"... I don't know - I'm not a lawyer.... are words from the dictionary trademarkable?..."
And even if you were, you'd need one. Dictionary words can describe products. Some dictionary words are associated with well known products. And here's the part where even if you were a lawyer, you would want to hire another one:
You can trademark or trade-name dictionary words. That seems obvious. What can you do with that? Here's where your lawyer will probably hire a small firm to assist him.
Sometimes nothing. Transmission? Right now, consumers associate the word transmission with transmissions. Seems pretty straightforward. Lots of companies have transmission in their names, the names of products, etc. Nobody's suing anyone else. How can this be? Isn't there one big, faceless, avaricious company that can sue all the little companies back into the stone age?
Well, we kind of answered our own question here. Because transmission isn't automatically associated with any one company or product (right now), anyone can use it, pretty much as they see fit.
Coke? Seems straightforward as well. Instruct your lawyer to fire those other lawyers, this one we can figure out ourselves. Or can we?
Coke is an industrial product; it's a specific byproduct of smelting metal. If you were in the business of dealing with this industrial product, you could probably name your company "American Coke" if you wanted. Now, it would be a good time to hire those lawyers again; but you might win. It's a bona fide name for you and what you do with what. The Coca-Cola company's lawyers are going to visit you, maybe. You might end up spending a lot of money defending your name, if they take it that far. But you might win. Or not. Who knows?
Coca-Cola's lawyers are going to have to prove that "American Coke" is likely to cause confusion amongst consumers with the soft drink "Coke", which they do have an intellectual property interest in. Sometimes people name things deliberately, and they intend to ride on the other product's coat tails. Usually, the courts take a dim view of that.
But sometimes it's a perfectly reasonable name for a company, perhaps a company in the coke business; and people who are in the business of knowing coke sometimes comes from a blast furnace instead of a 7-11 would not be in the least confused between American Coke and the Coca Cola Company and their respective products. American Coke would do well to listen to the huge law firm the smaller law firm hired by the lawyer, when they suggest they not take the founder's suggestion of a red-and-white corporate logo, and instead make it blue and black. Stuff like that helps sway the court in your favor.
"Windows" can be part of a company that actually makes, sells, fixes or otherwise deals with transparent stuff we use as building materials. Microsoft can do little about it; the "dictionary word" thing is partly at play here. But, if you're in the computer software business, now we have a potential confusion with your "Windows" and Microsoft's "Windows"; could consumers be confused that one was associated with the other? Probably, yes. Your lawyers will tell you if you won this one or not, but I'd settle, myself.
Note: I'm not going to argue any of this with anyone. It's just a hypothetical example. Get over it. We'd both end up needing lawyers to figure it out anyway.
Back on topic
The poor kid; MS played dirty pool here. Had his first instinct been to just renamed his product "Desktop Defender", he would probably be the one in position to sue MS since his product was there first and was in a similar market (broadly, computer software for MS Windows OS computers). As it was, they played a standard "Art of War" tactic on him by making him assume it was "Windows" they were in a huff about.
I think you missed my point; I certainly never there is anything flawed (or perfect, for that matter) about digital. I merely pointed out that it's a world that we, as humans, don't live in. Sooner or later, it's got to be in analog form if it wants to exist in the physical world, and typically (but not necessarily) it starts analog and ends analog.
"... Digital TV is a signal when can be exactly reproduced without loss of information. Analog TV can't...."
What is "Digital TV"? I'm not sure, but for sake of discussion, how about an example of a typical TV broadcast using, say, DirectTV:
Analog video & sound is digitized, the digital data is transmitted, received, and finally converted to analog so we can see and hear the TV show. By definition, what you referred to as "Digital TV" has an analog component that cannot be eliminated.
I'm not sure if following your argument means the analog portion must, by definition, be degraded but I am sure that the period of time the signal stays in the digital domain is irrelevant if it's a fundamental part of the process and that process must include an analog component.
Either the broadcast can be perfectly reproduced with necessary analog gear at each end (and I believe it can); or it can't (I think you believe it can't, correct me if I'm wrong) and the "perfect" part is irrelevant since it cannot rid itself from being part of a flawed process.
But, going back to my original post, let's put it this way: You can't watch "Digital TV" because our eyes only respond to analog information; any TV image must be in analog form for us to see it. Sorry, but wishing it were not so won't change that.
I love this question. elgee is confused to the point where he doesn't know what analog is, isn't sure what it's good for, or if anything made in the last 10 years even exists in an analog state. A sad state for modern man, I say.
Now, back to his question: Your eyes require analog light to see, and therefore read, anything. If you can read it, even if you're reading it on a computer screen, it's in an analog state.
We use analog things to store, transmit, or process digital data. It starts as analog, we then translate it to digital, but if we want to actually use it, eventually it has to be turned back to analog.
Where you might be confused is this: we don't actually have to change the digital data to analog to use it in an analog world; we can copy it and translate the copy to analog, leaving the digital original alone. That's how your computer displays a page of text on a monitor. But, rest assured, if you can read it, it's in an analog form.
"... Is printed matter analog or digital? Or does it depend how it is copied?..."
So, can you read printed text? It's analog then. Does it depend on how it's copied? Sort of. Every means of copying it must start as analog. It could then be translated to digital data ( desktop scanner) or not (photographic film). You have a choice. Then, it can be stored, transmitted, etc in either analog or digital form. As long as you never want to read it, it can remain in digital form. As soon as you do, it must be turned into analog.
"... If I scan it, it is digital...." It was analog, you turned it to digital, where it stays until you want to read it, when it must turn to analog for you to see it.
"... If I use an older copier to copy it, is it analog?..."
Perhaps; analog copiers exist.
Which brings us up to the main topic: copy control in the analog domain. It should be obvious that there is no way to do that without altering how something looks (reading, watching a video) or sounds (listening to or recording music, voice, the sound of the birds outside your home). Everything must ultimately be allowed to be translated from digital to analog or we can't actually make any real use of it. Certainly Hollywood needs to let us watch and hear their movies, and this must take place in the analog domain (no matter whether it's a newsreel on movie film or a DVD).
So, it strikes me as insanely stupid to even think this bill could be crafted in the first place. What are they going to do, make it a crime to run around the back yard with a cassette deck and a microphone, recording bumblebees? I don't understand what they think they're debating.
Good one. I'm still ROTFL. Made my day. Hey, that's a good one. Gotta love it. Good going. A winner.
Umm, all the PC Magazines are published and printed with Macs, and always have been. Doesn't stop them from writing about Microsoft, the x86PC, or any of that stuff. A lot of ads for PCs, PC gear, PC software, etc are laid up on Macs. Doesn't stop them from selling PC gear.
What's changed is the company and it's products (Apple); in particular the iPod. In fact, the player is really the one responsible; everyone, including PC users, seems to have bought one and that's what's creating the buzz. Before the iPod, people kind-of-sort-of knew there was probably a difference but didn't really pay attention. Now, they are curious and the media simply reflects that by talking about it more (a lot more).
Is it only me who noticed that Dvorak is writing about Macs in an article about too much Mac coverage?
