Winamp can do so much more than iTunes, and has a much better plugin interface. And skinning! iTunes dosen't even support skinning.
Would you care to further qualify this bold assertion? Exactly what can Winamp do that iTunes can't? If we're talking about the ability to play umpty-zillion file formats, then yeah, I suppose Winamp might have the edge... assuming you discount the existence of iTunes plugins that supply support for Ogg Vorbis, etc.
Exactly how is the Winamp plugin interface better than the iTunes plugin interface? I'm genuinely curious about this.
As for skinning... well, you're right about that. iTunes used to support skinning back when it was called SoundJam MP, but true to form, Apple eliminated support for skinning when they bought the product. On the other hand, Apple added support for audio CD burning and a host of other improvements, and eventually added tighter integration with the other iApps, so I'm willing to overlook the omission of a feature that caters to a user's personal aesthetics. The fact is, Apple has a fetish for consistent user interfaces, and they've time and again stomped out technologies for theming or skinning the OS and various applications that run on it.
And on the Mac your choice of sound card is: the one supplied.
How did this get modded at Insightful?
Actually, there are several alternative sound cards for the Mac. There's at least one version of the SoundBlaster Live! for the Mac, although Creative for whatever reason chose not to release OS X drivers for it. (I have read, however, that Apple now includes their own drivers for this card in OS X.) And of course there are several Pro audio cards for the Mac, but those are (obviously) targeted at musicians and sound engineers, not consumers.
Of course, if you're not wedded to the idea of internal sound hardware in your computer of choice, you can always try out various USB and FireWire audio solutions. Support for those is built into Mac OS X. Several of these devices offer audio much better than you could obtain from a card inside a personal computer, if for no other reason than the inside of your computer is a very electrically noisy environment. Stereophile has even reviewed a few of the better USB/FireWire external audio solutions.
Having said all that... the built-in audio on PowerMac hardware is actually pretty decent. For most people, it's "good enough," and of a quality that's comparable to the best motherboard audio you can get in the PC world. (Yeah, I know, someone is going to make a comment about audio problems on the MDD G4s and the early G5s, but as I understand it, much of that was traceable to the power supply; in the case of the G5 audio issues, I've only ever heard these artifacts coming out of the internal speaker, not from any external speakers.)
Unlike some folks, I've been tracking the relationship between Apple and the Linux world for a while now. In fact, my original impetus for becoming a switcher (in 1997 or 1998, no less) was the introduction of MkLinux. That's what convinced me to get rid of my PC and buy a PowerMac 7300.
MkLinux was a project within Apple to port the Linux kernel, along with the necessary GNU tools to make a complete OS, to the PowerMac architecture; this was accomplished by running the Linux kernel as a personality on top of the Mach microkernel, which was ported to the PowerPC PREP/CHRP architecture.
With the advent of other Linux ports to PowerPC, most of which involved running the Linux kernel monolithically rather than hosting it on top of Mach, MkLinux was mothballed and quietly discontinued. However, the engineers at Apple learned a lot from the process, and this set the stage for the eventual merger with NeXT and the Rhapsody project, which evolved into Darwin and OS X. Specifically, lessons learned from porting Mach to PowerPC and hosting various OS personalities on top of it proved invaluable.
It's fair to say that Apple contributes a lot to the Open Source world, and therefore the Linux world by extension. (KHTML has been improved a fair bit by Apple engineers since they picked it as the rendering engine for Safari.) Of course, Apple's contributed more heavily to the *BSD communities.
Suffice it to say that I don't think Apple is worried about Linux, at least not in the way that Microsoft is. I certainly don't see any enmity between Apple and the Linux communities that you seem to be implying.
What software does Apple make available to the Linux world? Well, besides their contributions to KHTML, they have Quicktime Streaming Server (or whatever they're calling it today) and various other Open Source projects that are free for the Linux community to use. Apple's Rendezvous code is open, for instance, and it's a pretty good implementation of ZeroConf as I understand it.
Of course, when push comes to shove, Apple will try to promote their own products over other products. What else would you expect of them? But failure to endorse Linux doesn't mean Apple and Linux are "enemies." Apple's big selling point is ease of use and ease of administration. So far, the Linux world doesn't have this across the board. Since Apple tightly controls the look and feel of everything Macintosh, as well as other aspects that make up the user experience, I don't think Linux will ever quite catch up in this arena. Some things can't be commoditized, and Open Source (for all its benefits) doesn't lend itself to the development of seamlessly integrated software suites with consistent user interfaces. Should that ever happen in a big way, then maybe Apple might re-think its relationship with the Linux world, because then Linux will be competing on Apple's turf; right now, though, there's not much competition.
That's all we need: two closed source, proprietary standards getting more powerful. On the upside, only one proprietary player/codec to download.
What the hell are you babbling about, and how did this get modded +4 Interesting?
I can't speak to Real's formats being proprietary, although as I understand it, they are based upon open standards. Rather, I'll focus on AAC.
AAC is an open standard, part of the MPEG4 specification. Anyone can license it. The objectionable part of Apple's for-pay music store is the FairPlay DRM that is used to wrap the AAC content. FairPlay isn't an open standard, although supposedly it can be licensed; since Apple didn't actually create FairPlay, one could theoretically license the technology from the developer, although I have no idea whether Apple has an exclusive agreement with them.
Rather than parroting someone's party line in a blatant attempt at karma whoring, you might try qualifying your statements and making sure you specify their scope.
Also, I wonder how this would affect the standard use of Real? Would streaming video & audio suddenly becoe available in some future form of iPod?
It's unlikely Apple would use someone else's streaming media technology when they have streaming video and audio support in Quicktime that is "good enough." At that point, the real question is whether Apple can introduce a product that is a souped-up iPod that supports real time streaming media (presumably over a wireless connection), and do so at a price point where consumers will buy the product in appreciable quantities. If the user experience and the cost are both excellent, fine; otherwise, it makes no sense to even talk about selling such a product.
when you get right down to it, sci fi isn't about the tech, the tech is just a vehicle for telling good stories using true-to-life characters that try (and sometimes fail) to explore the space between our ears
Technically, there's a distinction between science fiction and space opera, at least according to some writers in the Sci Fi genre. I once read an article written by one of Analog's regular contributors, who attempted to draw this distinction.
To the category of true science fiction belong works such as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (the book, not the movie); to the category of space opera belong works such as Star Wars. The idea is that true sci fi has at least one science element, even if it's badly conceived science, that is integral to the plot; without it, the story doesn't work. In Frankenstein, you have the concept of reanimating dead tissue with electricity, and creating life from non-life. Space opera and its close relatives, on the other hand, could be re-cast in another genre with little or no difficulty (e.g., a western). The technology is just a replaceable prop.
