through the 90's a removable cartridge drive system known as Bernoulli drives. They had "floppy" media (mylar, though, not foil), The drive would spin up the disk, then insert the heads, which were like hard drive heads - floating over the surface rather than the more standard pressed against the surface (a la Zip/Floppy drives).
Ah, Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_drive
Basically, this drive is similar, just in a self-contained format rather than a removable cartridge solution?
Though, bumping the drive while spinning could do a lot of damage from precession of the platters causing the material to warp. Fast spinning disks are miniature gyroscopes.