You never mentioned phones in your post: you said how FairPlay is really easy to defeat by burning and reripping. That doesnt work unless you sacrifice sound quality even further or battery time/storage space by reripping as lossless.
You should have said "Hey, it's a phone and will have crappy earbuds, so who would care if everything sounds like crap on it?"
Yes, if you turn it around and Mix, Burn, Rip, you can lose some quality in the Rip step if you use a lossy format, but that's true whether you're ripping stuff you burned from iTMS or you're importing a CD you bought at Borders.
Yes, because that CD you bought at Borders was lossy? Or is iTMS now supporting lossless downloading?
One lossy encoding is at least semi-acceptable.
Re-encoding a lossy file with another lossy compression is not the same as encoding a lossless file with lossy compression.
Incidentally, for what its worth, the sales folks at the local Radio Shack (Upper West Side, Manhattan) have told me that the Zune is flying off their shelves. When I told them that I was shocked... they admitted that they were too.
Perhaps they should put them in locked then. Shoplifting losses don't count as sales (except to the manufacturer).
The scarcity is real: there are problems producing blue laser diodes, and Sony has already postponed orders for diodes to other companies and is allocating the entire production to PS3 right now. Sony delayed their own Bluray player for this reason.
There is a reason why both BluRay and HD DVD players are spendy: the diodes are the bottleneck.
Irony: there are more PS3's slated for release day in the US than Microsoft had ready for the 360 release date last year. But in typical "let's bitch about Sony" slashdot crap, this fact is ignored.
As for selling 80,000 PS2's a year ago: well, duh... When a platform is 5 years old, you have very nice stable and predictable manufacturing yeilds. New hardware is always harder to make.
I have complete access to read (and even modify! w00t! that could be fun!) email for some 15,000 people.
Unlogged.
Do I?
Hell, no.
It would be nice to pretend it is all about ethics, but let's be realistic: it is really about "why would I -care- what they are jabbering about?" These are people who complain about getting "unbearable amounts of spam" when they get a total of a half dozen emails a day...
Sorry: nethack, dinking around on forums and mailing lists, listening to music... all of them are much more important than the sort of nonsense people send in mail. I really don't care what people mail each other, how many porn sites they visit or whatever it is they actually do online as long as they leave me alone.
It isnt ethics: it is pure and simple apathy about them.
The first CP/M was for the 8080. Zilog came out with the Z80 which offered twice the clock speed of an 8080 as well as some nice instruction enhancements and still ran 8080 code.
-Then- the 8088/8086 pair came out: these were 16 bit CPUs with some obvious inheritance from 8080 design. Digital Research had a convertor to convert 8080 assembly into 8088 assembly: but it was quirky and buggy, so you still had to retouch stuff. (Especially since most programmers actually used Microsoft's M80 assembler, not DRI's, since it supported Z80 instructions correctly instead of as horrid macros.)
Again, you said that the Z80 could run 8088 code. It couldn't.
"the Z80's instruction set is a superset of that of the 8088" is in no way true. The Z80's instruction set is a superset of the 8080. Not the 8088.
You mean the Z80 ran a superset of 8080. The 8088 is an entirely different beast (a 16-bit-internal 8080 sort of.. a real ugly CPU, actually, the Z80 and Z280 were much better successors to the 8080 series than the 8088 was, but that is another story).
There was an 8088 version of CP/M and even nifty machines like the Compupro10 (1 8088, 4 Z80s) that ran MP/M and eventually Concurrent CP/M (or Concurrent CP/M 8-16 on Compupro hardware, automatically executing programs on the right CPU).
A Z80 could in no way shape or form run 8088 code.
Pilot wasn't a command line interface: it was used to write a basic menuing system for the MD series.
The command line shipped on the MD series was good old "CCP", the "Console Command Processor".
ZCPR3 beat the DOS of its day, though, no doubt about it.
(And, yes, I still have my original MD3, and it still worked last I checked it. But, then it doesnt even have a fan. The only moving parts are the floppy drives.)
At which point it is cheaper to grab a cheap USB hard drive, put an encrypted filesystem on it, and use that for offsite backups. Get two if you want to be really safe.
Sure, it has everything to do with society becoming more obsesed with rush-rush "no time to cook, let me grab a bucket of KFC!" the loss of stay-at-home-moms that would cook healthy food, the cutbacks in afterschool sports programs, and a ton of other societal changes. They're not putting heroin in cheeseburgers to addict people. Really.
They make processed food the way they do because a) sugar and fat taste good and b) sugar and fat are cheaper than actual spices and flavoring.
