Hence the fight over this. Can you image if Challenge Response were part of say, outlook or built into Longhorn or WebTV, and no-one lese could use this fundmental approach? very valuable indeed.
So if no one elese but Mailblocks can implement a decent anti-spam response due to patents. then mailblocks has a perfect protection racket. start spamming everyone to sell....anti-spam software.
This is sort of silly really. People who like apple, dont want a cheap fake apple. they might want cheaper apples, but they want it to work like an apple does. And that means the total experience.
There's no way a mac on linux clone will ever match the quality, ease of maintence, the no-surprises of hardware comaptibility or missing drivers.
Its cute but its not a mac in the ways that attract people to mac.
I think its main utility is for people who run Linux that occasionally need to run mac software
If the enemy of my enemy is my freind then SUN microsystems must be as conflicted as the guy who was his own grand pa.
On the one hand SUN should be pleased with something that increaces the value of companies that have UNIX, like solaris, that is not legally encumbered.
Yet, they must be seriously quaesy to find them selves on the same legal side of the UNIX ownership issue as their arch enemy Microsoft.
On the other hand SUN has been poised on a bet-the-company move to LINUX and most analysts have said that this going to work they cant hesitate any longer. Now they probably will pause again.
Someone does not have to behave perfectly competent to be reasonably competent. Setting the standard that every developer has to check every line of code in liunx on every build would be preposterous; no one besides ATT, IBM and MS have the resources to do that.
likewise the complaints that SCO should have found this earlier are silly too. Maybe they could have, but they are not omniscient nor perfectly organized to be able to realize or detect that instantly. Until they organized as an IP company and not as a linux house they were not even inthe mindset to do so. is that their fault?
SCO cant go around checking every other vendors releases all the time. They just can spot check it when they want to. It would take a full time person to be either looking for it or a person of tremendous experience to be looking in the right place at the right time (that person would have to be familiar with what was ATT/SCO proprietory what was not and be aware of the legal nuances.
for example MS software has and probably still does have undetected propetary code in it. Put in by some lazy peon perhaps. Now of course they should not do this and they should actively prevent this. But that's not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is how many companies whose code MS has stolen are even aware of it. MS itself is not aware of it. this stuff happens and it takes a lot of effort for a small code house to actually discover they have had their code stolen.
remember SCO did not actually write UNIX. they bought it. so they aren't a giant codeing house.
SCO wont be bound by the GPL licence
on
What if SCO is Right?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I dont think there's much of a case to support SCO being held to the requirments of the GPL in their "released software". They were inadvertently duped into it, and thus cant be held accountable.
For example, IBM markets linux. Of course they did not write all of the code. Now suppose a devious linux developer were to insert say, all of some propriatey IBM application into the kernel code. If IBM does not check the code line by line they wont know it when they go to release the next edition of their variant of Linux that includes this new kernel. Thus IBM would have been duped in to releasing their own proprietary code. No reasonable person would think they were bound by the GPL.
The Math is just WRONG. Here's why
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Deivation assumes two falacies first,
that the price of goods is not partly determined by the demoninations of coins. for example, the reason why a candy bar is 50 cents or 65 cents and not say 48 cents is because we have nickels dimes and quarters. or that the reason a price is 5.95 cents and not 5.96 cents. etc..
Second, this assumes your change purse is stocked with all denominations. that's true at the cash register but not in my pocket. When I reach in my pocket and I pull out some change there are a myraid of ways I can make 25 cents. 5 nickels, 2 dimes and a nickel, 5 pennies+ etc..., not so with his optimal set. if I'm nissing any of the denominations its hard to make it up with the others.
third, entropy again reaching for change in my pocket the goal is not to find the minumum number of coins but rather to be able to pay the bill without thinking too much. that is the more ways I can add up to the same value the more likely I will on a random grab find the right coins to make it. I dont care how many coins.
yes, Because QWEST provides dsl via MSN, so its natural to be part of MSN.
Setting aside issues about the evil empire, Microsoft products on mac frequently dont suck. (e.g. look at office) or at least they dont suck as bad like they do on windows platforms. Microsoft's mac unit often puts the rest of the comany to shame.
When apple incorporated as apple they supposedly signed an agreement with apple records not to go into the record production bussiness.
from Wikipedia:
At one point, Apple Records sued Apple Computer for trademark infringment because the computer company broke their earlier agreement not to add sound to its computers. The case was settled out of court. Apple computers ever since have included a sound labelled sosumi ("So, sue me").
The label became successful, surviving the legal dissolution of the Beatles in 1974, and continuing to issue new material till 1976, although the holding company, Apple Corps., Ltd., is still in existence. The label was resurrected around the time of the Anthology for use on all Beatles CDs.
1.44 songs per second and less than 20 seconds to download a song means there are 28 concurrent downloads on average. I could handle with just a couple of PCs!!
of course the problem is the spike loads, and I would imagine that for every song downloaded 20 get listened to.
If we figure the peak period is 100 times larger and the lisenting and web services are another factor of 10 in load thats a couple thousand servers.
produces 11% RMS distortion of the original waveform. enought to hear.
on the otherhand 128 bit ACC -> AIFF -> 128 bit ACC
produces 6% RMS distortion.
I have not yet tested higher bit rates for MP3. however I would be surprised if 6% was not an aupper bound. This is not a pyscho acoustic test, merely an RMS test. 6% is quite acceptable for most listeners since a change of speakers or room can produce a simmilar effect. what is not clear is how this affects sounds humans are espically perceptive too such as the crach of symbols or noise in quiet passages.