Despite Gene Roddenberry selling the original Star Trek to NBC as a "wagon train to the stars," he hired real sci fi writers and told some pretty amazing stories that were genuine science fiction. Quite honestly, I saw nothing in Firefly that would classify it as genuine science fiction -- but if it's space opera, it's very competently written, proving that the term doesn't have to be a negative epithet.
Farscape was a bit uneven at times, but it did explore genuine science fictional themes at least some of the time. The rest of the time was spent on character development and dealing with plot arcs. It's pretty safe to say, though, that the story told by Farscape would fall completely apart without the underlying science concepts (wormhole travel, cerebral implants, etc.)
Now, if Phoenix is the cheapest place to live don't you think that more people are going to flood phoenix?
I never said Phoenix was the cheapest. I said it was cheaper than many alternatives.
I mean if cheap cost of living is everything, why not go further down to Mexico where its even cheaper?
Pity I already posted in this discussion, or I'd mod you a Troll with that comment. Cost of living, cheap or otherwise, isn't "everything," nor is it even the biggest factor in deciding where to live... unless you're really poor. But it's definitely a factor worth considering, unless you don't care about saving money.
I personally like Phoenix because it strikes a good balance between cost of living and the availability of technical jobs. For me, it works. For other people, it might not.
duh and cheaper cost of living = less jobs
And you know this because... why? I don't think the correlation is as direct as you seem to think it is. Also, do you mean fewer jobs total, or fewer jobs that you'd consider worth taking? There's a big difference.
Well, the case for putting industry in Arizona was compelling enough for Intel to migrate much of its operation to Arizona. Today, Intel is one of the biggest employers in the state of Arizona.
The prevalent attitude of "Why bother with Arizona when California is right next door?" is slowly dissipating. One advantage of Arizona over California is that we have a lower attrition rate for computer industry professionals. (One of the reasons Intel relocated much of its operation here had to do with the employment merry-go-round in Silicon Valley. One former Intel executive, who was one of the people leading the charge to move operations here, cited cases where Intel employees were job-hopping because of stupid things like being able to make a right-turn into the company parking lot instead of a left turn.)
Then again, the IT job market is really hurting right now in Arizona because of the economy, so there's very little employee churn right now.
One start-up company I worked at in Scottsdale, AZ, foundered about a year into my employment there. They were having quite a lot of trouble securing venture capital, and one excuse cited by the VCs we talked to (difficult to validate) was that we weren't headquartered in Silicon Valley. Apparently, the prevailing belief during the dot-com boom was that all the hot technology companies had to at least have a presence in Silicon Valley; if you weren't physically there, you couldn't possibly be that tech savvy. This is purely a perception issue.
Once the dot-com bubble burst, I think the overriding concern of cost drove a lot of people to reconsider their pro-Silicon Valley biases.
The sad thing is, my former employer, the start-up company I mentioned, relocated from Scottsdale, AZ, to San Jose, CA, just before the dot-com crash. Talk about bad timing. But at that point, nothing would have saved the company.
And I don't think the guy who said we have a low cost of living has tried to buy a house in Phoenix (or paid property or car taxes here).
It's all relative. The cost of living here in Arizona is a lot lower than, say, the cost of living in Connecticut... or California's Silicon Valley area...
I paid $75,000 for a house in downtown Phoenix, in the Coronado neighborhood. By the standards of many other communities across America, that's downright cheap. My car taxes are not outrageous, even though I own a "sports car." (1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse) I think the vehicle taxes are much higher if you own an SUV.
Cost of living factors in more than your tax liability or the cost of housing. Most goods and services in Arizona are cheaper than in neighboring states, and certainly are cheaper than many places farther away.
There is no faster way to make enemies than to point out someone's stupidity, and then prove it publicly.
Never have truer words been spoken on Slashdot. (Well, OK, that's probably not true, but this is an idiomatic expression in English...)
After publicly commenting in my weblog that I found a WiFi access point in my office building being run wide-open, with no security (not even a password), and noting that this access point belonged to someone in the Honeywell office just down the hall, I ran into an interesting situation several months later...
It seems that one of Honeywell's lawyers noticed this blog entry and found out that I was employed by a consulting firm that had Honeywell as one of its biggest customers. So Honeywell's solution to the embarrassment of having a gaping security hole pointed out publicly was to pressure my employer into firing me. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed, and I let Honeywell image the hard drive on my laptop; the Honeywell employee who set up the rogue access point wasn't so lucky.
The moral of the story is, large companies are humorless, and the bigger the company, the more draconian the steps they'll take to protect themselves and their corporate image. That doesn't mean you should cower in fear whenever these companies flex their muscles.
I realize you're not (directly) bashing Nintendo, but this rubbish that they only target little kids needs to stop.
Indeed. I bought a Game Cube, and played Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Definitely a mature title! Full of Lovecraftian creepiness and a fair amount of gore and psychological manipulation. It is one of the few survival horror type games that actually scared me.
I might also point out that the Resident Evil series was (re)released on the Game Cube, with revamped graphics and game play. I don't own those, but was impressed with what they did to beef up the titles.
If only the Game Cube weren't manufactured with bright colors, and had controllers that looked a little more like those for the PS2 and Dreamcast, I think it would have gone over better with adult gamers. But it's a fine system, and has plenty of adult-oriented games in its repertoire.
If their plan is now to add lossy DRMed files to the "ROM" directories of the discs, that's no favor -- just an inferior solution to a problem of their own creation.
Actually, there was no mention of DRM being applied to the files stored in the ROM portion of DVD-Audio discs. The files will be in AAC format, but no mention has been made of Apple's FairPlay DRM wrapper. Indeed, FairPlay encodes information about the purchaser and locks the file to that person's account; thus, FairPlay-wrapped AAC files wouldn't make sense for inclusion in a read-only optical disc.
Yes, the AAC files will be lossy, but making them available is better than making nothing available to the purchaser of the DVD-Audio disc. Besides, the vast majority of people wanting to "rip" tracks from a music disc (DVD-A or CD or whatever) are going to encode those tracks using one of several lossy formats -- MP3, AAC, or WMA. Making pre-encoded versions of these tracks available in AAC just cuts one step out of the process. (It also eliminates choice, but when space is at a premium, you want to go with something reasonable and cross-platform.)
The industry designed DVD-Audio and SACD to screw your ability to extract digital audio.
Which is why the DVD consortium is now suggesting that discs be pressed with a ROM portion containing AAC-encoded versions of the music tracks. Of course, the ROM session is optional, but... hopefully, more record labels will include this. As for SACD, you're right -- there are currently no tools available to rip from SACD, and most DVD drives won't be able to even read the high definition layer of a SACD disc. On the other hand, many SACD titles ship as hybrid discs that contain a layer of Red Book compatible CD audio, playable on a conventional CD player; assuming that the firmware on your CD/DVD-ROM drive is smart enough to ignore the SACD-specific stuff, you can rip from the CDDA layer just as you would from a normal CD.
