Within the industry, Rambus has a rep for shady dealings, and this would appear to serve as another case in point. Anytime a company finds itself compared with Enron...
It's seems obvious that they did wrong in adjusting their patents during and after the JEDEC process, without disclosing their patent knowledge or intents to the body at large. I can just hear the conversation: "Let's sit in on this standards body, write down their ideas, quielty patent them, wait for them to be implemented, hire lots of lawyers, and start suing everybody!!"
If they had been (or are) allowed to get away with their behavior in regards to that standards body, it undermines the ability of all companies to cooperatively design and create standards in good faith.
Do mastered (pressed) CDs last longer than CD-Rs? I'm guessing that if you had 220GB of data and an unlimited budget, perhaps you could get a hold of a professional DVD-Mastering system for archiving purposes.
Of course, (220GB / (8GB/disc)) ~ 28 disks. Hmm... on second thought, maybe that's still not a good enough idea..
"I was a apprenticed to a man who was living in the eye of the hurricane to know despair. He knew all the dreams by heart..."
Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?
Bingo. I could care less if they go back to some format that can't be digitally ripped straight to MP3. Shoot, I even kinda like LPs.
We're kinda spoiled, being able to rip CDs at 48x speeds. People have been copying music for years without that luxury (ever buy a dual tape deck? high speed dubbing?). As long as I can hear it, I can record it, and as long as I can record it, I can distribute it.
The one concern I have is if and when systems like Palladium turn our computers into closed systems that will not play media that hasn't been 'certified' and programs that aren't 'trusted'. At that point digital distribution of copied music become a little trickier. We can always count on a handful of hackers (or audiophiles) to create easily distributed versions of media, but if the average Joe's machine is under SCPA lockdown, well...if you're microsoft, would you choose to 'trust' an OGG-based player?
Ric
"...bulldozing everything down to make room for what was a byzatine a labyrinth a knotty mess of manifolding passageways a tangle of confusion where the walls made an asylum of baroque"
In all this discussion of console wars, many people seem to overlook an important point:
Microsoft is the only american player in the game.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as concerned about M$ as the next guy, but it seems to boil down to buying my entertainment from either some big japanese company or some bigger american company. I'm no economist, but isn't it better for my nation if my money stays in my nation's economy?
This'll get modded troll for sure--but what does 'phyrric' mean? I gather from context that it means hollow, or unsatifactory, but I can't find any references which explicitly define the word. Just curiousity.
"...like a joke, words were spoken, to provoke me, and to toss me, nude and empty, to the sea..."
Actually, from what I understand of the spec, SACD has a cryptographic handshake between the servo and the DSP, and in fact Sony is hoping to do all DSP/DAC conversions internally on one chip.
David Rich of Stereophile suggests in his arcticle that DSD signals are inherintly easier to "watermark."
I for one don't care if my media is digitaly copy protected. If I can convert my LPs to MP3, it's no less trouble to convert anything else...
--Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles.
"Oh, and the audiophiles won't care about copy protection too much. It'll degrade the quality of the recording anyway, no matter what you do."
You're right about the copy protection--audiophiles didn't mind vinyl, and abhor compressed audio (MP3, OGG) anyways. Shoot--even copied CDs can introduce jitter problems that are noticable to an audiophile.
SACD makes really purty sound. Just give me a portable SACD player and a guaranteed replacement if my disc breaks/gets scratched and I'm happy.
One disagreement--you can digitally encrypt a signal without infringing on it's quality. It's no different from using a lossless compression scheme. SACD does a decent job of this. The problem will come when they start trying to add analog watermarks.
--Come and get one in the yarbles. If you have any yarbles.
'The Cell' is being developed in what's called the STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) lab in Austin. According to a number of sources, the design has already been finalized on paper, and they're now in the process of prototype fabrication.
I would guess that the direction Sony took with their Emotion Engine will heavily influence the PS3 chip design. The EE is primarily a SIMD chip, which works well for running media-intesive applications such as video games. I would think that the PS3 chip will deviate from IBM's commercial and industrial processors by devoting more silicon to SIMD functionality.
I have a modest home theater system, and I just bought a low-end Sony DVD player. Turned out it had SACD playback, so I bought a copy of the Dave Brubeck SACD mentioned in the article. It really sounded alot smoother and more detailed than a CD did. I listened to that album three more times that night. I couldn't get enough of the sound.