Finally I have made an intriguing observation. I compared the AIFF I got off my CD to the ACC-> AIFF I downloaded from iTunes Music store. interestingly, the waveforms are not only different but the Pitch isdifferent. that's right the music plays just slightly (imperceptibly) slower on the iTunes version. I'm not sure why. Are not CD's digital, and if so what could cause the rate of playback to change. (were talking millseonds per second shifts in rate of play). It's also unlcear why the waveform of the ACC I purchased and the one I generated off the CD differed in ways besides pitch. The difference was larger than the difference between MP3 and ACC encoding using itunes. this suggests that the en-codec that apple is using is not the SAME one as the one found in itunes and introduces considerably more distrotion than the one found in itunes.
So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs? Is it just another way of communicating that perhaps allows one to avoid a congested/insecure ethernet backbone when connecting two neigboring macs? what's the big deal?
Microsoft (steve balmer) has said that we should not fret so much about Paladium (redubbed Next Generaion etc...) since it will be optional. The end user can choose not to use it. of course certain Apps wont run in non-trusted mode but that'll be my choice. And of course, the ability to run certain apps in a trusted mode will indeed be desirable (e.g. medical records, banking, coroporate VPN). sounds good right?
So if MS really feels this way, why are they so obstinate about the Xbox modding? Xbox's protection is highly analogous to the Paladium in the way it uses a secure platform. So it seems like I ought to be able to diable this at boot time. Okay in return I should expect that Xbox games and Xbox network should be inaccessible in a non-secure platform mode, but if we take steve balmer at his word then this should be an acceptable choice left to the user to make.
On the other hand one could draw a more troubling inference. MS is saying, we are going to lock out non-approved game vendors by using our secure computing platform as a club. This is not unreasonable if it just stopped at Xbox (since they dont have a monopoly on game boxes). But this may also be a the camel's nose in the tent for genertal computing: we're going to do the same with paladium to secure our software monopoly. We will just call it a choice-- a hobson's choice--to evade the monopoly problem.
Of course I'm just talking out my ass here. But I see a strong parallel and dont like it.
I used to sell INtel and Z-80 S-100 buss computers when the apple came out. I assumed it was just another comodore/trs-80/amiga toy. then one day i had to take one apart. Boy those machines were way ahead of their time. they just looked like toys cause they were so simple inside.
notable things compared to the "big iron" s-100 systems
1) mixing text and graphics on screen, not to mention sprites 2) memory mapped video (s-100 systems were buss and I/O based) 3) switching power supplies. Altair, imsai, cromenco, were all tranformer/rectifier/capacitor systems and you could barely lift them. a few of the game-sytems may have had swithcing power supplies, but none of the serious computers did. 4) pre-decoded memory mapped buss with pre-regulated voltages, made making plug in cards a snap. half the circuits on the lod s-100 bus cards were for decoding the bus handshaking signals (here were no single asic chips designed to do that back then) and another chunk of board area went for regulating the voltages. 5) soft sectored floppies. every one else was hard sectored leading to incompatible drive, proliferation of formats, and incompatible software for accessing them. the apples could reprogram themselves as drive technology improved rapidly.
But the really big deal with the apples was something few people appreciate. the first truly robust use of dynamic memory, that allowed all modern computing platforms. most of the big iron systems used static ram which needs something like 18 transistors per bit and consummed orders of magnitude more power and board area. an entire s-100 card, slightly bigger than a modern pci bus card, might hold 8K. yes you hear that right 8K not meg or 8 gig, of static ram chips. and thats why you needed those huge power supplies (and on board regulation).
if static memeory were still in use, a 1 gig memory card would be about ten times larger than todays dynamic memory and consume about 1 mega watt of power!!!! in static memeory current is flowing the whole time. in dynamic memory current only flows when the bit swithces state, the rest of the time it just stores charge. storing charge does not disspate any power. thus the future of computing hinged on dynamic memory.
Now lots of folks tried to build dynamic memory systems but refreshing these things over the s-100 bus was problematic. It was made worse because intel 80-80s used variable numbers of clock cycles to do an instruction so when the memory could be accessed was indeterminant. you might not reach the memory in time. and on board refresh systems were comlicated too. basically it was pretty unreliable stuff. I know, I sold and repaired it.
but woz pulled two great tricks. first he used the 6502 cpu which on every clock cycle the down beat is always gaurentted to never access memory. thus refreshes could hum along at 1 Mhz gaurenteed. the other clever things was that there was NO refresh circuitry at all! he beat this by letting the video memory be in main memory. the video was accessed on the back side of the clock, and its row-address signal was enogh to refresh all of the memory.
I fell in love with apple when I figure this out. so elegant. so few chips in side the damn machine. such tiny litte car slots. so cute.
of course even back then the MHZ myth was strong. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz while the 8080b ran at upt to 2. (Z80 went to 4) but instructions on an 8080 took 3 to 11 clock cycles with most about 4 or 5. and because the clock was so fast, much of the mmeory was too slow (typically about 500Ns response time was possible) to respond and had to inject wait states. this made it even slower. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz but most instructions took 1 clock cycle. some took up to 3. the slower rate was matched to the 500ns memory speed, (not to mention the second fetch on the back side for the video) so there were no waits. and the kicker was that on those three-clock cycle instructions the 6502 would pipe-line the next memeory fet
Challenge response is going to be effective but intrusive since a human must read the challenge and reply. this will suck when I sent the family newsletter to 40 friends I havent written to in a couple years and get 40 fresh challenges because my presence on their whitelist had expired. likewise even for automated things I sign up for like like slashdot updates or t rowe price stock reports
I'd like to suggest a way this could all be done automatically, so transparently your an AOL grandma could do it, and almost non-intrusively. Like the lessig-style stamp, all users would be charged say 0.01 cents to send ME an e-mail. but I would automatically refund this payment if either 1) the sender was in my addressbook/whitelist or 2) I did not file the e-mail in my junk mailbox.
