Oh, I also forgot that there is the Apple security announcement mailing list which also exists in archive form. The archive is password protected to slow harvesting of e-mail addresses but they tell you how to access it right in the password question, just enter archives as the user name and archives as the password.
Apple mails out a detailed announcement every time they release a patch or a fix for a vunerablility. Anyone can sign up with the mailing list to receive these timely announcements automatically.
Security Update 2004-06-07 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. The purpose of this update is to increase security by alerting you when opening an application for the first time via document mappings or a web address (URL). For more details, including a description of the new alert dialog box, please see: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artn um=25785
Versions: Security Update 2004-06-07 is available for the following system versions: * Mac OS X v10.3.4 "Panther" * Mac OS X Server v10.3.4 "Panther" * Mac OS X v10.2.8 "Jaguar" * Mac OS X Server v10.2.8 "Jaguar"
The following components are updated:
Component: LaunchServices CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0538 Impact: LaunchServices automatically registers applications, which could be used to cause the system to run unexpected applications. Discussion: LaunchServices is a system component that discovers and opens applications. This system component has been modified to only open applications that have previously been explicitly run on the system. Attempts to run an application that has not previously been explicitly run will result in a user alert. Further information is available in http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=257 85
Component: DiskImageMounter CVE-ID: No CVE ID has been reserved as this is only an additional preventative measure. Impact: The disk:// URI type mounts an anonymous remote file system using the http protocol. Discussion: The registration of the disk:// URI type is removed from the system as a preventative measure against attempts to automatically mount remote disk image file systems.
Component: Safari CVE-ID: CAN-2004-0539 Impact: The "Show in Finder" button would open certain downloaded files, in some cases executing downloaded applications. Discussion: The "Show in Finder" button will now reveal files in a Finder window and will no longer attempt to open them. This modification is only available for Mac OS X v10.3.4 "Panther" and Mac OS X Server v10.3.4 "Panther" systems as the issue does not apply to Mac OS X v10.2.8 "Jaguar" or Mac OS X Server v10.2.8 "Jaguar".
Component: Terminal CVE-ID: Not applicable Impact: Attempts to use a telnet:// URI with an alternate port number fail. Discussion: A modification has been made to allow the specification of an alternate port number in a telnet:// URI. This restores functionality that was removed with the recent fix for CAN-2004-0485.
The silence over the recent security updates (and the resulting mocking of one-paragraph summaries Apple then decided to release) has lost a lot of people's respect.
Oh you mean something like this incredibly detailed list of every security update ever? The one which lists the CVE IDs of the vulnerabilities and which links to the appropriate discussion of the problem?
Apple has provided this list for quite some time as you can see by looking at what was fixed. It only took me a few seconds to get from Apple's main page to locate this list.
The explanations of the security problems when you download the patches are left sparse deliberately because there are housewives, kids, grandparents, and other non-techs reading the explanations. If you had a diatribe on every vulnerability that was patched then you'll take the chance that the users might get scared off from patching just due to the geek factor required to read the update notes.
Apple does the smart thing and gives a small, easy to read blurb about the update in the download notes. Anyone who needs more in-depth information can easily find it at the Apple support webpages.
The volume of a gallon varies by temperature? That's a new one.
I thought liquids (of a given mass) changed volume very little in relation to temperature and pressure.
If you look at this web site you can see the thermal coefficient of volume expansion for gasoline. It is approximately 950 * 10^-6 / degree C.
This means that if you have 10 gallons of gasoline at 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) and it warms to 95 degrees F (35 degrees C) then it will be:
DV = bVi DT 950 * 10^-6 * 10 gal * (35 - 10) = 0.238 gal 10 gal + 0.238 gal = 10.238 gal
This is an increase of approximately 2.38% It's not huge but it certainly is measurable. Note that this is not much smaller than the expansion of an ideal gas under the same circumstances. An ideal gas going from 10 degrees C to 35 degrees C would expand by approximately 3.66%
I think I can understand why they would need 2 DVI's for this, however, I have a question:
Could this also work if you had 2 new nVidia boards set up in SLI mode?
This is the new nVidia board. The board is a nVidia 6800 Ultra DDL with "dual link". They just put 2 of them together on a single 8x AGP base in one package. The 8x AGP should have plenty of bandwidth to feed this board so the fact that the board is in a single slot shouldn't cause any slowdowns as opposed to having two cards in two slots.
The single overriding consideration in music, digital or analog, is not quality (which is subjective), but FIDELITY.
Pardon my use of the wrong term. I'm a chemist, not a music engineer.:-)
Digital music is stored as bits. Each individual bit corresponds to fidelity in music. When those bits change, the music changes, period. The only way to preserve the quality of original digital music is to not change it.