Why do you block ads? Because I hate them. And with what? Whatever works. Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads? No. What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many? Of course.
Interesting, but even more interesting, the RIAA seems to be "grandfathering" the radio and TV industries while simultaneously attacking new technologies. In fact, that could be a rather effective defense for XM/Sirius and who-knows-who-else.
You see, every radio station caches the output; there is the "tape delay" used to prevent someone swearing, etc and offending the sensibilities of middle America from making it to the transmitter. TV stations do the same thing to avoid any naked breasts, nasty words, and the like. The thing is, the whole broadcast is cached continuously, not just one show or another.
Sat providers, probably every cable company, you name it. They all cache audio and video.
Every broadcast must be logged for FCC compliance; the entire output of every station must be recorded and stored for a certain amount of time. Now, this is required as a condition of the broadcast license, but still, it's a recording of copyrighted work that the RIAA ignores.
Now, if you fail to enforce your trademarks, you can lose them. Copyright is a bit different, but none the less if it did end up in court then failing to enforce your rights on one industry while targeting another could easily result in the courts deciding you don't really have or deserve the right to harass people for caching anymore.
Your iPod doesn't support WMA because if it did, Apple has to pay a royalty to Microsoft for each iPod it sells, and each copy of ITunes for Macintosh it allows to be downloaded. At current rates of sales/downloading, it amounts to many, many millions of $.
Now, iTunes for Windows supports WMA, but iTunes for OSX doesn't. Why is that you suppose? Because Microsoft waives the royalty if it's an application that runs on Windows.
How about this one though. Since WMA is supported in the iPod's hardware but is not enabled due to royalty issues, what's the excuse for other mp3 players who have AAC supported in hardware (yep, pretty much all of 'em) but don't enable that, even though no royalties are due?
Supported formats in iPods: AAC (16 to 320 Kbps) Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store) MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps) MP3 VBR Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4) Apple Lossless WAV AIFF
"... Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't Fair Play a Microsoft thing, you know that little badge that shows up on their mp3 players and cdroms? Isn't Fair Play the CD DRM that Apple refuses to support?..."
Umm, yeah, sort of, but not quite, exactly.
Microsoft's Fair Play program is a promotional tool used in some countries. It's a registered trademark of Microsoft, and basically gives sales staff prizes for selling software. For example, here's a link for those of you who speak Russian: http://www.microsoft.com/rus/fairplay/
If you don't speak Russian, well, note the URL.
Apple's FairPlay is a DRM encoding/decoding scheme for music files. It's added onto Advanced Audio Codec format audio (which is not, as you hear often, a proprietary Apple format and works fine in many players) to create a file in the encoded format (which is proprietary).
So it's Microsoft Fair Play (TM) versus Apple FairPlay (TM). And it's AAC with the.m4a (everyone), and FairPlay encoded AAC with the.m4p extension (iTunes, the iTMS, and iPods only).
[From beginning of article] "... Online music has come a long way... since Apple turned the iPod into a necessary fashion accessory... To be fair, Apple did a superb job with the iPod and iTunes by making it easy for people. And, by making the software proprietary, they made it a lot harder for the competition; what you downloaded from iTunes wouldn't play elsewhere...."
Read carefully, you see either a predetermined bias (fine, it's in everything we read and the wise know how to look for it) or misunderstanding of the topic (not fine; he's offering advice here).
iTunes is a software product that runs on Windows and Macintosh computers. You can't download music "from iTunes". What he means is downloaded from the iTunes Music Store with the iTunes application on your PC and I would be fine with that if he just said that once, at the beginning of the article, but he doesn't. Most people are more careful to differentiate between the iTMS and iTunes itself.
"... If you're an iPod owner....then you're stuck with iTunes...."
You know, he writes in such a nice, matter-of-fact style that even after reading the entire article, I'm not sure whether it's bias or ignorance we're reading. But, for the record, the iPod will play pretty much any music format except ogg vorbis and WMA audio, you can get music files from any source, including some of those listed in the article, and iTunes-the-software will happily import and play other formats on your computer or upload them to your iPod, whereupon you can happily enjoy them just like any other mp3 player.
For, I dunno, 60 years, people have been dealing with the safe storage of music; you are neither alone nor is this a new problem, and finally it most certainly is not a problem without a solution. If you want to, it can be done.
Now, we need to get one thing straight right off the bat. You might be worrying about what digital format to use. Personally, I'm not going to wade into that much except for some sage advice: use a commercially viable format. In other words, RedBook CD players will be around in 50 years, somewhere, somehow.
They might be expensive, they might be hard to find, but they will be there somehow. I can't say the same for any computer-based format, nor could I say that for newer digital formats that might not get CD's traction. DVD-Video is another possibility (not DVD-Audio or SACD; they are still too vulnerable. But DVD-V offers good audio recording quality (48Khz sampling rate for 2-ch audio) and longer record times than CD).
Basically, if a record or movie label didn't sell lots (and lots and lots) of content on it, don't expect it to be around later. If they did, you might have to hunt down a 21st century librarian to help you, but there will be a way.
Part two, is this: Forget about digital. No, not what you're thinking. I'm here to point out that whether it's a CD, a hard drive, or a frisbee with a.wav file carved into it with a pen knife: they are all stubbornly analog media (that just happen to be storing digital data) and it's the health of the analog media you need to worry about.
Which brings us to the same stuff we've been dealing with for the last 50 years. Archival storage, or a close as you want to get. That can be complicated depending on what you've got to store, but it comes down to a few basic points; follow them and you will be fine, barring accidents.
I'm going to outline the basics; dig deeper if you want (some media need specific care; eg magnetic tape should be near but above freezing. Then again, freeze it and do the other two, and it will be in way better shape than if you stored them in the basement).
Cool. A freezer is a good idea for most media. Either keep it as near to 32F/0C as possible but above freezing (not so good for food, so we're talking dedicated storage), or run it colder and Just ignore your sealed box of music files when you go for the microwave pizzas.
Vertical. Store disks, tapes, etc on edge, not flat or laying on top of one another.
Sealed. Use acid free materials (plastic often is fine here; paper won't be unless it's special and expensive) and don't forget to tape it up air-tight. Remove paper labels, CD sleeves, etc and store separately if you want.
As for marking, I would suggest marking in some non-destructive manner, like on the case of the disk rather than the disk itself. You're not going to be playing them, so you shouldn't have to worry about losing track of which disk goes where.
Do include a little list of what is on the things (or as much info as you like; no-one will mind), but perhaps in it's own plastic bag. Make other copies for playing with.
Sapphire is just the OEM manufacturer of ATi cards. For quite a while you could only get ATi branded cards but now you can get them from ATi or Sapphire. I doubt they have much to do with the technology besides licensing it.
This is not a Credit Card authentication system. This is a credit card dis-authentication system. And it will only annoy your real, loyal, existing customers when it locks them out, and it will lock some out. Guaranteed.
Tried voice recognition passwords. Even when they work really well, they don't work that well. In fact, the better they work, the worse they work.