While it's not good enough for me to run out and replace my CD collection, it's good enough that most of my new music purchases will be SACD.
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It's seems obvious that they did wrong in adjusting their patents during and after the JEDEC process, without disclosing their patent knowledge or intents to the body at large. I can just hear the conversation: "Let's sit in on this standards body, write down their ideas, quielty patent them, wait for them to be implemented, hire lots of lawyers, and start suing everybody!!"
If they had been (or are) allowed to get away with their behavior in regards to that standards body, it undermines the ability of all companies to cooperatively design and create standards in good faith.
Of course, (220GB / (8GB/disc)) ~ 28 disks. Hmm... on second thought, maybe that's still not a good enough idea..
"I was a apprenticed to a man who was living in the eye of the hurricane to know despair. He knew all the dreams by heart..."
Even if they DO create a format that, magically, won't allow itself to be digitally reproduced - what's to stop audiophiles from recording and encoding the output stream?
Bingo. I could care less if they go back to some format that can't be digitally ripped straight to MP3. Shoot, I even kinda like LPs.
We're kinda spoiled, being able to rip CDs at 48x speeds. People have been copying music for years without that luxury (ever buy a dual tape deck? high speed dubbing?). As long as I can hear it, I can record it, and as long as I can record it, I can distribute it.
The one concern I have is if and when systems like Palladium turn our computers into closed systems that will not play media that hasn't been 'certified' and programs that aren't 'trusted'. At that point digital distribution of copied music become a little trickier. We can always count on a handful of hackers (or audiophiles) to create easily distributed versions of media, but if the average Joe's machine is under SCPA lockdown, well...if you're microsoft, would you choose to 'trust' an OGG-based player?
Ric
"...bulldozing everything down to make room for what was a byzatine a labyrinth a knotty mess of manifolding passageways a tangle of confusion where the walls made an asylum of baroque"
It's been done before. It was called Australia.
Microsoft is the only american player in the game.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as concerned about M$ as the next guy, but it seems to boil down to buying my entertainment from either some big japanese company or some bigger american company. I'm no economist, but isn't it better for my nation if my money stays in my nation's economy?
This'll get modded troll for sure--but what does 'phyrric' mean? I gather from context that it means hollow, or unsatifactory, but I can't find any references which explicitly define the word. Just curiousity. "...like a joke, words were spoken, to provoke me, and to toss me, nude and empty, to the sea..."
Actually, from what I understand of the spec, SACD has a cryptographic handshake between the servo and the DSP, and in fact Sony is hoping to do all DSP/DAC conversions internally on one chip. David Rich of Stereophile suggests in his arcticle that DSD signals are inherintly easier to "watermark." I for one don't care if my media is digitaly copy protected. If I can convert my LPs to MP3, it's no less trouble to convert anything else... --Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles.
"Oh, and the audiophiles won't care about copy protection too much. It'll degrade the quality of the recording anyway, no matter what you do." You're right about the copy protection--audiophiles didn't mind vinyl, and abhor compressed audio (MP3, OGG) anyways. Shoot--even copied CDs can introduce jitter problems that are noticable to an audiophile. SACD makes really purty sound. Just give me a portable SACD player and a guaranteed replacement if my disc breaks/gets scratched and I'm happy. One disagreement--you can digitally encrypt a signal without infringing on it's quality. It's no different from using a lossless compression scheme. SACD does a decent job of this. The problem will come when they start trying to add analog watermarks. --Come and get one in the yarbles. If you have any yarbles.
'The Cell' is being developed in what's called the STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) lab in Austin. According to a number of sources, the design has already been finalized on paper, and they're now in the process of prototype fabrication.
I would guess that the direction Sony took with their Emotion Engine will heavily influence the PS3 chip design. The EE is primarily a SIMD chip, which works well for running media-intesive applications such as video games. I would think that the PS3 chip will deviate from IBM's commercial and industrial processors by devoting more silicon to SIMD functionality.
I have a modest home theater system, and I just bought a low-end Sony DVD player. Turned out it had SACD playback, so I bought a copy of the Dave Brubeck SACD mentioned in the article. It really sounded alot smoother and more detailed than a CD did. I listened to that album three more times that night. I couldn't get enough of the sound.
While it's not good enough for me to run out and replace my CD collection, it's good enough that most of my new music purchases will be SACD.