I don't think you get it. Imagine apple wins, say, 97% of the player market. And you can only shop at iTunes, what will that do for prices? And service?
It is in the best interest of iPod users that people buy product by other manufacturers!
I agree with the CD thing, though. I am not going to buy an 128K DRMed album when I can get the same one for the same price on CD and do whatever I wish with it.
Does it do ALL the things 99% of buyers don't care about? Nope.
Does it rip music and copy it to their player and allow them to buy from the music store?
Yup.
To be honest, I haven't checked all those things. But the software with the most features is not necesarily better.
Don't think for a second more than one in a thousand people buying the iPod ever think about those things or ever end up using it. People are just too dumb to grasp how to use advanced features or care about them. (to them, their iPod is and "MP3" player, even though all their music is AAC)
Heck, I am an advanced user and because I am, I can't give a damn about those propriatery sharing systems, backing up from within the software (I backup my WHOLE computer) or burning audio CDs. (I still by my music on CD and rip it, not settling for DRMed, low bitrate music)
Not sure as what you mean with "as easy to use"; iTunes: rip cd, select library, select album, drag to player. Creative: rip cd, select library, select album, drag to player. Eh?
If Apple doesn't support the DRM of these other music stores, no, you can't play music you bought there. Creative has a point, the choice is very limitted.
But when is Creative finaly gonna play AAC files so I can buy tunes from the frigging' iTunes store!?:)
So your girlfriend is shallow and obsessed with beauty, even for products that are supposed to spend 99% of their time hidden away in your pocket and doing what they are supposed to be doing: playing music.;-)
I am not trashing the iPod, it's great, I just bought a mini for my sister, mostly for the same reason as your girlfriend's.
But that doesn't mean other's aren't very good players as well. Creative's software is as good as iTunes and the players are as easy to use. Two out of three ain't bad. Add to that better battery life (and user replacable for when it does fail completely) and that's the myth of Apple's technical superiority is gone.
The iPod is all about looks compared to these Creative players and I believe Creative can slice into Apple's marketshare a fair bit. Nobody is saying they will "beat apple" as others seem to interpret the statements.
90% of the mark-up is actualy British VAT and the rest is probably higher import duties. Don't forget as well that most americans will buy them in store and get sales tax slapped on top of the $499 as well.
The difference isn't that staggering and it certainly isn't Apple's fault. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they make more on these per unit in the US than they do in the UK!
How are they opressing their citizens this way? The fines in the US for breaking LPFM rules are much higher than here. If you can afford an iPod, PC and music collection, upgrading you car radio to something with a line in should be well within you finanacial posibilites and will sound a lot better too. So there is no real benefit for anyone for allowing these devices which inevitably will mallfunction and broadcast in bands or at levels they should not.
And don't give me this freedom of speech crap; you are not going to start a revolution by broadcasting the/your truth to your neighbours via a 100mW ERP FM transmitter so it is a completely moot point.
Live LCDs are nice for composing and certainly improve on the crappy viewfinder of film point and shoots. But the low quality of the preview image and it's lag are useless for judging focus and depth of field or split second photography.
That is precisely why I have never missed one for a second on my DSLR.
I certainly realise that, unfortunately, the rest of the world - especialy those not actualy using J2EE - doesn't.
The problems with frameworks like that is that they are nice for one-man shops or even small dot-coms, but when it comes to enterprise development, it's best to stick to standards that are likely to be around for a while. Java history is littered with road kill that was once a popular and sometimes even good framework - until something sexier came along or the original developers gave up and some fuckwits that took over destroyed it.
Use what works for you, but never declare anything superior or the only way to do things.
You can prototype - or simply develop - most things as quick in Java as in any "P" language; the only exception I can think of being a GUI interface, in that respect Tk kicks Swing's butt. Personaly I don't like the Ps much, I prefer the T - as in Tcl - for scripting. That language kicks any Ps ass when it comes to design, though it can't win on available libraries. (which I never missed yet, all the important ones are there if you know where to look)
Besides, rapid prototyping is overrated for all but impressing your manager or client. If you need to protoype you clearly do not understand the problem at hand and if you do prototype for the above given reason, you manager will make you use the prototype as base for production development. This means you spend the same amount of time as if you'd started properly straight away (and told him/her and their required demos to get lost for a few weeks) but end up with an inferior product because you are contantly hacking around the shortcuts you took to make that rapid prototype.
