Microsoft has been pounding on the word "innovate" and the phrase "freedom to innovate" so hard in an attempt to beat it either into submission, or to bend it into meaning what they want it to mean. There is innovation going on at Microsoft, in their graphics research division, but damned little of it to do with Windows.
They seem to have adopted Musolini's theory of "The Big Lie" that if you shout something at people loud enough and long enough that eventually they will will believe it, no matter how perposterous.
$0.35 per $15 album is 2.33%. 2.33% of $188 million is $4.39 million. That's not to say that artists aren't ripped off, but I somehow don't feel sorry for someone who blew well over four million dollars (Who knows how much more she made besides those CDs...) and then had to declare bankruptcy.
Read the COurtney Love piece or the Steve Albini piece. That is NOT take home pay. Out of the artist's share comes all the costs of recording the record and all the promotional copies that get sent out to the radio stations and a million other niggling, petty deductions including (I am not making this up) a deduction for "shellec breakage". Yes, a percentage for 78 RPM releases breaking in shipment.
The RIAA member companies employ the same creative accounting techniques that the MPAA member companies do, where a film can cost $100 million to make, sell $200 million in tickets and "not make a profit".
The best thing that can happen to artists is the demise of the "music industry".
Because Hotline is a pain. Yes, it's simple enough to use and has potential, but the reality is pretty unpleasant to use. You find that someone has something you're interested in. You have to see what particular hoops you have to jump through to get access "...go to this web site and sign up for this spam-bait..." To hell with that. I share over AudioGalaxy and Napster and the BearShare Gnutella client because I like to share, not to try to make a nickle from people.
Surely more bytes have been transfered over Hotline servers than ANY other file (not just mp3) sharing peer to peer system!!!
Probably, but if you're interested in MP3s, and are not looking for movies or warez, everything else is less of a pain.
Re:could a distributed parallel system be useful?
on
Genetic Stone Soup
·
· Score: 2
I wonder if it would be possible to use a massive parallel processing system (such as SETI) just to *start* things. I know that it isn't the lack of CPU the main issue, but I think it *could* become. Once a good strategy has been found, wouldn't a great amount of cpu power be useful? At least to try things, to experiment, to choose or refine a strategy.
There already is one: Folding @ Home. (As potential contact with aliens seems to be well handled at the moment, I'm going to be moving my spare cycles over to this.)
The slashdot blurb says "10000 lines of assembly code," when I don't actually think the article is suggesting he wrote the program in assembly language. The articles says that 10000 lines of code were written for the assembly program--a program which assembles data.
Possibly, but given the gentleman in questions age and history, the task he was trying to accomplish and the fact that speed was of the essense - I'd be shocked if he wrote anything other than the browser in a higher-level language. I can understand the confusion, but from my reading of the article, I came away with the impression that he wrote the Assembler program in Assembly.
Replying to my own posting, it appears that in a previous incarnation, Jim Kent was the author of the FLC/FLI animation format. That must be why the named was so familiar.
I hate to be a nitpicker, but this chap's hardly a typical twentysomething graduate student (which would have been a genuinely amazing feat) - he's a seasoned professional who's experienced in processing large datasets professionally.
Agreed, he likely brought a huge amount of pre-existing skill in matrix math. But 10k lines of assembly language hacking to beat richly funded capitalists with super-computers in four weeks is a truely amazing hack, no matter what their skill level.
BTW, his home page doesn't say: anyone know what graphics software worked on before? The name seems familiar - I think he used to hack math for a package called Digital Arts, but I could be wrong.
On another, slightly more disturbing note, I am somewhat concerned about the use of academic funding to compete with commercial enterprises. Just because RMS does it doesn't make it right.
What's disturbing is that academic institutions are being forced to compete with commercial enterprises that, frankly, should not exist. The idea of a commercial enterprise doing something as important to the entire human race as the sequencing of the genome with the intention to control distribution of the resulting science is deeply offensive. Just because you can make money doing something doesn't make it right.
Sorry Shayne, but I'm pretty damn sure that public performance of a copyrighted work is explicitly forbidden by copyright laws. You can't even do a cover without permission from the original author.
