Apple already pays EMI extra for DRM-free tracks. This isn't a matter of money, this is a matter of Universal simply refusing to sell DRM-free music to Apple at all. They're scared that Apple is now big enough in music sales to have real negotiating power against even the big RIAA members, and still growing rapidly, so they're trying to undermine their market share by going DRM-free and cutting Apple specifically out of DRM-free sales.
Yes, we've finally found the one thing that the record companies value more than controlling how consumers can use their music: controlling how big companies can use their music.
Of course, in a really competitive free market Apple could get around Universal's policy of not selling to them easily enough just getting one of Universal's approved resellers to resell to Apple. Even though adding yet another layer of middlemen would cut into both companies profit margin, they could make it up in volume. Judging by the reported results of Apple's DRM-free sales of EMI tracks, their sales would jump something like 150-300%, and of course whoever they bought Universal's DRM-free music from would sell hundreds of millions of tracks they wouldn't otherwise by January alone. But somehow I doubt any of Universal's tame resellers are going to try something that gutsy, even if Apple deigns to try.
How does making your keyboard radically thinner *not* bring ergonomics into play?
IIRC, a lot of typers' wrist problems can be largely a result of the unnatural angle people need to turn their wrists to type on a raised keyboard without lifting their wrists off the desk. Simply not raising the keyboard off the desk in the first place ought to be at least as effective a solution as those wrist-rest pads that people sell, and is far more elegant imho.
That was my first reaction as well. And if you're only using 8 bits per color, then yes one dual-link cable will do. However the display port panel in question uses 10 bits per color, which would require another cable even with dual-link DVI. As I understand DVI's handling of high bit depth displays, cable#1 would carry the most significant bits for it's half of the screen on link#1, and the least significant bits on link#2, while cable#2 does the same for it's half of the screen.
I'm still baffled as to why anyone would *want* to sync their mp3 player over wifi, given that you have to plug it in to charge it anyway. Until they get wireless power into mp3 players, wireless syncing seems like a somewhat pointless feature, to be included for buzzword-compliance only.
And there are so many more interesting things you could do with wifi on an mp3 player too... A relatively uncrippled pull-based local ad-hoc network (like iTunes sharing as opposed to Zune's heavily crippled push "squirting") would be an obvious win. And net radio access would be nice as well. Buying songs online could even work with a good enough interface (I doubt either current Zunes or iPods could make it a really enjoyable experience due to the limits of their controls, but the iPhone would do nicely.)
And that's not even mentioning more general-computing non-music tasks like web browsing and such...
Project Gutenberg is a collection of full text works. The Open Library is a database of books, which sometimes includes the full scanned text, and sometimes does not.
So if the same work was published a dozen different times, it would have an entry in The Open Library for each edition, and usually just one entry in Project Gutenberg assembled from all of the out-of-copyright printed editions.
I'm also not expecting them to share the new front end they wrote for the BSD-licensed LLVM.
The difference is, I'm not *expecting* them to open source their efforts, because I *know* they already open sourced it the day before yesterday, whereas you don't expect them to do it because you seem to have bought into the ridiculous meme that Apple is somehow against opening their source despite the massive amounts of time money and code they've donated to open source projects over the years when under no license requirement to do so.
GPL zealots are always quick to claim that anyone opposing their draconian license requirements dictating everything from hardware design to patent liability to derivative works must be selfishly hoarding their knowledge. I say it's the exact opposite, the GPL is a tool for hoarding knowledge in a community pool, where the pool's administrators at the FSF can use it for political power by interpreting and revising the GPL. Plenty of people (including corporations), are quite willing to openly share their code under truly free BSD-like terms, but consider subjecting themselves to the whims of the ideologues and lawyers of the FSF an increasingly unacceptable risk.
Actually, Heinlein anticipated the movement you're advocating, towards viewing peoples societally unacceptable behavior as a function of disease rather than decision. He explored it in his stories about the world after the overthrow of the American Prophets, under The Covenant.
They essentially abandoned the idea of 'punishing' criminals, instead offering offenders the choice of either compulsory psychotherapy to make them behave in a more societally acceptable manner (psychology was extremely well understood in that setting, and modern psychotherapy was considered practically infallible) or permanent exile from society to an ungoverned area.
The "at least XXXXX and can be YYYYY" phrase structure presents a range of responses, in this case the low end "OK" you quote is roughly equivalent to the "usable" end of that range.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. Maybe you should RTFA and some of the other posts for practice before replying to the next article that interests you.
You've been reading "various reviews" by people who've probably never touched an iPhone, much less scratched one or used one long enough to reasonably critique it.
