No kidding. Maybe, just maybe, the model of having companies make money from the distribution of music is not going to last. But then what happens? Musicians go back to the pre-phonograph days of making a living by performing live. Seems to me people listen to music, dig their bands and then go see them when they come to town, buying the accompanying tour merchandise and stuff. Sure, that leaves the music labels out in the cold. But is it any different of a change in the larger economy than when we switched from horse-drawn vehicles to gasoline-powered ones?
Come on, this isn't a class struggle. It's Big Business trying to protect their intellectual property. DRM sucks, this is yet another way in which it degrades computer systems. But Apple's just being a company, and their hack to DTrace is actually good coding. Dislike their choice, sure. But there's no epic struggle for humanity here.
My first ever gaming experience was playing the original Oregon Trail and Civil War on Teletype 33, two of them would come to our school for two weeks each year. I clearly remember sitting in an empty room with the two teletanks clanking away, trying to type "BANG" as quickly as I could. Civil War was much more fun, though, being a strategic warfare logistics game.
For my first video game experience I was extremely lucky as a kid to get to spend a day playing Empire on PLATO. Holy crap, I still can't believe that game. I think I spent more time designing my ships than actually trying to conquer the galaxy, but damn it was a lot of fun.
The headline really needs to be corrected. It's a question of election fraud, not voter fraud. This is a very important distinction: election fraud occurs when the vote counts are tampered with, voter fraud is when people vote multiple times. The Indiana voter ID requirement is currently being argued before the Supreme Court and the state is unable to document any voter fraud in Indiana's history.
As for what's going on in NH, the paper trail means nothing if it's not used for counting. I've read that 80% of the Diebold paper ballots have not been counted. Since there are some serious questions about the results, why wouldn't everyone say, "Hey yeah, that's what the paper is for! Let's count the ballots?"
This is all poisoned fruit from the electronic voting tree. Nobody believes election results anymore because of companies like Diebold who have taken an open process and made it closed, hiding away what's really happening. Mix in crap technology and you've got a crisis in confidence.
This is one of the main reasons I'm still using component video for my HD. Okay, mostly I have an early set that has no HDMI, but I've yet to rely on HDMI for anything. I've recently added a TiVo HD and Blu-ray player to my component video world, so you can get current HD gear without diving into HDMI. And no HDCP worries. I know I run the risk of getting hurt by that, but I think I'll get years of HD enjoyment before HDCP becomes a show-stopper (pun intended). And with any luck the DRM problem will become more difficult than it's worth, like we're seeing with music.
I'm sure the HDMI interop problems aren't as nasty as just a couple years ago, but it's been astounding how fragile the HDMI universe has appeared. For example, the Apple TV forum is peppered with people having difficulty getting TVs working with the Apple TV via HDMI. I just hooked up via component and had no worries. And what happens with HDMI 1.1 devices when all of a sudden everyone demands HDMI 1.3? That really is a "digital issue" because it's far too easy for the industry to "improve" the spec and then orphan a bunch of older hardware.
Getting rid of DRM is excellent, but going to MP3 is kind of like offering GIF instead of JPEG. Sure, it works and all, but AAC is the improved successor to MP3. Apple is going to have the audiophile* edge by selling unencumbered AACs if its competitors like Amazon.com stick with MP3. Not sure if that's going to be a big sway, but I personally prefer AAC.
*I'm aware of flac, et al, and the audio purity arguments, but I'm talking about dominant market conditions.
It's technically Apple's fault, and as I said in my original comment Apple can add support for more sites when they feel the need. My point was that, by balkanizing video distribution, companies such as Viacom and NBC run the risk of creating a fractured consumer market. Sure they get some benefits from distributing their own content, but is it enough to offset the loss of viewers? It may be for now, but how about three years from now, or five? How many people won't have integrated internet viewing with their big TVs as opposed to resorting to viewing from a web browser on a computer display?
This is nice and all, but this Flash video crap is stupid. Not only is it not cached properly by web browsers, but people don't watch TV on their tiny computer screens. I watch content via my Apple TV on my gigantic HDTV home theater, I have no interest in sitting at a keyboard waiting for video snippets to load in some Flash video player with a poor user interface.