Not true. As long as the performance rights society gets it's cut (ASCAP or BMI in the US) you can perform any song for the public and record it and sell the recordings. A friend of mine put together a "tribute" album of covers of a particular artist. He pays a percentage of each CD sale to BMI (the performance rights society for this artist) and everything is hunky-dory.
I know that Weird Al has to get permission from the author of every song he parodies, because even though the lyrics are his, the tune isn't.
He does that, but he does not need to do that. As long as the copyright on the tunes is paid, he can cover the song and modify the lyrics. The fact that it is a parody gives him even more rights than a straight cover, as the Supreme Court has affirmed that parody and satire have a special protected status greater than other material (see Larry Flynt vs Jerry Falwell and Two Live Crew vs the estate of Roy Orbison).
I have no idea why Al bothers to ask permission, other than the fact that he is a nice guy.
If you held a concert for 100,000 and played a Buffett song, you would be hearing from Buffett's lawyers even if you didn't charge a dime. The reason being that by hearing your performance, 100,000 no longer have to pay through some other means to hear that same music, if not the same artist.
Not true. There are thousands of cover bands all over the world covering famous songs, lame lounge singers singing Billy Joel songs, etc. As long as the venue has paid ASCAP and BMI for the rights to the songs (look for the decal for each on the window of your favorite club) you can listen to a bunch of fat 50ish guys in bad Hawaiian shirts who are not Jimmy Buffet spend the whole evening covering Jimmy Buffet songs.
And you contradict yourself. You first say that an expensive room is necessary. then you say that Les had mics over the kitchen sink. I really doubt that kitchen sinks are conducive to good acoustics.
Thery're not, agreed. But then, Les was recording onto 8-track analog tape and was going to be bouncing many times...I doubt if he recorded lead vocals there, just extra little vocal bits.
My answer is, you can put anachoic tile and foam anywhere and get a good room, but if you just try mics in different locations in your house, you'd be surprised at how good some creative locations can sound!
You can get a deader sounding room, but not a good room. And dead sound doesn't make the room actually quieter. The acoustic treatment doesn't have to be expensive, but making the walls thick is. There's a reason people building recording studios use isolated stud construction, construct floating slab floors...and it's not just to spend money.
This is not that expensive. Put 1/2" styrofoam on the walls and then cover that with carpet scraps.
That does not give you the mass necessary to actually block outside sounds. Much of the new home studio equipment is 24bit/96khz with a dynamic range. What you propose might work fine for recording a punk band that is not using the lower end of the dynamic range possible. But if an artist plans to have quiet bits, where for instance there is nothing but a single acoustic guitar string being plucked...then styrofoam just isn't going to cut it. You need isolated stud construction with multiple layers of sheetrock to block outside sound, and the deadness of a bunch of '70s era carpet-covered walls just isn't going to make that string sing. You need diffusion.
A lot of successful artists eventually built their own studios, but they usually couldn't afford it until they were successful. That was too late, as they had already signed a contract that gave the record company the ownership of the actual recordings, a right they gave up to get that first recording session. Now, they can create the recordings right from the start, and lease the master to the record company.
I hate to quote Karl Marx, who was a doofus in most respects, but he was right about the "workers controlling the means of production". Lots of artists (Frank Zappa for instance) have had to fight to regain ownership of their own work. The really offensive part is that standard record company contracts require the costs of the recording to come out of the artist's share of the royalties...and then the company owns the recording.
The main problem, scarcely touched on in the article, is that while the equipment is cheap, architecture is still expensive. The most expensive part of a recording studio is a good sounding room. A great, inexpensive large-diaphram condenser mic won't do you any good for recording vocals if people can hear a passing bus in the background, or if your voice sounds flat from mediocre acoustics. And don't even think of recording drums in most rooms.
Sampling works fine if that's your kind of music, but it doesn't work for all genres. But most of the artists I know are working this way now...even the ones who have traditionally worked in huge, expensive studios. The inventor of multi-tracking, Les Paul was also the father of the home studio. He had microphone lines all over the house to be able to record anywhere...he even had a mic hanging over the sink in case he needed a quick vocal overdub while his wife Mary Ford was cooking dinner.
Damn, this is a cool idea. I really wish this were true... but it screams " HOAX!!"