For the record, it's not just the latest iTunes that's had AAC as the default encoder.
I know this, since I've been tracking iTunes since its inception. Before that, I was a SoundJam MP user. (SoundJam MP was the application that became iTunes; Apple bought the rights to the software, and hired the main developer behind SoundJam.) When I'm ripping a CD, I have to make a conscious decision now whether I want to use AAC, which sounds better at lower bit-rates, or whether I want to use MP3, which I can burn to mix CDs for use on certain players that support MP3 CDs but not AAC files thrown into the mix.
But my post was already pretty long, and I didn't feel like digging through release notes to figure out exactly when Apple added AAC support to iTunes. So yes, you're right, but my omission was due to laziness, not ignorance.
Incidentally, one feature of SoundJam MP which I miss in iTunes is the ability to skin the application. SoundJam had some nice skins, including a bonus "jukebox" skin (made to look like a 50's jukebox, complete with cheezy bubble effects) that they made available to paying customers. But I guess Apple's very anti-themeable-interface these days.
Is this just a matter of updating the firmware and drivers, or do I yet AGAIN have to buy new equipment?
No, because this decision only pertains to the ROM portion of DVD-Audio discs; this is the portion readable on personal computers, and is ignored by the vast majority of DVD-Audio (not to mention DVD-Video) players on the market.
With all the protesting against the WTO in the United States, you'd think lawmakers here would have gotten the clue that many U.S. citizens don't like the WTO and want no part of it. I've seen nothing else that can galvanize unions and environmentalists in a common cause! Unions hate the WTO because of its impact on workers; environmentalists hate the WTO because it undermines the environmental protection laws of member nations.
Socialists hate the WTO because it promotes corporate greed and capitalism at the expense of everything else. Many conservatives hate the WTO because it undermines national sovereignty.
And yet lawmakers in the United States do little or nothing until the WTO tries to force the U.S. to accept Internet gambling; once that happens, you have lawmakers screaming that the U.S. should withdraw from the WTO.
In my humble opinion, this can be summed up thusly: "Right cause. Sickeningly wrong reason."
I quoted almost your entire post, and thus, I read the entire thing. I'm not taking anything out of context. How could I? I quoted you in your entirety.
You wrote "AAC is doomed to be less popular than..." (I'm not going to finish the sentence, as I already quoted it elsewhere, in its entirety.) I interpret this to be just like every other "foo is doomed" statement you read around Slashdot -- that is to say, someone's trying to proclaim a standard to be dead before it actually is. Then again, you don't seem to be very good at detecting sarcasm, and there was more than a little sarcasm implicit (and explicit!) in what I wrote.
In short, I'm not the one with the reading skills deficit.
There's nothing obscure about AAC -- iTunes and the iPod are market leaders now. Your statements and arguments make no sense. They have no internal logic.
There's nothing "closed" about AAC. Anyone is free to license the format. It's a part of MPEG4. Apple has nothing to do with that. FairPlay can be licensed, too, but nobody in the industry wants to bother, and every other manufacturer wants to rely on WMA and its far-more-restrictive DRM technology. This isn't what consumers want. That's why consumers have voted with their wallets and are buying songs from the iTunes Music Store, and why consumers are buying iPods.
So please, quit your whining about how I'm twisting your words. I understand perfectly well what you're saying. I just disagree with your thesis, such as it is.
And really, 99c for a song isn't even that great of a deal. That makes a 15 song cd = $15.... Which essencially [sic] is the same price it was before. Not only that but you end up with an inflexible lossy-encoded file.
Except that you typically get price breaks on the iTunes Music Store for buying entire albums. Albums typically sell for $9.99 on the store, which is way cheaper than buying each track individually if there are more than 10 tracks on the album. Also, some tracks are not available for individual download; one might argue that this is a ploy to force customers to buy the album, but typically such tracks are either bonus material or songs that probably wouldn't sell individually.
The latest trend on the iTunes Music Store is to give price breaks on buying an entire EP as well. In those cases, the cost of the EP is even cheaper than a full album, and often cheaper than buying the songs individually off the EP.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a (satisfied) iTunes Music Store customer. However, I buy most music on CD and rip it the traditional way still.
Whatever, AAC is doomed to be less popular than WMA and Mp3 until it becomes 100% free for me to write a player that supports that format. WMA is a distant second to Mp3 and is only catching up because MS allows companies to make their devices WMA compatable for zero dollars and ZERO cents thuas making it compatable with portable players. It still can not touch MP3 in popularity though. AAC is a horribly distand almost last place near FLAC and OGG and is only growing because Apple themselves is offering content in that file format. if they were not offering content in AAC then it would be completely dead...
I guess this is why AAC was just recently chosen by the DVD consortium to be the standard for audio in the ROM portion of DVD-Audio disks. (That's been one of my major gripes with DVD-Audio -- you can't rip the songs to your computer currently, because there's no software out there designed to do this.)
Yeah, right, AAC is dead. Never mind that the latest iTunes rips into AAC by default. (You have to go into preferences to switch audio import to use MP3 instead.) Never mind that the iTunes Music Store outperforms all other legitimate digital music distribution methods, and their format of choice is AAC with FairPlay.
apple as [sic] the opportunity to create a standard in a way that they tried with quicktime (which is still a distand third and being displaced with xvid/divx into fourth with Real Media)
I guess that's why Quicktime is doing just fine? Seriously, talk about a reality distortion field -- yours seems to be worse than Steve Jobs'. Xvid and DiVX are still the purview of the 133t, although there are more DVD players on the market now that will play videos encoded in these formats. So they are gaining traction and mainstream acceptance; but most players that support these formats are cheapies from China, where video piracy is rampant, and the build quality leaves something to be desired.
Incidentally, AAC and Quicktime are linked inextricably with MPEG4, which is a current and future video standard. DiVX/Xvid leverage the MPEG4 standard.
Quicktime is not just a niche format. It's everywhere. Most sites that serve up movie trailers do so in Quicktime format. Quicktime is almost always offered as an option for sites that support multiple video formats. And AAC wasn't "created" by Apple -- it's an open standard that they adopted.
Steve Jobs historically makes bone-headed decisions.. Apple would be king right now if they made the decisions to open up their goodies years ago...
So what you're saying is that your entire post is really just an excuse to slam Jobs and Apple, and has nothing to do with anything else. Obviously. Since real facts don't bear your arguments out.
So stick that in your pipe and smoke it mister troll.
Funny, you sound like the Troll in this case. Pity I used up my moderator points a couple days ago.