And there's another problem with Lilly's browser! Firefox will only spell-check textareas, not plain old <input type="text"> fields, like the subject field! It's all his fault, I tell you!
Does John Lilly's ranting about the horrors of "corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-Web thinking" strike anyone else as amusingly hypocritical when he's an executive for one of the current duopoly of corporations that control ~95% of the web browser market, and his company's flagship browser is arguably less standards compliant than the new entry he's railing against.
That's almost as many downloads as firefox got in its first 24 hrs.
That kind of depends on which release of Firefox you're talking about.
The first "preview release" of Firefox took about 100 hours to break 1 million downloads. Then Firefox 1.0 hit 1 million downloads in about 24 hours. And Firefox 1.5 hit 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours. And Firefox 2 hit a bit over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours.
I'd say the first public beta of Safari for Windows is most equivalent to Firefox's first preview release, so in those terms it's doing pretty damn well, especially considering it was just mentioned at WWDC and then immediately posted on Apple's website, whereas Firefox had been publicly developed and hyped for a long time before it's preview release. But then again, it's still well below the rate of download of the most current release of Firefox.
A new browser - that will target a different userbase to FF & divide the market up a little more, will make the web a better place for everyone.
Well, everyone except microsoft and mozilla, who could lose market share and search revenue...
I really hope that Apple does carve itself a good chunk of windows browser market share, because that would provide a lot of support for a more standards based and platform/browser independent web. But I'm not sure Apple is really betting anything on their ability to do so; if they just make it easier for more web developers to target and test for Webkit/Safari/iPhone/etc, I think they'll consider Safari for windows a success and take any market share gains as a nice bonus.
It's not even a watermark, it's just a couple of plain text metadata atoms (the MPEG-4 equivalent of ID3 tags).
This is basically the digital equivalent of printing your name on the receipt and putting it in the bag when you buy a CD. No one's forcing you to keep the receipt if you don't want to, and no one's going to read it but you anyway unless you choose to staple it to a public bulletin board for some odd reason.
I'm incredibly disgusted with the negative spin many people online have managed to put on Apple's move to sell DRM-free music. If you ever wonder why so many companies screw their customers, I think this illustrates one of the reasons. There's no upside in *not* screwing your customers; a lot of people can't or won't even recognize it when they're given everything they wanted.
Normalize-audio is the exact opposite of what I'm asking for.
You have a format that stores everything as loud as the producers want it, and software that quiets it down to the same level as the rest of your music.
What I want is a format that stores everything at a quieter level that maximizes it's dynamic range, and software that plays it back as loud as the producers wanted it, unless the user intervenes to turn the volume down. With that, the loudness war can continue on it's natural course without degrading the music as it is recorded, only compressing it into the top of it's range as it's played back by default.
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
That way the track could be recorded with it's full dynamic range preserved, so people who care about dynamic range can hear it clearly. And as the loudness war progresses that one multiplier could just be incremented, so that people who don't care about dynamic range will hear the track loudly.
I think the "How To" commercial does a pretty good job of showing why I expect the iPhone is going to do well.
They visually explained how to use every major feature of the thing in a 30sec TV spot.
Most people neither know or care about UMTS, or HSDPA, or AGPS, or any of the other high tech acronyms that certain/.ers obsess over having in their phones. But if they can see how an iPhone can be used for all their calls/mail/web/music&movies in 30sec of watching TV, *that* they'll like.
Technology has progressed to the point where a well thought out interface matters more than having the latest and greatest bullet points on a spec sheet some months before the other guy. The bottleneck that needs to be addressed these days isn't generally in the machine, it's often between the user and the machine.
imagine if we had laws that did away with most prohibitions against sharing, but that enforced crediting and permitted authors to enforce GPL-like provisions requiring sharing.
So basically it seems like this guy doesn't want to do away with copyright, he just wants to change it so that any non-GPL-style license is prohibited.
The previous article suggested libertarian style freedom (free as in free to shoot your neighbor if he steps on your land), while this guy suggests communist style freedom (free as in "show your papers to get in line for free bread comrade").
The embedded components that are typically needed are quite often not nearly as open as many of the components in PCs.
The AppleTV -is- a PC, it's got a 1.0GHz Pentium M-based based x86 processor, a GeForce Go 7300 GPU, a 40GB HDD, 256MB of RAM, USB, 100B-T Ethernet and 802.11b/g/n WiFi, with HDMI and component outputs...
Why should anyone interested in developing open solutions for set top boxes limit themselves to the OSD's closed embedded-style hardware, when Apple has provided a full PC that you can run whatever you want on (Mac OSX, linux, MythTV, etc...) in a nice neat package for almost the same price ($229 vs $299)? Especially when the AppleTV is sufficiently powerful to do HDTV divx/xvid decoding in software, whereas the Neuros OSD needs to use it's closed DSP core to handle even SDTV.
