Yes, sounds like a nice idea except it's not for music that needs to be authorized. It's for any audio that I choose to put on my machine. Most of it are MP3s that I ripped from my CDs.
If they can come out with a way that lets me access the music over the net then great... providing they don't try and hook claws into MY stuff. I can accept authentication of the downloaded music... I'm a little concerned about what would happen if the service goes away though.
And just how would I get it on a DVD-R disk. My hardware is one and two years old. I'm not really keen on making anually purchases of hardware just so I can store music. My next machine will be in another year or so.
I see a lot of people saying their are alternatives... but seriously... most of the alternatives suck ass. SSH tunnel or VPN... yeah sure... if you want to support that. I'm a sys admin... I have enough of that crap at work... I don't need to deal with support issues at home. DVD-R... sure... if I fork over the major moola. I'd sooner buy an iPod than a DVD-R drive. SCP/FTP/Web... yeah okay... not exactly convenient or the best "browsable".
Let's just face it. This new change took an awsome feature and ruined it. It was perfect for what it could do. Unfortunately, too perfect, and all the pirates and stupid websites (SpyMac) ruined it for the rest of us. Almost every alternative suggested is not "stupid easy" as a sharing protocol for MUSIC should be. As I said before... it's just music... I don't want to have to admin a friggen VPN or SSH tunnel just to listen to music. I just want to listen to my music.
Great idea, unless the machine I use at work is my personal PowerBook trying to access my PowerMac at home. The point of putting the music on my PowerMac was that I wouldn't be taking up 1/3 of my PowerBook HDD space for music.
And most of the music I have to share are MP3s from my own CDs. I actually don't have any pirated music in my collection (well, maybe 2-3 songs... but that's all). It has nothing to do with authorization, in my case, but rather sharing.
I know that there are strong legal reasons, but the paranoia in me can't help wonder what this change will do to sales of the iPods. Could it possibly drive up sales as the only method to make your music portable? Hmmm...
Sure, you could. And as much as I used to love having to work my brain to get something like this to work at home... I really don't have the desire to have to deal with it, let alone support any problems related to it.
I'm pretty pissed. I will be holding off on this update for a while. Sharing my home music to my laptop when on the road (at work, friends, etc) was part of the point!!! This just sucks! Sure, I could do VPN, but to play music?!?! It just seems like too much work to play music.
But then again... I recently got the new iPod too... so I guess I don't need to access it through my home network anymore. But it's annoying I can't share with a friend or two. It's not like I could support more through my home DSL connection.
Yeah. True. If they're a school with that many machines, they'd have to be pretty damn stupid to Pirate OS X. Apple Legal would have a field day if they ever found out.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.
Wow! Been a while since I've seen someone give props to OS/2.:) Maybe I should unzip my last OS/2 disk image to an old PC just to reminisce. I loved that you could just unzip the disk image and it would boot. Made for really flexible blasting of fresh images to new machines.
So, how will this latency effect slashdot first post?:) Will there be a race to the main database, or will someone who had first post lose it when absolute time data is finally received?
It works, but it's not great quality, especially in LA. There are stations on almost all of the available frequencies and they seem to blast at maximum power.
However, it does the basic job for what I need. Although a little disappointed, it's not too bad. I mostly wanted it to listen to audio books from my iPod, while in the car. And a little static while driving isn't too distracting.
If you have a tape adapter, stick with that. You'll get better quality.
I'm wondering if the iTrip available for older iPods has better quality/power/range. It at least has full frequency range, and not just 4 channels. We'll see... next time, I'll wait for reviews.
Yeah... the default backup plan when ratings go south... Bring on the Borg! Oh wait! That's what the preview for next week indicated!
I certainly hope they are doing more than that to improve the show! Just bringing in the Borg kind of breaks the idea that Earth didn't have any major confrontation until STTNG. If an earlier Enterprise happened to encounter the Borg, I would think that some records would have existed for Pickard to to be more prepared.:)
Still waiting for it to be delivered (should arrive today). A friend of mine (who works as a sound engineer at CalArts) says they work well. He said, it's not like having the CD in your car directly, but for the purpose of listening in your car, with wind, engine, and street sounds already degrading quality of experience, it's pretty good.