Understandable, but in this case the beta units have been in the hands of several of the most respected members of the AV Sciences Forum discussion group. This is a very high signal:noise group of home theater enthusiasts. They help each other out, party at trade shows, write excellent open-source software for video and other stuff. I'd have doubts too if these folks hadn't assured me that it is real, and works.
It's a hack, and a dammed clever one. Hopefully someone else will figure out how to interface the FireWire port this will add to the DTC-100 (and potentially any other HD reciever) to a FireWire card on a PC.
Doesn't look like it is from one of the big manufacters, i.e. sony.
No, it's from a tiny group of engineers, hacking hardware. Brilliant idea...we've been discussing it over at the AV Sciences Forum web site for the past month or two.
this I think is going to be the start of a trend, people that make devices that intrest the "hacker" comunity due to some "hackability".
Agreed. I want this. They plan to make this technology available for other devices as well.
With things like the DMCA our only hope is going to be the guy in the garage that can get a blueprint to a manufacter in Asia making things like this that can be quikly altered. I bet you won't see sony making a HDTV recorder that uses any open standord connector i.e firewire
So pathetically true. The worst thing to ever happen to Sony was their purchase of Columbia/CBS. The vital Disney/Universal vs. Sony "Betamax" trial would have never happened if Sony had been in the movie business before. They are comprimised now. Panasonic made their DVHS recorder with a copy protection system, but the MPAA and it's thug Jack Valente pressured Panasonic to pull it from the market with the threat that MPAA member companies (all the big studios) would no longer buy Panasonic broadcast equipment.
They keep claiming this is about "copyright", but that is a lie. The 5C system the Panasonic DVHS had covered that perfectly well. This is about their desire to control what programs you can tape, how many time you can watch the tape, preventing you from fast-forwarding through the commercials (like the compulsary crap on DVDs) and preventing your from making copies.
Also, this is probably why Lucas is not releasing the Star Wars films on DVD. He wants to release it on this new DVHS system with horrible limitations, and per-viewing charges. Screw him and his greed.
This is DIVX all over again. Hollywood will not be happy until the "play" button is a "pay" button.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, I saw the new DataPlay format. A lot of money behind it, tiny, rugged and 250 megs per side for a total of 500 megs in DVD-R format in a protected case the size of a Smart Card. See it at this web page.
It does have optional "content protection" but it shouldn't stop people from using for their own material. The engineers I talked with seemed pretty open to drivers being written for various operating systems (they want to sell hardware). Come September, expect to see these suckers all over the place.
BTW, my favorite part of this idea is the concept that geeks who are capable of constructing an analog speaker might become the heroes of an underground economy. (Note to the irony-impaired: I do not believe this will really happen.)
I've seen prototype digital speakers at the Consumer Electronics Show and CEDIA two years ago. Meridian is selling one currently with "copyright protection" built in. The DMCA specifically covers using FireWire for the connection between the sound source, the reciever and the speakers.
It generally performs very well. I use it for DVD (only in a secondary capacity, my regular DVD player is superior and I laugh at anyone who claims their PC's DVD player does a better job than a decent component DVD player
Any particular reason you do that? The folks who hang out at the AV Sciences Forum web site can easily afford stand-alone DVD players, and choose to build home theater PCs. I consult with a high-end audio-video dealership, I go to all the trade shows like CES and CEDIA and I can assure you - a good software DVD player in a well-assembled PC delivers a better picture than any stand-alone player currently on the market (there are some pieces in prototype form that may change that when they are released).
Use software player, like WinDVD 2000 or PowerDVD, through a GeForce2 MX video card & PowerStrip scaling the picture up to the "sweet spot" of a front projector. Run it at 72 or 96 or even 120 hz to multiply the 24 fps of a film-based DVD to avoid 3:2 pull-down artifacts.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I wouldn't use a stand-alone DVD player if you paid me.
In the same way that steam was once the principle area of technological innovation, that iron was, it's possible that silicon has peaked. Fine. Everything has it's day. Maybe optical computing will the the next nexus of technological innovation. Or biology. Or something that we cannot imagine.
At one point just after the turn of the last century, there was a call to shut down the patent office because "everything that can be invented already has" (now we have different reasons to want to shut it down!)
That's why it's called "innovation"...because it's stuff that we don't know about yet. This article, if the writer is unlucky, may one day have the same sort of notority that Vannervar Bush had with his vision of a few huge computers, with acres of vacumn tubes, cooled by Niagras of water.
