I dunno, that's kinda disingenuous... I think by saying binaries group, the parent's not just saying usenet, but more an umbrella term for what pretty much all internet gamers do:
(check one of the following): Hang out on irc, read usenet, hang out in gaming forums that also share ftps, use p2p software (DC, ed2k, waste, even hotline), use bittorrent.
My stance on this is a little different from my stance music DRM... Copy-protection for video games is just flat out wrong. Mark my words: The more draconian the copy protection the faster the exodus from the PC to the console. The phoning home and cd checks, and the old manual checks, code wheels, glitched sectors etc, all of these are easily defeatable AND unlike music and movies which are only now being copied en masse, games have been getting traded since the hobby micro-computer. These foisted inconveniences only SPUR ON the crack scene which in turn facilitates piracy. The forced upgrade cycle to complete buggy software and break current cracks also spur on the crack scene and abuse gamer sentiment. Industrial piracy is a Law Enforcement Issue -- not an End User issue.
Again: Inconvenient/intrusive copy protection schemes 1) drives the crack scene which in turn drives piracy (both casual, and 'industrial') 2) Drives PC gamers to consoles.
(Which, amusingly, defeats publishers justification for these systems in the first place.)
I want one of these so bad that my wife hides and destroys any ads or circulars in the paper and post for these. TiVos with burners. I have to have one.:) A 4.7gig disc will hold lots of 'medium quality' Daily Shows... so I wouldn't say the dual-layer thing is a big issue. You could fit more than one iFC movie recorded at 'high quality' on a dvd-r.
I've had a series 1, and upgraded to a series 2, and I've not had the hassles you've described... but as for a way to handing the "Channels I recieve" issue it's pretty easy...
After you've switched your guide to the tivo guide, and not the directv grid just do this:
Go into channels I receive, click select on any channels you know you don't get or you know you hate -- QVC for example.
If you don't know what the channel is... press 'live tv' once and then tune in that channel. if you don't get it or don't like it press 'left' once... it will pop you back to 'channels i receive' then you can just deselect that one and move on.
TiVo will remember the channels you don't recieve/don't like even through lineup changes and channel additions and deletions.
I've found that by whittling my channels list down to the ones I watch the most, and cutting out the fluff it makes it more likely that when I flip on the tv it will already be buffering up something I like.
"The data used to produce this highly detailed analysis is derived from anonymous and aggregate data collected when TiVo DVRs make a daily phone call to the company's broadcast center to retrieve and download programming information," the company says.
Holy crap that's old news. You couldn't dig up a newer article than that one? Something more definitive, like some actual viewing habits of... I dunno, me?
Frankly, I WANT TiVo to tell the powers that be what I watch and don't watch, and what commercials I skip. "Why?" I'm sure you're not asking, because maybe then Sci-Fi wouldn't cancel popular shows like Farscape;-( And... by knowing what commercials I skip through the shows I record wouldn't be full of Cialis ads.
That's all. Hardly "vigilantism", "stealing", or even "raping" (as one swivel-eyed zealot claimed on one forum I read - what is it with computer users that they insist on devaluing one of the worst crimes short of killing someone can commit against another human being?)
Without other facilities to emote (facial expression, body language) users of textual mediums often use loaded words. These words are powerful tools to evoke emotion. Hence peoples insistence on using terms like 'nuke', 'rape', 'own', 'whore', 'nazi', 'kill' in the most innocuous discussions.
If I say "your in it for the money" but you can't hear me shouting and turning red and shaking my fist, I better just resort to calling you a whore.
Frankly, I hope that question was rhetorical. In short, people use the word rape for the same reason they use the word fuck.
But you're telling me that DRM exists for its own sake, to protect Apple from direct competition. Just like CSS on a DVD. It's to ensure complete control of the industry, not to protect actors salaries or hollywood.
I don't know that anyone is saying that DRM exists for DRM's sake. DRM surely doesn't exist to protect Apple from competition. If anything the different DRM formats are competing in the 'free' market right now; And that's what this is about (Real wants you to think it's DRM content store is better so buy from us!).