What I mean by that is they can get them to recognize a distinct voice pattern; you can demonstrate it to a bunch of execs in a boardroom and it will work. You could sell them on it.
Where it doesn't work is separating your voice pattern from everything that isn't your voice pattern. As long as the background noise of the boardroom is more-or-less constant and similar, and the demo is brief, your little presentation will go off without a hitch.
Use it in the real world where you actually have an application for the technology, and you get failure. I would bet that if the boardroom demo was in two parts, with recording execs voice just before Christmas (winter, heater noise, outdoor sounds travels faster in dense air, etc) and the first proof of login just before Memorial Day, it would fail miserably.
It's not so much that sounds present when you authenticate will cause a lockout. It's that whatever background existed when you record the first pattern (used for subsequent comparisons) had damn well be there for the life of the system, and any new sounds when you authenticate will cause a failure.
Radio on, truck drive by, jet overhead, daytime vs nightime, winter vs summer, whatever. The all have a distinct but essentially random background. Voice recognition expects all this stuff to be the same. Forever.
The better it gets at pattern recognition, the worse it gets at background rejection. Chasing one problem leads to many others, and that's basically the whole history of VR technology right there.
I don't see it improving, although it might be possible. It's too unpredictable, basically, to invest in as far as I'm concerned. What if there was an easier way by the time you get it solid? What if there were 30 easier ways?
From the looks of things, VRT won't be solid anytime soon, so pencil in a lot of room for competing technology, and keep in mind by the time VR works, stuff that is unheard of now may have matured by then.
... and they did so by looking at the regulatory framework and changing it to suit faster broadband penetration where applicable. They didn't buy anything, or give any money away, which if I read you right was what you're implying.
The only public money ever spent by Canadian Governments was the initiative to insure (stage 1) every Canadian School had a computer, (stage 2) every Canadian classroom had a computer, and (stage 3) every Canadian classroom had internet access. Stage 3 was completed a few years ago; there is not a single classroom in Canada, no matter where it is, that doesn't have net access and at least one computer). And education is properly funded by public money.
If there was no private provider, in some communities only the school had access. No money was spent to subsidize internet access anywhere, including the north. Internet access is provide by the 7 largest telecos, the 2 largest cable companies, the 2 sat providers, a couple of microwave providers, and hundreds of smaller for profit operations.
Are there regulatory impediments to better broadband penetration in the US? Find them and fix them.
"... I think our schools and society needs to get away from teaching these rediculous absolutes. America is The Best. Edison invented The Lightbulb...."
Or, at a minimum, teach the facts.
Edison purchased the US patent for the incandescent lightbulb from Henry Woodward & Matthew Evans (Canada, 1875). The carbon filament was patented by Lewis Howard Latimer (African-American, patent granted to Latimer in 1881) who worked for Edison in New Jersey, although Woodward & Evans used but did not patent the carbon filament component on the working model used to support their patent application for the incandescent light itself.
A greater improvement was the Tungsten filament (W. D. Cooledge) but Edison's first bulbs and the 1879 demonstration used an improved (smaller) carbon element, had better vacuum due to Edisons work in that area, and ran at a lower power (which it could, because of the smaller filament).
Electric lighting in general was well known with many patents (beginning in 1801) in many countries prior to the incandescent patent of 1875. Some were Russian (my lame attempt to keep on topic) and some were incandescent, and in many cases patents were granted at different times in different countries for the same idea, sometimes with slightly different details in construction and sometimes not.
More commonly there were carbon arc lamps but forms of fleurescent lighting were also known and patented.
Edison was able to make a marketable, manufacturable light bulb with the application of cubic dollars the various inventors lacked. He most certainly did not invent the light bulb, nor did he patent it, but he improved by to a point where it was generally useful.
His company did, however, purchase relevant patents which enabled him to sell the devices, which he was eager to do in order to expand his real pet project, electricity and it's generation and transmission.
They can't. However, what they can do is simply bar journalists from the hearing, or one particular journalist if they find out who it is. That's what they normally do if someone outside of jurisdiction breaks a ban on publication.
They can also charge his "buddy" who presumably sits at the hearing room, which, last time I checked, was still on Canadian soil.
The blogger is safe; his source might dry up pretty soon though.
Most of the testimony has been public and not subject to a ban; there isn't much that isn't known from any newspaper and I didn't see anything in the blogger's post that hasn't been reported elsewhere in the public press in Canada. Not really sure what the "secret" is; I didn't see any.
They Judge must have his reasons, he is widely believed to be hostile to the Liberals and it was that Judge that none the less ordered the ban. I just didn't see any evidence of anything new in the blog entry. Typically the ban is in place to avoid prejudicing a trial jury if charges are a likely outcome of the testimony.
Go to http://www.lashampoo.net/unix/stopADVbanners.css.t xt and copy and paste the entire page into a text editor. Save and install (instructions are in the file, commented out with the usual #). This version I have is much older than this link but I've added a few urls to it so it's still working for me fine.
Kills most ads dead, including flash and other "popovers". You can edit it to your liking to include more blocked hosts anytime. Works with most browsers and most OS's.
If you use OSX/Safari, go to Window: Activity to view the urls of every item on any page, including the ones this CSS blocks and of course the ones that might get past from time to time. Add them as required by editing the text file.
Other OS's/browsers may have a similar ability (not just view source, although it does help sometimes to do that) but you will have to check that out yourself or perhaps if someone knows they could reply to this post and let us all in on it.
I have noticed a few sneak by once every few weeks, but for the most part it's working good for me and has for years. Add new offenders as they are discovered and it's pretty simple and painless.
Occasionally you will find a page where you need to view a button that is blocked (eg the "Download" button for Shockwave 10 won't show up with this enabled) so just disable temporarily and use as if you were John Q Public. Most of the time it doesn't affect "normal" content at all, or put another way I don't miss whatever I'm not seeing in the least.
iMagicTV was aquired by Alcatel (Paris, France) in 2003. SaskTel uses the iMagicTV technology from Alcatel, along with: Set Top Boxes from Pace (UK) Switching technology (at source) from Lucent Technologies (their first customer of the Stinger system for TVoverIP) Switching technology (teleco to customer) from VComm (Vancouver BC with manufacturing in Saskatoon, SK).
NBTel was a leading teleco before the Aliant "chainsawing". NBTel and SaskTel were the first (1993), and second (1994), respectively, telecos in North America to implement fully digital switching, while SaskTel completed it's All-Fibre Optic network in 1981, a project that was still uncompleted in NB in 1993.
SaskTel's all digital/all-fibre network consists of 14,000 km of optical fibre connecting 12 cities, 670 towns and villages, and 60,000 farms over an area of 640,000 km2 (the province of New Brunswick is 73,550 km2 in area).
Like other places in Canada, it's been available in Saskatchewan for quite a while now. Most communities had it rolled out in 2002.
