A few years ago (92?), the courts ruled that you couldn't trademark numbers or acronyms. Thus, the i586 became the Pentium, and Digital Equipment Corporation stopped using DEC. If a company's name is a series of letters, but it's not an acromyn, it can be trademarked. That's why they're just SGI now and not Silicon Graphics, Inc.
I have a fairly new PC (400MHz), and my mp3 player consumes a whopping 3% of the CPU time. Speed's not much of an issue any more.
The compression, though, is a killer. Like jpeg, many of the current encoders lack subtlety (xing is a huge offender here), and hack the sound up much more than necessary. This'll go away eventually.
Finally, if you've ever done sound editing, mp3 to wav to mp3 (...to wav to mp3... repeat ad infinitum) produces absolutely awful sound, even if you've used a good encoder and equipment. While that's not the fault of the medium, it'll result in a lot of crappy sound clips for a while, particularly in rap and other formats with extensive sampling.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago (92?), the courts ruled that you couldn't trademark numbers or acronyms. Thus, the i586 became the Pentium, and Digital Equipment Corporation stopped using DEC. If a company's name is a series of letters, but it's not an acromyn, it can be trademarked. That's why they're just SGI now and not Silicon Graphics, Inc.
I have a fairly new PC (400MHz), and my mp3 player consumes a whopping 3% of the CPU time. Speed's not much of an issue any more.
The compression, though, is a killer. Like jpeg, many of the current encoders lack subtlety (xing is a huge offender here), and hack the sound up much more than necessary. This'll go away eventually.
Finally, if you've ever done sound editing, mp3 to wav to mp3 (...to wav to mp3... repeat ad infinitum) produces absolutely awful sound, even if you've used a good encoder and equipment. While that's not the fault of the medium, it'll result in a lot of crappy sound clips for a while, particularly in rap and other formats with extensive sampling.