what is needed is some sort of distributed postal service to handle the actual micropayments. And this is the main problem--how to collect these. I think the least intrusive method is that when you get an e-mail account you put down a pre-payment, lets say $10 on account at the postal service. when you send messages that are welcome your account is not depleted. when you send messages that aren't it slowly drains.
the cost of the postal service ditributed servers could probably be paid for by 1) the charges for unwanted e-mail 2) interest on the deposits on account. thus people would be willing to set up these servers.
the final missing ingredient is a centralized server that coordinated the actual postal servers. all this would be would be like a DNS that told all of the remote servers the names of the other ones so they could communicate account info.
the transactions themselves would be in number about twice as the number of e-mails handled (one to the post office from the first ISP to receive the mail to validate the payment code in the header, one from to the postal service me to authorize refund/no refund), and the accounting message size very small.
Perhaps this is a rotten idea. its main benefits are 1) its not intrusive and is nearly transparent 2) it pays for itself 3) requires changes only at the browser level.
I does not stop spam from showing up in my inbox, but makes it very expensive to mass mail.
flame on! or suggests problems and their solution.
just made a CD then re-ripped it. It sounds pretty good though I think I can hear some difference.
So I ran the output of the original and the re-ripped Cd through a signal analysis package. there as an 11% rms difference between the wave forms. that's pretty huge certainly well above a pyscho-accoustic threshold. (that's about the difference a carpeted room versus a hardwood fllow can make. and easily noticed on ear phones.
also the specta were slightly differently shaped. at the high end. you can hear that. also the original ACC had no content above 15.5Khz. that's no CD quality though with my ears its hard to hear the difference. It does however mean that when you re-rip you will unvoidably erode the spectrum further, and into a range I can hear.
thus re-ripping a CD is NOT the answer. its not the same as buying something at the music store. so its critical that I be able to play the originals on various devices.
whoops. I meant to say that's about 1 million album's per year if they can sustain their expected pace of 1 million songs per month. (obviously its 5 million albums per year if they can sustain their first week sales)
according to wired news all of last year there were only half a million online sales of downloadable music from ALL sources combined!!!
in one week apple trippled the annual sales of online downloadable music. And The real profit made last week is coming from the 110,000 ipods they sold last week. the profit margin on those is much higher than the million records.
an that is just to apple user and no one else. imagine if this had been world wide.
On the otherhand 1 million sales is a tiny drop in the record sales bucket. if there are 1 million songs sold that's less than 100,000 albums sold. which means over the course of a year that will mean about a million album sold if they can sustain this pace. that's trivial. how many times a year does a artist release an album that goes "platinum"? seems to me they are many every year, some from each record label. thus if apple sustains this pace it will only contribute a single platinum album. Of course there may be a large multiplier effect if the profit margins on this are higher/lower than normal album sales.
What this really shows is how utterly insignificant all of the the other on line music sales were prior to this. they didn't even register: a single mega-record store in NY city could outsell all of the annual online music in a good day prior to apple's involvment. likewise selling CDs by mail also vastly exceeded this market.
heck AOL sent out more of their free trial disks than that!
on the otherhand, once this hits the rest of the world and once this hits the windows world. now were talking a large dent in the sales of music online. again remeber their may b eprofit margin mulitpiers too. this will be true in places that yearn for "pop" music but dont have such good access to music stores as in the US. likewise, world artists will be able to crack the US market if apple lets in lables that lack US distribution systems.
now lets talk about how intrusive the DRM is. its not bad compared to all previous efforts. you can keep your music on a CD so insome sense you own it. but re-ripping it is supposed to be not so good, and thus since digital music is the only way you will be using music in the future having an unrippable high quality CD is not as good as it seems.
Apple's tech knowledge base warns you to deauthenticate your mac before you
reformat the disk or sell it. its not clear but it seems to imply
that you could lose one of your 3 authentications if you dont.
Apple warns you they are free to change how they
authenticate your music when you install it on a new mac any time they wish.
This lack of clarity over the authentication protool has me
worried but not hyperventilating.
legitmate questions include:
1)how do I authenticate my music on future macs or ipods if
mac sells its music store to someone who either goes out of
bussiness or starts charging fees to authenticate. (dont laugh
mac switched its bussiness model from free to pay for mac.com
and claris works)
2) Someday i'll want to keep my music on my phone, credit-
card computer, ring, implant, etc....will future itunes allow me
to move music to non-mac music players?
3) if my computer is lost, the mother board dies, my hard disk
crashes, or a virus eats it, or my employer seizes it before
deauthenticate have I lost one of my authentications?
4) what if I go bankrupt and cant get a visa card. how do I
maintain a music store account so I can authenticate?
5) in the future, will legacy macs that cant run the latest OS
also not be able to de-authenticate?
As I said I'm not hyperventilating, and like 8-tracks and vinyl I
dont have the unreasonable expectation that I wont want to
replace my music media in the future. but I dont want to be
forced to because say apple goes out of the music bussniess.
and yes I realize I can make an audio CD but its not the same
as having bought a CD in the store since the store bought CD
will rip to higher audio quality for use in digital players (and I
predict in the future all useful players are going to be digital--
there wont be many CD players except as ripping devices)
should ebay be liable, yes. why? because a major part of what e-bay is selling is your good reputation. That is to say, one of the reasons you come back again anad again to buy or sell and the whole reason you use the same user name is to build your reputation.
its cumaulative tangible value infact exceed the value of the profit margin on MOST if not all transactions. You can infact SELL your user ID for cash proving this point. think about it.