Kahle should NOT be supported. The protection of GPL work is reason enough.
No, it's not reason enough. Protecting GPL work is important, but remedying some of the problems with current copyright law (including the gray area that orphaned works fall into) is more important. And since Kahle couldn't win by challenging the copyright term extension (Sonny Bono Act), this is the only avenue left.
Stop being so FSF/GNU-centric in your thinking. There's actually a lot of stuff out in the world that's more important (gasp!) than Free Software. Software is important, but our cultural heritage and the preservation of the original intent of the Constitution (in regards to patent and copyright legislation) are much more important.
As for your aversion to paperwork... duly noted. But making the process free of charge is ridiculous on its face. There's no such thing as free -- either the party seeking copyright protection pays a small fee (last I checked, approximately $20, well below the cost of electricity required to operate computer equipment for the length of time necessary to develop a non-trivial piece of software worth copyright protection), or the taxpayers pay for the clerical costs.
Besides, forcing a payment for renewal (even a nominal fee of $1) will weed out those copyright holders who have no interest in maintaining copyright protection for a given work. Likewise, in cases where copyright was originally assigned to a company which no longer exists, or where copyright was assigned to someone who is now deceased and whose estate is unaware that they hold the copyright (or doesn't care that they hold it), a nominal renewal fee and procedure will insure that such works fall into the public domain that much faster, thereby enriching everyone and thus serving the public interest.
The underpinnings of the GPL is copyright law. If that law now required contributors to go through the "copyright formalities" for them to get copyright protection under the law, then wouldn't this result in the contributed code ending up in the public domain, since a lot of people wouldn't have the time or the money to go through the process?
Anyone who didn't actively renew their copyright registration for a work would have that work end up in the Public Domain, which is how copyright law worked until the 1970's.
Having said that, it's not that expensive to register your work for copyright protections. And renewal isn't expensive either. The paperwork is relatively trivial. If you can't be bothered filing a single form and an example of your work with the copyright office, is the work really worth copyrighting? If you can take the time to write a piece of code, you can take the time to mail a copy of your code (along with the necessary form(s)) to the copyright office; similarly, how hard is it to mail a check and a simple form off to the copyright office for the renewal of a work? Consider that this was the law until the 1970's, and required of all software developers. Consider also that most companies that produce software still register with their country's copyright authority because doing so provides a clear record of ownership and makes winning court cases easier.
Also, I might point out that the majority of Linux code is copyrighted in other countries, and Berne specifically prohibits member states from imposing copyright formalities on the works copyrighted in other member states. So only code with copyright holders here in the United States would be affected by this case (or the proposed remedies, should the plaintiff win).
I might also point out that copyright renewal, prior to 1996, was only required after the first 24 years of the work's life. If any code remains in the Linux code base for that length of time, it probably deserves to slip into the public domain.
I can just see the legal tangle such a change would cause for Linux, et al. I also question how well such a change would work with the Berne Convention, since we're not talking about a novel here, written in one country, but a product written by hundreds of contributors from around the planet, both US and elsewhere.
See my above comments regarding Berne. In the case of the Linux kernel, individual contributors hold the copyrights to the modules/source files. Only those source files contributed by people residing in the U.S. would be affected by this case.
An easy way to streamline the administration of such a "mess" would be for the individual authors who don't want to be bothered maintaining their own copyrights to assign their copyrights to an authority, such as the FSF. That way, some centralized authority takes care of the ugly paperwork (which isn't all that ugly, honestly) and frees up those authors who don't care or don't wish to deal with it.
By the way, all of your questions could have been answered by following the links in the article and reading the information, including the FAQs surrounding this case. How you got modded "Insightful" is beyond me.
According to this
review of the ipod mini, firewire is slowered [sic] than usb.
A single data-point does not an argument make. Hi-Speed USB 2.0 does have a higher raw transfer rate than FireWire 400, but USB in general has worse latency, and higher CPU utilization, than FireWire.
I'm skeptical of the source of this data, also... since it's CNet. I wonder what testing methodology they used? (It's possible the "statistics" about transfer rates may have been influenced by anti-Apple sentiments festering at CNet.)
Carl Sagan also expounded this idea in lectures before he died -- I attended one of these lectures at RPI in 1993 or thereabouts. He also condensed his arguments into a book, entitled Pale Blue Dot.
Sagan used an interesting analogy... the swamps of Camarena. The story goes that an ancient city-state (one of the colonies of Syracuse, if I remember correctly) had a major malaria problem, and they sought to alleviate the problem by draining the nearby swamps. (Presumably, these people saw a correlation between swamp land and malaria, but probably didn't understand that mosquitoes were the disease vector.) Every civic leader of this city state was in favor of the plan except for the Oracle, who warned that there would be dire consequences.
The swamps were drained, and the incidence of malaria tapered off... and then a neighboring city-state invaded. It turned out that the swamp provided a natural barrier which made military invasion difficult.
Sagan argues that by tracking NEOs, we could be setting ourselves up for some nefarious figure (he suggested the leader of a rogue nation, but I think today we'd probably suspect a terrorist cell as a more likely candidate) using knowledge of NEOs to redirect one -- not to save Earth, but to deliberately hit targets on Earth. The idea is, in solving one problem, we might create a worse problem.
In all fairness, though, it seems that Carl Sagan's argument was mainly a justification for human colonization of other planets. That way, we don't have all our eggs in the same proverbial basket. While Dr. Sagan's argument might well be valid, one should bear in mind that his argument was motivated by a desire to promote human spaceflight and colonization of Mars. This point was driven home repeatedly in his lectures and in Pale Blue Dot. While I agree that it's a good idea to get our species off of this ball of rock and spread out a bit, I am not sure that any terrorist state would have sufficient means to hold the world hostage with ballistic NEOs.
Unless you have a contractual relationship with Nintendo that forbids it, you may excercise all the rights granted in 17 U.S. Code 117 with any copy of a work of software you have. That explicitly includes the right to make a copy of, and adapt if necessary, your copy of a work of software if it is an integral step in running it on a machine. What kind of machine is not limited by the US Code, and you don't have a contract with Nintendo limiting that right, which means you have a right to get a ROM reader, copy the game on to your PC, and play it on your PC.
Actually, even if you do have a contractual relationship with Nintendo, any clauses in the contract that contravene existing law are illegal and unenforceable.
Several years ago, I left an apartment before my lease expired; I'd purchased a house, and moved into it, partly because the management of the apartment complex refused to repair the air conditioning in a timely fashion. Where I live (Phoenix, Arizona), air conditioning is considered an essential service if it was available in the apartment at the time that the tenant moved in. The property managers tried to get me to pay for the remaining months in my lease, going so far as to keep my deposit to cover part of what they claimed I owed them...
