Then you can look at Vandana Shiva's talk about free-market's assault on India: everything from the destruction of indigenous jobs by heavy subsidizing of imported soya oil to companies patenting and attempting to forbid Indian farmers to grow crops that the Indian farmers themselves had developed! Basmati, Neem: natural products developed in India, but patents were taken out on these things by U.S. companies. Ever heard the name Monsanto? Unless you try and take a closer look at what people in India are saying, you won't: you're not going to hear about this from U.S. media- or 'globalized' media, for that matter. When was the last time you heard the name Bhopal? And yet more people died at Bhopal than in the WTC terrorist attack- by now, more than twice as many. Bhopal was caused by intentional negligence motivated by a desire to cut costs and economize, the better to compete in the global market... to this day, the reaction of Union Carbide has been to hush it up, even to the point of refusing to specify the poisons involved, which would help medical relief efforts that are _still_ relevant... but saying what was in the poison gas would be bad PR and possibly lead to some form of liability, so silence is still kept...
Yes- do please take a closer look at these things. The more you look, the more you see- and it matters.
Re:Not That Kind of Globalization
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Globalization
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· Score: 2
Interestingly, the free-market globalization process is creating 'slaves by proxy'.
If you can get cheaper labor in another country by moving jobs there and then tactfully overlooking conditions for work that exist there, you get cheaper labor: the 'slavery' is technically done by somebody else, and you don't ask how it's done. It's a proxy, and the people can lie inventively and say that they meet OSHA regulations or some such thing, but who is checking? Certainly not the company that benefits more by _not_ asking inconvenient questions.
Re:Lets Get Our Heads Straight
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Globalization
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· Score: 2
With regard to your claim,
"Corporations dont kill people. Corporations dont place people in our service against their free will. Corporations dont rape people. Corporations expand and build facilities in concordance with the local laws of the countries they occupy."
In your vehement assertion that corporations do not kill people through malice or negligence, don't force obedience through criminal or economic pressure, and that they obey the law even when the local law may be bribery or 'negotiable', do you get your proof...
...from the corporations themselves?
One of the primary errors here...
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Globalization
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· Score: 4, Insightful
"equitable spread of technology and a free-market economy"
Jon, you can't have equitable spread of anything and a free-market economy unless you have a really strange definition of equitable (most dictionaries will not include 'I got mine' as a definition).
Economies are inevitably controlled in some fashion- one term for this is 'dirigiste' (sp?) which means 'directed'. One result of this is the evening out of the ungovernable boom and bust cycles of free-market capitalism. There is plenty of reason to think that a worldwide ungoverned boom and bust cycle would be a bad thing.
Globalization does not have to mean uncontrolled freemarket Chicago School capitalism- it is just a convenient label for this, as uncontrolled freemarket Chicago School capitalism pushes for a global boom (as was once, foolishly, written about in Wired, in the 'Long Boom' issue) without a moment of thought for the resulting global _bust_ that will follow.
Equitable spread of technology yes- but free market economy is the last way you're gonna get that.
This isn't precisely strategy but more small-unit tactics- but here's why you are so right:)
It has decent interface for micromanaging the individuals that make up your force, distinct but easily understandable types (like the dwarf, who throws bombs, or archers, who are weak but fire distance weapons), damage is tracked on an individual unit basis and you can monitor it easily just by selecting the units, and it has the fully 3D map with extensive use of both large and small height gradations.
That's the basis for Myth's superiority right there. If the ranged weapons were, say, laser rifles, it would be nowhere near as interesting what Myth has. Your archer/dwarf has a range beyond which they cannot fire. This is not a fixed range- if you're firing down a gentle slope, surprise! You have more range. You can have units concealed among the terrain, or on cliff tops that are difficult to see up to. A dwarf can fire a bomb, miss, and have it roll back onto friendly units. You can have a bunch of fighters and a bunch of archers being attacked from the wrong side, and the fighters can't get past the archers because the archers are in the way, in spite of the easy interface.
It's based on very, very simple and intuitive concepts of units taking up space, moving at certain speeds, firing missiles that behave with realistic ballistics, on terrain that is convincingly unflat and irregular- none of these things are themselves that amazing, but combine them all and you have a tactical situation that is completely beyond any person's ability to _totally_ understand at any one time. So you make 'chunked' models of what's going on- 'group of guys over here, hill there, mostly flat here' and this is where the real tactics enter into it- just as it is with real-time massively multiplayer air combat games- it's a question of situational awareness in situations that are flat-out too complex to just rigidly understand.
So the point is not, "Let's have armies also require SHOEMAKERS and if you don't have enough shoemakers you can't march!". That's like a boolean value there. Instead, how about having fatigue? In Quake-style RTS games, such things are far from popular, because if you get injured you become dead meat, so it turns it into a boolean situation for you- hit == hosed, and you can't outrun your attacker. However, in strategy or tactical games, supposing you have a particular unit (such as a dwarf) that has skills you need, and that unit is hurt- and moving slightly slower than the others. Suddenly there's a whole new level of tactics. If you all just run away, your dwarf is a straggler and dead meat. Suddenly you have to time your retreat, cover the stragglers not because the rules tell you to but because the EMERGENT rules force you to.
The reason Myth is such a winner for you is, it's all about emergent rules in situations too complex to reduce to simple rules. It tests situational awareness ruthlessly.
*g* now you have me wanting to install it and start fooling with it again, instead of doing my work;)
mp3 inevitably causes considerable gain changing and alterations of the tonal content of music, by design.
Anytime you are doing gain changing, even in the smallest amount, you expand word lengths to contain the new value- 16 bits won't hold it anymore. The only exception is bit-shift gain changing- multiplying and dividing by twos- and that's rare in practice.
Anytime you expand word lengths, you have to reduce them to 16 bit again for 16 bit playback- and truncating sounds, and measures, awful. Dithering the result of the mp3 decoder SYNTHESIZER makes perfect sense, because it's not really the original 16 bit content at all. It's a sort of musical instrument attempting to _approximate_ the original content based on extremely poor information. Think of it as an elaborate synthesizer- what it's playing doesn't actually resemble the original 16 bit content much at all. Try a null test (subtracting inverted copy from the original) to see just how unlike the copy is from the original! And so, all of that divergence amounts to gain changing on different frequency ranges- and becomes subject to a need for dithering.