What we have now is nothing compared to what we will have soon.
The royalty for the is not that much: something like 0.50$US by player. I don't think it's a big market stopper although the minimum licencing is 15,000 units. BTW, I still prefer Ogg/Vorbis. I'm looking to make it in fix points algorithm for better performance on arm and other non-fpu embedded platform.
The killer isn't the player charge. The paperwork and hassles involved in the licencing is what will really cause manufacturers to move to OGG. That, and the freedom to modify it. That's why the Tivo runs on Linux. It isn't as if Microsoft hasn't been trying to get into that market for years. But why licence something if you can download and use for free? Any hassles with the GPL are barely noticable compared to working out a licencing agreement with Fraunhoffer and Thompson.
I talked to several different hardware manufacturers at the most recent CEDIA show. Every single one of the engineers, executives and salespeople I talked to was very interested in OGG Vorbis. They have no particular love of Thomsom or Fraunhoffer. A free encoder and decoder means they can sell their product for less and get a larger share of the market, make more money and buy their baby a new pair of shoes!
I'll be spending an equal amount of time at the COnsumer Electronics Show doing the same thing. I might even make business cards with a description of the Vorbis project and URLs. As soon as the code is optimized, it will appear in commercial products. It doesn't even have to sound better than MP3, just as good as MP3.
The big product at this year's CES will be home audio jukeboxes. Virtually every one of these will be running some version of GNU/Linux. Why? Because it's free...and you can get loads of programmers practically begging you to work on the project. The only thing keeping the price from dropping and getting it into homes is the MP3 licencing issue. That is delt with via Vorbis.
We'll see MP3 jukeboxes with 9 gig IDE drives designed to hook up to your home network in the $399 price range if they choose to go the Linux/Vorbis route.
I was amused by the description of the home with 4 ethernet jacks in every room so the owner could plug in wherever he was. Haven't these people heard of wireless networking?
Give me a 100 megabit wireless network, and I'll consider it. Until then, I'll stick with wires.
One of the most telling things about the thing's vapor status, is the improbable reverse curve display. Especially obvious on the zoomed view of the alleged device. God help us all when industrial designers get ahold of displays that can be bent and formed into convex and concave shapes.
Yep, the only type of person stupid enough to possibly fall for this is a Wall Street investor.
Dreadful ergonomics too. This is an example not of ergonomic design, but of the insidious and evil "ergonomic style" design. Not actually good or comfortable to use, it just has to losely resemble stuff that does. Blegh!
This whole debate ignore the dymanic nature of language. "English" isn't a plot by english speakers to establish global control. People learn english in order to buy into that power. English speakers use so many words from other languages that the language can't be said to have evolved so much as congealed.
It's virtually impossible to go through a day in the US without using at least a couple of words that have filtered into US english from other languages. And that's the way it should be. Dr. Samuel Johnson, when he published the first english dictionary, dispaired that people would try to use it as an authority; that it would define the language. He understood that no language in static except a dead one.
A larger point is not the trustability of various Linux binary distributions, but that the Founding Editor of LinuxWorld magazine did not seem to be aware of this very well known hack. I guess I just assumed that anyone who had been around as long as he had would have read the Jargon file or one of the printed "New Hacker's Dictionary" editions. It's generally considered one of the most ingenious hacks ever perpetrated...by one of the fathers of *NIX.
Anyway, here's what I've had to say about Windows lately. Two weeks ago, I called for Microsoft to open the source code to Windows so that we could be certain it didn't have any secret backdoors (see Resources for a link). Most of the people I've heard from on the topic agree. One person insisted that people could be embedding backdoors into Linux as well. I agree -- it is certainly possible. But here's the crucial difference between Windows and Linux: if someone puts a backdoor into Linux, someone will eventually find it. Once it is found, I can eliminate it, rebuild the kernel, and get back up and running safely within minutes.
In fairness, it must be pointed out that the Jargon File mentions a famous hack, where Ken Thompson put an undetectable backdoor into a version of *NIX. Does anyone know a reason to assume that they same hack couldn't be inserted into a binary distribution of Linux? I'm just trying to keep things fair.