Sasktel.com "Max" $C 45.00/month $C 5.00 discount per month if bundled with either a long distance package or DSL, $C 10.00 if both 135 TV channels (some at additional cost to basic package) 45 streaming Audio channels (commercial free); included in basic 33 streaming commercial Radio channels, included in basic Video-on-Demand movies, included in basic
I'd link to it, but only the home page is regular HTTP; as soon as you click on a link you're on a secure connection with lots of javaScript; works best with IE. Sasktel dot com if you're interested in checking it out.
On a related note, they're rolling out WiMax right now (30 Km range); been running for 2 years in small test communities and a full-scale rollout will be up (final test) in Kamloops BC this year.
Kamloops is a good place to test; it's in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. They plan to roll out wide-scale WiMax in 12-18 months in urban areas of BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Napster has value for you. Certainly I wouldn't suggest it had value for no one. Clearly there is a market for what they're doing.
Personally, in your case, I would be subscribing to XM or Sirius, having music in my car, my boat, and at home.
Maybe that doesn't offer any advantages to you; maybe you bike to work. But, since you don't mind being limited to your home PC for that, then for $50 worth of hardware and $30 worth of software from TimeTrax, you can record sat radio streams at home (including scheduled, unattended programming), get the same value you get, plus more. 4 months later you're at even money. http://www.timetraxtech.com/
I think Napster had a decent idea, but decent doesn't translate to sustainable or profitable. They had to split from Roxio, because of the losses they were sustaining. In fact, they had to sell Roxio to get cash to keep Napster up.
Perhaps I don't get it, but to me it sounds like MS selling Office to keep XBox alive. Microsoft is OK with XBox, but a smaller company might have had to make that choice, and Roxio was a small company.
If it has value for you, fine. They need thousands, perhaps millions of people like you, and I just don't see it.
Some people mention that you can still buy music on Napster. But for their business model to work, it's not 88c per song, it's $15.88 for one song, and $ 40.40 for 20 songs (in one month (the least expensive model; it's more $ if you buy less). I don't see the value, personally, no matter how I thrash it around.
First of all, let's start with the branding. Everyone knows Napster; it's a great "brand" amongst computer users. So far, so good.
Clear headed executive: OK, I'm listening. Tell me more.
What is it known for? Unlimited free downloads.
Clear headed executive: "Hmmmm." Ass kissing sycophant: We have a plan for that. We can leverage the brand, which is really associated with music, and get a head start on our competitors. When I say music, I'm still talking unlimited music here. All you want. It fits.
People who think downloading (for free) is "wrong" have a poor, perhaps negative, impression of the brand, while people who love the brand, don't pay for music.
Clear headed executive: Whoa. What was that? Ass kissing sycophant: It's nothing, CH. We got Super Bowl ads. We got Blender ads. We got CNN talking. We got a plan for all that. We can change the image. Clear Headed executive: So, you mean to tell me we bought this great brand, with awesome consumer awareness. But, in order to use it, we have to re-invent the image with massive advertising. What the f*ck did we buy the brand for if we have to spend the same money to use it as we would have to create it in the first place? And, aren't we bleeding red ink right now? Ass kicking sycophant: [left room, packing desk.]
You know, I was in the industry for over 20 years. I can usually tell if someone has a musical background or a purely hifi one.
They think differently; they approach hifi differently, for example. Like I said in my parent post, that doesn't invalidate what they say. But it does give the reader a clue to their perspecitve, which is a critical aspect of evaluating any advice as it relates to your own situation.
So, after your reply, I was curious about whether I had got him wrong or not.
Google gives me Rod Elliot, Elliot Sound Products, etc... we are talking about the same man, right?
He's a musician.
From the link: The Author: - For those brave or foolish enough to want to find out about me
Selected quotes: "... I have worked in the electronics, audio and of late the telecommunications industries for over 30 years,...In case anyone was wondering, I am not an "audiophile" in the true sense of the term. I enjoy music immensely, and quality reproduction is naturally very important to me.... or many years I had my own business, which was predominantly involved with musical instrument amps, PA systems and the like.... I played in a few bands for a while (guitar, then bass),... I spent quite a while mixing for live bands, and toured Australia a few times - life on the road with a rock band has to be experienced to be believed!...
He apporoaches the subject like a sound engineer does, although he has an interest in pure reproduction at home as well, and that's exactly how he came across in your first link.
I think, considering the subject of your parent post, you chose to link to his site wisely. He'a an appropriate authority for the topic of your post.
The link you provided is OK. Just a few comments for those who bothered reading it: The guy is obviously a musician, not a HiFi guy. Nothing wrong with that, although the two camps do have slightly different priorities in their respective quest for good sound. Each will tolerate some things the other won't, but good is good and bad is bad.
The Peak Power ratings he alluded to in the webpage for home audio equipment from the 70's ended (in the USA and Europe) because they were basically outlawed as being too misleading to consumers. They can still be mentioned, but RMS values must be prominent. There is such a thing as IEC peak power ratings, which at least does have a methodology to get the values. If it doesn't say it's IEC rated then it isn't, and the numbers are pure science fiction.
Without getting into too much detail, the FCC in the US ruled that "portable" audio can still use the "old lies" while non-portable audio must adhere to the RMS regulations. Although it might appear that anything that plugs into AC wall sockets is not portable, that's not true under the regulation. Basically, if it is not designed for permanent installation in a building or it it has a handle, it's portable, whether it can run on batteries or not.
Car Stereos, Blasters & Boom Boxes, and Computer Speakers are all "portable" and can use all kinds of inflated (compared to RMS) values for power output. TVs are "portable" if they have a handle on them, and most do, even if they're 150 pounds with 36" screens.
Power Ratings on loudspeakers (some posts in this subtopic mention them) are different altogether. There is no acceptable way to rate a speaker for power output in watts. Responsible manufacturers will offer a recommendation for power input. Even then, it's only a rather vague guide that depends on how they are used.
Speakers do not "put out power" in watts; they only accept power you deliver at a less than perfect efficiency, wasting the rest as heat. The "heat" is what usually blows them up and although too much excursion will cause a failure as well, it will only get that far if they are getting clean power to begin with. See JBL's PDF (3 pages) here: http://www.jblpro.com/pub/technote/spkpwfaq.pdf/
Back on to the Parent Post: Power supplies are expensive devices, comparatively. There are very few ways to get good, solid, output out of a power supply, and for the most part the solution is to add cubic dollars. They are simple devices, electrically, and everyone knows the "secrets". That's not to say an expensive PS is always good (they can just charge more) but it's very difficult to get good output from inexpensive devices; and I would suggest without tradeoffs (which may fit your intended use perfectly, or not at all) it's impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
" ... I don't know - I'm not a lawyer. ... are words from the dictionary trademarkable? ..."
And even if you were, you'd need one.
Dictionary words can describe products. Some dictionary words are associated with well known products. And here's the part where even if you were a lawyer, you would want to hire another one:
You can trademark or trade-name dictionary words. That seems obvious.
What can you do with that? Here's where your lawyer will probably hire a small firm to assist him.
Sometimes nothing. Transmission? Right now, consumers associate the word transmission with transmissions. Seems pretty straightforward. Lots of companies have transmission in their names, the names of products, etc. Nobody's suing anyone else. How can this be? Isn't there one big, faceless, avaricious company that can sue all the little companies back into the stone age?
