At the moment much of the possibilities for the hardware in the iPod is going unused, for whatever reasons. It's difficult to tell exactly what the out-of-the-box features are, as precise details are closed... but: There's a PP5002B-C in there, and the PP5002 product brief(pdf) states support for mp3 encoding, and decoding of mp3, wma, wma, aac and accelp.net formats. Of course, Apple use custom firmware which may not have all of these facilities. There's also been talk of using the iPod for direct sharing over firewire. There's possibility of using IP-over-Firewire and running a webserver on the thing. There's a lot of fun possibilities out there, especially if a few more hackers get on board, although no alternative firmware will gain popularity until it has a simple UI, one of the things apple tend to be rather good at. There's obviously a fair way to go with this uClinux project, and I'd expect much of it's initial progress has been made thanks to the ARM7TDMI port of UClinux - I'm not belittling the hard work of Bernard Leach here. The current mp3 and ogg playback is probably not as optimised as it could be with full knowledge of the portalplayer chip and the rest of the iPod's hardware. It would be great if information on the hardware would be opened up, but I don't see this happening for a while, in the mean time, get this man an official FDK!! (or maybe not, because of them damn legal issues). All things said, looks like a great start, just wish I had an iPod....
Wise words indeed. In the early days of OS X, I purchased OmniWeb as I prefered it to IE/Netscape/iCab et al and also wanted to support the company (OmniGroup). It was (is) a very nice looking browser with some great features - allthough it's compaitibility is slightly lacking these days. Opera must be mad, they're using excuses which have been viably used in the past for different projects by different companies to cover the fact that Opera is not and never has been popular on the Mac and they're going to leave the market. I'm truley amazed at their stance, there could have been a possibility that Chimera or OmniWeb be helped along by Apple and bundled with machines... but Opera.. what are they thinking! Finally, as others have said, Apple have provided the frameworks to the developer community, some of whom - read OmniGroup - have taken this as a positive thing, and will use this to build a full-blown feature-filled product. This approach is far more positive, you get the rendering engine done for you, then work on bells and whistles to create something people will pay for. OmniGroup could do well with their WebCore-based browser, and their attitude shows thought and maturity. Opera on the other hand seem to be overstating their position in the market, and threatening Apple with no, or very little basis, because of their own lack of ability to innovate.
Good point... thanks for clearing that up. I stand fully corrected on the royalty issue;) Still not impressed with the crippling of iDVD compared to DVD Studio Pro though.....
oh well, looks like I'm going to bite.... iDVD is available via one of two means, with a new Mac (i.e. paid for) or bought from Apple (i.e. paid for). The OWC hack could only be used with a legitimately owned copy of iDVD, to make it work with a legitimately owned, but non-BTO DVD-R drive. The workaround that OWC made, although possibly breaking a license agreement here or there, did not take money away from Apple, it just took away their control of the product and the market.
Apple have to pay a royalty, to whom exactly? DVD drives themselves have royalties attached, but thats a completely seperate issue. iDVD is Apple software, so who would they pay a royalty to.. themselves? Guess it could be a funky tax-loophole;)
If you have any info on where these royalties go, I'd be interested to hear. I guess it's possible they're using someone elses code, but if this is the case, I'd have thought Apple would have just bought the product (ala Soundjam and iTunes) rather than be stuick with royalties.
OWC never publicly said a bad thing about Apple, which isn't surprising as they are relatively small (especially compared to Apple) and are Authorised Dealers so want to keep on the good side of the mothership. Of course, the rest of the world reported things with a more critical eye, and the DMCA was mentioned during initial reports of what happened. Even if the DMCA wasn't directly attributed, it's still not fair-play from apple IMHO. OWC have a good history of making nice hacks for unsupported hardware (including the current XPostFacto for running OS X on older Macs). This really was a move to keep cheap and easy DVD production in the hands of Apple - it's the added extras that so often help sell Macs. It would not be difficult to remove this limitation in software and allow any DVD-R drive to be used, as is the case with much more expensive DVD Studio Pro. Ask yourself why this is the case...
Actually, although many people within Apple, and Apple themselves, at various times have argued against the DMCA to varying degrees, they have in fact used it themselves. OWC used to sell a patch for iDVD so it could be used with external DVD-R/RW's rather than just the BTO ones from Apple. They were informed by Apple that this violated Apple's intellectual property and the DMCA act and told to stop selling it. which they did, immediately.
While I like a lot of what Apple is doing, and they do employ open-source guys as well as give back to the community, this was a bit off. Especially as iDVD will soon be a non-free (as in beer) app as well as only working on certain drives. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them giving iDVD3 ability to work with all drives, as this would be even more of a slam in OWC's faces.