Of course what I was referring to was fidelity, but not "mechanical" (for my lack of a better term) fidelity but rather perceptual fidelity. The various lossy codecs, by their very nature, do not attempt to maintain good "mechanical" fidelity but rather they attempt to maintain good perceptual fidelity when listened to by the human ear. AAC and MP3 do this by keeping the data which our ears hear best and throwing out the data that is largely unnoticed by our ears.
CD-audio also attempts to maintain good perceptual fidelity, but it does so by sampling the sound at intervals. In doing this it maintains the sound levels captured at those moments but it does not truly capture the sound. This is due to the Nyquist Theory and aliasing of the sampled waveforms.
But the 44.1 kHz 16 bit PCM codec has been widely accepted as the consumer equivalent of lossless by the community. Sure, if you want to get absurdly technical, a CD isn't an *exact* replica of the master tape.
Yes, CD-audio is deemed "good enough" but I remember when the CD was first introduced there were scores of musicians gnashing their teeth over the sampling rates and how so much of the sound is lost in the process of sampling the master tapes to create the CD-audio. The loss in that encoding step is substantial and really shouldn't be ignored. Yes, the loss is accepted in today's music world but it hasn't gone away.
Anyways, the whole point is that there is loss in every processing step of listening to your music. The songs downloaded from the iTunes music store (and probably other digital music stores, depending on how they encode their music) are most likely better quality than the songs you rip at home. This is especially true when you use a lossy format such as MP3, but you also shouldn't ignore the fact that the pressed CD you are ripping from does have measurable loss when compared to the studio masters. The AAC files also have loss but the AAC format is pretty good at minimizing the loss of perceptual fidelity.
One thing is for sure - it's almost certainly better to have an AAC made on professional-level equipment with professional-level software from a studio master than it would be to have an MP3 ripped from a CD at home!
Current burnt CDs have a shelflife of about 2-3 years (I'va had some go after a year). A pressed CD lasts 20+ years (I have 18 yr old pressed CDs that still play flawlessly). SO the burning scenario just doesn't cut it.
First off, I've never had a burned CD go on me in a year. Certainly not one that was put in a dark, protected place. I've had some burned CDs from 5 years or so ago that still work fine when I need to retrieve something from them. I have read about estimates of protected CD-R shelf life being anywhere from 10 years to 100 years. That's a wide range so I'd stick with the low end of it.
Secondly, they do sell archival quality CD-Rs that have a much longer shelf life than the ordinary CD-Rs that are more common. Here are some archival quality CD-R that are estimated to have a 100-year shelf life or more. Prices range from $1.35 to $1.70 per CD, not bad for the shelf life and the fact that you would be storing around 700 minutes of music per disk if you keep the music as AAC files.
"This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD."
Yes, but probably not as good as the ~700kbps FLAC file I ripped with cdparanoia.
Or the 24/96 5.1 channel uncompressed DVD-audio mix.
What I am trying to say is that the AAC files you get from iTMS are pretty much equivalent to the CD-quality in the first place. Yes, there are some artifacts to the AAC files but there are also artifacts to the CD audio. Neither of them sound exactly like the studio masters, that's a side-effect of the process of translating from one format to another.
Look at it like this: studio master->CD->~700kbps FLAC studio master->CD->AAC studio master->iTMS AAC
The FLAC file is a 3rd generation recording (which is still extremely close to the 2nd generation because of the FLAC format). The iTMS AAC file is a 2nd generation recording. The AAC file ripped from CD is a 3nd generation recording. This doesn't mean that the AAC file is automatically better quality than the FLAC but it does mean that the iTMS AAC certainly is much better than the AAC ripped from a CD. The iTMS AAC is close in quality to the FLAC due to this and the fact that the AAC encoding is well-tuned to the human ear. Certainly I, and many other people, can't notice the differences and I really have tried to listen for them.
The iTMS files simply sound good. They are convenient, relatively inexpensive, and there is a good selection of them. It seems like a perfect match to me.
i trust my cd shelf a little bit more than i trust my computer?... then comes all the hassle in case you some day feel like you want some "alternative-ipod"
iTunes has a way to archive your music fairly easily. Create a playlist with the music you want to archive and burn a data CD or DVD with it. It will burn all of your files to a CD or DVD as AAC files which you can then put in a safebox somewhere.
As for the alternative music players you can easily convert the iTunes AAC files to some other format by burning a music CD and re-ripping to the format you want or by using one of the open source converters that have popped up. It's fairly simple and then your music is in whatever format you need.
Sure, its a bit of a hassle as you mentioned but then again it's cheaper than buying both a CD and the iTunes songs as the parent poster was talking about.
Because he wants the CD contents and all, and have the option of listening to it on a lower resolution computer based format.
The files in the iTMS were ripped from the masters using professional gear and software. This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD.