I will have to check and see. Oh! Just got a call from the receptionist. My package is here.:)
Playing the iPod on my car stereo (actually a CD player) was my biggest hold-out for getting an iPod. Then Apple listed the Belkin thing on their main page, I clicked for info, and was cursing my computer because I knew I wouldn't make it through the day being $450 poorer.
It's real simple. You plug it in to the audio jack, and tune your stereo to one of 4 low frequency channels. Belkin has more info on it than Apple does. It's not really iPod specific, but very handy (not to mention the look of it) for iPod. I think it runs on 2 AAA batteries.
Yeah! I bought a new CD and it doesn't work in my tape-deck car stereo! I bought the music, I should be able to play it on anything I want, without having to rip it, and record it to cassette. Not to mention loss of quality!
Yeesh! Give me a break! I agree DRM is rather lame. But as SOOO many people have said, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Personally, I'm unaffected by this, since my new iPod plays what I want, and can wirelessly (Belkin TuneCast) transmit to my FM stereo in my car.
There are SO many solutions to convert formats. But I see no reason why the format that your player happens to support should be what is used. I'm annoyed that stuff I buy (especially as an early adopter often times) ends up not being useful because of the trend/direction industries go. Oh well! Part of the risk of working on the near-bleeding edge of technology.
If you have some form of strange proxy for your outbound communication, I'm thinking it's your ISP limitting you, not the Apple authentication. There is no connection initiated from Apple TO you to authenticate the file. As such, most common proxy configurations should not hinder you.
There's likely a simple solution to you problem. Could tell you what, though, without knowing specifics.
I'm someone in the real world. Add on people who want to listen to music working out, snow boarding, etc... a CD sucks all together. I finally decided to get an iPod because of this service. I rarely bought music when I had to go to the music store. Since online services have been becoming more popular, I'm buying more music. And this service makes it even easier.
The time to DL the music to a digital player (iPod or other device) adds MAYBE another minute. And I can take my entire music collection with me to ANY of the locations you or I mentioned.
Just because you buy the music online doesn't mean you spend less time outdoors. It means you can spend that time living, not browsing INSIDE a store.
And as for your comments about "95%" (a little inflated) using Kazaa. I know that MOST of the people over 21-23 that I know actually don't want to pirate music. Granted the evil RIAA sucks ass, it's still illegal to pirate the music. Many people I've talked to said they might actually consider buying their music if it were this easy.
So... really, time will tell... but I'm think Apple has hit the mark. Windows users have followed the Mac/Apple concepts historically. Don't forget that little fact. I was a Windows/Linux user until about 2 years ago. I got tired of the fun things being tedious. Much happier now, as is every person (4 so far) I've converted to OS X.
1) I agree, but it is nice to quickly resort by song, artist, genre, album, etc. Searching is still easier if you have a good sense of what you are looking for.
2) They do link to Artists official sites. On the Artist page, many have an official link. Apple is on the ball with that. Buying the CD would be nice though, even for a little more. Although, personally, I'd probably never use that option.
4) Exactly what I was thinking. I found a lot of good stuff. I hope that the labels and music selection continues to grow. I'm sure a lot of time/work had to go into making all that available, especially with all the graphics and stuff specific to every artist and album. I'd like to see small independent songs available as well... maybe with lower prices for the truly unknown.
Actually, that's right... there are very fast tape systems. DLTs are very nice. I was actually thinking in terms of pure spooling, but rather restore times.
Further up in my posts I mentioned that I would be more enclined to using a harddrive system for primary backup (no doubting speed/capacity on that over tape), and an optical solution for long term storage. As such, time to backup isn't as much a concern, but when you need the data, it's always "yesterday".
And again... how the hell are you moderators mod'ing these posts of mine up to "5"s??? That's a WAY overrated mod. *sigh*:)
Tape can be more reliable, largely because of its time to evolve. It's a more durable solution.
Granted, most current tape systems support more storage than current optical systems. But optical backup systems are gaining popularity. I expect that as they become more popular, they will become cheaper, more reliable, faster, easier, and more spacious... just like every other form of technology that gained popular view.