Maybe that's no accident. Batten down the hatches for a bit of audio geekitude, it'll be worth it- and this COULD be tested fairly easily...
First of all, mp3 decoding is done through basically synthesising waves according to the (lossy) information being used, and outputting them as 16 bit 44.1K audio in the vast majority of cases.
mp3 audio is inherently lower quality than 16/44 (some other formats like WMA or 'mp3pro' are even more blatantly inaccurate, making up data out of the blue) and so, to my knowledge, the most common approach has been to just cast the resulting sample values to an int or something, which is the same as truncation of the value. This results in quantization distortion, and since it's just lousy mp3, who cares?
However, it is possible to decode mp3 to 24-bit resolution and up- and this is where it appears Apple's approach to these things gets interesting. My own experience with this started when I got iTunes running on a MacOS 8.6 system- before then, there was no chance of running iTunes, and I'd been using other means of playing mp3s, like SoundApp, which remains a nifty program but didn't prepare me for what I was going to hear from iTunes.
Briefly, I do audio mastering work, and have very high resolution audio gear coming off my Mac- and here's the deal- I started playing tunes off iTunes, and was very startled to hear them playing with a depth and dimensionality that I was totally unaccustomed to. The sound was more 3D than 2D, despite the mp3 sources. Why?
For a possible answer you might look here, at some tests done with 24-bit mp3 decoding libraries, and consider Apple's background in pro audio. Put simply, it's my suspicion that iTunes is decoding to 24 bit or 32-bit floating point, and dithering the result to 16 bits for the sound output DACs. This is a substantially more sophisticated approach than the usual 'mp3 is cheesy anyway' direct truncation, and it yields considerably better sound. I can't get direct confirmation of this by citing iTunes source, as iTunes is closed source- so I linked to a 24 bit decoder review page to drive home the point that this technology is out there and in use.
What does this have to do with iPod? Easy- what iTunes can do in software, iPod can do in embedded hardware. I think it would be a good idea to analyze the performance of iPod compared to other mp3 playing portables- and see whether iPod is pioneering high-resolution mp3 decoding and dithering in a portable. This can be measured: the noise floor will be different and up to 20 db lower compared to simple truncation! It is also likely to sound distinctly different as well- high-quality headphones might make this equally obvious.
Just thought I'd raise the issue, since the Register has apparently commented that it sounds nice, and I've had similar observations about iTunes... the _character_ of the improvement in sound is very much resolution domain stuff, and Winamp users can apparently get an example of this type of sound through a 24-bit MAD mp3 library plugin. If my hunch is correct, Apple are already routinely doing this in their products to get a more 'high-end' sound, including iPod- and it may be a first in mp3 portables. More research (by someone who _can_ just run out and buy a Nomad and an iPod and start measuring them;) ) is indicated:)
You're making unwarranted assumptions about the role of the free market in properly dealing with *insert subject here*.
Let's talk pro audio here. There's a particular product out there that's widely used, "Jam". It burns audio CDs and allows the setting of PQ codes- lots of mastering houses are using this, in conjunction with quadrillabuck DAWs, to produce final output. It burns DAO, lets you put in ISDN codes for vendors, a wide range of capabilities that are strictly professional use. It also tries to offer features like crossfades, but the resolution of its signal processing is so inferior to what a mastering house with Sonic Solutions has, that those features go unused.
The software was bought by Adaptec, and is being revised, for new versions to be sold commercially, sold into the consumer sphere. Now, mastering people depend on this software, and they would like substantially better dither, workflow improvements, specialised improvements to please their very, very small market.
How much do you want to bet that there will be no improvement in the crossfade handling, but you'll get maybe a graphic EQ stuck on, and on-the-fly burning from mp3s?
My point is that you're trusting in the commercial sphere to be the bringers of all good things, and the commercial sphere is just as capable of backstabbing. Look at CDRs. Mastering engineers can test the results of burns using special hardware to indicate the number of errors that are normally corrected silently by the CD player circuitry (your CD-R does not have this hardware. No consumer gear does, though some is hackable to enable it). Some brands of CDR are better at this than others, and 74 minutes is the standard media length. 80 minute CDRs came out, and mastering engineers freaked: the error rates were way up compared to 74 minute. The results were markedly inferior burns. As 80 minute media was pushed onto the market, it pushed out 74 minute media... where's the profit motive in keeping less-space media around for a relative few mastering geeks who, unlike the consumer, could test the error rates of the media? And that's the way it goes...
In that light, open source is a vital counter, not because it forces corporations to play nice- they won't- but because if you're doing specialized work and you are using Open Source, you can't have it taken away from you. If you use commercial, proprietary software, you're in constant danger of having your tools taken away and returned as consumer-grade kiddy toys, and you have no protection and no recourse. The only true safety is in owning your own tools- and with open source, you effectively do own your tools, it's just that if someone else wants a perfect copy of your tools without taking your copy away, they can have it.
Open Source has substantial value on its own, apart from any hypothetical ability it supposedly has to make corporations and competitors play nice. It's an ownership matter- a control issue.
The guy says "We're in discussions with everybody" and their target market is 'everything'. That's a really, really bad sign. The reason you haven't seen ANY of these yet, is because they're still waiting to hear the technical specifications from refrigerator manufacturers before finalizing the design;)
Secondly- so he thinks he has the support of most of the record labels? I'd looooove to see those contracts;) plenty of musicians think the same thing and stay confused for a long time why they're not getting paid. I'm picturing a situation in which the record companies 'found him a lawyer' to help understand the agreements they themselves drew up. He may have no idea what kind of sharks he was dealing with, or who his lawyer was REALLY working for. I have a hard time picturing this guy as sharp and paranoid enough to conduct negotiations with record companies without being utterly screwed.
So, don't even worry about this supplanting CDs with copy-prevented media.
The record companies have a huge amount of infrastructure in replicating houses etc. and even the ability to pressure replicators not to work with indies such as Negativland. They're going to move ahead with CD, non-Red-Book-compliant CD, DVD-A and SACD.
This is about taking this technology off the market so that it never becomes a 'piracy-friendly' techology, like a CD-R that's more easily transported. That's what this is about and why we won't ever see it come out.
Maybe that is so: in that case, I'd say this- go out there and reduce the power of Congress FIRST.