In fact, the iTMS music files sound damn close in quality to what you are getting on CD. Sure it may sound a little different than the song found on a CD but that doesn't mean it lost quality. Both the CD-audio and the AAC-audio introduce some artifacts simply due to the nature of digital formats and encoding.
As for other content, such as album covers and art, you get the artwork as part of your download from iTMS. If you look in iTunes there is an option to view the artwork for a song or for an album.
I bought it from the iTunes store, only to find that I can't burn it to CD to listen to it anywhere else, so it's stuck in iTunes or my iPod. Now while I can see the point here, I was under the impression that you could burn a CD x times using iTunes. Not true.
As another poster has said, you can certainly burn iTMS tracks to CD. In fact you can burn them to CD both as the original data files and as the AIFF format found on regular music CDs. You can burn a playlist 7 times after which you can just create a new playlist and burn 7 more times, repeat as you like.
ALL songs downloaded from iTMS have the exact same license. There is none of this crap that some music distrubutors have where song x has these limitations and song y has different limitations.
it's about making it a pain to put into itunes or whatever... so then you buy it off itunes instead of messing with it. It's like rebuying all of your records on CD.
Uh, if you are buying the album and you're going to rip it to iTunes why not just buy it from the iTunes Music Store in the first place? Then you only need to buy it once.
The real reason they are doing this is not to encourage you to buy your music multiple times or in a certain place. They are doing this to make it a pain for casual users to copy and distribute the songs. Sure they won't stop the hard-core techs from ripping the songs but they probably figure that if they stop the majority of people from being able to trade music then that's good enough. One problem with that notion is that it only takes 1 tech person to rip an album, the rest of humanity can leech off of the tech's efforts and download like crazy.
It's not enough to make it difficult to rip music and trade it. You either need to make it impossible to do or forget about stopping it. To me it makes much more sense to just make it insanely easy to get cheap, legal music. That way the free music isn't so much easier of an option than the bought music.
People will buy their music as long as the price is right and the barrier to obtaining the music is simple enough. Just look at the success of the iTunes Music Store. Keep lowering the prices of the songs there and continue to make buying simple and the music purchases will continue to grow.
Such abrupt one-in-a-million mutations like this kid don't count, because the chance is pretty much zero that in a tribe of, say, 100 people he'd also find a similar wife, so they can transmit this abrupt mutation to their children. Or if they do, it's not too far.
Such big deviations randomly appear, and then die.
It doesn't disappear quite as quickly as you may think. Assuming that this mutation is of the type where the child has two copies of the mutation, one from his mother and one from his father( which the article pretty much said it did), then the mutant's children would have one copy of the mutation. In successive generations every carrier of one mutation would have a 25% chance of having offspring with one mutation.
Once the mutation has gotten in enough of the population there will be some breeding back. Eventually two people with one copy of the mutation each will breed. Their offspring will have a 25% chance of having two copies of the mutation, a 50% chance of having one copy, and a 25% chance of having no copies. If the mutation is a positive factor then the people with mutations will do slightly better than those that don't have it and the people who don't have the mutation at all will get edged out. You won't eliminate all of the non-mutants but they will eventually make up no more than 25% of the population. The rest of the population would consist of around 50% one-mutation and 25% two-mutation people.
All of this is assuming that the mutation doesn't have some factor selecting against it, such as a physical appearance which lowers the chances of getting a mate or increased mortality before sexual maturity. Unfortunately (or even fortunately in many mutations!) most mutations do have factors that select against them and they die out for that reason.
Heh, you also. Ahh well, karma is not all it's cracked up to be. I wouldn't count on either of us getting positive moderation out of this.
On a side note, I like the images at the link you have in your sig. The keyboard and the mouse are probably from stock photography but I always grin when I see that equipment being used in images. Free advertising and all!:-)
Yeah yeah, I'm a typical Mac-head. At least I'm not a typical rabid, frothing-at-the mouth, drink the Kool-Aid, fanatic nut Mac-head!
The 'autorun' he was talking about is not a true autorun like the one on Windows. What the 'autorun' under Mac OS X does is tell the proper application (iTunes by default for an audio CD) to run. The default applications are pretty safe and they normally don't allow anything new to be installed automatically.
For example, when an audio CD is put in a Mac OS X machine it defaults to running iTunes. iTunes by default simply shows the music that is on the disk. Nothing else is run, nothing is installed. It is safe.
Now, if the user then goes on to run any old applications that happen to be on the data portion of the CD well then that's the user's dumbass fault if something evil gets installed!:-)
This is the first I've heard of copy protection being installed through autorun on Mac OS, but yes, there is autorun. In fact there was a worm that spread this way a couple years back.