Tapes have been trust-worthy for some time now, but they are slow and bulky. As the amount of data to backup continues to increase, tape won't be able to keep up. Optical media has progressed in speed considerably over the last few years. I know that some media (CR-R's for example) have hit media thresholds... but they're still MUCH faster than tape at current speeds.
I expect that optical media will continue to improve. In my original post I did state "or something similar", to allow for progress over current optical limitations. My main point really being that tape is dying out. An optical media is becoming a focus for long term storage media, and investment will go into improving upon it.
Yeah... I've heard of similar scenarios with RAID setups. That's why, if it is mission critical you not only run your RAID controllers with a hot spare, but you hav a cold spare ready to jump in, in case one of the hot controllers go bad. That way you can immediately get back to a hot-failover state, meaning no risk of down time. If you're really paranoid, you have 3 hot controllers, so if even two die you still have a 3rd.
And if you're really paranoid, each one has it's own power source, etc, etc, etc.:)
I can't believe I got a Score of 5 on that post though. heh.
Yeah... what I was thinking was that you'd actually increase the number of voters, but I think the proportions would be more in te favor of people who are easily manipulated by advertisement and propaganda.
Not that they're dumb, but if learning about the issues is not made equally as easy, then people will vote for what they're told to vote for, because they're already the people who don't express much interest in the issues.
I don't think that increasing the number of people voting is as important as increasing the awareness and interest in the issues being voted on.
Yeah, I've seen this trend for a while now. Our backup system is also a large HDD raid setup. And for things that need long term storage, those eventually get spooled to tape. I'm sure long term storage will probably start going the way of DVD optical media or something similar (better capacity more likely).
Yeah, the full usable image would be nice, but would probably require a shutdown for data consistency. The backup strategy would likely be similar to that of an Oracle system cold backup.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, sounds like a nice idea except it's not for music that needs to be authorized. It's for any audio that I choose to put on my machine. Most of it are MP3s that I ripped from my CDs.
If they can come out with a way that lets me access the music over the net then great... providing they don't try and hook claws into MY stuff. I can accept authentication of the downloaded music... I'm a little concerned about what would happen if the service goes away though.
-Alex
And just how would I get it on a DVD-R disk. My hardware is one and two years old. I'm not really keen on making anually purchases of hardware just so I can store music. My next machine will be in another year or so.
I see a lot of people saying their are alternatives... but seriously... most of the alternatives suck ass. SSH tunnel or VPN... yeah sure... if you want to support that. I'm a sys admin... I have enough of that crap at work... I don't need to deal with support issues at home. DVD-R... sure... if I fork over the major moola. I'd sooner buy an iPod than a DVD-R drive. SCP/FTP/Web... yeah okay... not exactly convenient or the best "browsable".
Let's just face it. This new change took an awsome feature and ruined it. It was perfect for what it could do. Unfortunately, too perfect, and all the pirates and stupid websites (SpyMac) ruined it for the rest of us. Almost every alternative suggested is not "stupid easy" as a sharing protocol for MUSIC should be. As I said before... it's just music... I don't want to have to admin a friggen VPN or SSH tunnel just to listen to music. I just want to listen to my music.
-Alex
Great idea, unless the machine I use at work is my personal PowerBook trying to access my PowerMac at home. The point of putting the music on my PowerMac was that I wouldn't be taking up 1/3 of my PowerBook HDD space for music.
And most of the music I have to share are MP3s from my own CDs. I actually don't have any pirated music in my collection (well, maybe 2-3 songs... but that's all). It has nothing to do with authorization, in my case, but rather sharing.
I know that there are strong legal reasons, but the paranoia in me can't help wonder what this change will do to sales of the iPods. Could it possibly drive up sales as the only method to make your music portable? Hmmm...
This change is truly disappointing to me.
-Alex
Sure, you could. And as much as I used to love having to work my brain to get something like this to work at home... I really don't have the desire to have to deal with it, let alone support any problems related to it.
I'm pretty pissed. I will be holding off on this update for a while. Sharing my home music to my laptop when on the road (at work, friends, etc) was part of the point!!! This just sucks! Sure, I could do VPN, but to play music?!?! It just seems like too much work to play music.
But then again... I recently got the new iPod too... so I guess I don't need to access it through my home network anymore. But it's annoying I can't share with a friend or two. It's not like I could support more through my home DSL connection.