It has more to do with "value meal" (how can we make cheap cheeseburgers for a buck and still have people think they're edible?) than some sort of "get them addicted to cheeseburgers, they will come in for a fix every day, and then we can make a fortune on the coke and fries!"
Actually I saw it on NBC news last night: it's apparently effective, or at least the ad is.
Annoying as hell, but effective.
Just imagine that (or the annoying Flash ads with flies buzzing around, or any other ads for that matter) showing as your screensaver or while writing documents... yep, so many people would really love that experience.
Not only is this patent bogus for prior art: it is one of the most useless concepts ever, which is why the companies that tried it almost 10 years ago now gave it up. Pissing off y our customers is usually considered a bad practice.
Music industry sources told Reuters earlier this month that Microsoft disclosed plans to be in the market before Christmas with a media player that will allow users to download videos and music wirelessly.
That is the only place discussion of Wirelss capabilities is mentioned: it apparently is not mentioned in the release, instead Reuters says, "well last month, someone told us that Microsoft told them it had wireless..."
as are some of the Emusic artists: Tom Waits? never heard of him.
I guess if you're into Country you're more of a Kris Kristofferson fan, oh, wait, he is at Emusic, too. As is John Lee Hooker, and even some Johnny Cash....
Most musicians want people to hear their music. The musicians are not the enemy: it is the major labels that restrict not only the rights of the listeners ("I have an iPod and a car stereo.... if I can't tolerate a double-lossy conversion, I have to buy a copy of everything in DRM'd AAC and DRM'd WMA..."), but the same record companies that are ripping off artists and tying up their music for years.
This is nothing new: the struggle between artists and record labels are old news. Prince changed his name to something unpronouncable in protest of a "we own you and we can sell you as we want" record contract ("oh, yeah, sell me when you can't spell my name"). The beauty of the net is that it reduces the space between artists and their fans: the need for a big label to handle "marketing" is lessened. And this is exactly why RIAA is so scared: it is all about control. If artists realized they can sell songs without a big record company and make more money.... just what is the point of RIAA?
The clueful independents are grasping this opportunity and making money.
DGM Live sells MP3's and FLACs of King Crimson and Fripp material. Magnatunes.com sells mp3s, oggs, flacs and wavs (ewww) of a few hundred indie artists. Emusic.com sells mp3s of thousands of indy artists.
Indies aren't as paranoid about their music as the major labels.
And don't forget that even once your own life and credit are restored... someone is out money.
Whether that is the vendor who sold an item or service and had the payment cancelled, or the bank that ate the loss: real money went into the hands of the thief and real money left the hands of someone else.
We all pay the cost of this: even if your Visa has never been stolen, merchants will pay higher fees to banks, banks will give less money to shareholders, and consumers will, as always just pay higher rates and prices and eat the loss.
A crime that injures a million people only marginally is still not a victimless crime.... especially when that crime is executed a million times a year. "Marginally" starts getting noticable.
Oh, it already has restriced my rights: I have the right to listen to the CD's I buy.
I don't own a CD player.
I don't run Windows.
Therefore I can not listen to the CD's that I buy unless I break the law and circumvent the DRM.
My objection is the argument that "DRM isn't bad if it is interoperable" -- Who defines what interoperable is? Does "Works fine on any CD drive, whether a CD-ROM in a PC or a dedicated player" mean anything? Not right now it doesn't. Does "Can be ripped to play on a car CD player as mp3 for less disc changes" count as interoperable? Nope.
DRM works be restricting rights: it breaks interoperability.. deliberately.
I am being sarcastic saying I would have no problem with DRM that didn't break interoperability: because it all does. That is what it was designed to do. The problem is that Microsoft, Apple and Real define interoperability as "well it plays on our players, that's good enough!"
When it isn't.
Nor is it good enough to only play on their players: I want it to play on -MINE- which means I get to rip it as FLAC or MP3 depending on source material and whether it is for car or Squeezebox.
Slashdot Mirror
why bother when the kidnapper is in custody?
You never mentioned phones in your post: you said how FairPlay is really easy to defeat by burning and reripping. That doesnt work unless you sacrifice sound quality even further or battery time/storage space by reripping as lossless.
You should have said "Hey, it's a phone and will have crappy earbuds, so who would care if everything sounds like crap on it?"
Yes, if you turn it around and Mix, Burn, Rip, you can lose some quality in the Rip step if you use a lossy format, but that's true whether you're ripping stuff you burned from iTMS or you're importing a CD you bought at Borders.
Yes, because that CD you bought at Borders was lossy? Or is iTMS now supporting lossless downloading?