At least with YouTube I can access the content directly from my Apple TV (not that YouTube has much to offer in their typical 3-second or whatever clips). I suspect if MySpace gets enough video content Apple will eventually add support for that as well. But companies like Viacom and NBC who decide to offer their own site of Flash video are going to find themselves unnecessarily limiting their potential audience. They'd be much smarter to figure out a way to centralize distribution.
Except when they don't. The higher-bitrate iTunes Plus songs are DRM-free AAC.
As for quality, I did my own listening tests between 192Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps AAC when Apple first added support for AAC, and I could clearly hear a difference (using iTunes encoding, maybe it was their ripper). To my ears AAC sounds much better than MP3. Others' ears may hear differently. If nothing else I get comparable audio quality. Don't fear the AAC.
For those using Safari, SafariPlus is a brilliant way to block Flash (and control unwanted cookies). It shows the rectangle for the Flash content, but you must click inside it to actually start up that Flash dropping. So you can use Flash when you want to, but nobody can make you use it. In these days of those damned embedded YouTube videos stopping Flash is a godsend. Good luck with your new X10-type annoying ads, Google.
Why hasn't Microsoft opened up WMA DRM? Same logic as applies to Apple's FairPlay. Microsoft, not making music player hardware, has been licensing their DRM technology all over the place in an attempt to push it into the marketplace. Apple, maker of the iPod and proprietor of the iTunes Store, has found no business reason to license FairPlay. What is interesting, however, is how Apple has decided to provide software for both Mac OS X and Windows to support FairPlay (iTunes/QuickTime), whereas Microsoft can't be bothered to support Mac OS X with their DRM.
(And yes I realize both companies leave linux in the cold, but linux really is not a significant market share for the consumer space.)
So, if I don't watch the advertisements during commerical breaks of "30 Rock", I am essentially stealing the broadcast content of that program.
Believe it or not, some TV networks actually tried to make that argument a few years ago with the rise of PVRs. They publicly stated that fast-forwarding past commercials was stealing. I'm sure they still feel that way, but aren't saying it publicly like they once did.
Where do these idiots get their ideas? Since when is something freely transmitted (broadcast or on the internet) "stolen" if their made-up way of generating revenue doesn't work out for them? It's like saying if one puts a pile of books on a table in the front yard next to a pile of advertisement brochures, can anyone call it "stealing" to take a book and leave the advertisements? (Even this analogy doesn't work because books are a finite resource, web pages aren't for all practical purposes).
Sorry, fools. If your business model isn't working blame it, not the people you want to take money from.
Apple says the battery is good for 300-400 charges. Considering typical use of a phone being recharged every few days, and iPhone owners reporting they can use their iPhone over multiple days without recharging, that's easily well over two years before the battery needs replacing. By then most people will be getting a different phone, iPhone gen 2 or the next cool thing from someone else.
Like the whingeing about EDGE speed, I think this is another example of a few loud complainers making a much bigger deal out of something different than their expectation. My first gen iPod with the non-replaceable battery didn't need a replacement for four years, and by then there were inexpensive 3rd party options available. And hey, if you hate having a non-replaceable battery go buy something else. Apple's not kept it a secret.
With the proliferation of mp3 players, the CD is an anachronistic format. Why buy a CD and spend the effort ripping it when you can just buy pre-ripped songs as downloads? Quality isn't going to be much of a factor, the offerings through iTunes sound "good enough". In the 1980s the music cassette tape became a dominant seller, and those were really crappy high-speed duplications of masters. Those of us with some sense of audio quality would still buy the vinyl and then make our own tapes on higher-quality tapes, but a huge consumer base just didn't care.
Cassettes also took off because they cost less than the corresponding vinyl album, so the portable convenience and price made them attractive and most people felt okay about replacing them after they wore out. If you look at albums on the iTunes Store they cost $10-$12 generally, whereas CDs are routinely $13-$16. So yeah, all the arguments about CDs sounding better than downloaded mp3 or AAC files is true, but I think it is moot for the majority of consumers.
Safari offers two things that no other browser offers: Apple's font rendering and color space recognition of images. Lots of Windows people seem to hate Apple's font rendering, but as a Mac user I prefer it. Windows font rendering seems ugly.