There is no technical reason you can't start your own non-DRM content store, just the catch is -- you won't be able to offer music from artists that fall under the RIAA's umbrella (and increasingly Indy labels that want to play with the big boys). If you have a stable full of artists that are either releasing their music into the public domain (and hence don't need you) or that operate on a copyrights trust then go for it!
I can't say that DRM on it's face is evil. The problem is the popular DRM schemes often conflict with established Fair Use. If you look at it pragmatically, there isn't anything wrong with trying to retain some copyrights over a product as liquid as non-corporeal digital media. However, the whole concept is being abused by the 'intellectual property' barons as feudal land grab. I wish we could just use the good old honor system -- and just assume that everyone is law-abiding. The fact is, people copy music and we have laws that say it's wrong. As artists and their handlers feel more and more threatened by this activity DRM will be increasingly used as deterrent.
Microsoft's sample product and royalty schedule says 25 cents for audio codec plus another 25 cents to network read (stream).
That's a 2 cent difference.
The licensing agreement also includes verbage that says 'you will also pay a royalty schedule for Plays Windows Media Logo License'... so maybe that's where the scales tip past the 2 cents.
Anyhow, MS says, "oooo WMA costs half as much as mpeg-4 for video!!"... makes you wonder why it's not an ISO if it's so great and cheap.
If you are a WMA licensee I'd be interested to know what your real costs are.
Yeah - actually over here http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lice nse.terms.html it lets us know that Apple spends about 62 cents for each copy of iTunes (or more technically, for each OS X install, since the codec will be a lib framework available to all software and users on the machine). The cost is for software.
Windows varieties will all have this cost covered (and could be even less as MS ships more units).
So, fwiw, your parent poster there was correct when he claimed that Vorbis was the only "free and open" codec, as that's actually the case, it was released to the public domain. Mpeg4-aac is an open spec (not proprietary), but it's not free.
I hate to make posts like these... but you are repeatedly using the word 'adapter' incorrectly.
What you are trying to say is "early adopters". You know 'adopt' to take on, not 'adapt' to change.
Grammar aside, it was not the Mac zealots that brought iTMS to where it is today. In truth it was really just regular old consumers. From your fiery rhetoric of the past I'm sure you will spit on those advertising-manipulated sheep as being just as worthless as "Mac zealots". The point you have to recognize, however, is that the mass market is what drives the success or failure of new technology.
If the mass market is ok with Fairplay, it will 'win', for better or for worse.
We're all holier than they -- but the little minority that bitches and moans on slashdot does not swing world markets.
Re:Data from Startrek TNG played poker
on
Geeks and Poker?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Geek alert:
I assure you, commander, the cards have been sufficiently randomized.
It seems that wasn't his goal at all. People in his forums were bending over backward to try and help him, and he eventually capitulates to say "I didn't want your help"... So in essence he's saying 'well crap on you people who offer free support, I just want it to work". So it doesn't matter whether the responses were genuine, 'rtfm', 'pebkac' or even 'stfu', he doesn't want "our" help.
Isn't 'It just works' the sort of attitude that should be driving him to get a powermac;)
$1000 a month would barely cover rent in tech inflated areas, or the area surrounding creativity based industries. Rent for a crappy apartment in NY: $800 a month. Rent for a crappy apartment in Atlanta: $600 a month. Rent for a crappy apartment in the Valley, $1000 a month.
Get real, $12kpy is well below the poverty line for most states (if not all of them, I'm sure google can answer that one).
As an un-employed tech worker who's going back to school -- I can tell you right now that 25k would be enough to squeak by, if your wife is doing better than you. And 20 would be the lowest you could consider and not live in HUD housing. IIUC, out sourced call center and tech workers make like 6-8000 a year, which is only enough to starve on here in the states.
I disagree with the lag over a modem with ssh. That just sounds foolish -- I mean how fast is the getty on your console set? (I'll tip you off: the default is usually 38400.)
Secondly, to avoid your hangup troubles, use 'screen(1)' on that remote machine, then if you do get dropped while working, you just reconnect, and connect back to the screen. I remotely edit website using mindterm (great java ssh client) this way all the time -- logging in typing 'screen bash' and then getting to work. All osx macs have screen too! go ahead try it!
