Re:Reasons Apple WON'T Like This
on
iPod on Windows
·
· Score: 1
Well, there's a bit of a difference between buying an iPod with an iMac, and buying an iMac with an iPod:-). You're saying that someone walked into the local Apple store to buy in iPod, and realized that they needed to drop an additional $1200 (lowest priced new Mac available w/FireWire) just to use the $400 mp3 player they came in to buy, and said "Okay. Where do I sign?"? You'll have to excuse me for being somewhat skeptical.
Now here's how I could see it possibly working:
Joe User walks into the Apple store to buy his new iPod (already owning a Mac w/FireWire). As he walks to the counter, he sees all these shiny new TiBooks/iMacs/G4s, and in a fit of impulse shopping, gets talked into buying a new machine. That's a bit more reasonable.
But to think that someone at home on the couch, watching a kewl iPod commercial on TV, says to themselves "Man. That iPod sure looks cool. Too bad I need a Mac to use it. Wait! I'll just buy one! Just to listen to 100's of hours of mp3s!" is a bit of a stretch.
-- Mando
Re:Reasons Apple WON'T Like This
on
iPod on Windows
·
· Score: 1
Nonsense.
1) People are NOT buying Macs just to use the iPod. The slashdot crowd is EXACTLY the type that fits that mold. I can't think of anyone other than a geek that would buy a computer just to use an MP3 player:-). And of course a salesperson is going to tell you that people walk in looking for an iPod and walk out with an iBook. They're sales people. That's their job.
2) This won't raise Apple's support costs substantially. If a user buys an iPod AND uses XPlay to load songs on it, chances are they're technically savvy enough to know to call XPlay rather than Apple.
I remember once driving through a mini-mall parking lot in Austin, TX and noting 3 UPS trucks parked next to each other. At the time I was waiting for a couple of demo machines to come back from a trade show in California (shipped via UPS). The machines were a day or two late (stuck in Austin somewhere, according to UPS tracking), so I was kinda on the lookout for UPS trucks.
As I drove by them, I noticed all three had their back doors wide open, and the delievery folks scampering around in the back of the trucks. To my abject horror, they were all digging around in trashed, open boxes on the floor of their trucks, trying to put God knows what back into the poor remnants of the boxes. It was terrible. I raced back to the office, and UPS had already been there with my machines (all okay, thank goodness).
You know, I've always heard good things about Micron, but my one experience (albeit a bit removed) totally soured me on the company. A couple of years ago my roomate bought a brand new computer from Micron. It was a monster (for the time): Pentium 133, 32M RAM, 17" monitor, and (pay attention here, kids) a 2GB SCSI hard drive. This machine was mega-choice. So one day as he's kicking my ass in Warcraft II, his machine locks up. He power-cycles the Beast (as we had affectionately named it), and when it gets power, there was a terrible clickity-clankity sound coming from the hard drive. We immediately turn it back off and call up Micron.
After being on hold for a terrible amount of time, we finally get on the phone with what must have been a Level -3 tech. We tell him the hard drive's fried and that we need a new one. "Okay," says the tech, "what's the model number?". My roomate gives him the model number, but says that he had special ordered the machine, and that it was a bit different from the base model, namely the 2GB SCSI hard drive. The tech reponds with "What kind of hard drive?", to which my roomate replies "SCSI". "Oh" says the tech, "We can't replace that. You'll need to call SCSI".
After the laughing, crying and yelling sub-sided, my roomate was finally able to get a manager on the line and get his damn hard drive RMA'd. I still wonder what happened to the Stupid Micron Tech:-)
Microsoft's XBox was one of the main reasons I went to E3, and I was sorely dissapointed. I played HALO for about 30 sec before the XBox crashed. Locked up hard. A bit disconcerted, I moved over to Oddworld, picked up the controller, and bam!. Blue Screen of Death. The poor marketing guy kept saying that we were all playing on some alpha hardware, and that all of these kinks would be worked out by Ship Date.