Many stores delberately sell items cheaply to establish an intial good reputation which allows them to seek higher profits later. E-bay knows this and promotes this will all sorts of "power seller badges" and the ability to restrict sales to people with good feedaback, and even offers the opportunity for enhanced selling venues to people with lots of good feedback. They are selling you the chance to improve your reputation.
if this reputation had no directly related commercial value, such as on slashdot then one could safely argue that ebay was not selling it. but they are and they are making money off of it. therefore their obligation to help you protect that reputation exists.
the fact that they cannot economically do so given the number of users is not any excuse at all. General motors could sell cars more cheaply too if they did not have to obey laws on car safety.
in deed, digressing a bit, e-bay does not adequately police the safety of their web site against fraud. just because it would cut into their profits to do so again does not make this an excuse. Night club owners are obligated to hire security to protect their patrons from evil doers. so is e-bay. Why? again because e-bay is making a profit off the activity.
speaking of codecs i've been doing my own anaylys of the apple acc and mpw and aiff formats. I've been converting acc to Aiff then to mp3 by two methods 1) use audio hijack to grab the itunes output and 2) use imovie to convert the acc to aiff.
what is odd is that while the final mp3 shows only 12% rms distortion (actually that's a fair bit if you're an audiophile) the intermediate AIFF shows massive added noise when I convert by imovie. this added noise is spread over the spectrum but has significant components at 10Khz. the final mp3 converted by method 1 or 2 are simmilar and show the same level of distortion 12% rms.
being a signals processing expert but not a codec expert I'm totally at a loss to explain how distortion can show up in the aiff then vanish when reconverted to mp3 (or back to ACC). this makes no sense, and is actually impossible from an information from a (naive) signal/noise point of view unless the noise/distortion is either predictable or out of band form the codec's point of view. never-the-less this is reproiducible.
I'd like to publish this analysis on slashdot but first want to clear this up.
Why do you need a 3d desktop. other than the actual legitimate uses of 3d for presentation of data there are what one might call psycic ergonomics. By this I mean clues and hinting that communicate to your brain things you need to know. A good example from the 2-d days was the way a macintosh icon would have little tracers radiate out form the application to the main window when you double clicked it. like it sort of popped out of the applications icon. IN the modern OSX the genie effect (or scale effect) has much the same effect: when you minimize an open window your brain registers where it was parked without you having to give it much conscious thought.
3d effect play simmilar roles. the tranparency and shadowing of foregroung and backrgound windows is something you immediatly grasp abd grasp without think about it becuase your brain already knows how po process those clues. like wise throbbing or size changing 3d icons can be subtle ways to grab your attention. Dialog boxes that drop down out of windows again clue you into what window they are refering to.
now done wrong they could also be wizbang distractions. This is of course what has always distinguished say apple products from others. Apple tends to follow a consisten and understated GUI that just directs your eye where it needs to go.
3d effects can clrify what is or is not a button, and even what you are supposed to do with it (twist, rock, slide, press)
no you dont need 3d. heck you dont need a gui. Dos didnt have it even though it did have a graphics mode.
Reminds me of the microsoft "house of the future" display they have in redmond. the amusing thing was, the house did not have any bathrooms. where do you want to go today would of course be the first thing on anyones mind whol actually lived in the house.
Maybe someone can explain this to me. As I probably misunderstand it, darwin is based on BSD. so presumbaly any imrpovements in openBSD are easy to migrate to Darwin and OS X?
when can I expect I get my security enhancements in OS X?
I did call myself a weasle did I not?
I do have one legit worry about these things. You can only copy them to three computers. At first this sounds like a lot but imagine the following. ten years from now I will probably have one through five or six computers (at work and at home and on portable units). If I ever fail to deauthenticate one of these computers I have ported my tunes to. or if I ever share the songs with a friend who then subsequently retures his computer without deauthenticating first. then before long I will lose access to ALL of my music!!!.
Its even unclear to me what happens if the host name chages or if I have to re-install my OS. will I lose one of my authentications each time I fail to deauthenticate a computer. (.e.g suppose the hard drive crashes and I have to rebuild my computer, I cant deauthenticate the old computer since its dead.)
Here's some tips that may fix the problems you encountered on the music store.
First the one click sign up form has a small bug if you already have any apple account with a credit card. (e.g. mac.com, applestore, developer account, iphoto). The error messages they give are misleading as to the root cause of the problem but here is the trick to getting it to work. You must make sure that all of your apple accounts have identical info. when I say identical i mean exact. for example having a ten digit hyphenated phone number on one account and not on the music store record, or a different zip code will break it. Finally, counter intuitively, do not enter the security code number from the back of the credit card. the reason here is that the mac.com accounts dont have a place for it to be entered.
if all else fails, create a fresh account with a new e-mail address.
for cover art of all those tunes you did not buy from apple the best solution is clutter a freeware app that works with itunes. it auto lookups the cover art using amazon.com. it has some other feeatures too. but mainly it works slightly better than the one built into itunes since it does a more successful job of recognizing when two songs belong to the same album and avoids storing the cover art twice.
if you want to drag the cover art from clutter into itunes here is a procedure I recomend--I wish I could automate it.