Unpopular, unfair and inherently flawed. What about people who are using their bandwidth for thinsg which they own, or for serving websites, or mail, or a myriad of other things which would never come under the jurisdiction of 'copyrighted' works.
Your argument that "unless I'm a commercial distributor of movies then it doesn't make sense for me to distribute it" brings up another important point. At the moment, mos people who use p2p or other file-sharing tools, pay for the bandwidth, equipment etc used, so it actually costs them money. Now, the big professional pirates, they charge for their goods, more directly take income away from the copyright holder, and can afford bandwidth or this supposed 'bandwidth tax'.
So, all that a tax like this would do, would be to increase the worst side of piracy and hurt or stop legitimate data-transfer and small-time sharing.
I don't call this approach freedom, and I think it would be missing a major oppurtunity to turn the clocks back on suspect law's which have been brought in over previous decades and to rethink the foundation of what copyright is.
NEWS FLASH : Last Month July 2002 The Crop Circle ConnectorÊ used over 232.42GB of Bandwidth (our highest bandwidth since 1995 for one calendar month). Since last year we have halved our Bandwidth costs, but this will still cost us around £400 to pay for July. Many people visit the web site to see the latest crop circles without contributing towards the web site with Memberships. We are asking people now to join us and maintain the best crop circle web with the best pictures on the Internet. Please do not let us down or yourselves and start joining today or sending us a donation.
Then again, maybe the no-doubt huge bandwidth bill they will receieve after being linked to from/. will be slightly offset by the contributions it (may) also bring(s)..
Who says they don't, myself, and I'm sure many other people on/. spent most of their childhood using a variety of computers with no GUI. Kids these days (oh no, I'm sounding like an old man already) may not pick up CLI stuff as quickly or at such an early age, but I don't think its because they can't. It's possibly more to do with the focus on GUI's and the visual, interactive medium in today's world, and the prevalence of such systems, certainly over CLI systems. Oh well... whatever the reasons, I certainly have fond memories of sneaking into buildings, finding a terminal, and playing away to find out what happened.....
While in many ways I agree, water, electricity, healthcare etc are more important priorities, once you've got these, you need to move onto infrastructure. What better infrastructure to than extremely cheap internet access. This can be used for communication, learning etc. The internet is tool which can be used for the dissemination of information, not just playing UT2003 and downloading mp3's. What better way to help rapidly improve a country and it's populace than give them a tool which they themselves can use for self-improvement, in whatever way they want, not in a way which is dictated by others.
Does security mean anything to anyone anymore? What are the security implications of Rendezvous?
Rendezvous currently only broadcasts availibility of services within a single subnet. This will change in the future though, then there would be the possibility of you broadcasting the availibility of services to the entire world. Of course, this happens already with such things as NetBIOS, and is a problem - mainly for users who don't understand networking concepts. But, this isn't a new situation, people do need to be better informed regarding security, but this is a seperate issue which needs addressing.
Rendezvous (and more specifically the zeroconf working group) is not there to increase security, it's to make networking and service discovery easier for people. That isn't to say that security isn't important and that it isn't something which the working group take seriously. But Rendezvous really doesn't harm security, certainly no more than a variety of other standards such as NetBIOS and UPnP.
If an individual or company is worried about security, then they should have a policy regarding this and methods to implement it, regardless of what OS, protocols, etc they are using.
Maybe this article about ATI's Radeon 9500Pro would have been a better one to link to. It shows how this cheaper R300 based product compares to other offerings and how it beats the Ti4200 hands down and often outdoes the Ti4600. It may not be the killer card that the 9700 is, and may not be a true entry level card, but for the mainstream gamer market it gives mighty fine performance for your cash.
Of course, by that time ATI will have moved to selling a low-cost 0.13 R300 based product for the entry level market and have their next-gen chips arriving. Nvidia have lost a lot of ground with putting all their eggs in the 0.13 basket and in missing their 6 month product cycle targets.
Isn't the only console thats being sold at a large loss at the moment the x-box. AFAIK, sony and Nintendo are not making (or certainly weren't until recent xmas boosting of market share exercises) actually losing money on the hardware. The PSone, is dirt cheap to make now, with the PS2, Sony have got over their initial cost of developing a totally new chip and the GC uses only slightly modified PPC750 and ATI hardware. From the recent wave of consoles, as far as I can tell, only Microsoft went way overboard with the hardware costs....