During the dispute, they specifically pointed out a clause in my most recently signed lease agreement, which stated in part that "the management shall not be held liable in the event that repairs can not be performed in a timely fashion." The wording is important, because Arizona's Landlord-Tenant laws specifically state that repairs to essential services (water, air conditioning, etc.) must be performed in a timely fashion. The attorney that I consulted with had a laugh over that -- it's impossible to remove legal rights with a contract. A contract can grant rights that wouldn't otherwise exist under the law (as long as those rights don't explicitly violate some other law), but it can't take them away. The GPL would be an example of a contract that grants rights in addition to what copyright law already provides.
Of course, companies like Nintendo can still try to enforce such contracts, and the mere threat of legal action from such a large company is enough to make most people back down. Thus, such contractual clauses are an excuse to use lawyers as an intimidation tactic to prevent law abiding citizens from exercising their rights.
If you look at the very end of the ExtremeTech article, in the blurb where they rate the Quicktime/MPEG-4 codec, they list the pros and cons:
Pros: Inexpensive, fast encoding speed, decent image quality
Cons:Horrible image quality
OK, so they may have had a little trouble with cut-and-paste mistakes. But I still found it amusing that they contradicted themselves in their summary blurb.
I also agree with several other people's comments: These results seem oddly skewed against the Quicktime/MPEG-4 codec. I know that Apple's MPEG-4 codec isn't as mature as some of the other Quicktime components, but I can't help but feel that the author of the article missed some important settings when using this codec. That another Slashdot reader was able to get excellent results with Apple's MPEG-4 codec makes me want to call shenanigans too. Or perhaps the ExtremeTech article author's methodology introduced enough noise to the source video (converting from DVD to Indeo) that it caused the MPEG-4 codec to choke?
Interesting... that same article also puts Canon behind Kodak, with only 16% of the U.S. market. Quite an unexpected result -- I'd thought that Canon was on top of the digital photography game!
Slashdot Mirror
Would you care to further qualify this bold assertion? Exactly what can Winamp do that iTunes can't? If we're talking about the ability to play umpty-zillion file formats, then yeah, I suppose Winamp might have the edge... assuming you discount the existence of iTunes plugins that supply support for Ogg Vorbis, etc.
Exactly how is the Winamp plugin interface better than the iTunes plugin interface? I'm genuinely curious about this.
As for skinning... well, you're right about that. iTunes used to support skinning back when it was called SoundJam MP, but true to form, Apple eliminated support for skinning when they bought the product. On the other hand, Apple added support for audio CD burning and a host of other improvements, and eventually added tighter integration with the other iApps, so I'm willing to overlook the omission of a feature that caters to a user's personal aesthetics. The fact is, Apple has a fetish for consistent user interfaces, and they've time and again stomped out technologies for theming or skinning the OS and various applications that run on it.
Actually, there are several alternative sound cards for the Mac. There's at least one version of the SoundBlaster Live! for the Mac, although Creative for whatever reason chose not to release OS X drivers for it. (I have read, however, that Apple now includes their own drivers for this card in OS X.) And of course there are several Pro audio cards for the Mac, but those are (obviously) targeted at musicians and sound engineers, not consumers.
Of course, if you're not wedded to the idea of internal sound hardware in your computer of choice, you can always try out various USB and FireWire audio solutions. Support for those is built into Mac OS X. Several of these devices offer audio much better than you could obtain from a card inside a personal computer, if for no other reason than the inside of your computer is a very electrically noisy environment. Stereophile has even reviewed a few of the better USB/FireWire external audio solutions.
Having said all that... the built-in audio on PowerMac hardware is actually pretty decent. For most people, it's "good enough," and of a quality that's comparable to the best motherboard audio you can get in the PC world. (Yeah, I know, someone is going to make a comment about audio problems on the MDD G4s and the early G5s, but as I understand it, much of that was traceable to the power supply; in the case of the G5 audio issues, I've only ever heard these artifacts coming out of the internal speaker, not from any external speakers.)
Unlike some folks, I've been tracking the relationship between Apple and the Linux world for a while now. In fact, my original impetus for becoming a switcher (in 1997 or 1998, no less) was the introduction of MkLinux. That's what convinced me to get rid of my PC and buy a PowerMac 7300.
MkLinux was a project within Apple to port the Linux kernel, along with the necessary GNU tools to make a complete OS, to the PowerMac architecture; this was accomplished by running the Linux kernel as a personality on top of the Mach microkernel, which was ported to the PowerPC PREP/CHRP architecture.
With the advent of other Linux ports to PowerPC, most of which involved running the Linux kernel monolithically rather than hosting it on top of Mach, MkLinux was mothballed and quietly discontinued. However, the engineers at Apple learned a lot from the process, and this set the stage for the eventual merger with NeXT and the Rhapsody project, which evolved into Darwin and OS X. Specifically, lessons learned from porting Mach to PowerPC and hosting various OS personalities on top of it proved invaluable.
It's fair to say that Apple contributes a lot to the Open Source world, and therefore the Linux world by extension. (KHTML has been improved a fair bit by Apple engineers since they picked it as the rendering engine for Safari.) Of course, Apple's contributed more heavily to the *BSD communities.
Suffice it to say that I don't think Apple is worried about Linux, at least not in the way that Microsoft is. I certainly don't see any enmity between Apple and the Linux communities that you seem to be implying.
What software does Apple make available to the Linux world? Well, besides their contributions to KHTML, they have Quicktime Streaming Server (or whatever they're calling it today) and various other Open Source projects that are free for the Linux community to use. Apple's Rendezvous code is open, for instance, and it's a pretty good implementation of ZeroConf as I understand it.
Of course, when push comes to shove, Apple will try to promote their own products over other products. What else would you expect of them? But failure to endorse Linux doesn't mean Apple and Linux are "enemies." Apple's big selling point is ease of use and ease of administration. So far, the Linux world doesn't have this across the board. Since Apple tightly controls the look and feel of everything Macintosh, as well as other aspects that make up the user experience, I don't think Linux will ever quite catch up in this arena. Some things can't be commoditized, and Open Source (for all its benefits) doesn't lend itself to the development of seamlessly integrated software suites with consistent user interfaces. Should that ever happen in a big way, then maybe Apple might re-think its relationship with the Linux world, because then Linux will be competing on Apple's turf; right now, though, there's not much competition.
What the hell are you babbling about, and how did this get modded +4 Interesting?
I can't speak to Real's formats being proprietary, although as I understand it, they are based upon open standards. Rather, I'll focus on AAC.
AAC is an open standard, part of the MPEG4 specification. Anyone can license it. The objectionable part of Apple's for-pay music store is the FairPlay DRM that is used to wrap the AAC content. FairPlay isn't an open standard, although supposedly it can be licensed; since Apple didn't actually create FairPlay, one could theoretically license the technology from the developer, although I have no idea whether Apple has an exclusive agreement with them.