Bah!
-Alex
Yeah. True. If they're a school with that many machines, they'd have to be pretty damn stupid to Pirate OS X. Apple Legal would have a field day if they ever found out.
-Alex
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.
-Alex
Wow! Been a while since I've seen someone give props to OS/2. :) Maybe I should unzip my last OS/2 disk image to an old PC just to reminisce. I loved that you could just unzip the disk image and it would boot. Made for really flexible blasting of fresh images to new machines.
-Alex
So, how will this latency effect slashdot first post? :) Will there be a race to the main database, or will someone who had first post lose it when absolute time data is finally received?
-Alex
Well, it will allow for those long-thinking chess players the time they seem to enjoy taking per move. :)
-Alex
Well, just to follow up..
It works, but it's not great quality, especially in LA. There are stations on almost all of the available frequencies and they seem to blast at maximum power.
However, it does the basic job for what I need. Although a little disappointed, it's not too bad. I mostly wanted it to listen to audio books from my iPod, while in the car. And a little static while driving isn't too distracting.
If you have a tape adapter, stick with that. You'll get better quality.
I'm wondering if the iTrip available for older iPods has better quality/power/range. It at least has full frequency range, and not just 4 channels. We'll see... next time, I'll wait for reviews.
-Alex
Yeah... the default backup plan when ratings go south... Bring on the Borg! Oh wait! That's what the preview for next week indicated!
:)
I certainly hope they are doing more than that to improve the show! Just bringing in the Borg kind of breaks the idea that Earth didn't have any major confrontation until STTNG. If an earlier Enterprise happened to encounter the Borg, I would think that some records would have existed for Pickard to to be more prepared.
-Alex
Still waiting for it to be delivered (should arrive today). A friend of mine (who works as a sound engineer at CalArts) says they work well. He said, it's not like having the CD in your car directly, but for the purpose of listening in your car, with wind, engine, and street sounds already degrading quality of experience, it's pretty good.
:)
I will have to check and see. Oh! Just got a call from the receptionist. My package is here.
-Alex
Playing the iPod on my car stereo (actually a CD player) was my biggest hold-out for getting an iPod. Then Apple listed the Belkin thing on their main page, I clicked for info, and was cursing my computer because I knew I wouldn't make it through the day being $450 poorer.
It's real simple. You plug it in to the audio jack, and tune your stereo to one of 4 low frequency channels. Belkin has more info on it than Apple does. It's not really iPod specific, but very handy (not to mention the look of it) for iPod. I think it runs on 2 AAA batteries.
Here's Belkin's page on that product.
-Alex
Yeah! I bought a new CD and it doesn't work in my tape-deck car stereo! I bought the music, I should be able to play it on anything I want, without having to rip it, and record it to cassette. Not to mention loss of quality!
Yeesh! Give me a break! I agree DRM is rather lame. But as SOOO many people have said, if you don't like it, don't buy it. Personally, I'm unaffected by this, since my new iPod plays what I want, and can wirelessly (Belkin TuneCast) transmit to my FM stereo in my car.
There are SO many solutions to convert formats. But I see no reason why the format that your player happens to support should be what is used. I'm annoyed that stuff I buy (especially as an early adopter often times) ends up not being useful because of the trend/direction industries go. Oh well! Part of the risk of working on the near-bleeding edge of technology.
-Alex
If you have some form of strange proxy for your outbound communication, I'm thinking it's your ISP limitting you, not the Apple authentication. There is no connection initiated from Apple TO you to authenticate the file. As such, most common proxy configurations should not hinder you.
There's likely a simple solution to you problem. Could tell you what, though, without knowing specifics.
-Alex
I'm someone in the real world. Add on people who want to listen to music working out, snow boarding, etc... a CD sucks all together. I finally decided to get an iPod because of this service. I rarely bought music when I had to go to the music store. Since online services have been becoming more popular, I'm buying more music. And this service makes it even easier.
The time to DL the music to a digital player (iPod or other device) adds MAYBE another minute. And I can take my entire music collection with me to ANY of the locations you or I mentioned.
Just because you buy the music online doesn't mean you spend less time outdoors. It means you can spend that time living, not browsing INSIDE a store.