The two are just very different beasts and there is a clear case when a proper OO language with clear contracts and inheritence is the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, web apps aren't the best example of such a case and that makes this comparison flawed, not the language in question itself!
JBoss is not a quality server, with or without docs. If you are doing a free project, orionserver.com is not only free to use, it probably is the best J2EE server, period.
As for all the frame works: stay away from them. Use XDoclet to automate your EJB generation (bit of a learning curve) and the incredibly simple SiteMesh to make layout a bit easier if you are doing a web app.
That's it, stay away from frameworks and you are laughing at how easy J2EE really is to develop in.
While I like Java, I have never been the greatest fan of J2EE for web applications, it's just over engineered.
But J2EE does more than just web apps. It's strength is being a business application server with Swing GUI front-end, the only competition in that field is.NET, and we know what platforms, or rather platform, that is supported on. The added bonus in that case is that it is dead easy to create a web application accessing the same systems. Try that with LAMP!
A fairer comparison would be LAMP and JSP/JDBC pure web apps. In which case in terms of number of instalations LAMP will always win because JSP doesn't play well in the $6.95/month massive multihosting game. But for business users, this is a moot point.
"Wouldn't it be great if one of these devices had WiMAX to upload directly to the internet?"
No, it would not. Why would you want to make anyone sit through your hours of uneditted footage?
If only owners of video cameras (and those uploading _all_ their digital photos to an online gallery) learned to edit what they capture before submitting it to their friends the world would be a lot less violent place...
While these organisations pay artists (or more precisely, composers) for their efforts, rights for use of the _recording_ belong to the record companies.
Recording and promoting albums is expensive, prohibitively so for most artists to finance it themselves and it is a very high risk investment. So in return for an advance to do all this, they sign their lives away to RIAA members and while the artists have copyright for the composition (intelectual property) they record companies own the recording.
This was also what George Michael vs. Sony Music was about. All he got was an advance to record his music, but this was paid back out of his earnings. Still, he would never own the recordings or have any control over their use.
So unless you also come up with some investors with better terms and that are more open minded about distribution...
Plus the fact that SI shooter shoot so many images, all in RAW+JPEG that WiFi would never keep up.
They will fill up a 1GB card so fast, getting them onto that laptop by first filling it up, then handing to an assistant who sticks it into a 8MB/sec card reader will get all those images faster onto that laptop than WiFi ever could. And without slowing down the camera.
This is purely a studio feature when shooting product shots, not for high-framerate sports coverage!
Besides, the framerate of the 8MP 1D Mk II (note the missing "s") is so much higher, making it the obvious choice for sports shooters.
That said, it also has 100Mbit wired lan, which could transfer at 8-9MB/sec, as fast as any memeory card.
That'd be hard. But a sensor with a higher quality end result than Reala _scanned_ on anything less than a drum scanner is dead easy these days. In fact, most 6MP DSLRS will do that.
First off all, at 192Kbit, this player won't fit a thousand songs. Secondly, who ever scrolls through that many songs trying to find a single anyway? Don't most people, like me, only select a playlist or album?
So the wheel is superior, but do you notice the difference in daily use? I don't on my Creative Zen NX 30Gb, which has better battery life and cost $150 less than the 30Gb iPod when I bought it.
Don't forget Sun has Sun Ray clients with either a 15" LCD or 17" CRT in an all in one design too at $1049 and $659(!) respectively. That's a big savings on 40 of these and for a library more than adequate
The smart card is not a requirement either. You can simply log in (as guest if you like), you just don't get your hot desking. This brings the possibilty of giving regular users a real account with some space for documents as well and it keeps their settings. Guest logins are trivial to revert to "standard state" every time they are logged off too.
You don't get IE but that only disables a small amount of websites that due to their stupid reliance on IE don't deserve your custom anyway.
She could probably even sue for emotional damages because of the content she got thrown into her inbox: personal tales of people's abuse.
I doubt she actualy lost any sleep over it, but all it takes is to convince a jury that/they/ would suffer emotionaly from reading all that and the millions will flow from Penguin to katie.com!
I normaly hate this kind of suit, but this call for payback.