Rather than parroting someone's party line in a blatant attempt at karma whoring, you might try qualifying your statements and making sure you specify their scope.
It's unlikely Apple would use someone else's streaming media technology when they have streaming video and audio support in Quicktime that is "good enough." At that point, the real question is whether Apple can introduce a product that is a souped-up iPod that supports real time streaming media (presumably over a wireless connection), and do so at a price point where consumers will buy the product in appreciable quantities. If the user experience and the cost are both excellent, fine; otherwise, it makes no sense to even talk about selling such a product.
Technically, there's a distinction between science fiction and space opera, at least according to some writers in the Sci Fi genre. I once read an article written by one of Analog's regular contributors, who attempted to draw this distinction.
To the category of true science fiction belong works such as Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (the book, not the movie); to the category of space opera belong works such as Star Wars. The idea is that true sci fi has at least one science element, even if it's badly conceived science, that is integral to the plot; without it, the story doesn't work. In Frankenstein, you have the concept of reanimating dead tissue with electricity, and creating life from non-life. Space opera and its close relatives, on the other hand, could be re-cast in another genre with little or no difficulty (e.g., a western). The technology is just a replaceable prop.
Despite Gene Roddenberry selling the original Star Trek to NBC as a "wagon train to the stars," he hired real sci fi writers and told some pretty amazing stories that were genuine science fiction. Quite honestly, I saw nothing in Firefly that would classify it as genuine science fiction -- but if it's space opera, it's very competently written, proving that the term doesn't have to be a negative epithet.
Farscape was a bit uneven at times, but it did explore genuine science fictional themes at least some of the time. The rest of the time was spent on character development and dealing with plot arcs. It's pretty safe to say, though, that the story told by Farscape would fall completely apart without the underlying science concepts (wormhole travel, cerebral implants, etc.)
I never said Phoenix was the cheapest. I said it was cheaper than many alternatives.
Pity I already posted in this discussion, or I'd mod you a Troll with that comment. Cost of living, cheap or otherwise, isn't "everything," nor is it even the biggest factor in deciding where to live... unless you're really poor. But it's definitely a factor worth considering, unless you don't care about saving money.
I personally like Phoenix because it strikes a good balance between cost of living and the availability of technical jobs. For me, it works. For other people, it might not.
And you know this because... why? I don't think the correlation is as direct as you seem to think it is. Also, do you mean fewer jobs total, or fewer jobs that you'd consider worth taking? There's a big difference.
Well, the case for putting industry in Arizona was compelling enough for Intel to migrate much of its operation to Arizona. Today, Intel is one of the biggest employers in the state of Arizona.
The prevalent attitude of "Why bother with Arizona when California is right next door?" is slowly dissipating. One advantage of Arizona over California is that we have a lower attrition rate for computer industry professionals. (One of the reasons Intel relocated much of its operation here had to do with the employment merry-go-round in Silicon Valley. One former Intel executive, who was one of the people leading the charge to move operations here, cited cases where Intel employees were job-hopping because of stupid things like being able to make a right-turn into the company parking lot instead of a left turn.)
Then again, the IT job market is really hurting right now in Arizona because of the economy, so there's very little employee churn right now.
One start-up company I worked at in Scottsdale, AZ, foundered about a year into my employment there. They were having quite a lot of trouble securing venture capital, and one excuse cited by the VCs we talked to (difficult to validate) was that we weren't headquartered in Silicon Valley. Apparently, the prevailing belief during the dot-com boom was that all the hot technology companies had to at least have a presence in Silicon Valley; if you weren't physically there, you couldn't possibly be that tech savvy. This is purely a perception issue.
Once the dot-com bubble burst, I think the overriding concern of cost drove a lot of people to reconsider their pro-Silicon Valley biases.
The sad thing is, my former employer, the start-up company I mentioned, relocated from Scottsdale, AZ, to San Jose, CA, just before the dot-com crash. Talk about bad timing. But at that point, nothing would have saved the company.
It's all relative. The cost of living here in Arizona is a lot lower than, say, the cost of living in Connecticut... or California's Silicon Valley area...
I paid $75,000 for a house in downtown Phoenix, in the Coronado neighborhood. By the standards of many other communities across America, that's downright cheap. My car taxes are not outrageous, even though I own a "sports car." (1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse) I think the vehicle taxes are much higher if you own an SUV.
Cost of living factors in more than your tax liability or the cost of housing. Most goods and services in Arizona are cheaper than in neighboring states, and certainly are cheaper than many places farther away.
Never have truer words been spoken on Slashdot. (Well, OK, that's probably not true, but this is an idiomatic expression in English...)
After publicly commenting in my weblog that I found a WiFi access point in my office building being run wide-open, with no security (not even a password), and noting that this access point belonged to someone in the Honeywell office just down the hall, I ran into an interesting situation several months later...
It seems that one of Honeywell's lawyers noticed this blog entry and found out that I was employed by a consulting firm that had Honeywell as one of its biggest customers. So Honeywell's solution to the embarrassment of having a gaping security hole pointed out publicly was to pressure my employer into firing me. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed, and I let Honeywell image the hard drive on my laptop; the Honeywell employee who set up the rogue access point wasn't so lucky.
The moral of the story is, large companies are humorless, and the bigger the company, the more draconian the steps they'll take to protect themselves and their corporate image. That doesn't mean you should cower in fear whenever these companies flex their muscles.
Indeed. I bought a Game Cube, and played Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Definitely a mature title! Full of Lovecraftian creepiness and a fair amount of gore and psychological manipulation. It is one of the few survival horror type games that actually scared me.
I might also point out that the Resident Evil series was (re)released on the Game Cube, with revamped graphics and game play. I don't own those, but was impressed with what they did to beef up the titles.
If only the Game Cube weren't manufactured with bright colors, and had controllers that looked a little more like those for the PS2 and Dreamcast, I think it would have gone over better with adult gamers. But it's a fine system, and has plenty of adult-oriented games in its repertoire.
Actually, there was no mention of DRM being applied to the files stored in the ROM portion of DVD-Audio discs. The files will be in AAC format, but no mention has been made of Apple's FairPlay DRM wrapper. Indeed, FairPlay encodes information about the purchaser and locks the file to that person's account; thus, FairPlay-wrapped AAC files wouldn't make sense for inclusion in a read-only optical disc.
Yes, the AAC files will be lossy, but making them available is better than making nothing available to the purchaser of the DVD-Audio disc. Besides, the vast majority of people wanting to "rip" tracks from a music disc (DVD-A or CD or whatever) are going to encode those tracks using one of several lossy formats -- MP3, AAC, or WMA. Making pre-encoded versions of these tracks available in AAC just cuts one step out of the process. (It also eliminates choice, but when space is at a premium, you want to go with something reasonable and cross-platform.)