Virgin have a new v:port system on their Airbus A340-600's which has some degree of video and audio on demand (300 hours of VOD rather than the fixed channel based system they have on older planes). I got to use one of these on a three day old plane during a recent lang-haul flight and it's a lot better than the old system, you get a bigger screen too:) There's also the capability to do networked games - simple ones mind you - between seats, as well as sending e-mail and SMS messages (for a fee though). Best of all, the system runs on Linux:) It's based on the Matsushita MAS3000 system. Unfortunately I found this out because my system was having 'issues' and needed to be rebooted, at which point I as was greeted by Tux and some nice boot messages:)
There's also the reason that (1) not everyone can afford to go to a big swanky cinema (if they can find one) and (2) the damn film isn't going to be out in China until next year. Even if this guy from dolby was telling the truth, and if the DVD's were 'real' (ie reasonable quality, and of the right film), what was he doing there? He was attending a conference of industry types concerning how to 'exploit' (their words not mine) the Chinese market. A good start would be to learn something about the market, not treat it the same as the US (or as 2nd class compared to the US) and for god's sake try releasing things internationally at the same time! If some rich bloke comes moaning about "this dreadful country where he went to try to screw money out of people and got screwed over by those people", especially when he has absolutely no proof, don't come moaning to me. end rant;)
That link would be great of you wanted to know about the Seventh Day Adventist Church in New York..... but, as we're talking about game dev, maybe this link would be better. Of course, just like the US and European GDC's, the official conference website is not the place to get news and pics from.
There's been a report at xlr8yourmac of a major incompatibility with these cards. Here's the quote:
I just installed the Carbon Sound Manager Update and when I reboot was unable to produce sound via my M-Audio Audiophile 2496. I was initially hoping this would fix some minor glitches that OS 10.2 re-introduced to the Audiophile. To my dismay, it cut sound entirely. I've already tried using the analog out as well to make sure it didn't break the SPDIF out only. I tried reinstalling the drivers as well with little luck. As of right now, I'm unaware of any way to remove the update. I'll test my other Jag install just to confirm that this indeed is isolated to the Carbon Sound Manager.
Agreed, while I wouldn't want/. to become a pure "there has been an update to {insert_whatever_package/app/etc}" site, the discussions can often prove useful. Well, that is when/if we can move on from this direction of discussion! It's important to know what the actual effects of various updates - particularly core OS ones - are, once they're in the wild./. is certainly a better place to discuss the caveats of such updates than say.. versiontracker. That said, there's often plenty of ppl trolling about how it's a waste of time talking about Linux kernel revs too, c'est la vie!
Erm, they do package it on CD (you also get the 3x CD distrib when you buy the HD) or a free download, this is just an alternative way of distributing the software, source and the entire ports tree. It's an attempt to make things easier...... clever that;)
It's a must upgrade IMHO, although there are two caveats. (1) MAJOR you've got too be extremely careful about dust getting in there (2) while the soldering is easy, the proper application of the film and boring out of a hole for the Afterburner in the case is not as straightforward. That said, it's a fun little project/upgrade and really makes a huge difference to the GBA.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment much of the possibilities for the hardware in the iPod is going unused, for whatever reasons.
It's difficult to tell exactly what the out-of-the-box features are, as precise details are closed... but:
There's a PP5002B-C in there, and the PP5002 product brief(pdf) states support for mp3 encoding, and decoding of mp3, wma, wma, aac and accelp.net formats. Of course, Apple use custom firmware which may not have all of these facilities.
There's also been talk of using the iPod for direct sharing over firewire. There's possibility of using IP-over-Firewire and running a webserver on the thing. There's a lot of fun possibilities out there, especially if a few more hackers get on board, although no alternative firmware will gain popularity until it has a simple UI, one of the things apple tend to be rather good at.
There's obviously a fair way to go with this uClinux project, and I'd expect much of it's initial progress has been made thanks to the ARM7TDMI port of UClinux - I'm not belittling the hard work of Bernard Leach here. The current mp3 and ogg playback is probably not as optimised as it could be with full knowledge of the portalplayer chip and the rest of the iPod's hardware. It would be great if information on the hardware would be opened up, but I don't see this happening for a while, in the mean time, get this man an official FDK!! (or maybe not, because of them damn legal issues).
All things said, looks like a great start, just wish I had an iPod....
Wise words indeed. In the early days of OS X, I purchased OmniWeb as I prefered it to IE/Netscape/iCab et al and also wanted to support the company (OmniGroup). It was (is) a very nice looking browser with some great features - allthough it's compaitibility is slightly lacking these days. Opera must be mad, they're using excuses which have been viably used in the past for different projects by different companies to cover the fact that Opera is not and never has been popular on the Mac and they're going to leave the market. I'm truley amazed at their stance, there could have been a possibility that Chimera or OmniWeb be helped along by Apple and bundled with machines... but Opera.. what are they thinking! Finally, as others have said, Apple have provided the frameworks to the developer community, some of whom - read OmniGroup - have taken this as a positive thing, and will use this to build a full-blown feature-filled product. This approach is far more positive, you get the rendering engine done for you, then work on bells and whistles to create something people will pay for. OmniGroup could do well with their WebCore-based browser, and their attitude shows thought and maturity. Opera on the other hand seem to be overstating their position in the market, and threatening Apple with no, or very little basis, because of their own lack of ability to innovate.