I'm all for heated competition, and it's great that AMD can claim integer performance supremacy on the high end again for a while. But at what cost do they make that claim?
The article mentions that the 8222 SE is priced at $2149. So if I want a system with more than 4 cores, I'm bound to pay ~2.5x as much per processor.
I can get a workstation with 8 3Ghz Clovertown Xenon cores from Apple for just under $4000, 8 Opteron cores at the same clock will cost me more than twice that for the processors alone, never mind a motherboard and system to house them.
I'm well aware of the increasing advantages of AMD's bus topology for >4 cores, but with pricing like that who can afford a system to really take advantage of it?
The rules originally required getting a user shell on a macbook connected to a wireless router without any other access, or getting a root shell under the same conditions on a second macbook without using the same bug. The prize was the macbook(s) you hacked.
But they decided not enough people were interested, so 3Com added a $10,000 bounty for a winning bug.
But no one could crack it, so they set the machine up to visit malicious web pages submitted by email.
Then someone found a bug in Safari, and successfully crafted a webpage to exploit it to get user shell access.
The really silly part is that there's no good reason the iPhone shouldn't support Word.doc files.
Apple already has.doc file support (both old-style and XML-based) in the default text editor that ships with OSX. I don't see why they wouldn't use that same code in the iPhone, which basically runs OSX with a more phone-appropriate set of interface widgets, to allow viewing and rudimentary editing of Word.docs.
Going by the 'logic' in the article, *all* AES implementations (i.e. software included on most of the world's computers) are forbidden by the DMCA. After all, someone somewhere might use any of them, along with a key acquired separately, to decrypt some media for which they don't own the copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, sure it's great for you mainstream x86 linux users.
But those of us on other platforms are still likely to be out of luck.
How hard could it be to just let people download each song in a purchased album via http when the entire store is already on the web?
Apple already pays EMI extra for DRM-free tracks.
This isn't a matter of money, this is a matter of Universal simply refusing to sell DRM-free music to Apple at all. They're scared that Apple is now big enough in music sales to have real negotiating power against even the big RIAA members, and still growing rapidly, so they're trying to undermine their market share by going DRM-free and cutting Apple specifically out of DRM-free sales.
Yes, we've finally found the one thing that the record companies value more than controlling how consumers can use their music: controlling how big companies can use their music.
Of course, in a really competitive free market Apple could get around Universal's policy of not selling to them easily enough just getting one of Universal's approved resellers to resell to Apple. Even though adding yet another layer of middlemen would cut into both companies profit margin, they could make it up in volume. Judging by the reported results of Apple's DRM-free sales of EMI tracks, their sales would jump something like 150-300%, and of course whoever they bought Universal's DRM-free music from would sell hundreds of millions of tracks they wouldn't otherwise by January alone. But somehow I doubt any of Universal's tame resellers are going to try something that gutsy, even if Apple deigns to try.
How does making your keyboard radically thinner *not* bring ergonomics into play?
IIRC, a lot of typers' wrist problems can be largely a result of the unnatural angle people need to turn their wrists to type on a raised keyboard without lifting their wrists off the desk. Simply not raising the keyboard off the desk in the first place ought to be at least as effective a solution as those wrist-rest pads that people sell, and is far more elegant imho.
That was my first reaction as well. And if you're only using 8 bits per color, then yes one dual-link cable will do.
However the display port panel in question uses 10 bits per color, which would require another cable even with dual-link DVI. As I understand DVI's handling of high bit depth displays, cable#1 would carry the most significant bits for it's half of the screen on link#1, and the least significant bits on link#2, while cable#2 does the same for it's half of the screen.
I'm still baffled as to why anyone would *want* to sync their mp3 player over wifi, given that you have to plug it in to charge it anyway.
Until they get wireless power into mp3 players, wireless syncing seems like a somewhat pointless feature, to be included for buzzword-compliance only.
And there are so many more interesting things you could do with wifi on an mp3 player too...
A relatively uncrippled pull-based local ad-hoc network (like iTunes sharing as opposed to Zune's heavily crippled push "squirting") would be an obvious win.
And net radio access would be nice as well.
Buying songs online could even work with a good enough interface (I doubt either current Zunes or iPods could make it a really enjoyable experience due to the limits of their controls, but the iPhone would do nicely.)
And that's not even mentioning more general-computing non-music tasks like web browsing and such...