Which is why the DVD consortium is now suggesting that discs be pressed with a ROM portion containing AAC-encoded versions of the music tracks. Of course, the ROM session is optional, but... hopefully, more record labels will include this. As for SACD, you're right -- there are currently no tools available to rip from SACD, and most DVD drives won't be able to even read the high definition layer of a SACD disc. On the other hand, many SACD titles ship as hybrid discs that contain a layer of Red Book compatible CD audio, playable on a conventional CD player; assuming that the firmware on your CD/DVD-ROM drive is smart enough to ignore the SACD-specific stuff, you can rip from the CDDA layer just as you would from a normal CD.
I know this, since I've been tracking iTunes since its inception. Before that, I was a SoundJam MP user. (SoundJam MP was the application that became iTunes; Apple bought the rights to the software, and hired the main developer behind SoundJam.) When I'm ripping a CD, I have to make a conscious decision now whether I want to use AAC, which sounds better at lower bit-rates, or whether I want to use MP3, which I can burn to mix CDs for use on certain players that support MP3 CDs but not AAC files thrown into the mix.
But my post was already pretty long, and I didn't feel like digging through release notes to figure out exactly when Apple added AAC support to iTunes. So yes, you're right, but my omission was due to laziness, not ignorance.
Incidentally, one feature of SoundJam MP which I miss in iTunes is the ability to skin the application. SoundJam had some nice skins, including a bonus "jukebox" skin (made to look like a 50's jukebox, complete with cheezy bubble effects) that they made available to paying customers. But I guess Apple's very anti-themeable-interface these days.
No, because this decision only pertains to the ROM portion of DVD-Audio discs; this is the portion readable on personal computers, and is ignored by the vast majority of DVD-Audio (not to mention DVD-Video) players on the market.
With all the protesting against the WTO in the United States, you'd think lawmakers here would have gotten the clue that many U.S. citizens don't like the WTO and want no part of it. I've seen nothing else that can galvanize unions and environmentalists in a common cause! Unions hate the WTO because of its impact on workers; environmentalists hate the WTO because it undermines the environmental protection laws of member nations.
Socialists hate the WTO because it promotes corporate greed and capitalism at the expense of everything else. Many conservatives hate the WTO because it undermines national sovereignty.
And yet lawmakers in the United States do little or nothing until the WTO tries to force the U.S. to accept Internet gambling; once that happens, you have lawmakers screaming that the U.S. should withdraw from the WTO.
In my humble opinion, this can be summed up thusly: "Right cause. Sickeningly wrong reason."
I quoted almost your entire post, and thus, I read the entire thing. I'm not taking anything out of context. How could I? I quoted you in your entirety.
You wrote "AAC is doomed to be less popular than..." (I'm not going to finish the sentence, as I already quoted it elsewhere, in its entirety.) I interpret this to be just like every other "foo is doomed" statement you read around Slashdot -- that is to say, someone's trying to proclaim a standard to be dead before it actually is. Then again, you don't seem to be very good at detecting sarcasm, and there was more than a little sarcasm implicit (and explicit!) in what I wrote.
In short, I'm not the one with the reading skills deficit.
There's nothing obscure about AAC -- iTunes and the iPod are market leaders now. Your statements and arguments make no sense. They have no internal logic.
There's nothing "closed" about AAC. Anyone is free to license the format. It's a part of MPEG4. Apple has nothing to do with that. FairPlay can be licensed, too, but nobody in the industry wants to bother, and every other manufacturer wants to rely on WMA and its far-more-restrictive DRM technology. This isn't what consumers want. That's why consumers have voted with their wallets and are buying songs from the iTunes Music Store, and why consumers are buying iPods.
So please, quit your whining about how I'm twisting your words. I understand perfectly well what you're saying. I just disagree with your thesis, such as it is.
Except that you typically get price breaks on the iTunes Music Store for buying entire albums. Albums typically sell for $9.99 on the store, which is way cheaper than buying each track individually if there are more than 10 tracks on the album. Also, some tracks are not available for individual download; one might argue that this is a ploy to force customers to buy the album, but typically such tracks are either bonus material or songs that probably wouldn't sell individually.
The latest trend on the iTunes Music Store is to give price breaks on buying an entire EP as well. In those cases, the cost of the EP is even cheaper than a full album, and often cheaper than buying the songs individually off the EP.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a (satisfied) iTunes Music Store customer. However, I buy most music on CD and rip it the traditional way still.
I guess this is why AAC was just recently chosen by the DVD consortium to be the standard for audio in the ROM portion of DVD-Audio disks. (That's been one of my major gripes with DVD-Audio -- you can't rip the songs to your computer currently, because there's no software out there designed to do this.)
Yeah, right, AAC is dead. Never mind that the latest iTunes rips into AAC by default. (You have to go into preferences to switch audio import to use MP3 instead.) Never mind that the iTunes Music Store outperforms all other legitimate digital music distribution methods, and their format of choice is AAC with FairPlay.
I guess that's why Quicktime is doing just fine? Seriously, talk about a reality distortion field -- yours seems to be worse than Steve Jobs'. Xvid and DiVX are still the purview of the 133t, although there are more DVD players on the market now that will play videos encoded in these formats. So they are gaining traction and mainstream acceptance; but most players that support these formats are cheapies from China, where video piracy is rampant, and the build quality leaves something to be desired.
Incidentally, AAC and Quicktime are linked inextricably with MPEG4, which is a current and future video standard. DiVX/Xvid leverage the MPEG4 standard.
Quicktime is not just a niche format. It's everywhere. Most sites that serve up movie trailers do so in Quicktime format. Quicktime is almost always offered as an option for sites that support multiple video formats. And AAC wasn't "created" by Apple -- it's an open standard that they adopted.
So what you're saying is that your entire post is really just an excuse to slam Jobs and Apple, and has nothing to do with anything else. Obviously. Since real facts don't bear your arguments out.
Funny, you sound like the Troll in this case. Pity I used up my moderator points a couple days ago.
No, it's not reason enough. Protecting GPL work is important, but remedying some of the problems with current copyright law (including the gray area that orphaned works fall into) is more important. And since Kahle couldn't win by challenging the copyright term extension (Sonny Bono Act), this is the only avenue left.
Stop being so FSF/GNU-centric in your thinking. There's actually a lot of stuff out in the world that's more important (gasp!) than Free Software. Software is important, but our cultural heritage and the preservation of the original intent of the Constitution (in regards to patent and copyright legislation) are much more important.