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Microsoft has been pounding on the word "innovate" and the phrase "freedom to innovate" so hard in an attempt to beat it either into submission, or to bend it into meaning what they want it to mean. There is innovation going on at Microsoft, in their graphics research division, but damned little of it to do with Windows.
They seem to have adopted Musolini's theory of "The Big Lie" that if you shout something at people loud enough and long enough that eventually they will will believe it, no matter how perposterous.
Read the COurtney Love piece or the Steve Albini piece. That is NOT take home pay. Out of the artist's share comes all the costs of recording the record and all the promotional copies that get sent out to the radio stations and a million other niggling, petty deductions including (I am not making this up) a deduction for "shellec breakage". Yes, a percentage for 78 RPM releases breaking in shipment.
The RIAA member companies employ the same creative accounting techniques that the MPAA member companies do, where a film can cost $100 million to make, sell $200 million in tickets and "not make a profit".
The best thing that can happen to artists is the demise of the "music industry".
Because Hotline is a pain. Yes, it's simple enough to use and has potential, but the reality is pretty unpleasant to use. You find that someone has something you're interested in. You have to see what particular hoops you have to jump through to get access "...go to this web site and sign up for this spam-bait..." To hell with that. I share over AudioGalaxy and Napster and the BearShare Gnutella client because I like to share, not to try to make a nickle from people.
Probably, but if you're interested in MP3s, and are not looking for movies or warez, everything else is less of a pain.
There already is one: Folding @ Home. (As potential contact with aliens seems to be well handled at the moment, I'm going to be moving my spare cycles over to this.)
Possibly, but given the gentleman in questions age and history, the task he was trying to accomplish and the fact that speed was of the essense - I'd be shocked if he wrote anything other than the browser in a higher-level language. I can understand the confusion, but from my reading of the article, I came away with the impression that he wrote the Assembler program in Assembly.
Replying to my own posting, it appears that in a previous incarnation, Jim Kent was the author of the FLC/FLI animation format. That must be why the named was so familiar.
Agreed, he likely brought a huge amount of pre-existing skill in matrix math. But 10k lines of assembly language hacking to beat richly funded capitalists with super-computers in four weeks is a truely amazing hack, no matter what their skill level.
BTW, his home page doesn't say: anyone know what graphics software worked on before? The name seems familiar - I think he used to hack math for a package called Digital Arts, but I could be wrong.
What's disturbing is that academic institutions are being forced to compete with commercial enterprises that, frankly, should not exist. The idea of a commercial enterprise doing something as important to the entire human race as the sequencing of the genome with the intention to control distribution of the resulting science is deeply offensive. Just because you can make money doing something doesn't make it right.
Not true. As long as the performance rights society gets it's cut (ASCAP or BMI in the US) you can perform any song for the public and record it and sell the recordings. A friend of mine put together a "tribute" album of covers of a particular artist. He pays a percentage of each CD sale to BMI (the performance rights society for this artist) and everything is hunky-dory.
He does that, but he does not need to do that. As long as the copyright on the tunes is paid, he can cover the song and modify the lyrics. The fact that it is a parody gives him even more rights than a straight cover, as the Supreme Court has affirmed that parody and satire have a special protected status greater than other material (see Larry Flynt vs Jerry Falwell and Two Live Crew vs the estate of Roy Orbison).
I have no idea why Al bothers to ask permission, other than the fact that he is a nice guy.
Not true. There are thousands of cover bands all over the world covering famous songs, lame lounge singers singing Billy Joel songs, etc. As long as the venue has paid ASCAP and BMI for the rights to the songs (look for the decal for each on the window of your favorite club) you can listen to a bunch of fat 50ish guys in bad Hawaiian shirts who are not Jimmy Buffet spend the whole evening covering Jimmy Buffet songs.
Thery're not, agreed. But then, Les was recording onto 8-track analog tape and was going to be bouncing many times...I doubt if he recorded lead vocals there, just extra little vocal bits.
You can get a deader sounding room, but not a good room. And dead sound doesn't make the room actually quieter. The acoustic treatment doesn't have to be expensive, but making the walls thick is. There's a reason people building recording studios use isolated stud construction, construct floating slab floors...and it's not just to spend money.