Re:the story is -1: irrelevant
on
Sun Rays For Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Add the cost of support and you save even more. I once did a cost analysis for a fictional 1000 desktop enterprise. The outcome was basicaly that because of the lower wage and benfit costs for desktop support personel, the _entire_ hardware/software license cost (including some massive Sun servers) was recouped in ONE year. The next three years of the write off, we are talking a couple of million saved each year.
Now tell me if they are really that expensive. I think not. If a Linux server version does come out and works properly, I might be very tempted to scatter a couple of these around the house.
The airwaves could still belong to the people. AM/FM, ClearChannel, et al do not start stations, they buy them. Anyone who can prove that a channel is still free to use can and will quite easily get a license.
The problem is that some of the old independents started to use research and play to the lowest common denominator. And people actualy liked it, so more followed and soon the people that knew how to play this game best bought more stations. And more people tuned in. And more independents decided to cash in and sell to these compnaies. The people sold out.
If people didn't like that kind of radio, they wouldn't have tuned in in the first place and not created this market.
All the FCC has tried to do is _limit_ this practice with anti monopoly laws, their rules certainly didn't create it.
The source isn't too reliable, but 44.1 was chosen basicaly because is was higher than 40, and a time base that they had lying around. The other version I heard was that it fitted well in PAL video for recording digital to video tape for testing. And Sony chose 48KHz for DAT because it fitted well in NTSC. Again, no idea if this is actualy true.
Anyway. If you had a 22.05Khz sinus, if it were not in phase with the two (yes, only two, think about it!) sampling points you would have at 44.1, it would either be recorded at a too low level or maybe not even at all! (180 degrees out of phase)
To overcome this, you sample at a much higher frequency, 4, 16, even 64 or 128 times. This gives you many more sampling points and you can make sure higher frequencies are properly picked up. After applying some magic, it's resampled down to 44.1.
A similar proces is done in reverse during playback, to ensure signals are actualy sinoid again and not a block wave form.
The problem is where they are placed, linear. If they were logarithmically (like human hearing is) it would be much better, especialy resolution at lower levels would be much improved.
Remember how good the 32KHz non-linear "long play" mode on DAT sounds?
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Ehrm, this post makes no sense if you don't use my original smiley in the quote.
;-)
Misquoted and used against me, you must be a politician, work for American network news, or both!
I don't think you get it. Imagine apple wins, say, 97% of the player market. And you can only shop at iTunes, what will that do for prices? And service?
It is in the best interest of iPod users that people buy product by other manufacturers!
I agree with the CD thing, though. I am not going to buy an 128K DRMed album when I can get the same one for the same price on CD and do whatever I wish with it.
Does it do ALL the things 99% of buyers don't care about? Nope.
Does it rip music and copy it to their player and allow them to buy from the music store?
Yup.
To be honest, I haven't checked all those things. But the software with the most features is not necesarily better.
Don't think for a second more than one in a thousand people buying the iPod ever think about those things or ever end up using it. People are just too dumb to grasp how to use advanced features or care about them. (to them, their iPod is and "MP3" player, even though all their music is AAC)
Heck, I am an advanced user and because I am, I can't give a damn about those propriatery sharing systems, backing up from within the software (I backup my WHOLE computer) or burning audio CDs. (I still by my music on CD and rip it, not settling for DRMed, low bitrate music)
Not sure as what you mean with "as easy to use"; iTunes: rip cd, select library, select album, drag to player. Creative: rip cd, select library, select album, drag to player. Eh?
If Apple doesn't support the DRM of these other music stores, no, you can't play music you bought there. Creative has a point, the choice is very limitted.
:)
But when is Creative finaly gonna play AAC files so I can buy tunes from the frigging' iTunes store!?
So your girlfriend is shallow and obsessed with beauty, even for products that are supposed to spend 99% of their time hidden away in your pocket and doing what they are supposed to be doing: playing music. ;-)
I am not trashing the iPod, it's great, I just bought a mini for my sister, mostly for the same reason as your girlfriend's.
But that doesn't mean other's aren't very good players as well. Creative's software is as good as iTunes and the players are as easy to use. Two out of three ain't bad. Add to that better battery life (and user replacable for when it does fail completely) and that's the myth of Apple's technical superiority is gone.
The iPod is all about looks compared to these Creative players and I believe Creative can slice into Apple's marketshare a fair bit. Nobody is saying they will "beat apple" as others seem to interpret the statements.
Competition is good!