Well, we kind of answered our own question here. Because transmission isn't automatically associated with any one company or product (right now), anyone can use it, pretty much as they see fit.
Coke? Seems straightforward as well. Instruct your lawyer to fire those other lawyers, this one we can figure out ourselves. Or can we?
Coke is an industrial product; it's a specific byproduct of smelting metal. If you were in the business of dealing with this industrial product, you could probably name your company "American Coke" if you wanted. Now, it would be a good time to hire those lawyers again; but you might win. It's a bona fide name for you and what you do with what. The Coca-Cola company's lawyers are going to visit you, maybe. You might end up spending a lot of money defending your name, if they take it that far. But you might win. Or not. Who knows?
Coca-Cola's lawyers are going to have to prove that "American Coke" is likely to cause confusion amongst consumers with the soft drink "Coke", which they do have an intellectual property interest in. Sometimes people name things deliberately, and they intend to ride on the other product's coat tails. Usually, the courts take a dim view of that.
But sometimes it's a perfectly reasonable name for a company, perhaps a company in the coke business; and people who are in the business of knowing coke sometimes comes from a blast furnace instead of a 7-11 would not be in the least confused between American Coke and the Coca Cola Company and their respective products. American Coke would do well to listen to the huge law firm the smaller law firm hired by the lawyer, when they suggest they not take the founder's suggestion of a red-and-white corporate logo, and instead make it blue and black. Stuff like that helps sway the court in your favor.
"Windows" can be part of a company that actually makes, sells, fixes or otherwise deals with transparent stuff we use as building materials. Microsoft can do little about it; the "dictionary word" thing is partly at play here. But, if you're in the computer software business, now we have a potential confusion with your "Windows" and Microsoft's "Windows"; could consumers be confused that one was associated with the other? Probably, yes. Your lawyers will tell you if you won this one or not, but I'd settle, myself.
Note: I'm not going to argue any of this with anyone. It's just a hypothetical example. Get over it. We'd both end up needing lawyers to figure it out anyway.
Back on topic
The poor kid; MS played dirty pool here. Had his first instinct been to just renamed his product "Desktop Defender", he would probably be the one in position to sue MS since his product was there first and was in a similar market (broadly, computer software for MS Windows OS computers). As it was, they played a standard "Art of War" tactic on him by making him assume it was "Windows" they were in a huff about.
I think you missed my point; I certainly never there is anything flawed (or perfect, for that matter) about digital. I merely pointed out that it's a world that we, as humans, don't live in. Sooner or later, it's got to be in analog form if it wants to exist in the physical world, and typically (but not necessarily) it starts analog and ends analog.
... Digital TV is a signal when can be exactly reproduced without loss of information. Analog TV can't. ..."
"
What is "Digital TV"? I'm not sure, but for sake of discussion, how about an example of a typical TV broadcast using, say, DirectTV:
Analog video & sound is digitized, the digital data is transmitted, received, and finally converted to analog so we can see and hear the TV show. By definition, what you referred to as "Digital TV" has an analog component that cannot be eliminated.
I'm not sure if following your argument means the analog portion must, by definition, be degraded but I am sure that the period of time the signal stays in the digital domain is irrelevant if it's a fundamental part of the process and that process must include an analog component.
Either the broadcast can be perfectly reproduced with necessary analog gear at each end (and I believe it can); or it can't (I think you believe it can't, correct me if I'm wrong) and the "perfect" part is irrelevant since it cannot rid itself from being part of a flawed process.
But, going back to my original post, let's put it this way:
You can't watch "Digital TV" because our eyes only respond to analog information; any TV image must be in analog form for us to see it. Sorry, but wishing it were not so won't change that.
I love this question. elgee is confused to the point where he doesn't know what analog is, isn't sure what it's good for, or if anything made in the last 10 years even exists in an analog state. A sad state for modern man, I say.
... Is printed matter analog or digital? Or does it depend how it is copied? ..."
... If I scan it, it is digital. ..."
... If I use an older copier to copy it, is it analog? ..."
Now, back to his question:
Your eyes require analog light to see, and therefore read, anything. If you can read it, even if you're reading it on a computer screen, it's in an analog state.
We use analog things to store, transmit, or process digital data. It starts as analog, we then translate it to digital, but if we want to actually use it, eventually it has to be turned back to analog.
Where you might be confused is this: we don't actually have to change the digital data to analog to use it in an analog world; we can copy it and translate the copy to analog, leaving the digital original alone. That's how your computer displays a page of text on a monitor. But, rest assured, if you can read it, it's in an analog form.
"
So, can you read printed text? It's analog then.
Does it depend on how it's copied? Sort of. Every means of copying it must start as analog. It could then be translated to digital data ( desktop scanner) or not (photographic film). You have a choice. Then, it can be stored, transmitted, etc in either analog or digital form. As long as you never want to read it, it can remain in digital form. As soon as you do, it must be turned into analog.
"
It was analog, you turned it to digital, where it stays until you want to read it, when it must turn to analog for you to see it.
"
Perhaps; analog copiers exist.
Which brings us up to the main topic: copy control in the analog domain. It should be obvious that there is no way to do that without altering how something looks (reading, watching a video) or sounds (listening to or recording music, voice, the sound of the birds outside your home). Everything must ultimately be allowed to be translated from digital to analog or we can't actually make any real use of it. Certainly Hollywood needs to let us watch and hear their movies, and this must take place in the analog domain (no matter whether it's a newsreel on movie film or a DVD).
So, it strikes me as insanely stupid to even think this bill could be crafted in the first place. What are they going to do, make it a crime to run around the back yard with a cassette deck and a microphone, recording bumblebees? I don't understand what they think they're debating.
Good one. I'm still ROTFL. Made my day. Hey, that's a good one. Gotta love it. Good going. A winner.
Umm, all the PC Magazines are published and printed with Macs, and always have been. Doesn't stop them from writing about Microsoft, the x86PC, or any of that stuff. A lot of ads for PCs, PC gear, PC software, etc are laid up on Macs. Doesn't stop them from selling PC gear.
What's changed is the company and it's products (Apple); in particular the iPod. In fact, the player is really the one responsible; everyone, including PC users, seems to have bought one and that's what's creating the buzz. Before the iPod, people kind-of-sort-of knew there was probably a difference but didn't really pay attention. Now, they are curious and the media simply reflects that by talking about it more (a lot more).
Is it only me who noticed that Dvorak is writing about Macs in an article about too much Mac coverage?
Why do you block ads?
Because I hate them.
And with what?
Whatever works.
Do you view internet ads as different from say, TV ads?
No.
What about in a magazine? Do you not buy a magazine because it has too many?
Of course.
Interesting, but even more interesting, the RIAA seems to be "grandfathering" the radio and TV industries while simultaneously attacking new technologies. In fact, that could be a rather effective defense for XM/Sirius and who-knows-who-else.
