I seem to remember a slew of jokes about the RIAA police running around busting people over the past few years. Strange how the RIAA is acting according to the most cynical perceptions people have of them.
No, the AAC spec includes DRM. MP3 essentially had a leg up because the majority of everyone's music collections are MP3's. In order to sell a portable player, companies simply have to support it, no matter how much pissing and whining the record labels do about it.
Support for Ogg Vorbis (or lack thereof) has to do with several factors.
Apple are pushing AAC. Do you think that Apple fought tooth and nail to drag the MPEG group back to reality with their licensing terms so consumers could encode and stream MPEG-4 for free just to risk undermining it with another codec? Certainly not. Apple threw its hat in with MPEG.
Not a lot of people use Vorbis for their encoding. I know a few people who rip exclusively to Ogg Vorbis, but I'm a computer geek, and I work with computer geeks. Ask some college girl with a Christmas list for mommy and daddy if she gives a rat's ass that the iPod she wants doesn't support Ogg Vorbis.
The Ogg Vorbis spec does not include DRM. Apple are treading a very fine line with respect to DRM. Jobs managed to RDF the shit out of the record companies to get them to agree to the almost comically weak (compared to what we all know the RIAA would really rather have) DRM restrictions. The record companies want to see Apple supporting DRM, or else they're going to pull the plug. Apple can get away with supporting MP3 because it's only the most popular music format in the fucking world, but Vorbis doesn't have that excuse. You have to support MP3 if you want any chance of success. WAV has the excuse that no person in his right mind would listen to uncompressed audio on his iPod, since it defeats the whole "x,000 songs in your pocket," {x | x = 1, 2, 3,...} mantra. Also, unless you like loading the equivalent of 10 MP3's into the player's RAM to play the WAV and thus reducing battery life, then who's going to put WAV on their iPod?
Ogg Vorbis is relegated to a small, niche market. Well, Apple have their fill of niche markets with the Mac line. The iPod appeals to regular people who have lots of MP3's on their computers. And those regular people think more along the lines of, "Can it do what I want," meaning "play MP3's." Well, yes, the iPod can. "Okay," they say, "But is it easy to use? I'm not good with computers." Well yes, the iPod is. "Wow!" They say upon seeing and holding one. "This thing is fucking cool as Hell!" Hence the 70% marketshare.
QT6 didn't even have two pass mpeg4 encoding for a long time and even now the quality/features are a joke compared to Xvid/Divx (which make use of things like b-frames, qpel, gmc).
3ivx D4.5 is available for both Mac and Windows platforms, and it produces output just as good as, if not better than, XviD, and DivX is a joke compared to either 3ivx or XviD. 3ivx has all those fancy buzzwords you love but know absolutely nothing about (or didn't you know that b-frames are inappropriate for lots of encodes because they reduce quality and can kill compression efficiency?).
On Windows the QT browser plugin is terrible and doesn't even allow you to zoom or fullscreen from the right-click menu (and windows media player does) so I'm stuck digging the freaking URL out of the page just to watch the stream in something other than a miniscule box (I use high res and I'm not changing it for a video in a web page).
I knew that browser plug-ins were relevant to video encoding somehow...
The few professionals doing DVD work I've ever talked to used Maestro and Scenarist, both PC apps. IME the parent is right on about macs having lost their spot re encoding.
Really? My uncle won two Emmies for his online editing work on the Oprah show, and he is a Mac user.
So in the words, you download programs from the internet, execute them, and then type in your password when prompted... Can you say the word 'Trojan' ?
As opposed to downloading a program from the internet, executing it, never being prompted for a password... can you say, "Much bigger chance of successful trojan infiltration"? Look, users aren't perfect, but if a program asks for administrator privileges, users have the opportunity to deny it. Windows installers and programs never give that opportunity. If you're logged in as an administrator, you've never, ever prompted for a password by default. In Mac OS X, you're always prompted if a program requests administrator privileges by default (you can tell the system to automatically authenticate, but this is off by default, and for good reason).
"HAHAHAHAH!! Mac OS X isn't perfect! Duh, I'm so smart!"