90% of the mark-up is actualy British VAT and the rest is probably higher import duties. Don't forget as well that most americans will buy them in store and get sales tax slapped on top of the $499 as well.
The difference isn't that staggering and it certainly isn't Apple's fault. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they make more on these per unit in the US than they do in the UK!
How are they opressing their citizens this way? The fines in the US for breaking LPFM rules are much higher than here. If you can afford an iPod, PC and music collection, upgrading you car radio to something with a line in should be well within you finanacial posibilites and will sound a lot better too. So there is no real benefit for anyone for allowing these devices which inevitably will mallfunction and broadcast in bands or at levels they should not.
And don't give me this freedom of speech crap; you are not going to start a revolution by broadcasting the/your truth to your neighbours via a 100mW ERP FM transmitter so it is a completely moot point.
Live LCDs are nice for composing and certainly improve on the crappy viewfinder of film point and shoots. But the low quality of the preview image and it's lag are useless for judging focus and depth of field or split second photography.
That is precisely why I have never missed one for a second on my DSLR.
I certainly realise that, unfortunately, the rest of the world - especialy those not actualy using J2EE - doesn't.
The problems with frameworks like that is that they are nice for one-man shops or even small dot-coms, but when it comes to enterprise development, it's best to stick to standards that are likely to be around for a while. Java history is littered with road kill that was once a popular and sometimes even good framework - until something sexier came along or the original developers gave up and some fuckwits that took over destroyed it.
Use what works for you, but never declare anything superior or the only way to do things.
You can prototype - or simply develop - most things as quick in Java as in any "P" language; the only exception I can think of being a GUI interface, in that respect Tk kicks Swing's butt. Personaly I don't like the Ps much, I prefer the T - as in Tcl - for scripting. That language kicks any Ps ass when it comes to design, though it can't win on available libraries. (which I never missed yet, all the important ones are there if you know where to look)
Besides, rapid prototyping is overrated for all but impressing your manager or client. If you need to protoype you clearly do not understand the problem at hand and if you do prototype for the above given reason, you manager will make you use the prototype as base for production development. This means you spend the same amount of time as if you'd started properly straight away (and told him/her and their required demos to get lost for a few weeks) but end up with an inferior product because you are contantly hacking around the shortcuts you took to make that rapid prototype.
The two are just very different beasts and there is a clear case when a proper OO language with clear contracts and inheritence is the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, web apps aren't the best example of such a case and that makes this comparison flawed, not the language in question itself!
JBoss is not a quality server, with or without docs. If you are doing a free project, orionserver.com is not only free to use, it probably is the best J2EE server, period.
As for all the frame works: stay away from them. Use XDoclet to automate your EJB generation (bit of a learning curve) and the incredibly simple SiteMesh to make layout a bit easier if you are doing a web app.
That's it, stay away from frameworks and you are laughing at how easy J2EE really is to develop in.
While I like Java, I have never been the greatest fan of J2EE for web applications, it's just over engineered.
.NET, and we know what platforms, or rather platform, that is supported on. The added bonus in that case is that it is dead easy to create a web application accessing the same systems. Try that with LAMP!
But J2EE does more than just web apps. It's strength is being a business application server with Swing GUI front-end, the only competition in that field is
A fairer comparison would be LAMP and JSP/JDBC pure web apps. In which case in terms of number of instalations LAMP will always win because JSP doesn't play well in the $6.95/month massive multihosting game. But for business users, this is a moot point.
No, it would not. Why would you want to make anyone sit through your hours of uneditted footage?
If only owners of video cameras (and those uploading _all_ their digital photos to an online gallery) learned to edit what they capture before submitting it to their friends the world would be a lot less violent place...
While these organisations pay artists (or more precisely, composers) for their efforts, rights for use of the _recording_ belong to the record companies.
Recording and promoting albums is expensive, prohibitively so for most artists to finance it themselves and it is a very high risk investment. So in return for an advance to do all this, they sign their lives away to RIAA members and while the artists have copyright for the composition (intelectual property) they record companies own the recording.
This was also what George Michael vs. Sony Music was about. All he got was an advance to record his music, but this was paid back out of his earnings. Still, he would never own the recordings or have any control over their use.
So unless you also come up with some investors with better terms and that are more open minded about distribution...
Plus the fact that SI shooter shoot so many images, all in RAW+JPEG that WiFi would never keep up.