There is no autorun feature under Mac OS X 10.3 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in 10.2 either. There is an autorun in Mac OS 9 and I believe there was one in versions of Mac OS X previous to 10.2
The only thing in Mac OS X which is similar to autorun is that you can set certain actions to happen when you put a CD or DVD in the drive. The default is for a blank CD or DVD to ask you what to do, for a music CD to open iTunes, a photo CD to open iPhoto and a video DVD to open DVD Player. All other CDs or DVDs will be just be mounted in the Finder if they contain a filesystem readable by Mac OS X.
None of these default actions will cause anything else to be run or anything to be installed on your computer. If you want you can change the default actions to run another application, to run a script, or to be ignored.
$ uname -a Linux aragorn 2.4.25-gentoo-r2 #2 Mon May 31 12:54:31 EDT 2004 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
I dunno. This is a "PC". I don't have any spy-ware either.
Hmm, let's see...
% uname -mpsrv Darwin 7.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.4.0: Wed May 12 16:58:24 PDT 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.7.7.obj~7/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
Yep, I have a "PC" also. Look it says it right there at the end. In fact, it is a p-p-p-powerpc!
No spyware either - unless you count Microsoft Word which sends out packets to your LAN, trying to see if you are running a copy on another computer. I quickly blocked that piece of spyware from being so noisy...
How do these disks work in real CD players? And if the CD player can hear the audio track, why can't my ripping software just record it? Does the WMA even enter into the picture?
PC data gets put from the outside of a CD toward the center, music goes from the center to the outside. Both can exist on one CD at the same time, just not on top of each other. When a PC reads a CD it first tries reading from the outside inward. If the PC finds files there and autostart is enabled (which it is by default on Windows...) the software will be automatically run. This software installs a program that runs in the background on your computer and blocks the reading of the music portion of the disk.
To allow you the ability to use the music on your computer they have pre-loaded the data part of the disk with WMA files that you can play in some music player programs on your PC. Of course, who knows what quality those files are and who knows if you use a player than can play WMA files. Not only that but those WMA files take up space on the CD so the manufacturer can't put a full 74 minutes of audio on the CD, even if the band had that much material for the album.
Fun fun fun.
Fortunately you can turn off the autorun feature. This is a good thing to do because it stops music companies and others from automatically running software and installing crap that you do not need or want to have running on your computer.
I suppose it's possible since you can update the firmware, but does Apple keep information about how to program the firmware proprietary, or is it open for people to tinker with?
I don't think Cocoa can be called a new API. Cocoa is OpenStep (with a few extensions) which was developed many years ago by NeXT and Sun, based on the NeXTStep APIs.
I called Cocoa new because it is relatively new. Yes, most of the API is carried over from NextStep and all of its incarnations but there is a lot of new functionality in the Cocoa API. It's a young and still developing API basically.
Cocoa uses reference counting which is simpler and faster than true garbage collection
Reference countingis a form of garbage collection. It's just a more simplistic approach to garbage collection than some of the other methods. There are some advantages, which you have mentioned, to reference counting and there are some disadvantages to it also, such as objects with cyclical references not getting freed. Overall reference counting does work well and it is fairly unobtrusive so it's a positive addition to Cocoa.
Of those APIs, Win32 was the easiest to use and had the best documentation. Carbon came in second, with Classic a very distant third.
Actually Classic and Carbon are pretty much one and the same. Carbon is Classic with some of the less-used and less-functional API removed, plus some of the newer Mac OS X-related stuff added in.
Classic has a TON of documentation, the print form of it was mostly the Inside Macintosh series, which had literally dozens of books. The books were separated logically by category (interapplication communication, graphics, human interface, etc) and had extremely detailed documentation on the Classic API as well as tons of examples. Most of that information is still good to use for Carbon, in fact most Classic programs will recompile easily using the Carbon API - just a few minor changes have to be made.
As for ease of use, Carbon and Classic seemed pretty intuitive to me. Certainly no harder to use than the Win32 API and, IMHO, probably easier.
Now the new entry into all of this is Cocoa. Cocoa is the new API that Apple is using for Mac OS X. Cocoa is based on Objective C, a Smalltalk-like language which adds object-oriented ideas to the C language. It does this in a fairly simple manner and doesn't feel as kludgey as the additions which C++ added to C. You can also use both C and C++ code within your Carbon code without too many hang-ups.
The Cocoa API has the poorest documentation of all of these API but it is definitely the most simple to use. It has a form of garbage collection, it has some very nice helper classes, and the method names (they are called messages in Objective C) and class names are very descriptive and intuitive. Of all the API I've discussed Cocoa might be the most difficult API to get information about but once you learn the basics you can really fly in coding with it.
No hotkey support regardless of focus. I want to change songs while coding without switching to iTunes, damnit (and no thanks, I don't need any 3rd party mini-app)
Control-click (or right-click) on the iTunes Dock icon. You can control iTunes through the menu that pops up, no matter if iTunes is in the background or the foreground.