One lossy encoding is at least semi-acceptable.
Re-encoding a lossy file with another lossy compression is not the same as encoding a lossless file with lossy compression.
Right because a 128k AAC file re-encoded into mp3 sounds just like the original.
Did I miss the memo where mp3 encoding became lossless?
Just burn your tracks to CD, then re-rip them. No big deal.
And crap for sound quality unless you re-rip to lossless, and 5-8 times the storage and less battery life.
Do you not understand what happens when you repeat a lossy compression?
Incidentally, for what its worth, the sales folks at the local Radio Shack (Upper West Side, Manhattan) have told me that the Zune is flying off their shelves. When I told them that I was shocked... they admitted that they were too.
Perhaps they should put them in locked then. Shoplifting losses don't count as sales (except to the manufacturer).
... "I had to get these Transporters to UPS or my customers will cry..."?
And FFXI requires a HDD...
And no doubt others will, too, certainly any mmorpgs will...
Nonsense.
The scarcity is real: there are problems producing blue laser diodes, and Sony has already postponed orders for diodes to other companies and is allocating the entire production to PS3 right now. Sony delayed their own Bluray player for this reason.
There is a reason why both BluRay and HD DVD players are spendy: the diodes are the bottleneck.
Irony: there are more PS3's slated for release day in the US than Microsoft had ready for the 360 release date last year. But in typical "let's bitch about Sony" slashdot crap, this fact is ignored.
As for selling 80,000 PS2's a year ago: well, duh... When a platform is 5 years old, you have very nice stable and predictable manufacturing yeilds. New hardware is always harder to make.
I have complete access to read (and even modify! w00t! that could be fun!) email for some 15,000 people.
Unlogged.
Do I?
Hell, no.
It would be nice to pretend it is all about ethics, but let's be realistic: it is really about "why would I -care- what they are jabbering about?" These are people who complain about getting "unbearable amounts of spam" when they get a total of a half dozen emails a day...
Sorry: nethack, dinking around on forums and mailing lists, listening to music... all of them are much more important than the sort of nonsense people send in mail. I really don't care what people mail each other, how many porn sites they visit or whatever it is they actually do online as long as they leave me alone.
It isnt ethics: it is pure and simple apathy about them.
Because, quite simply, if the license is invalid, then you have no license to even -use- let alone modify or distribute GPL code.
This is why the term "license" as in "permission" is used in copyright law, not "contract".
No, you have the chronology wrong still.
The first CP/M was for the 8080. Zilog came out with the Z80 which offered twice the clock speed of an 8080 as well as some nice instruction enhancements and still ran 8080 code.
-Then- the 8088/8086 pair came out: these were 16 bit CPUs with some obvious inheritance from 8080 design. Digital Research had a convertor to convert 8080 assembly into 8088 assembly: but it was quirky and buggy, so you still had to retouch stuff. (Especially since most programmers actually used Microsoft's M80 assembler, not DRI's, since it supported Z80 instructions correctly instead of as horrid macros.)
Again, you said that the Z80 could run 8088 code. It couldn't.
"the Z80's instruction set is a superset of that of the 8088" is in no way true. The Z80's instruction set is a superset of the 8080. Not the 8088.
You mean the Z80 ran a superset of 8080. The 8088 is an entirely different beast (a 16-bit-internal 8080 sort of.. a real ugly CPU, actually, the Z80 and Z280 were much better successors to the 8080 series than the 8088 was, but that is another story).
There was an 8088 version of CP/M and even nifty machines like the Compupro10 (1 8088, 4 Z80s) that ran MP/M and eventually Concurrent CP/M (or Concurrent CP/M 8-16 on Compupro hardware, automatically executing programs on the right CPU).
A Z80 could in no way shape or form run 8088 code.
CP/M was for 8080's originally, not 8088.
Pilot wasn't a command line interface: it was used to write a basic menuing system for the MD series.
The command line shipped on the MD series was good old "CCP", the "Console Command Processor".
ZCPR3 beat the DOS of its day, though, no doubt about it.
(And, yes, I still have my original MD3, and it still worked last I checked it. But, then it doesnt even have a fan. The only moving parts are the floppy drives.)
At which point it is cheaper to grab a cheap USB hard drive, put an encrypted filesystem on it, and use that for offsite backups. Get two if you want to be really safe.
Sure, it has everything to do with society becoming more obsesed with rush-rush "no time to cook, let me grab a bucket of KFC!" the loss of stay-at-home-moms that would cook healthy food, the cutbacks in afterschool sports programs, and a ton of other societal changes. They're not putting heroin in cheeseburgers to addict people. Really.