Is this guy for real? How does a vulnerability which involves an attacker having to break into your home network (much less a corporate one), take over a machine and then set it up as a rogue DHCP server anywhere near equivalent to something like Blaster, which spread automatically, with no machine spoofing required? Honestly, if your network is so utterly open to attack that it's a trivial task to spoof a DHCP server, there are bigger problems than OS X's security flaw there.
The claim that Mac OS X would have more viruses if it was more popular holds some merit, but it says nothing about the lethality of those viruses. OS X has all sharing network services off by default, unlike Windows, shutting down a large avenue for virus propagation. Mail shows the entire file name of an attachment, preventing attackers from hiding extensions. Mail also does not automatically execute attachments. Furthermore, any application wishing to do anything as administrator has to ask for a password by default, and root is disabled by default. This is not the case in Windows, where tales of administrator accounts with blank passwords abound. While there may be more attempts at writing viruses for OS X if it was more popular, far fewer of them would actually reach the scale of damage that things like Blaster did. Windows is an ideal virus propagation platform not just because it's popular, but more importantly, because it's default setup is insecure as well.
Why support FLAC? Granted, I love a free, lossless codec. It's great for listening on your computer... but you listen to your portable MP3 player with headphones. You're probably not going to notice the difference between lossless and lossy compression. Let's also not forget that playing lossless audio will suck up battery power because it'll take more of the player's RAM for the same amount of skip protection as compared to MP3, Vorbis or AAC. Portable players just aren't the market for supporting lossless audio, but whatever. If it wasn't a whole lot of extra effort on their part, why not?
The great thing about the iPod is that its firmware is upgradeable. This means that Apple could support Ogg Vorbis in the future, though I kind of doubt they will. They might end up undermining everything they worked for by dragging the MPEG group kicking and screaming to more reasonable licensing. But you never know...
Heh, reminds me of what one of my coworkers said to me one day. He was doing the usual friendly ragging on Macs and saying that a theatre wouldn't let me in because I was a Mac users.
"Well how would they know that? Because I dress better than you?" I asked.
"Yes! That's exactly it. You people have a sense of style, so you stick out around other geeks," he replied.
Bob also has enough money that he can pay the RIAA's outrageous prices for CD's, so he has no need to pirate music, thus he won't be in this situation in the first place.
We're talking about an industry that was convicted of price-fixing and whose product is probably one of the only pieces of technology that, in 20 years of existence, has not dropped in price, even though manufacturing and production costs have. This is an economic marvel.
Let's not forget the asinine extensions on copyright these assholes have gotten us. By original copyright law, all music since around the mid-80's should be public domain by now. These people reward artists for one hit song. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists (you know, people who actually work for a living and contribute more than happy thoughts to humanity) have to abide by patents, which don't let them simply live off of one thing for the rest of their lives. The original point of copyright law was to promote the continued development of the arts and to not let an artist live off of one work. Basically, the framers wanted artists to keep working, not just stop when they made something popular.
The one failing of the show, I think, is that sometimes they just can't let go of a joke. I remember the sequence when Peter go into a brawl with a giant chicken... it went on for a good 3-5 minutes. That's entirely too long for a simple humorous interlude. There was also the letter that Stewie wrote Brian after he'd left for England to live on the set of that English show. It took over a minute to read the thing, and it just lost its humor after 15 seconds anyway. There are tons of other examples of what should be small interludes being dragged out to fill 30 seconds or more throughout the series, but the rest of the show is hilarious enough to make up for it. Whenever God makes an appearance, it's always funny.
MEG: I wish God would just kill me now!
[Camera goes to Heaven, with God pointing a sniper rifle at Meg's head. Then a phone rings.]
GOD: Hello?... Kaaaaaaaren!
Uh, yeah, that's true. The "integration" argument against MS is completely stupid and should not have been pursued. Integration is decidedly and demonstrably BETTER for the consumer - witness Mac OS X, KDE, etc. All of these have various aspects of "integrated" applications, of course when KDE integrates the file manager and web browser, then it's INNOVATION!
You can remove the web browser in KDE. In OS X, no application is integrated to the extent that it's not removable. You can remove QuickTime Player, Safari, iTunes and any other application you can think of by simply moving it to the trash. You can even remove the file browser and Dock, but Apple keep the API's for these things closed, so certain functions (like minimizing windows or parsing.DS_Store files) become irreplaceable.