If you zoom the main iTunes window to its smaller size you are able to control the small window without changing focus. Just zoom the window (press the small green button in the tope left corner of the window) and drag the small window to a corner where it won't be obscured by a document. You can even make the zoomed window smaller by dragging the resize area at the bottom right corner of the window. Then you can just click on any of the controls in that window to change iTunes without changing focus away from what you are working on.
No watching of the library folders. Why can't I just copy audio files in the designated folder and iTunes notices that and adds them to the library like virtually any other player?
Go to this web page, download this file. Unstuff the file, take the "Add to iTunes Library" droplet out of the "Desktop Droplet" folder and put it on the desktop. Then just drag new music to that droplet and it will automatically be added to your library.
One thing, this script is a little bit outdated - it isn't set up to accept AAC files. This is easy to fix, just tell it to do so! Drag the droplet onto the Script Editor application found in the Applications folder. Change this line (line 8):
I've been using AppleScript for a bunch of stuff lately, but when I hit something that wasn't really intuitive in AppleScript that could easily be done in Perl, then I did it in Perl.
Yep, I'm constantly using the "do shell script" command in AppleScript to use a shell tool that is far more convenient to use than the equivalent plain-vanilla AppleScript. For example, a substring search-and-replace is simple using sed so I call it like this:
set theText to quoted form of "some text string" do shell script "echo " & theText & " | sed s/some/another/"
I keep seeing this claim, but on my year-old Powerbook, I see no evidence of anything that would support it. I've tried with lots of apps, and none of them will load a.ps file. Terminal does, but it displays the ASCII version, not a rendered version of the PS doc. I installed GSview; it works but runs under Classic. For PDF, I have Acrobat, and apparently nothing else can handle those files.
Mac OS X has native PDF compatability. Through PDF and some of the tools behind the scenes Mac OS X can handle PostScript files. For example, Preview can open PostScript files and render them properly. Mac OS X also has full support for PostScript fonts.
So the original poster was a bit off in claiming that Mac OS X has native support for PostScript.
There's a bit of history as to why Mac OS X uses Display PDF over PostScript. Back before Mac OS X there was NextStep (and its various incarnations). NextStep used PostScript as a basis for graphics and displays. The problem is that PostScript is a closed standard and Adobe wanted a ton of licensing fees for Apple to use it. Display PDF, on the other hand, was open and free and just as bit as good as PostScript for all intents and purposes. Apple switched over to Display PDF and never looked back.
I read the parent and immediately thought of why I stick with OS 8.6 for typography - drop da files into da fonts folder. Easy beans.
It's even easier with Mac OS X. If you have the Fonts folder in a Finder sidebar or on the Dock you just drag the files to the folder icon and they are installed. The Font Book application that comes with Mac OS X is also great for managing your fonts, as well as installing them.
Not only that but also Mac OS X has much better typography than Mac OS 8.6. It's Display PDF all the way through from font handling to printing. The antialiasing is smarter, the kerning more exact, better handling of Unicode and right-to-left character sets. The text just overall looks better and more consistant.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple mails out a detailed announcement every time they release a patch or a fix for a vunerablility. Anyone can sign up with the mailing list to receive these timely announcements automatically.
Here's an example of the latest announcement:
Oh you mean something like this incredibly detailed list of every security update ever? The one which lists the CVE IDs of the vulnerabilities and which links to the appropriate discussion of the problem?
Apple has provided this list for quite some time as you can see by looking at what was fixed. It only took me a few seconds to get from Apple's main page to locate this list.
The explanations of the security problems when you download the patches are left sparse deliberately because there are housewives, kids, grandparents, and other non-techs reading the explanations. If you had a diatribe on every vulnerability that was patched then you'll take the chance that the users might get scared off from patching just due to the geek factor required to read the update notes.
Apple does the smart thing and gives a small, easy to read blurb about the update in the download notes. Anyone who needs more in-depth information can easily find it at the Apple support webpages.
If you look at this web site you can see the thermal coefficient of volume expansion for gasoline. It is approximately 950 * 10^-6 / degree C.
This means that if you have 10 gallons of gasoline at 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) and it warms to 95 degrees F (35 degrees C) then it will be:
DV = bVi DT
950 * 10^-6 * 10 gal * (35 - 10) = 0.238 gal
10 gal + 0.238 gal = 10.238 gal
This is an increase of approximately 2.38% It's not huge but it certainly is measurable. Note that this is not much smaller than the expansion of an ideal gas under the same circumstances. An ideal gas going from 10 degrees C to 35 degrees C would expand by approximately 3.66%
This is the new nVidia board. The board is a nVidia 6800 Ultra DDL with "dual link". They just put 2 of them together on a single 8x AGP base in one package. The 8x AGP should have plenty of bandwidth to feed this board so the fact that the board is in a single slot shouldn't cause any slowdowns as opposed to having two cards in two slots.
Pardon my use of the wrong term. I'm a chemist, not a music engineer.