You see, every radio station caches the output; there is the "tape delay" used to prevent someone swearing, etc and offending the sensibilities of middle America from making it to the transmitter. TV stations do the same thing to avoid any naked breasts, nasty words, and the like. The thing is, the whole broadcast is cached continuously, not just one show or another.
Sat providers, probably every cable company, you name it. They all cache audio and video.
Every broadcast must be logged for FCC compliance; the entire output of every station must be recorded and stored for a certain amount of time. Now, this is required as a condition of the broadcast license, but still, it's a recording of copyrighted work that the RIAA ignores.
Now, if you fail to enforce your trademarks, you can lose them. Copyright is a bit different, but none the less if it did end up in court then failing to enforce your rights on one industry while targeting another could easily result in the courts deciding you don't really have or deserve the right to harass people for caching anymore.
Your iPod doesn't support WMA because if it did, Apple has to pay a royalty to Microsoft for each iPod it sells, and each copy of ITunes for Macintosh it allows to be downloaded. At current rates of sales/downloading, it amounts to many, many millions of $.
Now, iTunes for Windows supports WMA, but iTunes for OSX doesn't. Why is that you suppose? Because Microsoft waives the royalty if it's an application that runs on Windows.
How about this one though. Since WMA is supported in the iPod's hardware but is not enabled due to royalty issues, what's the excuse for other mp3 players who have AAC supported in hardware (yep, pretty much all of 'em) but don't enable that, even though no royalties are due?
Supported formats in iPods:
AAC (16 to 320 Kbps)
Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store)
MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps)
MP3 VBR
Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4)
Apple Lossless
WAV
AIFF
" ... Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't Fair Play a Microsoft thing, you know that little badge that shows up on their mp3 players and cdroms? Isn't Fair Play the CD DRM that Apple refuses to support? ..."
.m4a (everyone), and FairPlay encoded AAC with the .m4p extension (iTunes, the iTMS, and iPods only).
Umm, yeah, sort of, but not quite, exactly.
Microsoft's Fair Play program is a promotional tool used in some countries. It's a registered trademark of Microsoft, and basically gives sales staff prizes for selling software. For example, here's a link for those of you who speak Russian:
http://www.microsoft.com/rus/fairplay/
If you don't speak Russian, well, note the URL.
Apple's FairPlay is a DRM encoding/decoding scheme for music files. It's added onto Advanced Audio Codec format audio (which is not, as you hear often, a proprietary Apple format and works fine in many players) to create a file in the encoded format (which is proprietary).
So it's Microsoft Fair Play (TM) versus Apple FairPlay (TM). And it's AAC with the
[From beginning of article] ... ... since Apple turned the iPod into a necessary fashion accessory ... To be fair, Apple did a superb job with the iPod and iTunes by making it easy for people. And, by making the software proprietary, they made it a lot harder for the competition; what you downloaded from iTunes wouldn't play elsewhere. ..."
... If you're an iPod owner....then you're stuck with iTunes. ..."
"
Online music has come a long way
Read carefully, you see either a predetermined bias (fine, it's in everything we read and the wise know how to look for it) or misunderstanding of the topic (not fine; he's offering advice here).
iTunes is a software product that runs on Windows and Macintosh computers. You can't download music "from iTunes". What he means is downloaded from the iTunes Music Store with the iTunes application on your PC and I would be fine with that if he just said that once, at the beginning of the article, but he doesn't. Most people are more careful to differentiate between the iTMS and iTunes itself.
"
You know, he writes in such a nice, matter-of-fact style that even after reading the entire article, I'm not sure whether it's bias or ignorance we're reading. But, for the record, the iPod will play pretty much any music format except ogg vorbis and WMA audio, you can get music files from any source, including some of those listed in the article, and iTunes-the-software will happily import and play other formats on your computer or upload them to your iPod, whereupon you can happily enjoy them just like any other mp3 player.
For, I dunno, 60 years, people have been dealing with the safe storage of music; you are neither alone nor is this a new problem, and finally it most certainly is not a problem without a solution. If you want to, it can be done.
.wav file carved into it with a pen knife: they are all stubbornly analog media (that just happen to be storing digital data) and it's the health of the analog media you need to worry about.
Now, we need to get one thing straight right off the bat. You might be worrying about what digital format to use. Personally, I'm not going to wade into that much except for some sage advice: use a commercially viable format. In other words, RedBook CD players will be around in 50 years, somewhere, somehow.
They might be expensive, they might be hard to find, but they will be there somehow. I can't say the same for any computer-based format, nor could I say that for newer digital formats that might not get CD's traction. DVD-Video is another possibility (not DVD-Audio or SACD; they are still too vulnerable. But DVD-V offers good audio recording quality (48Khz sampling rate for 2-ch audio) and longer record times than CD).
Basically, if a record or movie label didn't sell lots (and lots and lots) of content on it, don't expect it to be around later. If they did, you might have to hunt down a 21st century librarian to help you, but there will be a way.
Part two, is this:
Forget about digital.
No, not what you're thinking. I'm here to point out that whether it's a CD, a hard drive, or a frisbee with a
Which brings us to the same stuff we've been dealing with for the last 50 years. Archival storage, or a close as you want to get. That can be complicated depending on what you've got to store, but it comes down to a few basic points; follow them and you will be fine, barring accidents.
I'm going to outline the basics; dig deeper if you want (some media need specific care; eg magnetic tape should be near but above freezing. Then again, freeze it and do the other two, and it will be in way better shape than if you stored them in the basement).
Cool. A freezer is a good idea for most media. Either keep it as near to 32F/0C as possible but above freezing (not so good for food, so we're talking dedicated storage), or run it colder and Just ignore your sealed box of music files when you go for the microwave pizzas.
Vertical. Store disks, tapes, etc on edge, not flat or laying on top of one another.
Sealed. Use acid free materials (plastic often is fine here; paper won't be unless it's special and expensive) and don't forget to tape it up air-tight. Remove paper labels, CD sleeves, etc and store separately if you want.
As for marking, I would suggest marking in some non-destructive manner, like on the case of the disk rather than the disk itself. You're not going to be playing them, so you shouldn't have to worry about losing track of which disk goes where.
Do include a little list of what is on the things (or as much info as you like; no-one will mind), but perhaps in it's own plastic bag. Make other copies for playing with.
The liquid metal cooling topic was covered on /. before, eg:/ 03/1421243&tid=222/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
The technology probably derives from http://www.nanocoolers.com/products_cooling.php/
Sapphire is just the OEM manufacturer of ATi cards. For quite a while you could only get ATi branded cards but now you can get them from ATi or Sapphire. I doubt they have much to do with the technology besides licensing it.
This is not a Credit Card authentication system. This is a credit card dis-authentication system. And it will only annoy your real, loyal, existing customers when it locks them out, and it will lock some out. Guaranteed.
Tried voice recognition passwords. Even when they work really well, they don't work that well. In fact, the better they work, the worse they work.
What I mean by that is they can get them to recognize a distinct voice pattern; you can demonstrate it to a bunch of execs in a boardroom and it will work. You could sell them on it.