Being a CS student does not necessarily grant one a good working knowledge of networks. I've seen plenty of CS students and experienced programmers who wouldn't know how to properly secure their systems. Now, if the person in question is a Network Infrastructure student or Novell-certified, it's almost a no-brainer that he should know how to secure his machine.
Of course, is it really right to hold someone liable for damages that result in an intrinsically harmless slip-up? Say I forget to patch SSH or Apache and someone launches an attack from my box. Should I be held liable? If so, why? Because I should know better? That may be true, but I can always argue that I'd intended to patch but just hadn't found the time to do so, and someone by chance, found my box. If my schedule in a particular week isn't amenable to patching a particular aspect of my system, but I need SSH or Apache during that week, why should I be held liable for damages resulting from someone illegally hijacking my computer? Let's keep the blame where it belongs, here.
Though, with IE blocking pop-ups, the advertisers will be forced to find new, more invasive ways of cluttering up web browsing. I've already been subjected to a few Flash ads here and there.
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I seem to remember a slew of jokes about the RIAA police running around busting people over the past few years. Strange how the RIAA is acting according to the most cynical perceptions people have of them.
That's why none of the people in charge of the clone strategy are at Apple anymore. I hear Steve Jobs is under consideration for CEO.
Yeah, because no one at Apple would ever think of putting a stipulation in the contract to bar HP from undercutting Apple ...
YAiK = Yet Another iPod Killer
Seems to me that we get another iPod killer once every couple of weeks, so I figure that we needed an acronym for it.
Support for Ogg Vorbis (or lack thereof) has to do with several factors.
- Apple are pushing AAC. Do you think that Apple fought tooth and nail to drag the MPEG group back to reality with their licensing terms so consumers could encode and stream MPEG-4 for free just to risk undermining it with another codec? Certainly not. Apple threw its hat in with MPEG.
- Not a lot of people use Vorbis for their encoding. I know a few people who rip exclusively to Ogg Vorbis, but I'm a computer geek, and I work with computer geeks. Ask some college girl with a Christmas list for mommy and daddy if she gives a rat's ass that the iPod she wants doesn't support Ogg Vorbis.
- The Ogg Vorbis spec does not include DRM. Apple are treading a very fine line with respect to DRM. Jobs managed to RDF the shit out of the record companies to get them to agree to the almost comically weak (compared to what we all know the RIAA would really rather have) DRM restrictions. The record companies want to see Apple supporting DRM, or else they're going to pull the plug. Apple can get away with supporting MP3 because it's only the most popular music format in the fucking world, but Vorbis doesn't have that excuse. You have to support MP3 if you want any chance of success. WAV has the excuse that no person in his right mind would listen to uncompressed audio on his iPod, since it defeats the whole "x,000 songs in your pocket," {x | x = 1, 2, 3,
...} mantra. Also, unless you like loading the equivalent of 10 MP3's into the player's RAM to play the WAV and thus reducing battery life, then who's going to put WAV on their iPod?
Ogg Vorbis is relegated to a small, niche market. Well, Apple have their fill of niche markets with the Mac line. The iPod appeals to regular people who have lots of MP3's on their computers. And those regular people think more along the lines of, "Can it do what I want," meaning "play MP3's." Well, yes, the iPod can. "Okay," they say, "But is it easy to use? I'm not good with computers." Well yes, the iPod is. "Wow!" They say upon seeing and holding one. "This thing is fucking cool as Hell!" Hence the 70% marketshare.How the fuck is pure speculation 'insightful'?
You will be assimilated. Your biological and cultural distinctiveness will be adapted to service us. Resistance is futile.
"HAHAHAHAH!! Mac OS X isn't perfect! Duh, I'm so smart!"
Is this guy for real? How does a vulnerability which involves an attacker having to break into your home network (much less a corporate one), take over a machine and then set it up as a rogue DHCP server anywhere near equivalent to something like Blaster, which spread automatically, with no machine spoofing required? Honestly, if your network is so utterly open to attack that it's a trivial task to spoof a DHCP server, there are bigger problems than OS X's security flaw there.
