I've always liked how French telephones have a spare earpiece for another person to listen in with. So this feature seems like it could be useful when someone comes to my desk to work on something with me. With it I'd be able to offer them a spare keyboard and mouse and some screen real estate (or maybe my second monitor) so they wouldn't have to be totally high-and-dry from the 'net while there.
I have been using a North Face "Big Shot"
about a year with a Dell Inspiron 4150, it's great:
It has plenty of room for a laptop, a sweater and some books, plus handy side pockets for a camera and sundries.
AFAIK from discussions with Sony engineering, although every attempt was made to give Minidisc high fidelity, the fact that its use of audio compression made it inherently impossible to create a perfect copy was viewed by some as a subtle benefit. In launching the MD format, Sony needed to address recording industry concerns over content protection -- DAT had just suffered its fatal blow as a consumer format due to RIAA litigation (or threats of same) over exactly this issue.
As long as the MD firewall remains intact (preventing direct access to the compressed audio data) the lossy, assymetric nature of each decompression and recompression generation makes it a perfect copy protection scheme (in that no external signal hacking can defeat it).
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I've always liked how French telephones have a spare earpiece for another person to listen in with. So this feature seems like it could be useful when someone comes to my desk to work on something with me. With it I'd be able to offer them a spare keyboard and mouse and some screen real estate (or maybe my second monitor) so they wouldn't have to be totally high-and-dry from the 'net while there.
I have been using a North Face "Big Shot" about a year with a Dell Inspiron 4150, it's great: It has plenty of room for a laptop, a sweater and some books, plus handy side pockets for a camera and sundries.
As long as the MD firewall remains intact (preventing direct access to the compressed audio data) the lossy, assymetric nature of each decompression and recompression generation makes it a perfect copy protection scheme (in that no external signal hacking can defeat it).
Note that with special care, an audio codec can be designed to minimize generational loss (see Frank Kurth's paper (PDF)). See also a discussion of the MD generational loss problem and Minidisc.org for further general coverage of the Minidisc format.