Where it doesn't work is separating your voice pattern from everything that isn't your voice pattern. As long as the background noise of the boardroom is more-or-less constant and similar, and the demo is brief, your little presentation will go off without a hitch.
Use it in the real world where you actually have an application for the technology, and you get failure. I would bet that if the boardroom demo was in two parts, with recording execs voice just before Christmas (winter, heater noise, outdoor sounds travels faster in dense air, etc) and the first proof of login just before Memorial Day, it would fail miserably.
It's not so much that sounds present when you authenticate will cause a lockout. It's that whatever background existed when you record the first pattern (used for subsequent comparisons) had damn well be there for the life of the system, and any new sounds when you authenticate will cause a failure.
Radio on, truck drive by, jet overhead, daytime vs nightime, winter vs summer, whatever. The all have a distinct but essentially random background. Voice recognition expects all this stuff to be the same. Forever.
The better it gets at pattern recognition, the worse it gets at background rejection. Chasing one problem leads to many others, and that's basically the whole history of VR technology right there.
I don't see it improving, although it might be possible. It's too unpredictable, basically, to invest in as far as I'm concerned. What if there was an easier way by the time you get it solid? What if there were 30 easier ways?
From the looks of things, VRT won't be solid anytime soon, so pencil in a lot of room for competing technology, and keep in mind by the time VR works, stuff that is unheard of now may have matured by then.
"Up North"? Where? There are no Federal programs to subsidize internet access. Did the town kick in some bucks or talk the province into it?
I live and work "up north" too. Some towns formed cooperatives for cable and internet, but they're locally funded.
... and they did so by looking at the regulatory framework and changing it to suit faster broadband penetration where applicable. They didn't buy anything, or give any money away, which if I read you right was what you're implying.
The only public money ever spent by Canadian Governments was the initiative to insure (stage 1) every Canadian School had a computer, (stage 2) every Canadian classroom had a computer, and (stage 3) every Canadian classroom had internet access. Stage 3 was completed a few years ago; there is not a single classroom in Canada, no matter where it is, that doesn't have net access and at least one computer). And education is properly funded by public money.
If there was no private provider, in some communities only the school had access. No money was spent to subsidize internet access anywhere, including the north. Internet access is provide by the 7 largest telecos, the 2 largest cable companies, the 2 sat providers, a couple of microwave providers, and hundreds of smaller for profit operations.
Are there regulatory impediments to better broadband penetration in the US? Find them and fix them.
" ... I think our schools and society needs to get away from teaching these rediculous absolutes. America is The Best. Edison invented The Lightbulb. ..."
Or, at a minimum, teach the facts.
Edison purchased the US patent for the incandescent lightbulb from Henry Woodward & Matthew Evans (Canada, 1875). The carbon filament was patented by Lewis Howard Latimer (African-American, patent granted to Latimer in 1881) who worked for Edison in New Jersey, although Woodward & Evans used but did not patent the carbon filament component on the working model used to support their patent application for the incandescent light itself.
A greater improvement was the Tungsten filament (W. D. Cooledge) but Edison's first bulbs and the 1879 demonstration used an improved (smaller) carbon element, had better vacuum due to Edisons work in that area, and ran at a lower power (which it could, because of the smaller filament).
Electric lighting in general was well known with many patents (beginning in 1801) in many countries prior to the incandescent patent of 1875. Some were Russian (my lame attempt to keep on topic) and some were incandescent, and in many cases patents were granted at different times in different countries for the same idea, sometimes with slightly different details in construction and sometimes not.
More commonly there were carbon arc lamps but forms of fleurescent lighting were also known and patented.
Edison was able to make a marketable, manufacturable light bulb with the application of cubic dollars the various inventors lacked. He most certainly did not invent the light bulb, nor did he patent it, but he improved by to a point where it was generally useful.
His company did, however, purchase relevant patents which enabled him to sell the devices, which he was eager to do in order to expand his real pet project, electricity and it's generation and transmission.
They can't. However, what they can do is simply bar journalists from the hearing, or one particular journalist if they find out who it is. That's what they normally do if someone outside of jurisdiction breaks a ban on publication.
They can also charge his "buddy" who presumably sits at the hearing room, which, last time I checked, was still on Canadian soil.
The blogger is safe; his source might dry up pretty soon though.
Most of the testimony has been public and not subject to a ban; there isn't much that isn't known from any newspaper and I didn't see anything in the blogger's post that hasn't been reported elsewhere in the public press in Canada. Not really sure what the "secret" is; I didn't see any.
They Judge must have his reasons, he is widely believed to be hostile to the Liberals and it was that Judge that none the less ordered the ban. I just didn't see any evidence of anything new in the blog entry. Typically the ban is in place to avoid prejudicing a trial jury if charges are a likely outcome of the testimony.
Forgot to mention this but for some of you it's important:
Won't work with IE. Microsoft chooses to ignore CSS standards with their browser. Sorry.
Works with any other browser, though, and I suppose it's another good reason to jump on the FireFox bandwagon for those of you who haven't already.
I just checked the NBC site with the CSS I posted (previous post to this one; "kill 'em all ... ").
Without: Yeah a nasty popover, blocks quite a bit of the top of the page.
With: You see a single blue line at the very top babbling about a casino, and the rest is all there, with nothing on top. Good enough for me.
Go to http://www.lashampoo.net/unix/stopADVbanners.css.t xt and copy and paste the entire page into a text editor. Save and install (instructions are in the file, commented out with the usual #). This version I have is much older than this link but I've added a few urls to it so it's still working for me fine.
Kills most ads dead, including flash and other "popovers". You can edit it to your liking to include more blocked hosts anytime. Works with most browsers and most OS's.
If you use OSX/Safari, go to Window: Activity to view the urls of every item on any page, including the ones this CSS blocks and of course the ones that might get past from time to time. Add them as required by editing the text file.
Other OS's/browsers may have a similar ability (not just view source, although it does help sometimes to do that) but you will have to check that out yourself or perhaps if someone knows they could reply to this post and let us all in on it.
I have noticed a few sneak by once every few weeks, but for the most part it's working good for me and has for years. Add new offenders as they are discovered and it's pretty simple and painless.
Occasionally you will find a page where you need to view a button that is blocked (eg the "Download" button for Shockwave 10 won't show up with this enabled) so just disable temporarily and use as if you were John Q Public. Most of the time it doesn't affect "normal" content at all, or put another way I don't miss whatever I'm not seeing in the least.
iMagicTV was aquired by Alcatel (Paris, France) in 2003. SaskTel uses the iMagicTV technology from Alcatel, along with:
Set Top Boxes from Pace (UK)
Switching technology (at source) from Lucent Technologies (their first customer of the Stinger system for TVoverIP)
Switching technology (teleco to customer) from VComm (Vancouver BC with manufacturing in Saskatoon, SK).
NBTel was a leading teleco before the Aliant "chainsawing". NBTel and SaskTel were the first (1993), and second (1994), respectively, telecos in North America to implement fully digital switching, while SaskTel completed it's All-Fibre Optic network in 1981, a project that was still uncompleted in NB in 1993.