No, it's not the same thing.
Corn syrup, fat and salt are not addictive.
They make processed food the way they do because a) sugar and fat taste good and b) sugar and fat are cheaper than actual spices and flavoring.
It has more to do with "value meal" (how can we make cheap cheeseburgers for a buck and still have people think they're edible?) than some sort of "get them addicted to cheeseburgers, they will come in for a fix every day, and then we can make a fortune on the coke and fries!"
Actually I saw it on NBC news last night: it's apparently effective, or at least the ad is.
Annoying as hell, but effective.
Just imagine that (or the annoying Flash ads with flies buzzing around, or any other ads for that matter) showing as your screensaver or while writing documents... yep, so many people would really love that experience.
Not only is this patent bogus for prior art: it is one of the most useless concepts ever, which is why the companies that tried it almost 10 years ago now gave it up. Pissing off y our customers is usually considered a bad practice.
For $5/month this advertisement can play without sound.
For $10/month we won't run this ad.
The actual "release" is a story in Billboard Magazine that requires paid registration... you have another source?
Actually, you should RTFA.
Music industry sources told Reuters earlier this month that Microsoft disclosed plans to be in the market before Christmas with a media player that will allow users to download videos and music wirelessly.
That is the only place discussion of Wirelss capabilities is mentioned: it apparently is not mentioned in the release, instead Reuters says, "well last month, someone told us that Microsoft told them it had wireless..."
Hardly confirmed: it is reported as a rumor.
yeah, King Crimson (DGM Live) is crap.. really...
as are some of the Emusic artists: Tom Waits? never heard of him.
I guess if you're into Country you're more of a Kris Kristofferson fan, oh, wait, he is at Emusic, too. As is John Lee Hooker, and even some Johnny Cash....
Most musicians want people to hear their music. The musicians are not the enemy: it is the major labels that restrict not only the rights of the listeners ("I have an iPod and a car stereo.... if I can't tolerate a double-lossy conversion, I have to buy a copy of everything in DRM'd AAC and DRM'd WMA..."), but the same record companies that are ripping off artists and tying up their music for years.
This is nothing new: the struggle between artists and record labels are old news. Prince changed his name to something unpronouncable in protest of a "we own you and we can sell you as we want" record contract ("oh, yeah, sell me when you can't spell my name"). The beauty of the net is that it reduces the space between artists and their fans: the need for a big label to handle "marketing" is lessened. And this is exactly why RIAA is so scared: it is all about control. If artists realized they can sell songs without a big record company and make more money.... just what is the point of RIAA?
The clueful independents are grasping this opportunity and making money.
You mean no Major-RIAA-Controlled label.
DGM Live sells MP3's and FLACs of King Crimson and Fripp material.
Magnatunes.com sells mp3s, oggs, flacs and wavs (ewww) of a few hundred indie artists.
Emusic.com sells mp3s of thousands of indy artists.
Indies aren't as paranoid about their music as the major labels.
And don't forget that even once your own life and credit are restored... someone is out money.
Whether that is the vendor who sold an item or service and had the payment cancelled, or the bank that ate the loss: real money went into the hands of the thief and real money left the hands of someone else.
We all pay the cost of this: even if your Visa has never been stolen, merchants will pay higher fees to banks, banks will give less money to shareholders, and consumers will, as always just pay higher rates and prices and eat the loss.
A crime that injures a million people only marginally is still not a victimless crime.... especially when that crime is executed a million times a year. "Marginally" starts getting noticable.
Oh, it already has restriced my rights: I have the right to listen to the CD's I buy.
I don't own a CD player.
I don't run Windows.
Therefore I can not listen to the CD's that I buy unless I break the law and circumvent the DRM.
My objection is the argument that "DRM isn't bad if it is interoperable" -- Who defines what interoperable is? Does "Works fine on any CD drive, whether a CD-ROM in a PC or a dedicated player" mean anything? Not right now it doesn't. Does "Can be ripped to play on a car CD player as mp3 for less disc changes" count as interoperable? Nope.
DRM works be restricting rights: it breaks interoperability.. deliberately.
I am being sarcastic saying I would have no problem with DRM that didn't break interoperability: because it all does. That is what it was designed to do. The problem is that Microsoft, Apple and Real define interoperability as "well it plays on our players, that's good enough!"
When it isn't.
Nor is it good enough to only play on their players: I want it to play on -MINE- which means I get to rip it as FLAC or MP3 depending on source material and whether it is for car or Squeezebox.