The color space stuff is a big deal to photographers, and it's very annoying that no other browser seems to respect the ICC color profile in images. I've seen a lot of discussion about Firefox versus Safari on the Mac and why Firefox seems to "wash out" images. It's really a shame Firefox doesn't respect ICC color profiles, it's such an obvious thing for a browser to do.
So maybe yeah, Safari isn't as "powerful" as Firefox or MSIE. But it offers an easy-to-use, standards-compliant browsing experience with a level of display rendering not found in other browsers. Many people may not be impressed, but just as many may find it more to their liking. Time will tell.
They're using this fictional history as a way to cover up that Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in the center. Certainly the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was an attempt to free Yog-Sothoth (see the "Elder Sign" section).
Interesting article about Snapper leaving Wal-Mart, because the company saw Wal-Mart pushing them to continually lower prices and supplying Wal-Mart also meant issues with huge inventory. Dell seems to be making a crazy (or desperate) decision here, since one of their strengths was always their low inventory overhead. It's like a complete about-face for the company.
The Matrix collection is exclusive to HD-DVD only for the time being, it will be released on Blu-ray eventually. If you know it's coming to Blu-ray is there a reason to get all bunched up over which format to go with? And how many of us are still waiting for this whole nonsense to end?
Since I have an older HDTV with component inputs I've stayed in that world, avoiding HDMI. Boy am I glad I did, it sounds like an interoperability nightmare. I've particularly seen it with the Apple TV, where many people have problems hooking it up via HDMI to various TVs. I've personally had no problem using component and have not seen anyone complain about problems with component on the Apple TV forums. HDMI might be better on paper, but in the real world HDCP (or something) has made HDMI a real frustrating mess for consumers.
EDGE is much faster than GPRS
on
FCC Approves iPhone
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've been using EDGE through T-Mobile and it's much faster than GPRS. Not sure how it compares to EVDO and I won't vouch for AT&T's network, but it's misleading to tag the iPhone with "slow GPRS" when it supports EDGE.
It's a rather frightening notion that people think of WEP or WPA as their sole means of security. The underlying data were apparently unencrypted, which implies open protocols like telnet and http. WEP was intended to make wireless as "secure" as wired networking, which means not much. WEP shouldn't be used because it's completely compromised, but even WPA shouldn't be the sole level of security. WPA should be viewed as a means to thwart casual snooping of network traffic, but I'd still hope secure data layer protocols like ssh and https are being employed, not to mention encrypting data files that contain sensitive data.
The YouTube-ization of web content is an affront to user interface design, not to mention the underlying framework of the www. Ever go to a web page with six or seven auto-loading videos? Yikes. To make things worse, if you leave the page and come back the videos load all over again, because they are not cached. Talk about unnecessary use of bandwidth.
And the players themselves, ugh. Notice how they all look like the QuickTime or Windows Media players, but the controls don't really work? Try and fast forward or reverse reverse playback. Sometimes the play/pause barely work. The Flash video players have the familiar video controls, but they're quite often no better than fake plastic ones glued to the screen.
I did learn, even went through typewriter class in school. It doesn't work for me. I am, despite your experience, quite a capable coder. I also type well over 60 wpm as a hunt and pecker (heh), although the quality of my coding comes from thinking about algorithms and implementation design and not how fast I churn out instructions.
I'm a fairly fast hunt-and-peck typist, I don't do touch typing. My fingers "hover" above the keyboard and I've basically got muscle memory for where the keys are, moving my fingers without looking at the keyboard. While I like the idea of the dvorak layout, I don't see how it benefits someone who's not a touch typist.
This web app stuff is a fad (I hope). It was really popular in the late 1990s as well. Eventually the weight of developing in the unreliable and limiting multi-purpose browser gets to be too much, and desktop apps come back into vogue. Ajax makes things a lot nicer than ten years ago, but people expect more as well. Some things can be done really well using Ajax but it's not the solution for everything.
iTunes is a dedicated desktop app that uses internet data intelligently, but Apple made a good choice not depending on a browser. Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible? And then there's the comparison of something like QuickTime or Windows Media players and the pseudo video players written in Flash with bad control responsiveness and limited functionality.