1) open itunes and create a smart playlist of all track=1 tunes to get one tune from every album. 2) click on cover art display where it says "selection" and it will change to "now playing", 3) in the finder open ~/Library/Images/com.sprote.clutter/CDs and sort it by date.
now iterate the following, start playing the first song in your smart playlist, clutter will fetch the album cover, the finder will show a folder containing a jpeg. drag this to the album art in itunes, press command -> to move to the next song in itunes. rinse lather repeat. the only proble I encoutered was as I said in some cases itunes cant figure out that two songs are from the same album.
if you need high res cover art go to walmart's web site.
ps I spent last night playing with the store and after i got it to accept my credit card (yep the credit company called me to see if this was fraud too--multiple charges in a row for the same small amount is a fraud flag not an apple bug). I bought five peices of music before i realized this was like eating potatoe chips. flawless instant downloads, pristine music. fairly easy to find what I wanted, and though some things I wanted are missing the breadth of their coverage in other musical forms is astonishing. I even bough some music form artists I had never heard before because I found it while browsing. I really enjoyed the ability to fill in my music collection with a few songs I used to have on vinyl but would never be willing to buy the whole album again just to get those favorites.
and my conclusion is this. I've spent hours on kazza trying to download just a few songs I wanted. it rarely works the fist time since the servers beomce un avalaible or some dickhead entered the album decriptor wrong or the connection stinks or you cant find a decent bit rate or just part of the album..yada yada yada.
after using the applse site I realized what steve jobs was saying when he pointed out on cnn that using Kazza is like paying yourself minimum wages since you can only get 5 songs (= 5 dollars) in a hours worth of work!!! hopefully in a few years the price will drop even more at which point it will be way better than free,
THe only thing I was not too happy about was that I cant get these in mp3 format so I cant send them to my freinds with plain jane mp3 players. (you cant convert acc that you purchesed to mp3 in itunes--it will let you convert acc songs that you ripped yourself). I could burn a cd and re-rip them but by then the quality will be down. But franky this is just me being a weasel. its not fair use for me to mail songs around the globe.
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Hence the fight over this. Can you image if Challenge Response were part of say, outlook or built into Longhorn or WebTV, and no-one lese could use this fundmental approach? very valuable indeed.
So if no one elese but Mailblocks can implement a decent anti-spam response due to patents. then mailblocks has a perfect protection racket. start spamming everyone to sell....anti-spam software.
This is sort of silly really. People who like apple, dont want a cheap fake apple. they might want cheaper apples, but they want it to work like an apple does. And that means the total experience.
There's no way a mac on linux clone will ever match the quality, ease of maintence, the no-surprises of hardware comaptibility or missing drivers.
Its cute but its not a mac in the ways that attract people to mac.
I think its main utility is for people who run Linux that occasionally need to run mac software
On the one hand SUN should be pleased with something that increaces the value of companies that have UNIX, like solaris, that is not legally encumbered.
Yet, they must be seriously quaesy to find them selves on the same legal side of the UNIX ownership issue as their arch enemy Microsoft.
On the other hand SUN has been poised on a bet-the-company move to LINUX and most analysts have said that this going to work they cant hesitate any longer. Now they probably will pause again.
likewise the complaints that SCO should have found this earlier are silly too. Maybe they could have, but they are not omniscient nor perfectly organized to be able to realize or detect that instantly. Until they organized as an IP company and not as a linux house they were not even inthe mindset to do so. is that their fault?
SCO cant go around checking every other vendors releases all the time. They just can spot check it when they want to. It would take a full time person to be either looking for it or a person of tremendous experience to be looking in the right place at the right time (that person would have to be familiar with what was ATT/SCO proprietory what was not and be aware of the legal nuances.
for example MS software has and probably still does have undetected propetary code in it. Put in by some lazy peon perhaps. Now of course they should not do this and they should actively prevent this. But that's not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is how many companies whose code MS has stolen are even aware of it. MS itself is not aware of it. this stuff happens and it takes a lot of effort for a small code house to actually discover they have had their code stolen.
remember SCO did not actually write UNIX. they bought it. so they aren't a giant codeing house.
For example, IBM markets linux. Of course they did not write all of the code. Now suppose a devious linux developer were to insert say, all of some propriatey IBM application into the kernel code. If IBM does not check the code line by line they wont know it when they go to release the next edition of their variant of Linux that includes this new kernel. Thus IBM would have been duped in to releasing their own proprietary code. No reasonable person would think they were bound by the GPL.
The Deivation assumes two falacies
first,
that the price of goods is not partly determined by the demoninations of coins. for example, the reason why a candy bar is 50 cents or 65 cents and not say 48 cents is because we have nickels dimes and quarters. or that the reason a price is 5.95 cents and not 5.96 cents. etc..
Second,
this assumes your change purse is stocked with all denominations. that's true at the cash register but not in my pocket. When I reach in my pocket and I pull out some change there are a myraid of ways I can make 25 cents. 5 nickels, 2 dimes and a nickel, 5 pennies+ etc...,
not so with his optimal set. if I'm nissing any of the denominations its hard to make it up with the others.
third, entropy
again reaching for change in my pocket the goal is not to find the minumum number of coins but rather to be able to pay the bill without thinking too much. that is the more ways I can add up to the same value the more likely I will on a random grab find the right coins to make it. I dont care how many coins.
yes, Because QWEST provides dsl via MSN, so its natural to be part of MSN.
Setting aside issues about the evil empire, Microsoft products on mac frequently dont suck. (e.g. look at office) or at least they dont suck as bad like they do on windows platforms. Microsoft's mac unit often puts the rest of the comany to shame.
When apple incorporated as apple they supposedly signed an agreement with apple records not to go into the record production bussiness.
from Wikipedia:
At one point, Apple Records sued Apple Computer for trademark infringment because the computer company broke their earlier agreement not to add sound to its computers. The case was settled out of court. Apple computers ever since have included a sound labelled sosumi ("So, sue me").
The label became successful, surviving the legal dissolution of the Beatles in 1974, and continuing to issue new material till 1976, although the holding company, Apple Corps., Ltd., is still in existence. The label was resurrected around the time of the Anthology for use on all Beatles CDs.
1.44 songs per second and less than 20 seconds to download a song means there are 28 concurrent downloads on average. I could handle with just a couple of PCs!!
of course the problem is the spike loads, and I would imagine that for every song downloaded 20 get listened to.