I'm usually the guy that runs out and buys new consoles the second they come out, but this time I think I'll wait until they put a couple of Service Packs out.
Gosh. When I first heard about Elison's quest for a national ID card, my Privacy-Sense when haywire. I saw this as the end of public privacy and civil-liberties. After reading the article and specifically the quotes from Gen. Schwarzkopf and Alan Dershowitz, I began to wonder these fears weren't a bit irrational. I mean, if they're voluntary and all, what's the big deal? All the security and convenience that it would provide would surely outweigh any paranoid delusions of Big Brother watching over me. Wouldn't it?
I've been searching for some semblance of hope and security ever since 9/11. Working in Lower Manhattan and living across the Hudson from Manhattan has totally changed my life, and not all for the good. I am completely scared of coming into work. I am afraid to walk around town and ride the subways. For all intents and purposes, the terrorist attacks have succeeded when it comes to me and my family. We are scared shitless. So, when people start offering ANYTHING that seems to provide a bit of security, I tend to be a bit less skeptical than usual.
That being said, I'm still not sure that I'm totally in agreement with national ID cards. Sure, they're voluntary today. What about tomorrow? What provisions do we have that will keep them (and those who use them) from growing in power? And who is to say that another emergency won't happen again, causing even more draconian measures to be put in place?
These are the kinds of questions that make me uneasy. Of course, the very worst thing is that these questions even need to be raised at all.
The way I understand it, the problem is not so much with watermarking, but with the way SDMI is implementing watermarking.
Since each song (in this case) must contain the same watermark (or at least a small set of similar watermarks), Joan Hacker now has all the data she needs to eliminate said watermarks. In the technical document from the french hackers, they showed that by correlating the audio from the marked and unmarked songs it was easy (for interesting amounts of easy) to find the watermark and remove it.
This is the crux of the problem as I see it. As long as the same data is used to watermark each song, programmers will be able to pick out that data and remove it. Since SDMI compliant devices will need to support unmarked songs (legacy cds, independant records, etc), they have no way to stop this most trivial of attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's a bit of a difference between buying an iPod with an iMac, and buying an iMac with an iPod :-). You're saying that someone walked into the local Apple store to buy in iPod, and realized that they needed to drop an additional $1200 (lowest priced new Mac available w/FireWire) just to use the $400 mp3 player they came in to buy, and said "Okay. Where do I sign?"? You'll have to excuse me for being somewhat skeptical.
Now here's how I could see it possibly working:
Joe User walks into the Apple store to buy his new iPod (already owning a Mac w/FireWire). As he walks to the counter, he sees all these shiny new TiBooks/iMacs/G4s, and in a fit of impulse shopping, gets talked into buying a new machine. That's a bit more reasonable.
But to think that someone at home on the couch, watching a kewl iPod commercial on TV, says to themselves "Man. That iPod sure looks cool. Too bad I need a Mac to use it. Wait! I'll just buy one! Just to listen to 100's of hours of mp3s!" is a bit of a stretch.
--
Mando
Nonsense.
:-). And of course a salesperson is going to tell you that people walk in looking for an iPod and walk out with an iBook. They're sales people. That's their job.
1) People are NOT buying Macs just to use the iPod. The slashdot crowd is EXACTLY the type that fits that mold. I can't think of anyone other than a geek that would buy a computer just to use an MP3 player
2) This won't raise Apple's support costs substantially. If a user buys an iPod AND uses XPlay to load songs on it, chances are they're technically savvy enough to know to call XPlay rather than Apple.
--
Mando
I remember once driving through a mini-mall parking lot in Austin, TX and noting 3 UPS trucks parked next to each other. At the time I was waiting for a couple of demo machines to come back from a trade show in California (shipped via UPS). The machines were a day or two late (stuck in Austin somewhere, according to UPS tracking), so I was kinda on the lookout for UPS trucks.