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No kidding. Maybe, just maybe, the model of having companies make money from the distribution of music is not going to last. But then what happens? Musicians go back to the pre-phonograph days of making a living by performing live. Seems to me people listen to music, dig their bands and then go see them when they come to town, buying the accompanying tour merchandise and stuff. Sure, that leaves the music labels out in the cold. But is it any different of a change in the larger economy than when we switched from horse-drawn vehicles to gasoline-powered ones?
Come on, this isn't a class struggle. It's Big Business trying to protect their intellectual property. DRM sucks, this is yet another way in which it degrades computer systems. But Apple's just being a company, and their hack to DTrace is actually good coding. Dislike their choice, sure. But there's no epic struggle for humanity here.
My first ever gaming experience was playing the original Oregon Trail and Civil War on Teletype 33, two of them would come to our school for two weeks each year. I clearly remember sitting in an empty room with the two teletanks clanking away, trying to type "BANG" as quickly as I could. Civil War was much more fun, though, being a strategic warfare logistics game.
For my first video game experience I was extremely lucky as a kid to get to spend a day playing Empire on PLATO. Holy crap, I still can't believe that game. I think I spent more time designing my ships than actually trying to conquer the galaxy, but damn it was a lot of fun.
The headline really needs to be corrected. It's a question of election fraud, not voter fraud. This is a very important distinction: election fraud occurs when the vote counts are tampered with, voter fraud is when people vote multiple times. The Indiana voter ID requirement is currently being argued before the Supreme Court and the state is unable to document any voter fraud in Indiana's history.
As for what's going on in NH, the paper trail means nothing if it's not used for counting. I've read that 80% of the Diebold paper ballots have not been counted. Since there are some serious questions about the results, why wouldn't everyone say, "Hey yeah, that's what the paper is for! Let's count the ballots?"
This is all poisoned fruit from the electronic voting tree. Nobody believes election results anymore because of companies like Diebold who have taken an open process and made it closed, hiding away what's really happening. Mix in crap technology and you've got a crisis in confidence.
This is one of the main reasons I'm still using component video for my HD. Okay, mostly I have an early set that has no HDMI, but I've yet to rely on HDMI for anything. I've recently added a TiVo HD and Blu-ray player to my component video world, so you can get current HD gear without diving into HDMI. And no HDCP worries. I know I run the risk of getting hurt by that, but I think I'll get years of HD enjoyment before HDCP becomes a show-stopper (pun intended). And with any luck the DRM problem will become more difficult than it's worth, like we're seeing with music.
I'm sure the HDMI interop problems aren't as nasty as just a couple years ago, but it's been astounding how fragile the HDMI universe has appeared. For example, the Apple TV forum is peppered with people having difficulty getting TVs working with the Apple TV via HDMI. I just hooked up via component and had no worries. And what happens with HDMI 1.1 devices when all of a sudden everyone demands HDMI 1.3? That really is a "digital issue" because it's far too easy for the industry to "improve" the spec and then orphan a bunch of older hardware.
Getting rid of DRM is excellent, but going to MP3 is kind of like offering GIF instead of JPEG. Sure, it works and all, but AAC is the improved successor to MP3. Apple is going to have the audiophile* edge by selling unencumbered AACs if its competitors like Amazon.com stick with MP3. Not sure if that's going to be a big sway, but I personally prefer AAC.
*I'm aware of flac, et al, and the audio purity arguments, but I'm talking about dominant market conditions.
It's technically Apple's fault, and as I said in my original comment Apple can add support for more sites when they feel the need. My point was that, by balkanizing video distribution, companies such as Viacom and NBC run the risk of creating a fractured consumer market. Sure they get some benefits from distributing their own content, but is it enough to offset the loss of viewers? It may be for now, but how about three years from now, or five? How many people won't have integrated internet viewing with their big TVs as opposed to resorting to viewing from a web browser on a computer display?
This is nice and all, but this Flash video crap is stupid. Not only is it not cached properly by web browsers, but people don't watch TV on their tiny computer screens. I watch content via my Apple TV on my gigantic HDTV home theater, I have no interest in sitting at a keyboard waiting for video snippets to load in some Flash video player with a poor user interface.