If we figure the peak period is 100 times larger and the lisenting and web services are another factor of 10 in load thats a couple thousand servers.
anyone have a better guess?
I can give you one data point.
128 bit ACC ->AIFF -> 128bit mp3
produces 11% RMS distortion of the original waveform. enought to hear.
on the otherhand
128 bit ACC -> AIFF -> 128 bit ACC
produces 6% RMS distortion.
I have not yet tested higher bit rates for MP3. however I would be surprised if 6% was not an aupper bound. This is not a pyscho acoustic test, merely an RMS test. 6% is quite acceptable for most listeners since a change of speakers or room can produce a simmilar effect. what is not clear is how this affects sounds humans are espically perceptive too such as the crach of symbols or noise in quiet passages.
Finally I have made an intriguing observation. I compared the AIFF I got off my CD to the ACC-> AIFF I downloaded from iTunes Music store. interestingly, the waveforms are not only different but the Pitch isdifferent. that's right the music plays just slightly (imperceptibly) slower on the iTunes version. I'm not sure why. Are not CD's digital, and if so what could cause the rate of playback to change. (were talking millseonds per second shifts in rate of play). It's also unlcear why the waveform of the ACC I purchased and the one I generated off the CD differed in ways besides pitch. The difference was larger than the difference between MP3 and ACC encoding using itunes. this suggests that the en-codec that apple is using is not the SAME one as the one found in itunes and introduces considerably more distrotion than the one found in itunes.
So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs?
Is it just another way of communicating that perhaps allows one to avoid a congested/insecure ethernet backbone when connecting two neigboring macs?
what's the big deal?
So if MS really feels this way, why are they so obstinate about the Xbox modding? Xbox's protection is highly analogous to the Paladium in the way it uses a secure platform. So it seems like I ought to be able to diable this at boot time. Okay in return I should expect that Xbox games and Xbox network should be inaccessible in a non-secure platform mode, but if we take steve balmer at his word then this should be an acceptable choice left to the user to make.
On the other hand one could draw a more troubling inference. MS is saying, we are going to lock out non-approved game vendors by using our secure computing platform as a club. This is not unreasonable if it just stopped at Xbox (since they dont have a monopoly on game boxes). But this may also be a the camel's nose in the tent for genertal computing: we're going to do the same with paladium to secure our software monopoly. We will just call it a choice-- a hobson's choice--to evade the monopoly problem.
Of course I'm just talking out my ass here. But I see a strong parallel and dont like it.
I used to sell INtel and Z-80 S-100 buss computers when the apple came out. I assumed it was just another comodore/trs-80/amiga toy. then one day i had to take one apart. Boy those machines were way ahead of their time. they just looked like toys cause they were so simple inside.
notable things compared to the "big iron" s-100 systems
1) mixing text and graphics on screen, not to mention sprites
2) memory mapped video (s-100 systems were buss and I/O based)
3) switching power supplies. Altair, imsai, cromenco, were all tranformer/rectifier/capacitor systems and you could barely lift them. a few of the game-sytems may have had swithcing power supplies, but none of the serious computers did.
4) pre-decoded memory mapped buss with pre-regulated voltages, made making plug in cards a snap. half the circuits on the lod s-100 bus cards were for decoding the bus handshaking signals (here were no single asic chips designed to do that back then) and another chunk of board area went for regulating the voltages.
5) soft sectored floppies. every one else was hard sectored leading to incompatible drive, proliferation of formats, and incompatible software for accessing them. the apples could reprogram themselves as drive technology improved rapidly.
But the really big deal with the apples was something few people appreciate. the first truly robust use of dynamic memory, that allowed all modern computing platforms. most of the big iron systems used static ram which needs something like 18 transistors per bit and consummed orders of magnitude more power and board area. an entire s-100 card, slightly bigger than a modern pci bus card, might hold 8K. yes you hear that right 8K not meg or 8 gig, of static ram chips. and thats why you needed those huge power supplies (and on board regulation).
if static memeory were still in use, a 1 gig memory card would be about ten times larger than todays dynamic memory and consume about 1 mega watt of power!!!!
in static memeory current is flowing the whole time. in dynamic memory current only flows when the bit swithces state, the rest of the time it just stores charge. storing charge does not disspate any power.
thus the future of computing hinged on dynamic memory.
Now lots of folks tried to build dynamic memory systems but refreshing these things over the s-100 bus was problematic. It was made worse because intel 80-80s used variable numbers of clock cycles to do an instruction so when the memory could be accessed was indeterminant. you might not reach the memory in time. and on board refresh systems were comlicated too. basically it was pretty unreliable stuff. I know, I sold and repaired it.
but woz pulled two great tricks. first he used the 6502 cpu which on every clock cycle the down beat is always gaurentted to never access memory. thus refreshes could hum along at 1 Mhz gaurenteed. the other clever things was that there was NO refresh circuitry at all! he beat this by letting the video memory be in main memory. the video was accessed on the back side of the clock, and its row-address signal was enogh to refresh all of the memory.