They will fill up a 1GB card so fast, getting them onto that laptop by first filling it up, then handing to an assistant who sticks it into a 8MB/sec card reader will get all those images faster onto that laptop than WiFi ever could. And without slowing down the camera.
This is purely a studio feature when shooting product shots, not for high-framerate sports coverage!
Besides, the framerate of the 8MP 1D Mk II (note the missing "s") is so much higher, making it the obvious choice for sports shooters.
That said, it also has 100Mbit wired lan, which could transfer at 8-9MB/sec, as fast as any memeory card.
That'd be hard. But a sensor with a higher quality end result than Reala _scanned_ on anything less than a drum scanner is dead easy these days. In fact, most 6MP DSLRS will do that.
First off all, at 192Kbit, this player won't fit a thousand songs. Secondly, who ever scrolls through that many songs trying to find a single anyway? Don't most people, like me, only select a playlist or album?
So the wheel is superior, but do you notice the difference in daily use? I don't on my Creative Zen NX 30Gb, which has better battery life and cost $150 less than the 30Gb iPod when I bought it.
Real java apps are packaged in a Jar file with a manifest file that takes care of everything...
I have yet to come acros a site that doesn't allow me access based on User-Agent.
The main problem seems to be VB script, ActiveX and IE specific JS. (even when a standard one is available. Sigh...)
Don't forget Sun has Sun Ray clients with either a 15" LCD or 17" CRT in an all in one design too at $1049 and $659(!) respectively. That's a big savings on 40 of these and for a library more than adequate
The smart card is not a requirement either. You can simply log in (as guest if you like), you just don't get your hot desking. This brings the possibilty of giving regular users a real account with some space for documents as well and it keeps their settings. Guest logins are trivial to revert to "standard state" every time they are logged off too.
You don't get IE but that only disables a small amount of websites that due to their stupid reliance on IE don't deserve your custom anyway.
She could probably even sue for emotional damages because of the content she got thrown into her inbox: personal tales of people's abuse.
/they/ would suffer emotionaly from reading all that and the millions will flow from Penguin to katie.com!
I doubt she actualy lost any sleep over it, but all it takes is to convince a jury that
I normaly hate this kind of suit, but this call for payback.
Add the cost of support and you save even more. I once did a cost analysis for a fictional 1000 desktop enterprise. The outcome was basicaly that because of the lower wage and benfit costs for desktop support personel, the _entire_ hardware/software license cost (including some massive Sun servers) was recouped in ONE year. The next three years of the write off, we are talking a couple of million saved each year.
Now tell me if they are really that expensive. I think not. If a Linux server version does come out and works properly, I might be very tempted to scatter a couple of these around the house.
The airwaves could still belong to the people. AM/FM, ClearChannel, et al do not start stations, they buy them. Anyone who can prove that a channel is still free to use can and will quite easily get a license.
The problem is that some of the old independents started to use research and play to the lowest common denominator. And people actualy liked it, so more followed and soon the people that knew how to play this game best bought more stations. And more people tuned in. And more independents decided to cash in and sell to these compnaies. The people sold out.
If people didn't like that kind of radio, they wouldn't have tuned in in the first place and not created this market.
All the FCC has tried to do is _limit_ this practice with anti monopoly laws, their rules certainly didn't create it.
The source isn't too reliable, but 44.1 was chosen basicaly because is was higher than 40, and a time base that they had lying around. The other version I heard was that it fitted well in PAL video for recording digital to video tape for testing. And Sony chose 48KHz for DAT because it fitted well in NTSC. Again, no idea if this is actualy true.
Anyway. If you had a 22.05Khz sinus, if it were not in phase with the two (yes, only two, think about it!) sampling points you would have at 44.1, it would either be recorded at a too low level or maybe not even at all! (180 degrees out of phase)
To overcome this, you sample at a much higher frequency, 4, 16, even 64 or 128 times. This gives you many more sampling points and you can make sure higher frequencies are properly picked up. After applying some magic, it's resampled down to 44.1.
A similar proces is done in reverse during playback, to ensure signals are actualy sinoid again and not a block wave form.
The problem is where they are placed, linear. If they were logarithmically (like human hearing is) it would be much better, especialy resolution at lower levels would be much improved.
Remember how good the 32KHz non-linear "long play" mode on DAT sounds?