At least with YouTube I can access the content directly from my Apple TV (not that YouTube has much to offer in their typical 3-second or whatever clips). I suspect if MySpace gets enough video content Apple will eventually add support for that as well. But companies like Viacom and NBC who decide to offer their own site of Flash video are going to find themselves unnecessarily limiting their potential audience. They'd be much smarter to figure out a way to centralize distribution.
Apple's AAC's have DRM
Except when they don't. The higher-bitrate iTunes Plus songs are DRM-free AAC.
As for quality, I did my own listening tests between 192Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps AAC when Apple first added support for AAC, and I could clearly hear a difference (using iTunes encoding, maybe it was their ripper). To my ears AAC sounds much better than MP3. Others' ears may hear differently. If nothing else I get comparable audio quality. Don't fear the AAC.
For those using Safari, SafariPlus is a brilliant way to block Flash (and control unwanted cookies). It shows the rectangle for the Flash content, but you must click inside it to actually start up that Flash dropping. So you can use Flash when you want to, but nobody can make you use it. In these days of those damned embedded YouTube videos stopping Flash is a godsend. Good luck with your new X10-type annoying ads, Google.
Why hasn't Microsoft opened up WMA DRM? Same logic as applies to Apple's FairPlay. Microsoft, not making music player hardware, has been licensing their DRM technology all over the place in an attempt to push it into the marketplace. Apple, maker of the iPod and proprietor of the iTunes Store, has found no business reason to license FairPlay. What is interesting, however, is how Apple has decided to provide software for both Mac OS X and Windows to support FairPlay (iTunes/QuickTime), whereas Microsoft can't be bothered to support Mac OS X with their DRM.
(And yes I realize both companies leave linux in the cold, but linux really is not a significant market share for the consumer space.)
So, if I don't watch the advertisements during commerical breaks of "30 Rock", I am essentially stealing the broadcast content of that program.
Believe it or not, some TV networks actually tried to make that argument a few years ago with the rise of PVRs. They publicly stated that fast-forwarding past commercials was stealing. I'm sure they still feel that way, but aren't saying it publicly like they once did.
Where do these idiots get their ideas? Since when is something freely transmitted (broadcast or on the internet) "stolen" if their made-up way of generating revenue doesn't work out for them? It's like saying if one puts a pile of books on a table in the front yard next to a pile of advertisement brochures, can anyone call it "stealing" to take a book and leave the advertisements? (Even this analogy doesn't work because books are a finite resource, web pages aren't for all practical purposes).
Sorry, fools. If your business model isn't working blame it, not the people you want to take money from.
Apple says the battery is good for 300-400 charges. Considering typical use of a phone being recharged every few days, and iPhone owners reporting they can use their iPhone over multiple days without recharging, that's easily well over two years before the battery needs replacing. By then most people will be getting a different phone, iPhone gen 2 or the next cool thing from someone else.
Like the whingeing about EDGE speed, I think this is another example of a few loud complainers making a much bigger deal out of something different than their expectation. My first gen iPod with the non-replaceable battery didn't need a replacement for four years, and by then there were inexpensive 3rd party options available. And hey, if you hate having a non-replaceable battery go buy something else. Apple's not kept it a secret.
With the proliferation of mp3 players, the CD is an anachronistic format. Why buy a CD and spend the effort ripping it when you can just buy pre-ripped songs as downloads? Quality isn't going to be much of a factor, the offerings through iTunes sound "good enough". In the 1980s the music cassette tape became a dominant seller, and those were really crappy high-speed duplications of masters. Those of us with some sense of audio quality would still buy the vinyl and then make our own tapes on higher-quality tapes, but a huge consumer base just didn't care.
Cassettes also took off because they cost less than the corresponding vinyl album, so the portable convenience and price made them attractive and most people felt okay about replacing them after they wore out. If you look at albums on the iTunes Store they cost $10-$12 generally, whereas CDs are routinely $13-$16. So yeah, all the arguments about CDs sounding better than downloaded mp3 or AAC files is true, but I think it is moot for the majority of consumers.
Safari offers two things that no other browser offers: Apple's font rendering and color space recognition of images. Lots of Windows people seem to hate Apple's font rendering, but as a Mac user I prefer it. Windows font rendering seems ugly.