As for your aversion to paperwork... duly noted. But making the process free of charge is ridiculous on its face. There's no such thing as free -- either the party seeking copyright protection pays a small fee (last I checked, approximately $20, well below the cost of electricity required to operate computer equipment for the length of time necessary to develop a non-trivial piece of software worth copyright protection), or the taxpayers pay for the clerical costs.
Besides, forcing a payment for renewal (even a nominal fee of $1) will weed out those copyright holders who have no interest in maintaining copyright protection for a given work. Likewise, in cases where copyright was originally assigned to a company which no longer exists, or where copyright was assigned to someone who is now deceased and whose estate is unaware that they hold the copyright (or doesn't care that they hold it), a nominal renewal fee and procedure will insure that such works fall into the public domain that much faster, thereby enriching everyone and thus serving the public interest.
Anyone who didn't actively renew their copyright registration for a work would have that work end up in the Public Domain, which is how copyright law worked until the 1970's.
Having said that, it's not that expensive to register your work for copyright protections. And renewal isn't expensive either. The paperwork is relatively trivial. If you can't be bothered filing a single form and an example of your work with the copyright office, is the work really worth copyrighting? If you can take the time to write a piece of code, you can take the time to mail a copy of your code (along with the necessary form(s)) to the copyright office; similarly, how hard is it to mail a check and a simple form off to the copyright office for the renewal of a work? Consider that this was the law until the 1970's, and required of all software developers. Consider also that most companies that produce software still register with their country's copyright authority because doing so provides a clear record of ownership and makes winning court cases easier.
Also, I might point out that the majority of Linux code is copyrighted in other countries, and Berne specifically prohibits member states from imposing copyright formalities on the works copyrighted in other member states. So only code with copyright holders here in the United States would be affected by this case (or the proposed remedies, should the plaintiff win).
I might also point out that copyright renewal, prior to 1996, was only required after the first 24 years of the work's life. If any code remains in the Linux code base for that length of time, it probably deserves to slip into the public domain.
See my above comments regarding Berne. In the case of the Linux kernel, individual contributors hold the copyrights to the modules/source files. Only those source files contributed by people residing in the U.S. would be affected by this case.
An easy way to streamline the administration of such a "mess" would be for the individual authors who don't want to be bothered maintaining their own copyrights to assign their copyrights to an authority, such as the FSF. That way, some centralized authority takes care of the ugly paperwork (which isn't all that ugly, honestly) and frees up those authors who don't care or don't wish to deal with it.
By the way, all of your questions could have been answered by following the links in the article and reading the information, including the FAQs surrounding this case. How you got modded "Insightful" is beyond me.
A single data-point does not an argument make. Hi-Speed USB 2.0 does have a higher raw transfer rate than FireWire 400, but USB in general has worse latency, and higher CPU utilization, than FireWire.
I'm skeptical of the source of this data, also... since it's CNet. I wonder what testing methodology they used? (It's possible the "statistics" about transfer rates may have been influenced by anti-Apple sentiments festering at CNet.)
Carl Sagan also expounded this idea in lectures before he died -- I attended one of these lectures at RPI in 1993 or thereabouts. He also condensed his arguments into a book, entitled Pale Blue Dot.
Sagan used an interesting analogy... the swamps of Camarena. The story goes that an ancient city-state (one of the colonies of Syracuse, if I remember correctly) had a major malaria problem, and they sought to alleviate the problem by draining the nearby swamps. (Presumably, these people saw a correlation between swamp land and malaria, but probably didn't understand that mosquitoes were the disease vector.) Every civic leader of this city state was in favor of the plan except for the Oracle, who warned that there would be dire consequences.
The swamps were drained, and the incidence of malaria tapered off... and then a neighboring city-state invaded. It turned out that the swamp provided a natural barrier which made military invasion difficult.
Sagan argues that by tracking NEOs, we could be setting ourselves up for some nefarious figure (he suggested the leader of a rogue nation, but I think today we'd probably suspect a terrorist cell as a more likely candidate) using knowledge of NEOs to redirect one -- not to save Earth, but to deliberately hit targets on Earth. The idea is, in solving one problem, we might create a worse problem.
In all fairness, though, it seems that Carl Sagan's argument was mainly a justification for human colonization of other planets. That way, we don't have all our eggs in the same proverbial basket. While Dr. Sagan's argument might well be valid, one should bear in mind that his argument was motivated by a desire to promote human spaceflight and colonization of Mars. This point was driven home repeatedly in his lectures and in Pale Blue Dot. While I agree that it's a good idea to get our species off of this ball of rock and spread out a bit, I am not sure that any terrorist state would have sufficient means to hold the world hostage with ballistic NEOs.
Actually, even if you do have a contractual relationship with Nintendo, any clauses in the contract that contravene existing law are illegal and unenforceable.
Several years ago, I left an apartment before my lease expired; I'd purchased a house, and moved into it, partly because the management of the apartment complex refused to repair the air conditioning in a timely fashion. Where I live (Phoenix, Arizona), air conditioning is considered an essential service if it was available in the apartment at the time that the tenant moved in. The property managers tried to get me to pay for the remaining months in my lease, going so far as to keep my deposit to cover part of what they claimed I owed them...
During the dispute, they specifically pointed out a clause in my most recently signed lease agreement, which stated in part that "the management shall not be held liable in the event that repairs can not be performed in a timely fashion." The wording is important, because Arizona's Landlord-Tenant laws specifically state that repairs to essential services (water, air conditioning, etc.) must be performed in a timely fashion. The attorney that I consulted with had a laugh over that -- it's impossible to remove legal rights with a contract. A contract can grant rights that wouldn't otherwise exist under the law (as long as those rights don't explicitly violate some other law), but it can't take them away. The GPL would be an example of a contract that grants rights in addition to what copyright law already provides.
Of course, companies like Nintendo can still try to enforce such contracts, and the mere threat of legal action from such a large company is enough to make most people back down. Thus, such contractual clauses are an excuse to use lawyers as an intimidation tactic to prevent law abiding citizens from exercising their rights.
OK, so they may have had a little trouble with cut-and-paste mistakes. But I still found it amusing that they contradicted themselves in their summary blurb.
I also agree with several other people's comments: These results seem oddly skewed against the Quicktime/MPEG-4 codec. I know that Apple's MPEG-4 codec isn't as mature as some of the other Quicktime components, but I can't help but feel that the author of the article missed some important settings when using this codec. That another Slashdot reader was able to get excellent results with Apple's MPEG-4 codec makes me want to call shenanigans too. Or perhaps the ExtremeTech article author's methodology introduced enough noise to the source video (converting from DVD to Indeo) that it caused the MPEG-4 codec to choke?
Interesting... that same article also puts Canon behind Kodak, with only 16% of the U.S. market. Quite an unexpected result -- I'd thought that Canon was on top of the digital photography game!
Good link!