As I drove by them, I noticed all three had their back doors wide open, and the delievery folks scampering around in the back of the trucks. To my abject horror, they were all digging around in trashed, open boxes on the floor of their trucks, trying to put God knows what back into the poor remnants of the boxes. It was terrible. I raced back to the office, and UPS had already been there with my machines (all okay, thank goodness).
--
Mando
You know, I've always heard good things about Micron, but my one experience (albeit a bit removed) totally soured me on the company. A couple of years ago my roomate bought a brand new computer from Micron. It was a monster (for the time): Pentium 133, 32M RAM, 17" monitor, and (pay attention here, kids) a 2GB SCSI hard drive. This machine was mega-choice. So one day as he's kicking my ass in Warcraft II, his machine locks up. He power-cycles the Beast (as we had affectionately named it), and when it gets power, there was a terrible clickity-clankity sound coming from the hard drive. We immediately turn it back off and call up Micron.
:-)
After being on hold for a terrible amount of time, we finally get on the phone with what must have been a Level -3 tech. We tell him the hard drive's fried and that we need a new one. "Okay," says the tech, "what's the model number?". My roomate gives him the model number, but says that he had special ordered the machine, and that it was a bit different from the base model, namely the 2GB SCSI hard drive. The tech reponds with "What kind of hard drive?", to which my roomate replies "SCSI". "Oh" says the tech, "We can't replace that. You'll need to call SCSI".
After the laughing, crying and yelling sub-sided, my roomate was finally able to get a manager on the line and get his damn hard drive RMA'd. I still wonder what happened to the Stupid Micron Tech
--
Mando
Microsoft's XBox was one of the main reasons I went to E3, and I was sorely dissapointed. I played HALO for about 30 sec before the XBox crashed. Locked up hard. A bit disconcerted, I moved over to Oddworld, picked up the controller, and bam!. Blue Screen of Death. The poor marketing guy kept saying that we were all playing on some alpha hardware, and that all of these kinks would be worked out by Ship Date.
I'm usually the guy that runs out and buys new consoles the second they come out, but this time I think I'll wait until they put a couple of Service Packs out.
--
mando
Gosh. When I first heard about Elison's quest for a national ID card, my Privacy-Sense when haywire. I saw this as the end of public privacy and civil-liberties. After reading the article and specifically the quotes from Gen. Schwarzkopf and Alan Dershowitz, I began to wonder these fears weren't a bit irrational. I mean, if they're voluntary and all, what's the big deal? All the security and convenience that it would provide would surely outweigh any paranoid delusions of Big Brother watching over me. Wouldn't it?
I've been searching for some semblance of hope and security ever since 9/11. Working in Lower Manhattan and living across the Hudson from Manhattan has totally changed my life, and not all for the good. I am completely scared of coming into work. I am afraid to walk around town and ride the subways. For all intents and purposes, the terrorist attacks have succeeded when it comes to me and my family. We are scared shitless. So, when people start offering ANYTHING that seems to provide a bit of security, I tend to be a bit less skeptical than usual.
That being said, I'm still not sure that I'm totally in agreement with national ID cards. Sure, they're voluntary today. What about tomorrow? What provisions do we have that will keep them (and those who use them) from growing in power? And who is to say that another emergency won't happen again, causing even more draconian measures to be put in place?
These are the kinds of questions that make me uneasy. Of course, the very worst thing is that these questions even need to be raised at all.
--
Mando
The way I understand it, the problem is not so much with watermarking, but with the way SDMI is implementing watermarking.
Since each song (in this case) must contain the same watermark (or at least a small set of similar watermarks), Joan Hacker now has all the data she needs to eliminate said watermarks. In the technical document from the french hackers, they showed that by correlating the audio from the marked and unmarked songs it was easy (for interesting amounts of easy) to find the watermark and remove it.
This is the crux of the problem as I see it. As long as the same data is used to watermark each song, programmers will be able to pick out that data and remove it. Since SDMI compliant devices will need to support unmarked songs (legacy cds, independant records, etc), they have no way to stop this most trivial of attacks.
--Mando