I don't think I'm at all unreasonable in thinking that you Libertarian guys would like to get in there, abandon anything resembling campaign finance reform- and try and get MORE power, not less, because you have things you want to accomplish. Unfortunately, I don't think you are at all likely to get in there and reduce your own power.
I'm one of the 'quirky engineers' (probably the most significant thing I've actually produced is this but there's lots of other stuff) and I have Asperger's Syndrome. It does _not_ mean you smell;) but it does mean you cannot function on exactly the same level as a 'normal human', at least not indefinitely. I have ulcers, homelessness, and a brief period in a psychiatric ward to attest to that. These days I place more value on being me- and ironically this is what has made me capable of contributing to the world in any sense.
I could easily have been the guy in the article- useless (through stressing and being a fish out of water), beset by self-esteem problems, and soon fired. I've also been the 'guru', once I'd started dealing with life more on my terms- in that case, I got relied upon for so much that I burned out and _I_ chose to part ways with the company, rather than be fired.
The essay 'care and feeding of a hacker' is almost a textbook example of 'how to use a person with Asperger's effectively'. The most important things are: employ them in the field that they're already obsessed with, give them resources, stay out of the way, and have a marketing team to sell what they produce because they themselves cannot do marketing as well as more social creatures can. Do _not_ make your quirky Asperger's geek double as a sales weasel;)
That useless guy in the article _might_ be hugely effective in the right context. Or not... but the article author's company clearly wasn't the right context, and I doubt they're a healthy environment for 'quirky geniuses'. You almost have to have a support network just for turning the quirky-output into products and selling them- without the quirky-geniuses, you may not have a product at all, but without the sales weasels, only Slashdot will ever hear about you...
(Slashdot ate a long involved essay- I can't exactly duplicate it and so I'm going to be a good little slashdotter and just present conclusions without supporting argument;) )
Nope.
(well, maybe a _little_ more;) )
The problem here is, the author of this article lives in an immediate-gratification world in which there is no possible reason to use some other software if the MS one has more features and has lock-in.
It is quixotic to pick a solution that is known to be doomed to 'lose', if you care more about 'winning versus losing' than you do about meeting specific demands and accomplishing defined tasks.
However, only through the quixotic does the world progress: inevitably you'll find there are other, hidden advantages to the 'loser' choice, that are being ignored by the 'win/lose' mentality.
Instead of having a do-everything-for-you mail client, some choose immunity from Microsoft-hosted mail worms. Instead of defining a journalist as someone with a really GOOD spell checker, some define a journalist as someone who's read and written so much that they can spell all by themselves. (CmdrTaco is not necessarily a journalist- he is an essayist of links. We don't turn to him for skilled presentation of all information, we turn to him for quirky presentation of _his_ personal choices in information. He needs no spell checker to be valid- but he's not a journalist.)
Insisting on maximum immediate gratification is a childish thing, and Microsoft's children are numerous- indeed, they outnumber all other computing factions. However, the question to ask is- when you want a bridge built, or an article written, or an educated opinion delivered on a subject such as the relevance of mass popularity to effectiveness as a desktop computer user- do you ask a child?
And you've read the source code, satisfying yourself that your 'unprotected' files will not expire at some future time and revert to 'protected'? Obligating you to re-release them under the now-current form of WMA?
We may know OURSELVES better. I think it's fine that Europe can have ID cards without great benefit or great problems. However, I don't trust my own country to be able to pull this off, and so I'd have to count myself with the 'alarmists' on this one.
The next thing you know, we might turn around and demand that every world citizen have to have one of OUR ID cards, because they are so cool and high tech and all. We'd have all kinds of reasons, probably backed up by more terrorist attacks, but the bottom line would be that we would be presenting the world with an ultimatum, while it looked down the barrel of our military force and observed the twitchiness of our collective trigger finger.
The LAST thing we need is more defenses for Bunker USA. The LAST thing we need is support for our tendency to be the empire builder. And this is antithetical to our dearest values anyhow- hell, we were formed through _rebellion_ against an Empire, and now the best we can do is attempt another one? What the hell does that have to do with liberty?
I think that at least some of the resistance to this idea comes not from ignorance, but from self-understanding. We're good at a lot of things, we Americans. But we're not wise. But we sure have a lot of energy. Now we have ten times the energy and hysteria that we used to have, and a bunch of vulturelike capitalist types trying to invent information systems to make us feel safer- and also to get much more detailed control and surveillance over our lives, for the sake of that one guy who might be a terrorist undercover. Look at our history, at what even our Presidents have done to seek control (I'm thinking Nixon here, primarily).
If we have surveillance over all aspects of our lives, I want it to be some British person, quieted by the knowledge of lost empires, taking a more Continental pace, a more England-sized ambition to the job. I do NOT want our own merry little capitalists and politicians, hot for empire and world domination, manning the cameras and policing the checkpoints, and neither should you- because I'm telling you, what gives you the idea it would stop there, within our borders?
After the terrorist attacks on the WTC, I got to see some of my fellow Americans, not wise ones but not monsters either, talking with perfect poise and seriousness about the desirability of our invading Canada and Mexico to expand our territory for our own protection. About invading any troublesome Middle East country and simply annexing it. And this is from people who _weren't_ looking for the 'glass parking lot' approach! Something was wrong inside their heads- they honestly felt, in defiance of all history, that the best chance for world peace was an American Empire, like Rome and Britain before it. Some of our leaders feel the same way.
Look- whatever you do, remember this one thing: we are not wise, and we are not always safe to be around. We need to be cajoled and cuddled and soothed into the modern world, and the terrorists are NOT HELPING. Neither are our captains of industry- empire by another name can be empire all the same, you Europeans know that, we _don't_.
Stop trusting us! Smile, soothe, and be freakin' smart, because it's going to take a while for us to be rational, or have any clue about being a world citizen.
Additional note that I came across since posting this: you'd think they'd meet estimates, right? Not. Microsoft missed Wall Street estimates this last time around by as much as _twenty_ cents a share. That is serious hurting. To some extent they've gotten themselves into an absolutely impossible position- even if they fail immediately it's still gonna be a brutally hard lesson, and the longer they hang in there the worse the crunch will be.
Bear in mind that _while_ they are missing estimates they are also shoveling cash into X-Box, into.NET, all these projects. Their burn rate is incalculable. I will risk a guess and say, just as a hunch, that Microsoft is probably going to go broke _before_ any of the other dooms catch up to them. By the time the DoJ comes around with an elaborate and paranoid rulebook for Microsoft to play by, it may already be too late. Had they been broken up they could have done wonderful things with their finances in the process, and continued to thrive as much as ever- but that opportunity is lost to them now, most likely.