That does not give you the mass necessary to actually block outside sounds. Much of the new home studio equipment is 24bit/96khz with a dynamic range. What you propose might work fine for recording a punk band that is not using the lower end of the dynamic range possible. But if an artist plans to have quiet bits, where for instance there is nothing but a single acoustic guitar string being plucked...then styrofoam just isn't going to cut it. You need isolated stud construction with multiple layers of sheetrock to block outside sound, and the deadness of a bunch of '70s era carpet-covered walls just isn't going to make that string sing. You need diffusion.
A lot of successful artists eventually built their own studios, but they usually couldn't afford it until they were successful. That was too late, as they had already signed a contract that gave the record company the ownership of the actual recordings, a right they gave up to get that first recording session. Now, they can create the recordings right from the start, and lease the master to the record company.
I hate to quote Karl Marx, who was a doofus in most respects, but he was right about the "workers controlling the means of production". Lots of artists (Frank Zappa for instance) have had to fight to regain ownership of their own work. The really offensive part is that standard record company contracts require the costs of the recording to come out of the artist's share of the royalties...and then the company owns the recording.
The main problem, scarcely touched on in the article, is that while the equipment is cheap, architecture is still expensive. The most expensive part of a recording studio is a good sounding room. A great, inexpensive large-diaphram condenser mic won't do you any good for recording vocals if people can hear a passing bus in the background, or if your voice sounds flat from mediocre acoustics. And don't even think of recording drums in most rooms.
Sampling works fine if that's your kind of music, but it doesn't work for all genres. But most of the artists I know are working this way now...even the ones who have traditionally worked in huge, expensive studios. The inventor of multi-tracking, Les Paul was also the father of the home studio. He had microphone lines all over the house to be able to record anywhere...he even had a mic hanging over the sink in case he needed a quick vocal overdub while his wife Mary Ford was cooking dinner.
Understandable, but in this case the beta units have been in the hands of several of the most respected members of the AV Sciences Forum discussion group. This is a very high signal:noise group of home theater enthusiasts. They help each other out, party at trade shows, write excellent open-source software for video and other stuff. I'd have doubts too if these folks hadn't assured me that it is real, and works.
It's a hack, and a dammed clever one. Hopefully someone else will figure out how to interface the FireWire port this will add to the DTC-100 (and potentially any other HD reciever) to a FireWire card on a PC.
So pathetically true. The worst thing to ever happen to Sony was their purchase of Columbia/CBS. The vital Disney/Universal vs. Sony "Betamax" trial would have never happened if Sony had been in the movie business before. They are comprimised now. Panasonic made their DVHS recorder with a copy protection system, but the MPAA and it's thug Jack Valente pressured Panasonic to pull it from the market with the threat that MPAA member companies (all the big studios) would no longer buy Panasonic broadcast equipment.
They keep claiming this is about "copyright", but that is a lie. The 5C system the Panasonic DVHS had covered that perfectly well. This is about their desire to control what programs you can tape, how many time you can watch the tape, preventing you from fast-forwarding through the commercials (like the compulsary crap on DVDs) and preventing your from making copies.
Also, this is probably why Lucas is not releasing the Star Wars films on DVD. He wants to release it on this new DVHS system with horrible limitations, and per-viewing charges. Screw him and his greed.
This is DIVX all over again. Hollywood will not be happy until the "play" button is a "pay" button.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, I saw the new DataPlay format. A lot of money behind it, tiny, rugged and 250 megs per side for a total of 500 megs in DVD-R format in a protected case the size of a Smart Card. See it at this web page.
It does have optional "content protection" but it shouldn't stop people from using for their own material. The engineers I talked with seemed pretty open to drivers being written for various operating systems (they want to sell hardware). Come September, expect to see these suckers all over the place.
I've seen prototype digital speakers at the Consumer Electronics Show and CEDIA two years ago. Meridian is selling one currently with "copyright protection" built in. The DMCA specifically covers using FireWire for the connection between the sound source, the reciever and the speakers.
Any particular reason you do that? The folks who hang out at the AV Sciences Forum web site can easily afford stand-alone DVD players, and choose to build home theater PCs. I consult with a high-end audio-video dealership, I go to all the trade shows like CES and CEDIA and I can assure you - a good software DVD player in a well-assembled PC delivers a better picture than any stand-alone player currently on the market (there are some pieces in prototype form that may change that when they are released).