Actually, as I submitted earlier today, AT&T has reversed it's previous stance, and broken ranks with the other major cellular providers, by endorsing FCC chairman Kevin Martin's plan to require open access to 22Mhz of the 60Mhz to be auctioned by the FCC in the 700Mhz band. This statement prompted Verizon to reiterate their opposition to any open access requirements, and Google to state their wish that the entire 60Mhz be auctioned with open access requirements.
Open access rules would require the auction winner to allow any compatible device to connect to their networks on the effected spectrum.
Project Gutenberg is a collection of full text works.
The Open Library is a database of books, which sometimes includes the full scanned text, and sometimes does not.
So if the same work was published a dozen different times, it would have an entry in The Open Library for each edition, and usually just one entry in Project Gutenberg assembled from all of the out-of-copyright printed editions.
I'm also not expecting them to share the new front end they wrote for the BSD-licensed LLVM.
The difference is, I'm not *expecting* them to open source their efforts, because I *know* they already open sourced it the day before yesterday, whereas you don't expect them to do it because you seem to have bought into the ridiculous meme that Apple is somehow against opening their source despite the massive amounts of time money and code they've donated to open source projects over the years when under no license requirement to do so.
GPL zealots are always quick to claim that anyone opposing their draconian license requirements dictating everything from hardware design to patent liability to derivative works must be selfishly hoarding their knowledge. I say it's the exact opposite, the GPL is a tool for hoarding knowledge in a community pool, where the pool's administrators at the FSF can use it for political power by interpreting and revising the GPL. Plenty of people (including corporations), are quite willing to openly share their code under truly free BSD-like terms, but consider subjecting themselves to the whims of the ideologues and lawyers of the FSF an increasingly unacceptable risk.
Actually, Heinlein anticipated the movement you're advocating, towards viewing peoples societally unacceptable behavior as a function of disease rather than decision. He explored it in his stories about the world after the overthrow of the American Prophets, under The Covenant.
They essentially abandoned the idea of 'punishing' criminals, instead offering offenders the choice of either compulsory psychotherapy to make them behave in a more societally acceptable manner (psychology was extremely well understood in that setting, and modern psychotherapy was considered practically infallible) or permanent exile from society to an ungoverned area.
The "at least XXXXX and can be YYYYY" phrase structure presents a range of responses, in this case the low end "OK" you quote is roughly equivalent to the "usable" end of that range.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension. Maybe you should RTFA and some of the other posts for practice before replying to the next article that interests you.
You've been reading "various reviews" by people who've probably never touched an iPhone, much less scratched one or used one long enough to reasonably critique it.
Tonight four major papers' tech columnists, who've had review units to (ab)use for weeks, released their reviews.
All four of them disagree with your evaluation; saying it doesn't scratch, and stating that the virtual keyboard is at least usable and can be as quick and easy as a physical thumbboard once you get used to it.
And there's another problem with Lilly's browser!
Firefox will only spell-check textareas, not plain old <input type="text"> fields, like the subject field!
It's all his fault, I tell you!
Does John Lilly's ranting about the horrors of "corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-Web thinking" strike anyone else as amusingly hypocritical when he's an executive for one of the current duopoly of corporations that control ~95% of the web browser market, and his company's flagship browser is arguably less standards compliant than the new entry he's railing against.
That kind of depends on which release of Firefox you're talking about.
The first "preview release" of Firefox took about 100 hours to break 1 million downloads.
Then Firefox 1.0 hit 1 million downloads in about 24 hours.
And Firefox 1.5 hit 1.5 million downloads in the first 24 hours.
And Firefox 2 hit a bit over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours.
I'd say the first public beta of Safari for Windows is most equivalent to Firefox's first preview release, so in those terms it's doing pretty damn well, especially considering it was just mentioned at WWDC and then immediately posted on Apple's website, whereas Firefox had been publicly developed and hyped for a long time before it's preview release. But then again, it's still well below the rate of download of the most current release of Firefox.
Well, everyone except microsoft and mozilla, who could lose market share and search revenue...
I really hope that Apple does carve itself a good chunk of windows browser market share, because that would provide a lot of support for a more standards based and platform/browser independent web. But I'm not sure Apple is really betting anything on their ability to do so; if they just make it easier for more web developers to target and test for Webkit/Safari/iPhone/etc, I think they'll consider Safari for windows a success and take any market share gains as a nice bonus.
It's not even a watermark, it's just a couple of plain text metadata atoms (the MPEG-4 equivalent of ID3 tags).
This is basically the digital equivalent of printing your name on the receipt and putting it in the bag when you buy a CD. No one's forcing you to keep the receipt if you don't want to, and no one's going to read it but you anyway unless you choose to staple it to a public bulletin board for some odd reason.