Of course what I was referring to was fidelity, but not "mechanical" (for my lack of a better term) fidelity but rather perceptual fidelity. The various lossy codecs, by their very nature, do not attempt to maintain good "mechanical" fidelity but rather they attempt to maintain good perceptual fidelity when listened to by the human ear. AAC and MP3 do this by keeping the data which our ears hear best and throwing out the data that is largely unnoticed by our ears.
CD-audio also attempts to maintain good perceptual fidelity, but it does so by sampling the sound at intervals. In doing this it maintains the sound levels captured at those moments but it does not truly capture the sound. This is due to the Nyquist Theory and aliasing of the sampled waveforms.
Yes, CD-audio is deemed "good enough" but I remember when the CD was first introduced there were scores of musicians gnashing their teeth over the sampling rates and how so much of the sound is lost in the process of sampling the master tapes to create the CD-audio. The loss in that encoding step is substantial and really shouldn't be ignored. Yes, the loss is accepted in today's music world but it hasn't gone away.
Anyways, the whole point is that there is loss in every processing step of listening to your music. The songs downloaded from the iTunes music store (and probably other digital music stores, depending on how they encode their music) are most likely better quality than the songs you rip at home. This is especially true when you use a lossy format such as MP3, but you also shouldn't ignore the fact that the pressed CD you are ripping from does have measurable loss when compared to the studio masters. The AAC files also have loss but the AAC format is pretty good at minimizing the loss of perceptual fidelity.
One thing is for sure - it's almost certainly better to have an AAC made on professional-level equipment with professional-level software from a studio master than it would be to have an MP3 ripped from a CD at home!
First off, I've never had a burned CD go on me in a year. Certainly not one that was put in a dark, protected place. I've had some burned CDs from 5 years or so ago that still work fine when I need to retrieve something from them. I have read about estimates of protected CD-R shelf life being anywhere from 10 years to 100 years. That's a wide range so I'd stick with the low end of it.
Secondly, they do sell archival quality CD-Rs that have a much longer shelf life than the ordinary CD-Rs that are more common. Here are some archival quality CD-R that are estimated to have a 100-year shelf life or more. Prices range from $1.35 to $1.70 per CD, not bad for the shelf life and the fact that you would be storing around 700 minutes of music per disk if you keep the music as AAC files.
Here is a good article on archiving your music: Archiving to CDR: some considerations
What I am trying to say is that the AAC files you get from iTMS are pretty much equivalent to the CD-quality in the first place. Yes, there are some artifacts to the AAC files but there are also artifacts to the CD audio. Neither of them sound exactly like the studio masters, that's a side-effect of the process of translating from one format to another.
Look at it like this:
studio master->CD->~700kbps FLAC
studio master->CD->AAC
studio master->iTMS AAC
The FLAC file is a 3rd generation recording (which is still extremely close to the 2nd generation because of the FLAC format). The iTMS AAC file is a 2nd generation recording. The AAC file ripped from CD is a 3nd generation recording. This doesn't mean that the AAC file is automatically better quality than the FLAC but it does mean that the iTMS AAC certainly is much better than the AAC ripped from a CD. The iTMS AAC is close in quality to the FLAC due to this and the fact that the AAC encoding is well-tuned to the human ear. Certainly I, and many other people, can't notice the differences and I really have tried to listen for them.
The iTMS files simply sound good. They are convenient, relatively inexpensive, and there is a good selection of them. It seems like a perfect match to me.
iTunes has a way to archive your music fairly easily. Create a playlist with the music you want to archive and burn a data CD or DVD with it. It will burn all of your files to a CD or DVD as AAC files which you can then put in a safebox somewhere.
As for the alternative music players you can easily convert the iTunes AAC files to some other format by burning a music CD and re-ripping to the format you want or by using one of the open source converters that have popped up. It's fairly simple and then your music is in whatever format you need.
Sure, its a bit of a hassle as you mentioned but then again it's cheaper than buying both a CD and the iTunes songs as the parent poster was talking about.
The files in the iTMS were ripped from the masters using professional gear and software. This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD.
In fact, the iTMS music files sound damn close in quality to what you are getting on CD. Sure it may sound a little different than the song found on a CD but that doesn't mean it lost quality. Both the CD-audio and the AAC-audio introduce some artifacts simply due to the nature of digital formats and encoding.
As for other content, such as album covers and art, you get the artwork as part of your download from iTMS. If you look in iTunes there is an option to view the artwork for a song or for an album.
As another poster has said, you can certainly burn iTMS tracks to CD. In fact you can burn them to CD both as the original data files and as the AIFF format found on regular music CDs. You can burn a playlist 7 times after which you can just create a new playlist and burn 7 more times, repeat as you like.
ALL songs downloaded from iTMS have the exact same license. There is none of this crap that some music distrubutors have where song x has these limitations and song y has different limitations.