Use software player, like WinDVD 2000 or PowerDVD, through a GeForce2 MX video card & PowerStrip scaling the picture up to the "sweet spot" of a front projector. Run it at 72 or 96 or even 120 hz to multiply the 24 fps of a film-based DVD to avoid 3:2 pull-down artifacts.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I wouldn't use a stand-alone DVD player if you paid me.
Visit the AV Sciences Forum, home for those of us who measure our monitors in feet!
In the same way that steam was once the principle area of technological innovation, that iron was, it's possible that silicon has peaked. Fine. Everything has it's day. Maybe optical computing will the the next nexus of technological innovation. Or biology. Or something that we cannot imagine.
At one point just after the turn of the last century, there was a call to shut down the patent office because "everything that can be invented already has" (now we have different reasons to want to shut it down!)
That's why it's called "innovation"...because it's stuff that we don't know about yet. This article, if the writer is unlucky, may one day have the same sort of notority that Vannervar Bush had with his vision of a few huge computers, with acres of vacumn tubes, cooled by Niagras of water.
What we have now is nothing compared to what we will have soon.
The killer isn't the player charge. The paperwork and hassles involved in the licencing is what will really cause manufacturers to move to OGG. That, and the freedom to modify it. That's why the Tivo runs on Linux. It isn't as if Microsoft hasn't been trying to get into that market for years. But why licence something if you can download and use for free? Any hassles with the GPL are barely noticable compared to working out a licencing agreement with Fraunhoffer and Thompson.
I talked to several different hardware manufacturers at the most recent CEDIA show. Every single one of the engineers, executives and salespeople I talked to was very interested in OGG Vorbis. They have no particular love of Thomsom or Fraunhoffer. A free encoder and decoder means they can sell their product for less and get a larger share of the market, make more money and buy their baby a new pair of shoes!
I'll be spending an equal amount of time at the COnsumer Electronics Show doing the same thing. I might even make business cards with a description of the Vorbis project and URLs. As soon as the code is optimized, it will appear in commercial products. It doesn't even have to sound better than MP3, just as good as MP3.
The big product at this year's CES will be home audio jukeboxes. Virtually every one of these will be running some version of GNU/Linux. Why? Because it's free...and you can get loads of programmers practically begging you to work on the project. The only thing keeping the price from dropping and getting it into homes is the MP3 licencing issue. That is delt with via Vorbis.
We'll see MP3 jukeboxes with 9 gig IDE drives designed to hook up to your home network in the $399 price range if they choose to go the Linux/Vorbis route.
Give me a 100 megabit wireless network, and I'll consider it. Until then, I'll stick with wires.
One of the most telling things about the thing's vapor status, is the improbable reverse curve display. Especially obvious on the zoomed view of the alleged device. God help us all when industrial designers get ahold of displays that can be bent and formed into convex and concave shapes.
Yep, the only type of person stupid enough to possibly fall for this is a Wall Street investor.
Dreadful ergonomics too. This is an example not of ergonomic design, but of the insidious and evil "ergonomic style" design. Not actually good or comfortable to use, it just has to losely resemble stuff that does. Blegh!
This whole debate ignore the dymanic nature of language. "English" isn't a plot by english speakers to establish global control. People learn english in order to buy into that power. English speakers use so many words from other languages that the language can't be said to have evolved so much as congealed.
It's virtually impossible to go through a day in the US without using at least a couple of words that have filtered into US english from other languages. And that's the way it should be. Dr. Samuel Johnson, when he published the first english dictionary, dispaired that people would try to use it as an authority; that it would define the language. He understood that no language in static except a dead one.
A larger point is not the trustability of various Linux binary distributions, but that the Founding Editor of LinuxWorld magazine did not seem to be aware of this very well known hack. I guess I just assumed that anyone who had been around as long as he had would have read the Jargon file or one of the printed "New Hacker's Dictionary" editions. It's generally considered one of the most ingenious hacks ever perpetrated...by one of the fathers of *NIX.
Nick wrote:
In fairness, it must be pointed out that the Jargon File mentions a famous hack, where Ken Thompson put an undetectable backdoor into a version of *NIX. Does anyone know a reason to assume that they same hack couldn't be inserted into a binary distribution of Linux? I'm just trying to keep things fair.