I'll agree on X over a modem... It NEEDS compression: google for 'nx compression'.
Attacked? It's an alternate frontend, not a decryption device.... All that has changed is that the potential number of users has been increased because you no longer need to use MacOS or Windows to run the official iTunes client.
This is totally false. Sorry. This software downloads Apple's (relatively) high bitrate 30 second previews. It DOES NOT FACILITATE PURCHASE OR DOWNLOAD OF AUTHORIZED PURCHASES.
So - in case you didn't absorb anything from the article: this software will facilitate non-itunes user's and non-itms customer's use of iTMS resources.
Whether the use of such resources is 'wrong' or 'fair use' really depends on the eula you agree to or ignore or argue is unenforceable. I'm not judging -- I'm just trying to focus the discussion.
I have found having 20 or 30 AOL users call AOL's tech support screaming about AOL bouncing importiant mail as spam gets you off the list fairly quickly.
This statement is pretty much false. I am a now retired 7 year veteran of the Tech and CAT dept's at AOL (jax south). Anyone screaming about not getting email because their host is blacklisted has to follow the same procedure that the other sensible and honest posters have mentioned. You have the mail administrator responsible contact tech support and the post master. Tech support files an email problem report from the information you provide this is first line, you will then recieve email or a phone call from a noc guy that handles mail, and if problems persists you contact the 703 number or the use the postmaster website as instructed.
Irate callers get nothing but a soothing voice repeating that we need the responsible party to contact us as soon as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience. I guess until they push a coach or maybe agm over the edge, at which point they get a stern repetition, an inquiry if we can help with any other issues, and if not, then silence. At that point, they can move on to other business or hang up.
I agree with your point, but given that many of the p2p files are actually being distributed BEFORE they are being released, I don't see how correctly time-limiting the copyright system is going to impact the damage done (perceived or real) by p2p apps.
Since at least 1976 (or was it an earlier copyright bill?) any creative work is 'automagically' copyrighted. Its date of release is irrelevant.
The time limit on copyright is to allow for Americans to build upon the public domain as many great entrepreneurs until the beginning of the 20th century could. Lessig's Free Culture has a great discussion of this.
If the term of copyright had remained more or less inline with the Framer's vision I could be remixing music from the 50s WITH NO PENALTY. Wait that was off topic -- kids could be trading all media prior to 1960 WITH NO PENALTY.
Any discussion about copyright is really about the Public Domain and what shall and shall not exist in it.
The bottle neck of a Modem is SO SMALL that on any modern machine processing power is irrelevant. So called 'web accelerators' do two things to improve perceived performance: they cache popular web content (this reduces dns lookup latency, routing latency) and in many cases recompress images with more compressed jpegs and if the browser supports it compresses the html as well. The net effect is that you squeeze 40 to 50k out of the website on the isp end (with all the processing overhead that entails on THEIR end) before sending over the modem.
The last machines that decoded a jpeg at less than 5 KBps were 386's -- and how many of those had 32bit displays?
So anyhow, the short version is when talking about 'netburst' and 'webcellerator' and 'aolhighspeed' the 5 KBps bottle neck of an average modem is such a huge limiting factor that processor is not an issue.
If you are talking about huge bandwidth like gig-e and greater, then you have to have a processor and bus fast enough to support the throughput. This is why the advertisements that lean toward "faster computer faster downloads!" are misleading.
And to quickly address soft modems: any g4 or pentium3 is beyond powerful enough for v.92 softmodems. The speed of the processor does not effect connection speed, line quality does.
For those of you who are too young to remember, Microsoft's marketing people destroyed the market for GeoWindows (a far better GUI), DRDOS, WordPerfect Suite, OS/2 and many other far superior packages...