Uh, if you are buying the album and you're going to rip it to iTunes why not just buy it from the iTunes Music Store in the first place? Then you only need to buy it once.
The real reason they are doing this is not to encourage you to buy your music multiple times or in a certain place. They are doing this to make it a pain for casual users to copy and distribute the songs. Sure they won't stop the hard-core techs from ripping the songs but they probably figure that if they stop the majority of people from being able to trade music then that's good enough. One problem with that notion is that it only takes 1 tech person to rip an album, the rest of humanity can leech off of the tech's efforts and download like crazy.
It's not enough to make it difficult to rip music and trade it. You either need to make it impossible to do or forget about stopping it. To me it makes much more sense to just make it insanely easy to get cheap, legal music. That way the free music isn't so much easier of an option than the bought music.
People will buy their music as long as the price is right and the barrier to obtaining the music is simple enough. Just look at the success of the iTunes Music Store. Keep lowering the prices of the songs there and continue to make buying simple and the music purchases will continue to grow.
It doesn't disappear quite as quickly as you may think. Assuming that this mutation is of the type where the child has two copies of the mutation, one from his mother and one from his father( which the article pretty much said it did), then the mutant's children would have one copy of the mutation. In successive generations every carrier of one mutation would have a 25% chance of having offspring with one mutation.
Once the mutation has gotten in enough of the population there will be some breeding back. Eventually two people with one copy of the mutation each will breed. Their offspring will have a 25% chance of having two copies of the mutation, a 50% chance of having one copy, and a 25% chance of having no copies. If the mutation is a positive factor then the people with mutations will do slightly better than those that don't have it and the people who don't have the mutation at all will get edged out. You won't eliminate all of the non-mutants but they will eventually make up no more than 25% of the population. The rest of the population would consist of around 50% one-mutation and 25% two-mutation people.
All of this is assuming that the mutation doesn't have some factor selecting against it, such as a physical appearance which lowers the chances of getting a mate or increased mortality before sexual maturity. Unfortunately (or even fortunately in many mutations!) most mutations do have factors that select against them and they die out for that reason.
Heh, you also. Ahh well, karma is not all it's cracked up to be. I wouldn't count on either of us getting positive moderation out of this.
On a side note, I like the images at the link you have in your sig. The keyboard and the mouse are probably from stock photography but I always grin when I see that equipment being used in images. Free advertising and all!
Yeah yeah, I'm a typical Mac-head. At least I'm not a typical rabid, frothing-at-the mouth, drink the Kool-Aid, fanatic nut Mac-head!
The 'autorun' he was talking about is not a true autorun like the one on Windows. What the 'autorun' under Mac OS X does is tell the proper application (iTunes by default for an audio CD) to run. The default applications are pretty safe and they normally don't allow anything new to be installed automatically.
For example, when an audio CD is put in a Mac OS X machine it defaults to running iTunes. iTunes by default simply shows the music that is on the disk. Nothing else is run, nothing is installed. It is safe.
Now, if the user then goes on to run any old applications that happen to be on the data portion of the CD well then that's the user's dumbass fault if something evil gets installed!
There is no autorun feature under Mac OS X 10.3 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't in 10.2 either. There is an autorun in Mac OS 9 and I believe there was one in versions of Mac OS X previous to 10.2
The only thing in Mac OS X which is similar to autorun is that you can set certain actions to happen when you put a CD or DVD in the drive. The default is for a blank CD or DVD to ask you what to do, for a music CD to open iTunes, a photo CD to open iPhoto and a video DVD to open DVD Player. All other CDs or DVDs will be just be mounted in the Finder if they contain a filesystem readable by Mac OS X.
None of these default actions will cause anything else to be run or anything to be installed on your computer. If you want you can change the default actions to run another application, to run a script, or to be ignored.
Hmm, let's see...Yep, I have a "PC" also. Look it says it right there at the end. In fact, it is a p-p-p- power pc!
No spyware either - unless you count Microsoft Word which sends out packets to your LAN, trying to see if you are running a copy on another computer. I quickly blocked that piece of spyware from being so noisy...
PC data gets put from the outside of a CD toward the center, music goes from the center to the outside. Both can exist on one CD at the same time, just not on top of each other. When a PC reads a CD it first tries reading from the outside inward. If the PC finds files there and autostart is enabled (which it is by default on Windows...) the software will be automatically run. This software installs a program that runs in the background on your computer and blocks the reading of the music portion of the disk.
To allow you the ability to use the music on your computer they have pre-loaded the data part of the disk with WMA files that you can play in some music player programs on your PC. Of course, who knows what quality those files are and who knows if you use a player than can play WMA files. Not only that but those WMA files take up space on the CD so the manufacturer can't put a full 74 minutes of audio on the CD, even if the band had that much material for the album.