The color space stuff is a big deal to photographers, and it's very annoying that no other browser seems to respect the ICC color profile in images. I've seen a lot of discussion about Firefox versus Safari on the Mac and why Firefox seems to "wash out" images. It's really a shame Firefox doesn't respect ICC color profiles, it's such an obvious thing for a browser to do.
So maybe yeah, Safari isn't as "powerful" as Firefox or MSIE. But it offers an easy-to-use, standards-compliant browsing experience with a level of display rendering not found in other browsers. Many people may not be impressed, but just as many may find it more to their liking. Time will tell.
They're using this fictional history as a way to cover up that Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in the center. Certainly the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was an attempt to free Yog-Sothoth (see the "Elder Sign" section).
Interesting article about Snapper leaving Wal-Mart, because the company saw Wal-Mart pushing them to continually lower prices and supplying Wal-Mart also meant issues with huge inventory. Dell seems to be making a crazy (or desperate) decision here, since one of their strengths was always their low inventory overhead. It's like a complete about-face for the company.
The Matrix collection is exclusive to HD-DVD only for the time being, it will be released on Blu-ray eventually. If you know it's coming to Blu-ray is there a reason to get all bunched up over which format to go with? And how many of us are still waiting for this whole nonsense to end?
Since I have an older HDTV with component inputs I've stayed in that world, avoiding HDMI. Boy am I glad I did, it sounds like an interoperability nightmare. I've particularly seen it with the Apple TV, where many people have problems hooking it up via HDMI to various TVs. I've personally had no problem using component and have not seen anyone complain about problems with component on the Apple TV forums. HDMI might be better on paper, but in the real world HDCP (or something) has made HDMI a real frustrating mess for consumers.
I've been using EDGE through T-Mobile and it's much faster than GPRS. Not sure how it compares to EVDO and I won't vouch for AT&T's network, but it's misleading to tag the iPhone with "slow GPRS" when it supports EDGE.
It's a rather frightening notion that people think of WEP or WPA as their sole means of security. The underlying data were apparently unencrypted, which implies open protocols like telnet and http. WEP was intended to make wireless as "secure" as wired networking, which means not much. WEP shouldn't be used because it's completely compromised, but even WPA shouldn't be the sole level of security. WPA should be viewed as a means to thwart casual snooping of network traffic, but I'd still hope secure data layer protocols like ssh and https are being employed, not to mention encrypting data files that contain sensitive data.
The YouTube-ization of web content is an affront to user interface design, not to mention the underlying framework of the www. Ever go to a web page with six or seven auto-loading videos? Yikes. To make things worse, if you leave the page and come back the videos load all over again, because they are not cached. Talk about unnecessary use of bandwidth.
And the players themselves, ugh. Notice how they all look like the QuickTime or Windows Media players, but the controls don't really work? Try and fast forward or reverse reverse playback. Sometimes the play/pause barely work. The Flash video players have the familiar video controls, but they're quite often no better than fake plastic ones glued to the screen.
I did learn, even went through typewriter class in school. It doesn't work for me. I am, despite your experience, quite a capable coder. I also type well over 60 wpm as a hunt and pecker (heh), although the quality of my coding comes from thinking about algorithms and implementation design and not how fast I churn out instructions.
I'm a fairly fast hunt-and-peck typist, I don't do touch typing. My fingers "hover" above the keyboard and I've basically got muscle memory for where the keys are, moving my fingers without looking at the keyboard. While I like the idea of the dvorak layout, I don't see how it benefits someone who's not a touch typist.
This web app stuff is a fad (I hope). It was really popular in the late 1990s as well. Eventually the weight of developing in the unreliable and limiting multi-purpose browser gets to be too much, and desktop apps come back into vogue. Ajax makes things a lot nicer than ten years ago, but people expect more as well. Some things can be done really well using Ajax but it's not the solution for everything.
iTunes is a dedicated desktop app that uses internet data intelligently, but Apple made a good choice not depending on a browser. Compare Google Maps to Google Earth, which is more responsive and flexible? And then there's the comparison of something like QuickTime or Windows Media players and the pseudo video players written in Flash with bad control responsiveness and limited functionality.