I fell in love with apple when I figure this out. so elegant. so few chips in side the damn machine. such tiny litte car slots. so cute.
of course even back then the MHZ myth was strong. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz while the 8080b ran at upt to 2. (Z80 went to 4) but instructions on an 8080 took 3 to 11 clock cycles with most about 4 or 5. and because the clock was so fast, much of the mmeory was too slow (typically about 500Ns response time was possible) to respond and had to inject wait states. this made it even slower. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz but most instructions took 1 clock cycle. some took up to 3. the slower rate was matched to the 500ns memory speed, (not to mention the second fetch on the back side for the video) so there were no waits. and the kicker was that on those three-clock cycle instructions the 6502 would pipe-line the next memeory fet
I'd like to suggest a way this could all be done automatically, so transparently your an AOL grandma could do it, and almost non-intrusively. Like the lessig-style stamp, all users would be charged say 0.01 cents to send ME an e-mail. but I would automatically refund this payment if either 1) the sender was in my addressbook/whitelist or 2) I did not file the e-mail in my junk mailbox.
what is needed is some sort of distributed postal service to handle the actual micropayments. And this is the main problem--how to collect these. I think the least intrusive method is that when you get an e-mail account you put down a pre-payment, lets say $10 on account at the postal service. when you send messages that are welcome your account is not depleted. when you send messages that aren't it slowly drains.
the cost of the postal service ditributed servers could probably be paid for by
1) the charges for unwanted e-mail
2) interest on the deposits on account.
thus people would be willing to set up these servers.
the final missing ingredient is a centralized server that coordinated the actual postal servers. all this would be would be like a DNS that told all of the remote servers the names of the other ones so they could communicate account info.
the transactions themselves would be in number about twice as the number of e-mails handled (one to the post office from the first ISP to receive the mail to validate the payment code in the header, one from to the postal service me to authorize refund/no refund), and the accounting message size very small.
Perhaps this is a rotten idea. its main benefits are 1) its not intrusive and is nearly transparent 2) it pays for itself 3) requires changes only at the browser level.
I does not stop spam from showing up in my inbox, but makes it very expensive to mass mail.
flame on! or suggests problems and their solution.
So I ran the output of the original and the re-ripped Cd through a signal analysis package. there as an 11% rms difference between the wave forms. that's pretty huge certainly well above a pyscho-accoustic threshold. (that's about the difference a carpeted room versus a hardwood fllow can make. and easily noticed on ear phones.
also the specta were slightly differently shaped. at the high end. you can hear that.
also the original ACC had no content above 15.5Khz. that's no CD quality though with my ears its hard to hear the difference. It does however mean that when you re-rip you will unvoidably erode the spectrum further, and into a range I can hear.
thus re-ripping a CD is NOT the answer. its not the same as buying something at the music store. so its critical that I be able to play the originals on various devices.
whoops. I meant to say that's about 1 million album's per year if they can sustain their expected pace of 1 million songs per month. (obviously its 5 million albums per year if they can sustain their first week sales)
an that is just to apple user and no one else. imagine if this had been world wide.
On the otherhand 1 million sales is a tiny drop in the record sales bucket. if there are 1 million songs sold that's less than 100,000 albums sold. which means over the course of a year that will mean about a million album sold if they can sustain this pace. that's trivial. how many times a year does a artist release an album that goes "platinum"? seems to me they are many every year, some from each record label. thus if apple sustains this pace it will only contribute a single platinum album. Of course there may be a large multiplier effect if the profit margins on this are higher/lower than normal album sales.
What this really shows is how utterly insignificant all of the the other on line music sales were prior to this. they didn't even register: a single mega-record store in NY city could outsell all of the annual online music in a good day prior to apple's involvment. likewise selling CDs by mail also vastly exceeded this market.
heck AOL sent out more of their free trial disks than that!
on the otherhand, once this hits the rest of the world and once this hits the windows world. now were talking a large dent in the sales of music online. again remeber their may b eprofit margin mulitpiers too. this will be true in places that yearn for "pop" music but dont have such good access to music stores as in the US. likewise, world artists will be able to crack the US market if apple lets in lables that lack US distribution systems.
now lets talk about how intrusive the DRM is. its not bad compared to all previous efforts. you can keep your music on a CD so insome sense you own it. but re-ripping it is supposed to be not so good, and thus since digital music is the only way you will be using music in the future having an unrippable high quality CD is not as good as it seems. Apple's tech knowledge base warns you to deauthenticate your mac before you reformat the disk or sell it. its not clear but it seems to imply that you could lose one of your 3 authentications if you dont.
Apple warns you they are free to change how they authenticate your music when you install it on a new mac any time they wish.
This lack of clarity over the authentication protool has me worried but not hyperventilating.
legitmate questions include:
1)how do I authenticate my music on future macs or ipods if mac sells its music store to someone who either goes out of bussiness or starts charging fees to authenticate. (dont laugh mac switched its bussiness model from free to pay for mac.com and claris works)
2) Someday i'll want to keep my music on my phone, credit- card computer, ring, implant, etc....will future itunes allow me to move music to non-mac music players?
3) if my computer is lost, the mother board dies, my hard disk crashes, or a virus eats it, or my employer seizes it before deauthenticate have I lost one of my authentications?
4) what if I go bankrupt and cant get a visa card. how do I maintain a music store account so I can authenticate?
5) in the future, will legacy macs that cant run the latest OS also not be able to de-authenticate?
As I said I'm not hyperventilating, and like 8-tracks and vinyl I dont have the unreasonable expectation that I wont want to replace my music media in the future. but I dont want to be forced to because say apple goes out of the music bussniess.
and yes I realize I can make an audio CD but its not the same as having bought a CD in the store since the store bought CD will rip to higher audio quality for use in digital players (and I predict in the future all useful players are going to be digital-- there wont be many CD players except as ripping devices)
its cumaulative tangible value infact exceed the value of the profit margin on MOST if not all transactions. You can infact SELL your user ID for cash proving this point. think about it.