Um- 'Microsoft will march on a road of bones!' isn't exactly a new concept. You will indeed find many people to confirm this: most of whom work for Microsoft Marketing. By that logic, Microsoft Bob long ago became the dominant user interface of the 21st century (some would say it _has_;) )
It's nice to insist that Microsoft will always win, but you also need a dose of reality. It isn't simply that Microsoft is fighting it out with fellow software developers like Sun, or that they are trying to force people into a highly proprietary version of e-business that IS NOT PROVEN TO WORK using software that has been an enormous reliability headache (Peter Principle for software?)... though this by itself would be a strong argument that they are going to fail.
The trouble is, the degree of control and influence they are seeking puts them in a dominant position to actual governments. They want to be able to shut you off if you haven't paid your bills no matter _who_ you are- and there are people out there who do not define themselves as 'consumers' or take such threats lightly. For instance, the military- if not the US military, then that of other countries. Not to mention the EU taking a very dim view of XP and.NET in general- not to mention the fact that they are consistently losing in the US courts and betting everything on the somewhat strange notion that, if only they delay and commit greater and greater crimes as fast as they possibly can, by the time they are to be punished they will be more powerful than the government and will have to be let go.
That's very childish: governments don't take challenges to their power lightly.
So: I contradict you..NET _cannot_ win, except in a vacuum with certain set rules (that MS has infinite money, that the ground rules everywhere in the world are totally unrestricted Chicago School free-market capitalism, that there can be no reaction to their aggression except economic reactions). And _none_ of those rules even apply! Microsoft burns through horrible sums of money and there's no telling how much they _really_ have- even they might not know. They're not honest people, why would you trust them to tell you the true state of their resources? They're faced with situations all over the world that defy Chicago School capitalism, even in the USA. And they have already been targeted with anthrax mailings- clearly not everyone in the world is prepared to just 'compete in the free market' with them, after all this talk of war on Microsoft it seems at least somebody out there is identifying them (and not unreasonably) with Western Capitalism, and launching terror attacks on them specifically.
The problem here is hubris: it's better if.NET _does_ fail, and I mean better for Microsoft. It would do them enormous damage, but they'd be able to re-adjust, as IBM did when they were in Microsoft's position. Pursuing their expansion strategy to the uttermost limit only guarantees a harder fall.
If third-party security companies and organisations can be made to take responsibility for the protection of Microsoft customers, can Microsoft sue them for failing to adequately protect the public against software flaws Microsoft itself created and distributed?
You should have seen me when I was your age;) then I was _really_ insecure.
Suit yourself. Your opinions of what has class are your own. I don't think it's proper for open source development to be taking place in back rooms and through private little deals. (Neither should government, but that's another story);)
"You know, you could just write the man an e-mail, rather than this lame, off-topic self-promotion."
Hi AC;)
Actually, "there are professional-quality wordlength reduction algorithms available to free software" is just as relevant to professional audio on Linux as "here's a 24 track digital audio workstation program for Linux". This is because the field is littered with proprietary approaches: you can license algorithms like Apogee's UV-22 or POW-R 3, but you can't use them in free software because you'd have to disclose them.
Given that this would otherwise permanently cripple Linux/free professional audio by guaranteeing that its basic sound was inferior to proprietary software that can license these high-performance algorithms, the fact that there are Free routines out there is GOOD.
So *phbbbbt* to you, sir;) if you want to have moral authority, _you_ write a wordlength reduction routine that peaks at -160 db noise floor at 16/44.1 and then proceed to not tell anyone about it.
Free software is everybody's. There's no point in hiding it. For all you know, some unexpected person might have found that information useful, gone off and read the source and built it into their own app that has nothing to do with Audacity. That's the _point_.
You're using the GPL. So do I. Want any code or algorithms from Mastering Tools Pro? I'm doing compression, limiting, a couple forms of equalization, declicking/peak expansion, and numerous forms of wordlength reduction, some of which would be realtime in C++. In fact, because you're GPL, you _can't_ have some of the more 'brand name' wordlength reduction algorithms like POW-R, because they are proprietary, but it just so happens that the ones I do are GPL. You're welcome to take a look at the spectral analyses of these algorithms compared to common ones like TPDF dither.
If you're not using dithered 2-busses yet, run don't walk to check that stuff out- you really need to be covering that base to be pro-level. Even Pro Tools has had to bow to pressure and incorporate a dithered buss in their new mixer, and they have such a big name that they've stagnated horribly.
Talk to me if this sounds interesting- it's definitely about what _you_ think is important. You can suit yourselves, I'm just saying that I'm happy to consult with you for nothing and donate algorithms under the GPL- and consider that, although you guys are clearly much better coders than me, it's possible that there are people out there with a clearer idea of what constitutes a state of the art DAW system. Within the narrow confines of digital gain staging and wordlength reduction practices (and possibly compression and limiting, though I'm damned if I can figure how to implement a realtime lookahead limiter for you guys without sacrificing latency), I'd suggest that I'm the guy you should be talking to. Up to you...
The high end multitrack machine RADAR runs on BeOS. It's been really impressing people who loathe Pro Tools. Even with professional audio equipment there's levels and levels. On one level, Pro Tools is all wizzy keen and professional, compared to, say, Cool Edit: but you can still get stuff that leaves it in the dust, and at least one of those high-end options (RADAR) runs on BeOS.
What "monopoly" on force? Are you a libertarian?;)
Welcome to reality- this is the logical extension of the libertarian worldview, precisely because force isn't restrained to any one group in particular. As you can see, companies are perfectly free to pursue this sort of thing- the only way a government would be able to stop it would be if it was able to punish the company in some manner. And that's not a given, that's just your assumption, if you tend to immediately think 'guns and armies' and not think further.
Think 'red tape' and 'lawyers' instead and you'll begin to see force in a lot of other hands.
I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.
You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.
Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:
new powermac to take on ADAT editing duties and run the quirky old transfer card I have
OS 8.6
Amadeus 2 v 3.2.3, which imports and exports Ogg- unsure quite what version- and Amadeus isn't free, but the deal is I _have_ bought it earlier and my registration number works on 3.2.3
iTunes (more on this later)
And so, _yesterday_, I set about getting a preliminary look at Ogg Vorbis using sonogram analysis on my Encoder Hell test sound- put in half a day on it, and updated my site to include the new information. And today, guess what turns up on Slashdot? Spooky.
Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...
Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:
"Conclusion: Ogg Vorbis, at least the version I tested, is not wildly superior to mp3. Used at bit rates under 192K it tries much harder to encode real high-frequency data, but on some sounds such as a tone sweep its sophistication backfires, producing artifacts that show up plainly in the sonograms."
"However, used at higher bit rates it strikes a very clever balance, managing to pull together the best qualities of wildly different mp3 encoders into a single sonic presentation. Again, it behaves similarly to the very impressive BladeEnc in tonal purity, but instead of the miserable transient behavior of BladeEnc, it mimics the overstated transient behavior of Fraunhofer. This could easily be seen as best of both worlds."
That is, to my mind, a pretty strong endorsement, requiring only that high bit rates be used (as is intended) As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand. It also is, in my professional opinion, very well positioned to keep mp3 in check- mp3 can only maintain its dominance by not getting carried away with licensing and IP abuses, because Ogg is sonically superior enough to be able to take over _if_ given the opportunity of a situation involving harsh mp3 licensing, given widespread use of higher bit rates rather than low ones. (This is why I dismiss WMA- it belongs to yesterday, an era of limited storage space and harsh licensing restrictions)
Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.
A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.
I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.
However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...
...because I write them. And that means that although I am not a Linux C coder- since the code and the algorithms for quadratic and primitive root residue dithers and indeterminate-order noise shaping are in the GPL sphere, the Linux world can have those technologies freely- and the proprietary world can't. Which may mean that Linux players (mp3 or Ogg) can fairly easily boast strikingly better sound quality than proprietary ones...
It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...
Slashdot Mirror
Then you can look at Vandana Shiva's talk about free-market's assault on India: everything from the destruction of indigenous jobs by heavy subsidizing of imported soya oil to companies patenting and attempting to forbid Indian farmers to grow crops that the Indian farmers themselves had developed! Basmati, Neem: natural products developed in India, but patents were taken out on these things by U.S. companies. Ever heard the name Monsanto? Unless you try and take a closer look at what people in India are saying, you won't: you're not going to hear about this from U.S. media- or 'globalized' media, for that matter. When was the last time you heard the name Bhopal? And yet more people died at Bhopal than in the WTC terrorist attack- by now, more than twice as many. Bhopal was caused by intentional negligence motivated by a desire to cut costs and economize, the better to compete in the global market... to this day, the reaction of Union Carbide has been to hush it up, even to the point of refusing to specify the poisons involved, which would help medical relief efforts that are _still_ relevant... but saying what was in the poison gas would be bad PR and possibly lead to some form of liability, so silence is still kept...
Yes- do please take a closer look at these things. The more you look, the more you see- and it matters.
If you can get cheaper labor in another country by moving jobs there and then tactfully overlooking conditions for work that exist there, you get cheaper labor: the 'slavery' is technically done by somebody else, and you don't ask how it's done. It's a proxy, and the people can lie inventively and say that they meet OSHA regulations or some such thing, but who is checking? Certainly not the company that benefits more by _not_ asking inconvenient questions.
In your vehement assertion that corporations do not kill people through malice or negligence, don't force obedience through criminal or economic pressure, and that they obey the law even when the local law may be bribery or 'negotiable', do you get your proof...
Jon, you can't have equitable spread of anything and a free-market economy unless you have a really strange definition of equitable (most dictionaries will not include 'I got mine' as a definition).
Economies are inevitably controlled in some fashion- one term for this is 'dirigiste' (sp?) which means 'directed'. One result of this is the evening out of the ungovernable boom and bust cycles of free-market capitalism. There is plenty of reason to think that a worldwide ungoverned boom and bust cycle would be a bad thing.
Globalization does not have to mean uncontrolled freemarket Chicago School capitalism- it is just a convenient label for this, as uncontrolled freemarket Chicago School capitalism pushes for a global boom (as was once, foolishly, written about in Wired, in the 'Long Boom' issue) without a moment of thought for the resulting global _bust_ that will follow.
Equitable spread of technology yes- but free market economy is the last way you're gonna get that.
It has decent interface for micromanaging the individuals that make up your force, distinct but easily understandable types (like the dwarf, who throws bombs, or archers, who are weak but fire distance weapons), damage is tracked on an individual unit basis and you can monitor it easily just by selecting the units, and it has the fully 3D map with extensive use of both large and small height gradations.
That's the basis for Myth's superiority right there. If the ranged weapons were, say, laser rifles, it would be nowhere near as interesting what Myth has. Your archer/dwarf has a range beyond which they cannot fire. This is not a fixed range- if you're firing down a gentle slope, surprise! You have more range. You can have units concealed among the terrain, or on cliff tops that are difficult to see up to. A dwarf can fire a bomb, miss, and have it roll back onto friendly units. You can have a bunch of fighters and a bunch of archers being attacked from the wrong side, and the fighters can't get past the archers because the archers are in the way, in spite of the easy interface.
It's based on very, very simple and intuitive concepts of units taking up space, moving at certain speeds, firing missiles that behave with realistic ballistics, on terrain that is convincingly unflat and irregular- none of these things are themselves that amazing, but combine them all and you have a tactical situation that is completely beyond any person's ability to _totally_ understand at any one time. So you make 'chunked' models of what's going on- 'group of guys over here, hill there, mostly flat here' and this is where the real tactics enter into it- just as it is with real-time massively multiplayer air combat games- it's a question of situational awareness in situations that are flat-out too complex to just rigidly understand.
So the point is not, "Let's have armies also require SHOEMAKERS and if you don't have enough shoemakers you can't march!". That's like a boolean value there. Instead, how about having fatigue? In Quake-style RTS games, such things are far from popular, because if you get injured you become dead meat, so it turns it into a boolean situation for you- hit == hosed, and you can't outrun your attacker. However, in strategy or tactical games, supposing you have a particular unit (such as a dwarf) that has skills you need, and that unit is hurt- and moving slightly slower than the others. Suddenly there's a whole new level of tactics. If you all just run away, your dwarf is a straggler and dead meat. Suddenly you have to time your retreat, cover the stragglers not because the rules tell you to but because the EMERGENT rules force you to.