Geoworks Ensemble (as referred to in a previous post) for the PC was a derivation of the previous GEOS for Commodores and early Apples. It was a gui that was available prior to Windows 1.0 -- and at the same time was more advanced than Windows 1.0. It always befuddles me when I think about what happened back in the PC/XT days. I mean so many companies kind of rolled over - Geoworks was superior to the Windows of it's day up until about Win3.1 -- at which point without 3rd party vendors creating new software for Geos it just started to fade away. The Geos folks just weren't far sighted enough to publicly release api's etc. Having AOL and a couple spreadsheet guys just wasn't enough to keep them on the map. I'd say once AOL left Geos their coffin was nailed shut.
I think everyone is familiar enough with the os/2 situation that I don't need to rehash it. Sheesh.
If you want to play an aac file an 'mp3 player' (term used genericly) that isn't an ipod - this is what you do:
Plug in the mp3 player.
Click on the song/songs you bought. click 'Advanced', then click 'Convert Selection to MP3'.
Wait.
Drag mp3's out of iTunes, on to mp3 player.
In fact -- you can use these same steps to convert any format that iTunes reads into an mp3 or your non ipod mp3 player. Anyhow, the only problem is when the DRM battle has escalated to the point where there are no longer mp3 players on the market, then you will have to make a choice between camps.
Eventually, labor costs will hit bottom. After moving manufacturing from Mexico to China to Vietnam, companies are starting to hit the floor in those costs. Outsourcing development and accounting and everything else to India will eventually move down the ladder until a Bantu tribesman is doing your taxes, which amount to over 50% of your miniumum wage salary that you earned working in the food service or retail industry -- the only jobs left in the US.
I don't want to sound like a nut -- but in this projected future we won't even have the menial service sector jobs as they will be replaced by robots. I mean that in a loose sense, maybe not c3p0 robots, but vending machines, artificial burger makers and taco loaders, with smiling synthetic 'user interface' droids behind the counter, or virtual counter. The point I'm making is the humans we 'need' in America today to do the menial work will gradually be replaced by robots (owned by who else?) at the same time that all but the highest executive decisions are being outsourced. Leaving the so-called First World with huge levels of un-employment, and un-employability.
In fact, some even believe that a certain level of Management will become automated by expert systems, etc.
In the end, we'll all need to start thinking about post-capitalism: there is a point when labor will cost nothing, and management will cost nothing. The only part left will be innovation - and there's someone thinking about the automated system for that as well.
(oh - and I know one of you is saying "well who will take care of the robots, or make the robots or whatever. And the answer is: duh, the robots. If a robot can build a car, there's no reason it can't build another robot. We already have computerized maintenance, just replace the intermediary.)
Slashdot Mirror
And yet in Canada, many leave their doors unlocked... Does it lead to more or less theft than where you live?
I dunno, that's kinda disingenuous... I think by saying binaries group, the parent's not just saying usenet, but more an umbrella term for what pretty much all internet gamers do:
(check one of the following): Hang out on irc, read usenet, hang out in gaming forums that also share ftps, use p2p software (DC, ed2k, waste, even hotline), use bittorrent.
My stance on this is a little different from my stance music DRM... Copy-protection for video games is just flat out wrong. Mark my words: The more draconian the copy protection the faster the exodus from the PC to the console. The phoning home and cd checks, and the old manual checks, code wheels, glitched sectors etc, all of these are easily defeatable AND unlike music and movies which are only now being copied en masse, games have been getting traded since the hobby micro-computer. These foisted inconveniences only SPUR ON the crack scene which in turn facilitates piracy. The forced upgrade cycle to complete buggy software and break current cracks also spur on the crack scene and abuse gamer sentiment. Industrial piracy is a Law Enforcement Issue -- not an End User issue.
Again: Inconvenient/intrusive copy protection schemes 1) drives the crack scene which in turn drives piracy (both casual, and 'industrial') 2) Drives PC gamers to consoles.
(Which, amusingly, defeats publishers justification for these systems in the first place.)
I want one of these so bad that my wife hides and destroys any ads or circulars in the paper and post for these. TiVos with burners. I have to have one. :) A 4.7gig disc will hold lots of 'medium quality' Daily Shows... so I wouldn't say the dual-layer thing is a big issue. You could fit more than one iFC movie recorded at 'high quality' on a dvd-r.