Fun fun fun.
Fortunately you can turn off the autorun feature. This is a good thing to do because it stops music companies and others from automatically running software and installing crap that you do not need or want to have running on your computer.
Apple provides plenty of information and links to information on the Apple Open Firmware Home Page. They even have a good sense of humor. The machine that the site is running on is located at "bananajr6000.apple.com"!
I called Cocoa new because it is relatively new. Yes, most of the API is carried over from NextStep and all of its incarnations but there is a lot of new functionality in the Cocoa API. It's a young and still developing API basically.
Reference counting is a form of garbage collection. It's just a more simplistic approach to garbage collection than some of the other methods. There are some advantages, which you have mentioned, to reference counting and there are some disadvantages to it also, such as objects with cyclical references not getting freed. Overall reference counting does work well and it is fairly unobtrusive so it's a positive addition to Cocoa.
Actually Classic and Carbon are pretty much one and the same. Carbon is Classic with some of the less-used and less-functional API removed, plus some of the newer Mac OS X-related stuff added in.
Classic has a TON of documentation, the print form of it was mostly the Inside Macintosh series, which had literally dozens of books. The books were separated logically by category (interapplication communication, graphics, human interface, etc) and had extremely detailed documentation on the Classic API as well as tons of examples. Most of that information is still good to use for Carbon, in fact most Classic programs will recompile easily using the Carbon API - just a few minor changes have to be made.
As for ease of use, Carbon and Classic seemed pretty intuitive to me. Certainly no harder to use than the Win32 API and, IMHO, probably easier.
Now the new entry into all of this is Cocoa. Cocoa is the new API that Apple is using for Mac OS X. Cocoa is based on Objective C, a Smalltalk-like language which adds object-oriented ideas to the C language. It does this in a fairly simple manner and doesn't feel as kludgey as the additions which C++ added to C. You can also use both C and C++ code within your Carbon code without too many hang-ups.
The Cocoa API has the poorest documentation of all of these API but it is definitely the most simple to use. It has a form of garbage collection, it has some very nice helper classes, and the method names (they are called messages in Objective C) and class names are very descriptive and intuitive. Of all the API I've discussed Cocoa might be the most difficult API to get information about but once you learn the basics you can really fly in coding with it.
Run iTunes, select a playlist, hit apple-B or select Edit->Show Browser
The browse window that appears does all this for you.
Control-click (or right-click) on the iTunes Dock icon. You can control iTunes through the menu that pops up, no matter if iTunes is in the background or the foreground.
If you zoom the main iTunes window to its smaller size you are able to control the small window without changing focus. Just zoom the window (press the small green button in the tope left corner of the window) and drag the small window to a corner where it won't be obscured by a document. You can even make the zoomed window smaller by dragging the resize area at the bottom right corner of the window. Then you can just click on any of the controls in that window to change iTunes without changing focus away from what you are working on.
Go to this web page, download this file. Unstuff the file, take the "Add to iTunes Library" droplet out of the "Desktop Droplet" folder and put it on the desktop. Then just drag new music to that droplet and it will automatically be added to your library.
One thing, this script is a little bit outdated - it isn't set up to accept AAC files. This is easy to fix, just tell it to do so! Drag the droplet onto the Script Editor application found in the Applications folder. Change this line (line 8):to this:Save it and you are all set.
It is trivial to change this script into a Folder Actions so that you can have a "watched folder" if you want that.
Yep, I'm constantly using the "do shell script" command in AppleScript to use a shell tool that is far more convenient to use than the equivalent plain-vanilla AppleScript. For example, a substring search-and-replace is simple using sed so I call it like this:
Mac OS X has native PDF compatability. Through PDF and some of the tools behind the scenes Mac OS X can handle PostScript files. For example, Preview can open PostScript files and render them properly. Mac OS X also has full support for PostScript fonts.
So the original poster was a bit off in claiming that Mac OS X has native support for PostScript.
There's a bit of history as to why Mac OS X uses Display PDF over PostScript. Back before Mac OS X there was NextStep (and its various incarnations). NextStep used PostScript as a basis for graphics and displays. The problem is that PostScript is a closed standard and Adobe wanted a ton of licensing fees for Apple to use it. Display PDF, on the other hand, was open and free and just as bit as good as PostScript for all intents and purposes. Apple switched over to Display PDF and never looked back.
It's even easier with Mac OS X. If you have the Fonts folder in a Finder sidebar or on the Dock you just drag the files to the folder icon and they are installed. The Font Book application that comes with Mac OS X is also great for managing your fonts, as well as installing them.
Not only that but also Mac OS X has much better typography than Mac OS 8.6. It's Display PDF all the way through from font handling to printing. The antialiasing is smarter, the kerning more exact, better handling of Unicode and right-to-left character sets. The text just overall looks better and more consistant.