The reason Myth is such a winner for you is, it's all about emergent rules in situations too complex to reduce to simple rules. It tests situational awareness ruthlessly.
*g* now you have me wanting to install it and start fooling with it again, instead of doing my work ;)
mp3 inevitably causes considerable gain changing and alterations of the tonal content of music, by design.
Anytime you are doing gain changing, even in the smallest amount, you expand word lengths to contain the new value- 16 bits won't hold it anymore. The only exception is bit-shift gain changing- multiplying and dividing by twos- and that's rare in practice.
Anytime you expand word lengths, you have to reduce them to 16 bit again for 16 bit playback- and truncating sounds, and measures, awful. Dithering the result of the mp3 decoder SYNTHESIZER makes perfect sense, because it's not really the original 16 bit content at all. It's a sort of musical instrument attempting to _approximate_ the original content based on extremely poor information. Think of it as an elaborate synthesizer- what it's playing doesn't actually resemble the original 16 bit content much at all. Try a null test (subtracting inverted copy from the original) to see just how unlike the copy is from the original! And so, all of that divergence amounts to gain changing on different frequency ranges- and becomes subject to a need for dithering.
First of all, mp3 decoding is done through basically synthesising waves according to the (lossy) information being used, and outputting them as 16 bit 44.1K audio in the vast majority of cases.
mp3 audio is inherently lower quality than 16/44 (some other formats like WMA or 'mp3pro' are even more blatantly inaccurate, making up data out of the blue) and so, to my knowledge, the most common approach has been to just cast the resulting sample values to an int or something, which is the same as truncation of the value. This results in quantization distortion, and since it's just lousy mp3, who cares?
However, it is possible to decode mp3 to 24-bit resolution and up- and this is where it appears Apple's approach to these things gets interesting. My own experience with this started when I got iTunes running on a MacOS 8.6 system- before then, there was no chance of running iTunes, and I'd been using other means of playing mp3s, like SoundApp, which remains a nifty program but didn't prepare me for what I was going to hear from iTunes.
Briefly, I do audio mastering work, and have very high resolution audio gear coming off my Mac- and here's the deal- I started playing tunes off iTunes, and was very startled to hear them playing with a depth and dimensionality that I was totally unaccustomed to. The sound was more 3D than 2D, despite the mp3 sources. Why?
For a possible answer you might look here, at some tests done with 24-bit mp3 decoding libraries, and consider Apple's background in pro audio. Put simply, it's my suspicion that iTunes is decoding to 24 bit or 32-bit floating point, and dithering the result to 16 bits for the sound output DACs. This is a substantially more sophisticated approach than the usual 'mp3 is cheesy anyway' direct truncation, and it yields considerably better sound. I can't get direct confirmation of this by citing iTunes source, as iTunes is closed source- so I linked to a 24 bit decoder review page to drive home the point that this technology is out there and in use.
What does this have to do with iPod? Easy- what iTunes can do in software, iPod can do in embedded hardware. I think it would be a good idea to analyze the performance of iPod compared to other mp3 playing portables- and see whether iPod is pioneering high-resolution mp3 decoding and dithering in a portable. This can be measured: the noise floor will be different and up to 20 db lower compared to simple truncation! It is also likely to sound distinctly different as well- high-quality headphones might make this equally obvious.
Just thought I'd raise the issue, since the Register has apparently commented that it sounds nice, and I've had similar observations about iTunes... the _character_ of the improvement in sound is very much resolution domain stuff, and Winamp users can apparently get an example of this type of sound through a 24-bit MAD mp3 library plugin. If my hunch is correct, Apple are already routinely doing this in their products to get a more 'high-end' sound, including iPod- and it may be a first in mp3 portables. More research (by someone who _can_ just run out and buy a Nomad and an iPod and start measuring them ;) ) is indicated :)
Let's talk pro audio here. There's a particular product out there that's widely used, "Jam". It burns audio CDs and allows the setting of PQ codes- lots of mastering houses are using this, in conjunction with quadrillabuck DAWs, to produce final output. It burns DAO, lets you put in ISDN codes for vendors, a wide range of capabilities that are strictly professional use. It also tries to offer features like crossfades, but the resolution of its signal processing is so inferior to what a mastering house with Sonic Solutions has, that those features go unused.
The software was bought by Adaptec, and is being revised, for new versions to be sold commercially, sold into the consumer sphere. Now, mastering people depend on this software, and they would like substantially better dither, workflow improvements, specialised improvements to please their very, very small market.
How much do you want to bet that there will be no improvement in the crossfade handling, but you'll get maybe a graphic EQ stuck on, and on-the-fly burning from mp3s?
My point is that you're trusting in the commercial sphere to be the bringers of all good things, and the commercial sphere is just as capable of backstabbing. Look at CDRs. Mastering engineers can test the results of burns using special hardware to indicate the number of errors that are normally corrected silently by the CD player circuitry (your CD-R does not have this hardware. No consumer gear does, though some is hackable to enable it). Some brands of CDR are better at this than others, and 74 minutes is the standard media length. 80 minute CDRs came out, and mastering engineers freaked: the error rates were way up compared to 74 minute. The results were markedly inferior burns. As 80 minute media was pushed onto the market, it pushed out 74 minute media... where's the profit motive in keeping less-space media around for a relative few mastering geeks who, unlike the consumer, could test the error rates of the media? And that's the way it goes...
In that light, open source is a vital counter, not because it forces corporations to play nice- they won't- but because if you're doing specialized work and you are using Open Source, you can't have it taken away from you. If you use commercial, proprietary software, you're in constant danger of having your tools taken away and returned as consumer-grade kiddy toys, and you have no protection and no recourse. The only true safety is in owning your own tools- and with open source, you effectively do own your tools, it's just that if someone else wants a perfect copy of your tools without taking your copy away, they can have it.
Open Source has substantial value on its own, apart from any hypothetical ability it supposedly has to make corporations and competitors play nice. It's an ownership matter- a control issue.