I've had a series 1, and upgraded to a series 2, and I've not had the hassles you've described... but as for a way to handing the "Channels I recieve" issue it's pretty easy...
... press 'live tv' once and then tune in that channel. if you don't get it or don't like it press 'left' once... it will pop you back to 'channels i receive' then you can just deselect that one and move on.
After you've switched your guide to the tivo guide, and not the directv grid just do this:
Go into channels I receive, click select on any channels you know you don't get or you know you hate -- QVC for example.
If you don't know what the channel is
TiVo will remember the channels you don't recieve/don't like even through lineup changes and channel additions and deletions.
I've found that by whittling my channels list down to the ones I watch the most, and cutting out the fluff it makes it more likely that when I flip on the tv it will already be buffering up something I like.
"The data used to produce this highly detailed analysis is derived from anonymous and aggregate data collected when TiVo DVRs make a daily phone call to the company's broadcast center to retrieve and download programming information," the company says.
... I dunno, me?
;-( And ... by knowing what commercials I skip through the shows I record wouldn't be full of Cialis ads.
Holy crap that's old news. You couldn't dig up a newer article than that one? Something more definitive, like some actual viewing habits of
Frankly, I WANT TiVo to tell the powers that be what I watch and don't watch, and what commercials I skip. "Why?" I'm sure you're not asking, because maybe then Sci-Fi wouldn't cancel popular shows like Farscape
That's all. Hardly "vigilantism", "stealing", or even "raping" (as one swivel-eyed zealot claimed on one forum I read - what is it with computer users that they insist on devaluing one of the worst crimes short of killing someone can commit against another human being?)
Without other facilities to emote (facial expression, body language) users of textual mediums often use loaded words. These words are powerful tools to evoke emotion. Hence peoples insistence on using terms like 'nuke', 'rape', 'own', 'whore', 'nazi', 'kill' in the most innocuous discussions.
If I say "your in it for the money" but you can't hear me shouting and turning red and shaking my fist, I better just resort to calling you a whore.
Frankly, I hope that question was rhetorical. In short, people use the word rape for the same reason they use the word fuck.
I don't know that anyone is saying that DRM exists for DRM's sake. DRM surely doesn't exist to protect Apple from competition. If anything the different DRM formats are competing in the 'free' market right now; And that's what this is about (Real wants you to think it's DRM content store is better so buy from us!).
There is no technical reason you can't start your own non-DRM content store, just the catch is -- you won't be able to offer music from artists that fall under the RIAA's umbrella (and increasingly Indy labels that want to play with the big boys). If you have a stable full of artists that are either releasing their music into the public domain (and hence don't need you) or that operate on a copyrights trust then go for it!
I can't say that DRM on it's face is evil. The problem is the popular DRM schemes often conflict with established Fair Use. If you look at it pragmatically, there isn't anything wrong with trying to retain some copyrights over a product as liquid as non-corporeal digital media. However, the whole concept is being abused by the 'intellectual property' barons as feudal land grab. I wish we could just use the good old honor system -- and just assume that everyone is law-abiding. The fact is, people copy music and we have laws that say it's wrong. As artists and their handlers feel more and more threatened by this activity DRM will be increasingly used as deterrent.
Sorry for going on a riff.
Just for the record: Apple didn't develop FairPlay with "[their own] R&D money and facilities". Apple bought the technology outright.
Now that's hilarious!
YOU are needing my wisdoms BAD!!
As I was saying to your child poster the royalty for mpeg4-aac is about 52 cents for the codec.
e nse.terms.html a logueDetail?CSNUMBER=36083&ICS1=35&ICS2=40&ICS 3=
... so maybe that's where the scales tip past the 2 cents.
royalties: http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lic
spec: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.Cat
Microsoft's sample product and royalty schedule says 25 cents for audio codec plus another 25 cents to network read (stream).
That's a 2 cent difference.
The licensing agreement also includes verbage that says 'you will also pay a royalty schedule for Plays Windows Media Logo License'
Anyhow, MS says, "oooo WMA costs half as much as mpeg-4 for video!!"... makes you wonder why it's not an ISO if it's so great and cheap.