And as for your comments about "95%" (a little inflated) using Kazaa. I know that MOST of the people over 21-23 that I know actually don't want to pirate music. Granted the evil RIAA sucks ass, it's still illegal to pirate the music. Many people I've talked to said they might actually consider buying their music if it were this easy.
So... really, time will tell... but I'm think Apple has hit the mark. Windows users have followed the Mac/Apple concepts historically. Don't forget that little fact. I was a Windows/Linux user until about 2 years ago. I got tired of the fun things being tedious. Much happier now, as is every person (4 so far) I've converted to OS X.
Just my $0.02.
-Alex
1) I agree, but it is nice to quickly resort by song, artist, genre, album, etc. Searching is still easier if you have a good sense of what you are looking for.
2) They do link to Artists official sites. On the Artist page, many have an official link. Apple is on the ball with that. Buying the CD would be nice though, even for a little more. Although, personally, I'd probably never use that option.
4) Exactly what I was thinking. I found a lot of good stuff. I hope that the labels and music selection continues to grow. I'm sure a lot of time/work had to go into making all that available, especially with all the graphics and stuff specific to every artist and album. I'd like to see small independent songs available as well... maybe with lower prices for the truly unknown.
-Alex
3)
I was actually thinking in terms of pure spooling, but rather restore times.
Oops... that should read "I wasn't actually...".
-Alex
Actually, that's right... there are very fast tape systems. DLTs are very nice. I was actually thinking in terms of pure spooling, but rather restore times.
:)
Further up in my posts I mentioned that I would be more enclined to using a harddrive system for primary backup (no doubting speed/capacity on that over tape), and an optical solution for long term storage. As such, time to backup isn't as much a concern, but when you need the data, it's always "yesterday".
And again... how the hell are you moderators mod'ing these posts of mine up to "5"s??? That's a WAY overrated mod. *sigh*
-Alex
Tape can be more reliable, largely because of its time to evolve. It's a more durable solution.
Granted, most current tape systems support more storage than current optical systems. But optical backup systems are gaining popularity. I expect that as they become more popular, they will become cheaper, more reliable, faster, easier, and more spacious... just like every other form of technology that gained popular view.
Tapes have been trust-worthy for some time now, but they are slow and bulky. As the amount of data to backup continues to increase, tape won't be able to keep up. Optical media has progressed in speed considerably over the last few years. I know that some media (CR-R's for example) have hit media thresholds... but they're still MUCH faster than tape at current speeds.
I expect that optical media will continue to improve. In my original post I did state "or something similar", to allow for progress over current optical limitations. My main point really being that tape is dying out. An optical media is becoming a focus for long term storage media, and investment will go into improving upon it.
-Alex
Yeah... I've heard of similar scenarios with RAID setups. That's why, if it is mission critical you not only run your RAID controllers with a hot spare, but you hav a cold spare ready to jump in, in case one of the hot controllers go bad. That way you can immediately get back to a hot-failover state, meaning no risk of down time. If you're really paranoid, you have 3 hot controllers, so if even two die you still have a 3rd.
:)
And if you're really paranoid, each one has it's own power source, etc, etc, etc.
I can't believe I got a Score of 5 on that post though. heh.
-Alex
Yeah... what I was thinking was that you'd actually increase the number of voters, but I think the proportions would be more in te favor of people who are easily manipulated by advertisement and propaganda.
Not that they're dumb, but if learning about the issues is not made equally as easy, then people will vote for what they're told to vote for, because they're already the people who don't express much interest in the issues.
I don't think that increasing the number of people voting is as important as increasing the awareness and interest in the issues being voted on.
Just my $0.02.
-Alex
Yeah, I've seen this trend for a while now. Our backup system is also a large HDD raid setup. And for things that need long term storage, those eventually get spooled to tape. I'm sure long term storage will probably start going the way of DVD optical media or something similar (better capacity more likely).
:)
Yeah, the full usable image would be nice, but would probably require a shutdown for data consistency. The backup strategy would likely be similar to that of an Oracle system cold backup.
-Alex
I think they went the other way.
... and then maybe a second time, for fun!
1. Attack the users (threats and such)
2. Attack Napster
3. Attack the VCs.
-Alex
Damn! You beat me to it!
-Alex