Good point... thanks for clearing that up. I stand fully corrected on the royalty issue ;)
Still not impressed with the crippling of iDVD compared to DVD Studio Pro though.....
oh well, looks like I'm going to bite....
iDVD is available via one of two means, with a new Mac (i.e. paid for) or bought from Apple (i.e. paid for). The OWC hack could only be used with a legitimately owned copy of iDVD, to make it work with a legitimately owned, but non-BTO DVD-R drive. The workaround that OWC made, although possibly breaking a license agreement here or there, did not take money away from Apple, it just took away their control of the product and the market.
Apple have to pay a royalty, to whom exactly? DVD drives themselves have royalties attached, but thats a completely seperate issue. iDVD is Apple software, so who would they pay a royalty to.. themselves? Guess it could be a funky tax-loophole ;)
If you have any info on where these royalties go, I'd be interested to hear. I guess it's possible they're using someone elses code, but if this is the case, I'd have thought Apple would have just bought the product (ala Soundjam and iTunes) rather than be stuick with royalties.
OWC never publicly said a bad thing about Apple, which isn't surprising as they are relatively small (especially compared to Apple) and are Authorised Dealers so want to keep on the good side of the mothership.
Of course, the rest of the world reported things with a more critical eye, and the DMCA was mentioned during initial reports of what happened. Even if the DMCA wasn't directly attributed, it's still not fair-play from apple IMHO.
OWC have a good history of making nice hacks for unsupported hardware (including the current XPostFacto for running OS X on older Macs). This really was a move to keep cheap and easy DVD production in the hands of Apple - it's the added extras that so often help sell Macs. It would not be difficult to remove this limitation in software and allow any DVD-R drive to be used, as is the case with much more expensive DVD Studio Pro. Ask yourself why this is the case...
Actually, although many people within Apple, and Apple themselves, at various times have argued against the DMCA to varying degrees, they have in fact used it themselves. OWC used to sell a patch for iDVD so it could be used with external DVD-R/RW's rather than just the BTO ones from Apple. They were informed by Apple that this violated Apple's intellectual property and the DMCA act and told to stop selling it. which they did, immediately.
While I like a lot of what Apple is doing, and they do employ open-source guys as well as give back to the community, this was a bit off. Especially as iDVD will soon be a non-free (as in beer) app as well as only working on certain drives. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them giving iDVD3 ability to work with all drives, as this would be even more of a slam in OWC's faces.
Unpopular, unfair and inherently flawed. What about people who are using their bandwidth for thinsg which they own, or for serving websites, or mail, or a myriad of other things which would never come under the jurisdiction of 'copyrighted' works.
Your argument that "unless I'm a commercial distributor of movies then it doesn't make sense for me to distribute it" brings up another important point. At the moment, mos people who use p2p or other file-sharing tools, pay for the bandwidth, equipment etc used, so it actually costs them money. Now, the big professional pirates, they charge for their goods, more directly take income away from the copyright holder, and can afford bandwidth or this supposed 'bandwidth tax'.
So, all that a tax like this would do, would be to increase the worst side of piracy and hurt or stop legitimate data-transfer and small-time sharing.
I don't call this approach freedom, and I think it would be missing a major oppurtunity to turn the clocks back on suspect law's which have been brought in over previous decades and to rethink the foundation of what copyright is.
Who says they don't, myself, and I'm sure many other people on /. spent most of their childhood using a variety of computers with no GUI.
Kids these days (oh no, I'm sounding like an old man already) may not pick up CLI stuff as quickly or at such an early age, but I don't think its because they can't. It's possibly more to do with the focus on GUI's and the visual, interactive medium in today's world, and the prevalence of such systems, certainly over CLI systems.
Oh well... whatever the reasons, I certainly have fond memories of sneaking into buildings, finding a terminal, and playing away to find out what happened.....
While in many ways I agree, water, electricity, healthcare etc are more important priorities, once you've got these, you need to move onto infrastructure. What better infrastructure to than extremely cheap internet access. This can be used for communication, learning etc. The internet is tool which can be used for the dissemination of information, not just playing UT2003 and downloading mp3's. What better way to help rapidly improve a country and it's populace than give them a tool which they themselves can use for self-improvement, in whatever way they want, not in a way which is dictated by others.