If you are a WMA licensee I'd be interested to know what your real costs are.
Yeah - actually over here http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lice nse.terms.html it lets us know that Apple spends about 62 cents for each copy of iTunes (or more technically, for each OS X install, since the codec will be a lib framework available to all software and users on the machine). The cost is for software.
:)
Windows varieties will all have this cost covered (and could be even less as MS ships more units).
So, fwiw, your parent poster there was correct when he claimed that Vorbis was the only "free and open" codec, as that's actually the case, it was released to the public domain. Mpeg4-aac is an open spec (not proprietary), but it's not free.
Sorry for nitpicking you...
I hate to make posts like these ... but you are repeatedly using the word 'adapter' incorrectly.
What you are trying to say is "early adopters". You know 'adopt' to take on, not 'adapt' to change.
Grammar aside, it was not the Mac zealots that brought iTMS to where it is today. In truth it was really just regular old consumers. From your fiery rhetoric of the past I'm sure you will spit on those advertising-manipulated sheep as being just as worthless as "Mac zealots". The point you have to recognize, however, is that the mass market is what drives the success or failure of new technology.
If the mass market is ok with Fairplay, it will 'win', for better or for worse.
We're all holier than they -- but the little minority that bitches and moans on slashdot does not swing world markets.
Geek alert:
I assure you, commander, the cards have been sufficiently randomized.
The episode is Cause and Effect.
We invaded Iraq because "Saddam Hussein [possessed] weapons of mass destruction."
When our president gave the ultimatum for Hussein and his family to leave Iraq, they did not leave. This ultimatum was not a UN Resolution.
Excellent post on Langa's talkback forum
It seems that wasn't his goal at all. People in his forums were bending over backward to try and help him, and he eventually capitulates to say "I didn't want your help"... So in essence he's saying 'well crap on you people who offer free support, I just want it to work". So it doesn't matter whether the responses were genuine, 'rtfm', 'pebkac' or even 'stfu', he doesn't want "our" help.
Isn't 'It just works' the sort of attitude that should be driving him to get a powermac ;)
"Intellectual property" isn't property. I won't challenge you to change my mind, but regardless of your dismissal of the point, it is still valid.
The very term itself is an example of its bias.
A painting is property, its subject is not.
A list of instructions is property, but the algorithm is not.
Paintings and lists are copyrightable. Ideas are not.
Finally, I thought this thread was about patents, not copyright. Ha.
Get real, $12kpy is well below the poverty line for most states (if not all of them, I'm sure google can answer that one).
As an un-employed tech worker who's going back to school -- I can tell you right now that 25k would be enough to squeak by, if your wife is doing better than you. And 20 would be the lowest you could consider and not live in HUD housing. IIUC, out sourced call center and tech workers make like 6-8000 a year, which is only enough to starve on here in the states.
Oh crap, Did I respond to a troll?
Secondly, to avoid your hangup troubles, use 'screen(1)' on that remote machine, then if you do get dropped while working, you just reconnect, and connect back to the screen. I remotely edit website using mindterm (great java ssh client) this way all the time -- logging in typing 'screen bash' and then getting to work. All osx macs have screen too! go ahead try it!
I'll agree on X over a modem... It NEEDS compression: google for 'nx compression'.
This is totally false. Sorry. This software downloads Apple's (relatively) high bitrate 30 second previews. It DOES NOT FACILITATE PURCHASE OR DOWNLOAD OF AUTHORIZED PURCHASES.
So - in case you didn't absorb anything from the article: this software will facilitate non-itunes user's and non-itms customer's use of iTMS resources.
Whether the use of such resources is 'wrong' or 'fair use' really depends on the eula you agree to or ignore or argue is unenforceable. I'm not judging -- I'm just trying to focus the discussion.
This statement is pretty much false. I am a now retired 7 year veteran of the Tech and CAT dept's at AOL (jax south). Anyone screaming about not getting email because their host is blacklisted has to follow the same procedure that the other sensible and honest posters have mentioned. You have the mail administrator responsible contact tech support and the post master. Tech support files an email problem report from the information you provide this is first line, you will then recieve email or a phone call from a noc guy that handles mail, and if problems persists you contact the 703 number or the use the postmaster website as instructed.