I'm incredibly disgusted with the negative spin many people online have managed to put on Apple's move to sell DRM-free music. If you ever wonder why so many companies screw their customers, I think this illustrates one of the reasons. There's no upside in *not* screwing your customers; a lot of people can't or won't even recognize it when they're given everything they wanted.
Normalize-audio is the exact opposite of what I'm asking for.
You have a format that stores everything as loud as the producers want it, and software that quiets it down to the same level as the rest of your music.
What I want is a format that stores everything at a quieter level that maximizes it's dynamic range, and software that plays it back as loud as the producers wanted it, unless the user intervenes to turn the volume down. With that, the loudness war can continue on it's natural course without degrading the music as it is recorded, only compressing it into the top of it's range as it's played back by default.
Couldn't we just add a tag to every track with a floating point number by which to multiply the magnitude of all the samples in that track by default.
That way the track could be recorded with it's full dynamic range preserved, so people who care about dynamic range can hear it clearly. And as the loudness war progresses that one multiplier could just be incremented, so that people who don't care about dynamic range will hear the track loudly.
I think the "How To" commercial does a pretty good job of showing why I expect the iPhone is going to do well.
/.ers obsess over having in their phones. But if they can see how an iPhone can be used for all their calls/mail/web/music&movies in 30sec of watching TV, *that* they'll like.
They visually explained how to use every major feature of the thing in a 30sec TV spot.
Most people neither know or care about UMTS, or HSDPA, or AGPS, or any of the other high tech acronyms that certain
Technology has progressed to the point where a well thought out interface matters more than having the latest and greatest bullet points on a spec sheet some months before the other guy. The bottleneck that needs to be addressed these days isn't generally in the machine, it's often between the user and the machine.
So basically it seems like this guy doesn't want to do away with copyright, he just wants to change it so that any non-GPL-style license is prohibited.
The previous article suggested libertarian style freedom (free as in free to shoot your neighbor if he steps on your land), while this guy suggests communist style freedom (free as in "show your papers to get in line for free bread comrade").
Actually, you got it right on the 2nd try.
You can enable full network access via SSH, or boot another OS, just by booting from a USB drive these days, without opening the AppleTV.
The AppleTV -is- a PC, it's got a 1.0GHz Pentium M-based based x86 processor, a GeForce Go 7300 GPU, a 40GB HDD, 256MB of RAM, USB, 100B-T Ethernet and 802.11b/g/n WiFi, with HDMI and component outputs...
Why should anyone interested in developing open solutions for set top boxes limit themselves to the OSD's closed embedded-style hardware, when Apple has provided a full PC that you can run whatever you want on (Mac OSX, linux, MythTV, etc...) in a nice neat package for almost the same price ($229 vs $299)? Especially when the AppleTV is sufficiently powerful to do HDTV divx/xvid decoding in software, whereas the Neuros OSD needs to use it's closed DSP core to handle even SDTV.
I'm all for heated competition, and it's great that AMD can claim integer performance supremacy on the high end again for a while. But at what cost do they make that claim?
The article mentions that the 8222 SE is priced at $2149. So if I want a system with more than 4 cores, I'm bound to pay ~2.5x as much per processor.
I can get a workstation with 8 3Ghz Clovertown Xenon cores from Apple for just under $4000, 8 Opteron cores at the same clock will cost me more than twice that for the processors alone, never mind a motherboard and system to house them.
I'm well aware of the increasing advantages of AMD's bus topology for >4 cores, but with pricing like that who can afford a system to really take advantage of it?
As I understand it:
The rules originally required getting a user shell on a macbook connected to a wireless router without any other access, or getting a root shell under the same conditions on a second macbook without using the same bug.
The prize was the macbook(s) you hacked.
But they decided not enough people were interested, so 3Com added a $10,000 bounty for a winning bug.
But no one could crack it, so they set the machine up to visit malicious web pages submitted by email.
Then someone found a bug in Safari, and successfully crafted a webpage to exploit it to get user shell access.
The really silly part is that there's no good reason the iPhone shouldn't support Word .doc files.
.doc file support (both old-style and XML-based) in the default text editor that ships with OSX. I don't see why they wouldn't use that same code in the iPhone, which basically runs OSX with a more phone-appropriate set of interface widgets, to allow viewing and rudimentary editing of Word .docs.
Apple already has
Going by the 'logic' in the article, *all* AES implementations (i.e. software included on most of the world's computers) are forbidden by the DMCA.
After all, someone somewhere might use any of them, along with a key acquired separately, to decrypt some media for which they don't own the copyright.