Rendezvous currently only broadcasts availibility of services within a single subnet. This will change in the future though, then there would be the possibility of you broadcasting the availibility of services to the entire world. Of course, this happens already with such things as NetBIOS, and is a problem - mainly for users who don't understand networking concepts. But, this isn't a new situation, people do need to be better informed regarding security, but this is a seperate issue which needs addressing.
Rendezvous (and more specifically the zeroconf working group) is not there to increase security, it's to make networking and service discovery easier for people. That isn't to say that security isn't important and that it isn't something which the working group take seriously. But Rendezvous really doesn't harm security, certainly no more than a variety of other standards such as NetBIOS and UPnP.
If an individual or company is worried about security, then they should have a policy regarding this and methods to implement it, regardless of what OS, protocols, etc they are using.
Maybe this article about ATI's Radeon 9500Pro would have been a better one to link to. It shows how this cheaper R300 based product compares to other offerings and how it beats the Ti4200 hands down and often outdoes the Ti4600. It may not be the killer card that the 9700 is, and may not be a true entry level card, but for the mainstream gamer market it gives mighty fine performance for your cash.
Of course, by that time ATI will have moved to selling a low-cost 0.13 R300 based product for the entry level market and have their next-gen chips arriving. Nvidia have lost a lot of ground with putting all their eggs in the 0.13 basket and in missing their 6 month product cycle targets.
Isn't the only console thats being sold at a large loss at the moment the x-box. AFAIK, sony and Nintendo are not making (or certainly weren't until recent xmas boosting of market share exercises) actually losing money on the hardware. The PSone, is dirt cheap to make now, with the PS2, Sony have got over their initial cost of developing a totally new chip and the GC uses only slightly modified PPC750 and ATI hardware. From the recent wave of consoles, as far as I can tell, only Microsoft went way overboard with the hardware costs....
Virgin have a new v:port system on their Airbus A340-600's which has some degree of video and audio on demand (300 hours of VOD rather than the fixed channel based system they have on older planes). I got to use one of these on a three day old plane during a recent lang-haul flight and it's a lot better than the old system, you get a bigger screen too :) There's also the capability to do networked games - simple ones mind you - between seats, as well as sending e-mail and SMS messages (for a fee though). :) It's based on the Matsushita MAS3000 system. Unfortunately I found this out because my system was having 'issues' and needed to be rebooted, at which point I as was greeted by Tux and some nice boot messages :)
Best of all, the system runs on Linux
I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52?
Nah, people setup blogs for that sorta self-gratification ;)
(or should that read self-delusion)
There's also the reason that (1) not everyone can afford to go to a big swanky cinema (if they can find one) and (2) the damn film isn't going to be out in China until next year. ;)
Even if this guy from dolby was telling the truth, and if the DVD's were 'real' (ie reasonable quality, and of the right film), what was he doing there? He was attending a conference of industry types concerning how to 'exploit' (their words not mine) the Chinese market. A good start would be to learn something about the market, not treat it the same as the US (or as 2nd class compared to the US) and for god's sake try releasing things internationally at the same time! If some rich bloke comes moaning about "this dreadful country where he went to try to screw money out of people and got screwed over by those people", especially when he has absolutely no proof, don't come moaning to me.
end rant
pudges short term memory must have been purged in a cron job during the last five days....
That link would be great of you wanted to know about the Seventh Day Adventist Church in New York..... but, as we're talking about game dev, maybe this link would be better. Of course, just like the US and European GDC's, the official conference website is not the place to get news and pics from.
Agreed, while I wouldn't want /. to become a pure "there has been an update to {insert_whatever_package/app/etc}" site, the discussions can often prove useful. Well, that is when/if we can move on from this direction of discussion! It's important to know what the actual effects of various updates - particularly core OS ones - are, once they're in the wild. /. is certainly a better place to discuss the caveats of such updates than say.. versiontracker. That said, there's often plenty of ppl trolling about how it's a waste of time talking about Linux kernel revs too, c'est la vie!
Erm, they do package it on CD (you also get the 3x CD distrib when you buy the HD) or a free download, this is just an alternative way of distributing the software, source and the entire ports tree. It's an attempt to make things easier...... clever that ;)
It's a must upgrade IMHO, although there are two caveats. (1) MAJOR you've got too be extremely careful about dust getting in there (2) while the soldering is easy, the proper application of the film and boring out of a hole for the Afterburner in the case is not as straightforward.
That said, it's a fun little project/upgrade and really makes a huge difference to the GBA.