Irate callers get nothing but a soothing voice repeating that we need the responsible party to contact us as soon as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience. I guess until they push a coach or maybe agm over the edge, at which point they get a stern repetition, an inquiry if we can help with any other issues, and if not, then silence. At that point, they can move on to other business or hang up.
The time limit on copyright is to allow for Americans to build upon the public domain as many great entrepreneurs until the beginning of the 20th century could. Lessig's Free Culture has a great discussion of this.
If the term of copyright had remained more or less inline with the Framer's vision I could be remixing music from the 50s WITH NO PENALTY. Wait that was off topic -- kids could be trading all media prior to 1960 WITH NO PENALTY.
Any discussion about copyright is really about the Public Domain and what shall and shall not exist in it.
The bottle neck of a Modem is SO SMALL that on any modern machine processing power is irrelevant. So called 'web accelerators' do two things to improve perceived performance: they cache popular web content (this reduces dns lookup latency, routing latency) and in many cases recompress images with more compressed jpegs and if the browser supports it compresses the html as well. The net effect is that you squeeze 40 to 50k out of the website on the isp end (with all the processing overhead that entails on THEIR end) before sending over the modem.
The last machines that decoded a jpeg at less than 5 KBps were 386's -- and how many of those had 32bit displays?
So anyhow, the short version is when talking about 'netburst' and 'webcellerator' and 'aolhighspeed' the 5 KBps bottle neck of an average modem is such a huge limiting factor that processor is not an issue.
If you are talking about huge bandwidth like gig-e and greater, then you have to have a processor and bus fast enough to support the throughput. This is why the advertisements that lean toward "faster computer faster downloads!" are misleading.
And to quickly address soft modems: any g4 or pentium3 is beyond powerful enough for v.92 softmodems. The speed of the processor does not effect connection speed, line quality does.
Geoworks Ensemble (as referred to in a previous post) for the PC was a derivation of the previous GEOS for Commodores and early Apples. It was a gui that was available prior to Windows 1.0 -- and at the same time was more advanced than Windows 1.0. It always befuddles me when I think about what happened back in the PC/XT days. I mean so many companies kind of rolled over - Geoworks was superior to the Windows of it's day up until about Win3.1 -- at which point without 3rd party vendors creating new software for Geos it just started to fade away. The Geos folks just weren't far sighted enough to publicly release api's etc. Having AOL and a couple spreadsheet guys just wasn't enough to keep them on the map. I'd say once AOL left Geos their coffin was nailed shut.
I think everyone is familiar enough with the os/2 situation that I don't need to rehash it. Sheesh.
If you want to play an aac file an 'mp3 player' (term used genericly) that isn't an ipod - this is what you do:
In fact -- you can use these same steps to convert any format that iTunes reads into an mp3 or your non ipod mp3 player. Anyhow, the only problem is when the DRM battle has escalated to the point where there are no longer mp3 players on the market, then you will have to make a choice between camps.
I don't want to sound like a nut -- but in this projected future we won't even have the menial service sector jobs as they will be replaced by robots. I mean that in a loose sense, maybe not c3p0 robots, but vending machines, artificial burger makers and taco loaders, with smiling synthetic 'user interface' droids behind the counter, or virtual counter. The point I'm making is the humans we 'need' in America today to do the menial work will gradually be replaced by robots (owned by who else?) at the same time that all but the highest executive decisions are being outsourced. Leaving the so-called First World with huge levels of un-employment, and un-employability.
In fact, some even believe that a certain level of Management will become automated by expert systems, etc.
In the end, we'll all need to start thinking about post-capitalism: there is a point when labor will cost nothing, and management will cost nothing. The only part left will be innovation - and there's someone thinking about the automated system for that as well.
(oh - and I know one of you is saying "well who will take care of the robots, or make the robots or whatever. And the answer is: duh, the robots. If a robot can build a car, there's no reason it can't build another robot. We already have computerized maintenance, just replace the intermediary.)