I think it may have already killed a number of kiosks, judging from early reports ;)
The guy says "We're in discussions with everybody" and their target market is 'everything'. That's a really, really bad sign. The reason you haven't seen ANY of these yet, is because they're still waiting to hear the technical specifications from refrigerator manufacturers before finalizing the design ;)
Secondly- so he thinks he has the support of most of the record labels? I'd looooove to see those contracts ;) plenty of musicians think the same thing and stay confused for a long time why they're not getting paid. I'm picturing a situation in which the record companies 'found him a lawyer' to help understand the agreements they themselves drew up. He may have no idea what kind of sharks he was dealing with, or who his lawyer was REALLY working for. I have a hard time picturing this guy as sharp and paranoid enough to conduct negotiations with record companies without being utterly screwed.
So, don't even worry about this supplanting CDs with copy-prevented media.
The record companies have a huge amount of infrastructure in replicating houses etc. and even the ability to pressure replicators not to work with indies such as Negativland. They're going to move ahead with CD, non-Red-Book-compliant CD, DVD-A and SACD.
This is about taking this technology off the market so that it never becomes a 'piracy-friendly' techology, like a CD-R that's more easily transported. That's what this is about and why we won't ever see it come out.
I don't think I'm at all unreasonable in thinking that you Libertarian guys would like to get in there, abandon anything resembling campaign finance reform- and try and get MORE power, not less, because you have things you want to accomplish. Unfortunately, I don't think you are at all likely to get in there and reduce your own power.
I'm one of the 'quirky engineers' (probably the most significant thing I've actually produced is this but there's lots of other stuff) and I have Asperger's Syndrome. It does _not_ mean you smell ;) but it does mean you cannot function on exactly the same level as a 'normal human', at least not indefinitely. I have ulcers, homelessness, and a brief period in a psychiatric ward to attest to that. These days I place more value on being me- and ironically this is what has made me capable of contributing to the world in any sense.
I could easily have been the guy in the article- useless (through stressing and being a fish out of water), beset by self-esteem problems, and soon fired. I've also been the 'guru', once I'd started dealing with life more on my terms- in that case, I got relied upon for so much that I burned out and _I_ chose to part ways with the company, rather than be fired.
The essay 'care and feeding of a hacker' is almost a textbook example of 'how to use a person with Asperger's effectively'. The most important things are: employ them in the field that they're already obsessed with, give them resources, stay out of the way, and have a marketing team to sell what they produce because they themselves cannot do marketing as well as more social creatures can. Do _not_ make your quirky Asperger's geek double as a sales weasel ;)
That useless guy in the article _might_ be hugely effective in the right context. Or not... but the article author's company clearly wasn't the right context, and I doubt they're a healthy environment for 'quirky geniuses'. You almost have to have a support network just for turning the quirky-output into products and selling them- without the quirky-geniuses, you may not have a product at all, but without the sales weasels, only Slashdot will ever hear about you...
Nope.
(well, maybe a _little_ more ;) )
The problem here is, the author of this article lives in an immediate-gratification world in which there is no possible reason to use some other software if the MS one has more features and has lock-in.
It is quixotic to pick a solution that is known to be doomed to 'lose', if you care more about 'winning versus losing' than you do about meeting specific demands and accomplishing defined tasks.
However, only through the quixotic does the world progress: inevitably you'll find there are other, hidden advantages to the 'loser' choice, that are being ignored by the 'win/lose' mentality.
Instead of having a do-everything-for-you mail client, some choose immunity from Microsoft-hosted mail worms. Instead of defining a journalist as someone with a really GOOD spell checker, some define a journalist as someone who's read and written so much that they can spell all by themselves. (CmdrTaco is not necessarily a journalist- he is an essayist of links. We don't turn to him for skilled presentation of all information, we turn to him for quirky presentation of _his_ personal choices in information. He needs no spell checker to be valid- but he's not a journalist.)
Insisting on maximum immediate gratification is a childish thing, and Microsoft's children are numerous- indeed, they outnumber all other computing factions. However, the question to ask is- when you want a bridge built, or an article written, or an educated opinion delivered on a subject such as the relevance of mass popularity to effectiveness as a desktop computer user- do you ask a child?
And you've read the source code, satisfying yourself that your 'unprotected' files will not expire at some future time and revert to 'protected'? Obligating you to re-release them under the now-current form of WMA?
The next thing you know, we might turn around and demand that every world citizen have to have one of OUR ID cards, because they are so cool and high tech and all. We'd have all kinds of reasons, probably backed up by more terrorist attacks, but the bottom line would be that we would be presenting the world with an ultimatum, while it looked down the barrel of our military force and observed the twitchiness of our collective trigger finger.
The LAST thing we need is more defenses for Bunker USA. The LAST thing we need is support for our tendency to be the empire builder. And this is antithetical to our dearest values anyhow- hell, we were formed through _rebellion_ against an Empire, and now the best we can do is attempt another one? What the hell does that have to do with liberty?
I think that at least some of the resistance to this idea comes not from ignorance, but from self-understanding. We're good at a lot of things, we Americans. But we're not wise. But we sure have a lot of energy. Now we have ten times the energy and hysteria that we used to have, and a bunch of vulturelike capitalist types trying to invent information systems to make us feel safer- and also to get much more detailed control and surveillance over our lives, for the sake of that one guy who might be a terrorist undercover. Look at our history, at what even our Presidents have done to seek control (I'm thinking Nixon here, primarily).
If we have surveillance over all aspects of our lives, I want it to be some British person, quieted by the knowledge of lost empires, taking a more Continental pace, a more England-sized ambition to the job. I do NOT want our own merry little capitalists and politicians, hot for empire and world domination, manning the cameras and policing the checkpoints, and neither should you- because I'm telling you, what gives you the idea it would stop there, within our borders?
After the terrorist attacks on the WTC, I got to see some of my fellow Americans, not wise ones but not monsters either, talking with perfect poise and seriousness about the desirability of our invading Canada and Mexico to expand our territory for our own protection. About invading any troublesome Middle East country and simply annexing it. And this is from people who _weren't_ looking for the 'glass parking lot' approach! Something was wrong inside their heads- they honestly felt, in defiance of all history, that the best chance for world peace was an American Empire, like Rome and Britain before it. Some of our leaders feel the same way.
Look- whatever you do, remember this one thing: we are not wise, and we are not always safe to be around. We need to be cajoled and cuddled and soothed into the modern world, and the terrorists are NOT HELPING. Neither are our captains of industry- empire by another name can be empire all the same, you Europeans know that, we _don't_.
Stop trusting us! Smile, soothe, and be freakin' smart, because it's going to take a while for us to be rational, or have any clue about being a world citizen.