Many stores delberately sell items cheaply to establish an intial good reputation which allows them to seek higher profits later. E-bay knows this and promotes this will all sorts of "power seller badges" and the ability to restrict sales to people with good feedaback, and even offers the opportunity for enhanced selling venues to people with lots of good feedback. They are selling you the chance to improve your reputation.
if this reputation had no directly related commercial value, such as on slashdot then one could safely argue that ebay was not selling it. but they are and they are making money off of it. therefore their obligation to help you protect that reputation exists.
the fact that they cannot economically do so given the number of users is not any excuse at all. General motors could sell cars more cheaply too if they did not have to obey laws on car safety.
in deed, digressing a bit, e-bay does not adequately police the safety of their web site against fraud. just because it would cut into their profits to do so again does not make this an excuse. Night club owners are obligated to hire security to protect their patrons from evil doers. so is e-bay. Why? again because e-bay is making a profit off the activity.
what is odd is that while the final mp3 shows only 12% rms distortion (actually that's a fair bit if you're an audiophile) the intermediate AIFF shows massive added noise when I convert by imovie. this added noise is spread over the spectrum but has significant components at 10Khz. the final mp3 converted by method 1 or 2 are simmilar and show the same level of distortion 12% rms.
being a signals processing expert but not a codec expert I'm totally at a loss to explain how distortion can show up in the aiff then vanish when reconverted to mp3 (or back to ACC). this makes no sense, and is actually impossible from an information from a (naive) signal/noise point of view unless the noise/distortion is either predictable or out of band form the codec's point of view. never-the-less this is reproiducible.
I'd like to publish this analysis on slashdot but first want to clear this up.
anyone got a clue?
3d effect play simmilar roles. the tranparency and shadowing of foregroung and backrgound windows is something you immediatly grasp abd grasp without think about it becuase your brain already knows how po process those clues. like wise throbbing or size changing 3d icons can be subtle ways to grab your attention. Dialog boxes that drop down out of windows again clue you into what window they are refering to.
now done wrong they could also be wizbang distractions. This is of course what has always distinguished say apple products from others. Apple tends to follow a consisten and understated GUI that just directs your eye where it needs to go.
3d effects can clrify what is or is not a button, and even what you are supposed to do with it (twist, rock, slide, press)
no you dont need 3d. heck you dont need a gui. Dos didnt have it even though it did have a graphics mode.
Reminds me of the microsoft "house of the future" display they have in redmond. the amusing thing was, the house did not have any bathrooms. where do you want to go today would of course be the first thing on anyones mind whol actually lived in the house.
Maybe someone can explain this to me. As I probably misunderstand it, darwin is based on BSD. so presumbaly any imrpovements in openBSD are easy to migrate to Darwin and OS X?
when can I expect I get my security enhancements in OS X?
Its even unclear to me what happens if the host name chages or if I have to re-install my OS. will I lose one of my authentications each time I fail to deauthenticate a computer. (.e.g suppose the hard drive crashes and I have to rebuild my computer, I cant deauthenticate the old computer since its dead.)
First the one click sign up form has a small bug if you already have any apple account with a credit card. (e.g. mac.com, applestore, developer account, iphoto). The error messages they give are misleading as to the root cause of the problem but here is the trick to getting it to work. You must make sure that all of your apple accounts have identical info. when I say identical i mean exact. for example having a ten digit hyphenated phone number on one account and not on the music store record, or a different zip code will break it. Finally, counter intuitively, do not enter the security code number from the back of the credit card. the reason here is that the mac.com accounts dont have a place for it to be entered.
if all else fails, create a fresh account with a new e-mail address.
for cover art of all those tunes you did not buy from apple the best solution is clutter a freeware app that works with itunes. it auto lookups the cover art using amazon.com. it has some other feeatures too. but mainly it works slightly better than the one built into itunes since it does a more successful job of recognizing when two songs belong to the same album and avoids storing the cover art twice.
if you want to drag the cover art from clutter into itunes here is a procedure I recomend--I wish I could automate it. 1) open itunes and create a smart playlist of all track=1 tunes to get one tune from every album. 2) click on cover art display where it says "selection" and it will change to "now playing", 3) in the finder open ~/Library/Images/com.sprote.clutter/CDs and sort it by date.
now iterate the following, start playing the first song in your smart playlist, clutter will fetch the album cover, the finder will show a folder containing a jpeg. drag this to the album art in itunes, press command -> to move to the next song in itunes. rinse lather repeat. the only proble I encoutered was as I said in some cases itunes cant figure out that two songs are from the same album.
if you need high res cover art go to walmart's web site.
ps I spent last night playing with the store and after i got it to accept my credit card (yep the credit company called me to see if this was fraud too--multiple charges in a row for the same small amount is a fraud flag not an apple bug). I bought five peices of music before i realized this was like eating potatoe chips. flawless instant downloads, pristine music. fairly easy to find what I wanted, and though some things I wanted are missing the breadth of their coverage in other musical forms is astonishing. I even bough some music form artists I had never heard before because I found it while browsing. I really enjoyed the ability to fill in my music collection with a few songs I used to have on vinyl but would never be willing to buy the whole album again just to get those favorites.
and my conclusion is this. I've spent hours on kazza trying to download just a few songs I wanted. it rarely works the fist time since the servers beomce un avalaible or some dickhead entered the album decriptor wrong or the connection stinks or you cant find a decent bit rate or just part of the album..yada yada yada.
after using the applse site I realized what steve jobs was saying when he pointed out on cnn that using Kazza is like paying yourself minimum wages since you can only get 5 songs (= 5 dollars) in a hours worth of work!!! hopefully in a few years the price will drop even more at which point it will be way better than free,
THe only thing I was not too happy about was that I cant get these in mp3 format so I cant send them to my freinds with plain jane mp3 players. (you cant convert acc that you purchesed to mp3 in itunes--it will let you convert acc songs that you ripped yourself). I could burn a cd and re-rip them but by then the quality will be down. But franky this is just me being a weasel. its not fair use for me to mail songs around the globe.