SaskTel's all digital/all-fibre network consists of 14,000 km of optical fibre connecting 12 cities, 670 towns and villages, and 60,000 farms over an area of 640,000 km2 (the province of New Brunswick is 73,550 km2 in area).
Like other places in Canada, it's been available in Saskatchewan for quite a while now. Most communities had it rolled out in 2002.
Sasktel.com
"Max"
$C 45.00/month
$C 5.00 discount per month if bundled with either a long distance package or DSL, $C 10.00 if both
135 TV channels (some at additional cost to basic package)
45 streaming Audio channels (commercial free); included in basic
33 streaming commercial Radio channels, included in basic
Video-on-Demand movies, included in basic
I'd link to it, but only the home page is regular HTTP; as soon as you click on a link you're on a secure connection with lots of javaScript; works best with IE. Sasktel dot com if you're interested in checking it out.
On a related note, they're rolling out WiMax right now (30 Km range); been running for 2 years in small test communities and a full-scale rollout will be up (final test) in Kamloops BC this year.
Kamloops is a good place to test; it's in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. They plan to roll out wide-scale WiMax in 12-18 months in urban areas of BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Napster has value for you. Certainly I wouldn't suggest it had value for no one. Clearly there is a market for what they're doing.
Personally, in your case, I would be subscribing to XM or Sirius, having music in my car, my boat, and at home.
Maybe that doesn't offer any advantages to you; maybe you bike to work. But, since you don't mind being limited to your home PC for that, then for $50 worth of hardware and $30 worth of software from TimeTrax, you can record sat radio streams at home (including scheduled, unattended programming), get the same value you get, plus more. 4 months later you're at even money. http://www.timetraxtech.com/
I think Napster had a decent idea, but decent doesn't translate to sustainable or profitable. They had to split from Roxio, because of the losses they were sustaining. In fact, they had to sell Roxio to get cash to keep Napster up.
Perhaps I don't get it, but to me it sounds like MS selling Office to keep XBox alive. Microsoft is OK with XBox, but a smaller company might have had to make that choice, and Roxio was a small company.
If it has value for you, fine. They need thousands, perhaps millions of people like you, and I just don't see it.
Some people mention that you can still buy music on Napster. But for their business model to work, it's not 88c per song, it's $15.88 for one song, and $ 40.40 for 20 songs (in one month (the least expensive model; it's more $ if you buy less). I don't see the value, personally, no matter how I thrash it around.
First of all, let's start with the branding.
Everyone knows Napster; it's a great "brand" amongst computer users. So far, so good.
Clear headed executive: OK, I'm listening. Tell me more.
What is it known for? Unlimited free downloads.
Clear headed executive: "Hmmmm."
Ass kissing sycophant: We have a plan for that. We can leverage the brand, which is really associated with music, and get a head start on our competitors. When I say music, I'm still talking unlimited music here. All you want. It fits.
People who think downloading (for free) is "wrong" have a poor, perhaps negative, impression of the brand, while people who love the brand, don't pay for music.
Clear headed executive: Whoa. What was that?
Ass kissing sycophant: It's nothing, CH. We got Super Bowl ads. We got Blender ads. We got CNN talking. We got a plan for all that. We can change the image.
Clear Headed executive: So, you mean to tell me we bought this great brand, with awesome consumer awareness. But, in order to use it, we have to re-invent the image with massive advertising. What the f*ck did we buy the brand for if we have to spend the same money to use it as we would have to create it in the first place? And, aren't we bleeding red ink right now?
Ass kicking sycophant: [left room, packing desk.]
You know, I was in the industry for over 20 years. I can usually tell if someone has a musical background or a purely hifi one.
... we are talking about the same man, right?
... I have worked in the electronics, audio and of late the telecommunications industries for over 30 years, ...In case anyone was wondering, I am not an "audiophile" in the true sense of the term. I enjoy music immensely, and quality reproduction is naturally very important to me. ... or many years I had my own business, which was predominantly involved with musical instrument amps, PA systems and the like. ... I played in a few bands for a while (guitar, then bass), ... I spent quite a while mixing for live bands, and toured Australia a few times - life on the road with a rock band has to be experienced to be believed! ...
They think differently; they approach hifi differently, for example. Like I said in my parent post, that doesn't invalidate what they say. But it does give the reader a clue to their perspecitve, which is a critical aspect of evaluating any advice as it relates to your own situation.
So, after your reply, I was curious about whether I had got him wrong or not.
Google gives me Rod Elliot, Elliot Sound Products, etc
He's a musician.
From the link:
The Author: - For those brave or foolish enough to want to find out about me
Selected quotes:
"
He apporoaches the subject like a sound engineer does, although he has an interest in pure reproduction at home as well, and that's exactly how he came across in your first link.
I think, considering the subject of your parent post, you chose to link to his site wisely. He'a an appropriate authority for the topic of your post.
Regards.
The link you provided is OK. Just a few comments for those who bothered reading it:
The guy is obviously a musician, not a HiFi guy. Nothing wrong with that, although the two camps do have slightly different priorities in their respective quest for good sound. Each will tolerate some things the other won't, but good is good and bad is bad.
The Peak Power ratings he alluded to in the webpage for home audio equipment from the 70's ended (in the USA and Europe) because they were basically outlawed as being too misleading to consumers. They can still be mentioned, but RMS values must be prominent. There is such a thing as IEC peak power ratings, which at least does have a methodology to get the values. If it doesn't say it's IEC rated then it isn't, and the numbers are pure science fiction.
Without getting into too much detail, the FCC in the US ruled that "portable" audio can still use the "old lies" while non-portable audio must adhere to the RMS regulations. Although it might appear that anything that plugs into AC wall sockets is not portable, that's not true under the regulation. Basically, if it is not designed for permanent installation in a building or it it has a handle, it's portable, whether it can run on batteries or not.
Car Stereos, Blasters & Boom Boxes, and Computer Speakers are all "portable" and can use all kinds of inflated (compared to RMS) values for power output. TVs are "portable" if they have a handle on them, and most do, even if they're 150 pounds with 36" screens.
Power Ratings on loudspeakers (some posts in this subtopic mention them) are different altogether. There is no acceptable way to rate a speaker for power output in watts. Responsible manufacturers will offer a recommendation for power input. Even then, it's only a rather vague guide that depends on how they are used.
Speakers do not "put out power" in watts; they only accept power you deliver at a less than perfect efficiency, wasting the rest as heat. The "heat" is what usually blows them up and although too much excursion will cause a failure as well, it will only get that far if they are getting clean power to begin with. See JBL's PDF (3 pages) here:
http://www.jblpro.com/pub/technote/spkpwfaq.pdf/
Back on to the Parent Post:
Power supplies are expensive devices, comparatively. There are very few ways to get good, solid, output out of a power supply, and for the most part the solution is to add cubic dollars. They are simple devices, electrically, and everyone knows the "secrets". That's not to say an expensive PS is always good (they can just charge more) but it's very difficult to get good output from inexpensive devices; and I would suggest without tradeoffs (which may fit your intended use perfectly, or not at all) it's impossible.