-Chris Johnson
Bear in mind that _while_ they are missing estimates they are also shoveling cash into X-Box, into .NET, all these projects. Their burn rate is incalculable. I will risk a guess and say, just as a hunch, that Microsoft is probably going to go broke _before_ any of the other dooms catch up to them. By the time the DoJ comes around with an elaborate and paranoid rulebook for Microsoft to play by, it may already be too late. Had they been broken up they could have done wonderful things with their finances in the process, and continued to thrive as much as ever- but that opportunity is lost to them now, most likely.
It's nice to insist that Microsoft will always win, but you also need a dose of reality. It isn't simply that Microsoft is fighting it out with fellow software developers like Sun, or that they are trying to force people into a highly proprietary version of e-business that IS NOT PROVEN TO WORK using software that has been an enormous reliability headache (Peter Principle for software?)... though this by itself would be a strong argument that they are going to fail.
The trouble is, the degree of control and influence they are seeking puts them in a dominant position to actual governments. They want to be able to shut you off if you haven't paid your bills no matter _who_ you are- and there are people out there who do not define themselves as 'consumers' or take such threats lightly. For instance, the military- if not the US military, then that of other countries. Not to mention the EU taking a very dim view of XP and .NET in general- not to mention the fact that they are consistently losing in the US courts and betting everything on the somewhat strange notion that, if only they delay and commit greater and greater crimes as fast as they possibly can, by the time they are to be punished they will be more powerful than the government and will have to be let go.
That's very childish: governments don't take challenges to their power lightly.
So: I contradict you. .NET _cannot_ win, except in a vacuum with certain set rules (that MS has infinite money, that the ground rules everywhere in the world are totally unrestricted Chicago School free-market capitalism, that there can be no reaction to their aggression except economic reactions). And _none_ of those rules even apply! Microsoft burns through horrible sums of money and there's no telling how much they _really_ have- even they might not know. They're not honest people, why would you trust them to tell you the true state of their resources? They're faced with situations all over the world that defy Chicago School capitalism, even in the USA. And they have already been targeted with anthrax mailings- clearly not everyone in the world is prepared to just 'compete in the free market' with them, after all this talk of war on Microsoft it seems at least somebody out there is identifying them (and not unreasonably) with Western Capitalism, and launching terror attacks on them specifically.
The problem here is hubris: it's better if .NET _does_ fail, and I mean better for Microsoft. It would do them enormous damage, but they'd be able to re-adjust, as IBM did when they were in Microsoft's position. Pursuing their expansion strategy to the uttermost limit only guarantees a harder fall.
If third-party security companies and organisations can be made to take responsibility for the protection of Microsoft customers, can Microsoft sue them for failing to adequately protect the public against software flaws Microsoft itself created and distributed?
Suit yourself. Your opinions of what has class are your own. I don't think it's proper for open source development to be taking place in back rooms and through private little deals. (Neither should government, but that's another story) ;)
Hi AC ;)
Actually, "there are professional-quality wordlength reduction algorithms available to free software" is just as relevant to professional audio on Linux as "here's a 24 track digital audio workstation program for Linux". This is because the field is littered with proprietary approaches: you can license algorithms like Apogee's UV-22 or POW-R 3, but you can't use them in free software because you'd have to disclose them.
Given that this would otherwise permanently cripple Linux/free professional audio by guaranteeing that its basic sound was inferior to proprietary software that can license these high-performance algorithms, the fact that there are Free routines out there is GOOD.
So *phbbbbt* to you, sir ;) if you want to have moral authority, _you_ write a wordlength reduction routine that peaks at -160 db noise floor at 16/44.1 and then proceed to not tell anyone about it.
Free software is everybody's. There's no point in hiding it. For all you know, some unexpected person might have found that information useful, gone off and read the source and built it into their own app that has nothing to do with Audacity. That's the _point_.
If you're not using dithered 2-busses yet, run don't walk to check that stuff out- you really need to be covering that base to be pro-level. Even Pro Tools has had to bow to pressure and incorporate a dithered buss in their new mixer, and they have such a big name that they've stagnated horribly.
Talk to me if this sounds interesting- it's definitely about what _you_ think is important. You can suit yourselves, I'm just saying that I'm happy to consult with you for nothing and donate algorithms under the GPL- and consider that, although you guys are clearly much better coders than me, it's possible that there are people out there with a clearer idea of what constitutes a state of the art DAW system. Within the narrow confines of digital gain staging and wordlength reduction practices (and possibly compression and limiting, though I'm damned if I can figure how to implement a realtime lookahead limiter for you guys without sacrificing latency), I'd suggest that I'm the guy you should be talking to. Up to you...
The high end multitrack machine RADAR runs on BeOS. It's been really impressing people who loathe Pro Tools. Even with professional audio equipment there's levels and levels. On one level, Pro Tools is all wizzy keen and professional, compared to, say, Cool Edit: but you can still get stuff that leaves it in the dust, and at least one of those high-end options (RADAR) runs on BeOS.
Music group CDs are considered promotional 'free goods' and do not pay a royalty to the artist.
What "monopoly" on force? Are you a libertarian? ;)
Welcome to reality- this is the logical extension of the libertarian worldview, precisely because force isn't restrained to any one group in particular. As you can see, companies are perfectly free to pursue this sort of thing- the only way a government would be able to stop it would be if it was able to punish the company in some manner. And that's not a given, that's just your assumption, if you tend to immediately think 'guns and armies' and not think further.
Think 'red tape' and 'lawyers' instead and you'll begin to see force in a lot of other hands.
I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.
You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.
Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:
And so, _yesterday_, I set about getting a preliminary look at Ogg Vorbis using sonogram analysis on my Encoder Hell test sound- put in half a day on it, and updated my site to include the new information. And today, guess what turns up on Slashdot? Spooky.
Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...
Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:
That is, to my mind, a pretty strong endorsement, requiring only that high bit rates be used (as is intended) As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand. It also is, in my professional opinion, very well positioned to keep mp3 in check- mp3 can only maintain its dominance by not getting carried away with licensing and IP abuses, because Ogg is sonically superior enough to be able to take over _if_ given the opportunity of a situation involving harsh mp3 licensing, given widespread use of higher bit rates rather than low ones. (This is why I dismiss WMA- it belongs to yesterday, an era of limited storage space and harsh licensing restrictions)
Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.
A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.
I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.
However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...
It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...