The claim that Mac OS X would have more viruses if it was more popular holds some merit, but it says nothing about the lethality of those viruses. OS X has all sharing network services off by default, unlike Windows, shutting down a large avenue for virus propagation. Mail shows the entire file name of an attachment, preventing attackers from hiding extensions. Mail also does not automatically execute attachments. Furthermore, any application wishing to do anything as administrator has to ask for a password by default, and root is disabled by default. This is not the case in Windows, where tales of administrator accounts with blank passwords abound. While there may be more attempts at writing viruses for OS X if it was more popular, far fewer of them would actually reach the scale of damage that things like Blaster did. Windows is an ideal virus propagation platform not just because it's popular, but more importantly, because it's default setup is insecure as well.
Uh ... yeah. People go "Oooh, cool!" all the time.
You know, they've put Linux on the iPod. :)
Why support FLAC? Granted, I love a free, lossless codec. It's great for listening on your computer ... but you listen to your portable MP3 player with headphones. You're probably not going to notice the difference between lossless and lossy compression. Let's also not forget that playing lossless audio will suck up battery power because it'll take more of the player's RAM for the same amount of skip protection as compared to MP3, Vorbis or AAC. Portable players just aren't the market for supporting lossless audio, but whatever. If it wasn't a whole lot of extra effort on their part, why not?
...
The great thing about the iPod is that its firmware is upgradeable. This means that Apple could support Ogg Vorbis in the future, though I kind of doubt they will. They might end up undermining everything they worked for by dragging the MPEG group kicking and screaming to more reasonable licensing. But you never know
Could you please post in normal text next time? Horizontal scrolling is a pain in the ass.
Hm ... I guess I must've offended one of the home boyz who happened to have mod points. Lighten up, asshole.
But no man! Rap is about oppression ... and a bunch of other deep stuff! Ya homie. Allz us deep-thinkin mofo's be talkin' like dis. Weeeeeerd.
Heh, reminds me of what one of my coworkers said to me one day. He was doing the usual friendly ragging on Macs and saying that a theatre wouldn't let me in because I was a Mac users.
"Well how would they know that? Because I dress better than you?" I asked.
"Yes! That's exactly it. You people have a sense of style, so you stick out around other geeks," he replied.
Bob also has enough money that he can pay the RIAA's outrageous prices for CD's, so he has no need to pirate music, thus he won't be in this situation in the first place.
We're talking about an industry that was convicted of price-fixing and whose product is probably one of the only pieces of technology that, in 20 years of existence, has not dropped in price, even though manufacturing and production costs have. This is an economic marvel.
Let's not forget the asinine extensions on copyright these assholes have gotten us. By original copyright law, all music since around the mid-80's should be public domain by now. These people reward artists for one hit song. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists (you know, people who actually work for a living and contribute more than happy thoughts to humanity) have to abide by patents, which don't let them simply live off of one thing for the rest of their lives. The original point of copyright law was to promote the continued development of the arts and to not let an artist live off of one work. Basically, the framers wanted artists to keep working, not just stop when they made something popular.
The one failing of the show, I think, is that sometimes they just can't let go of a joke. I remember the sequence when Peter go into a brawl with a giant chicken ... it went on for a good 3-5 minutes. That's entirely too long for a simple humorous interlude. There was also the letter that Stewie wrote Brian after he'd left for England to live on the set of that English show. It took over a minute to read the thing, and it just lost its humor after 15 seconds anyway. There are tons of other examples of what should be small interludes being dragged out to fill 30 seconds or more throughout the series, but the rest of the show is hilarious enough to make up for it. Whenever God makes an appearance, it's always funny.
... Kaaaaaaaren!
MEG: I wish God would just kill me now!
[Camera goes to Heaven, with God pointing a sniper rifle at Meg's head. Then a phone rings.]
GOD: Hello?
Hehe ... good to know people enjoy my work. :)
Being a CS student does not necessarily grant one a good working knowledge of networks. I've seen plenty of CS students and experienced programmers who wouldn't know how to properly secure their systems. Now, if the person in question is a Network Infrastructure student or Novell-certified, it's almost a no-brainer that he should know how to secure his machine.
Of course, is it really right to hold someone liable for damages that result in an intrinsically harmless slip-up? Say I forget to patch SSH or Apache and someone launches an attack from my box. Should I be held liable? If so, why? Because I should know better? That may be true, but I can always argue that I'd intended to patch but just hadn't found the time to do so, and someone by chance, found my box. If my schedule in a particular week isn't amenable to patching a particular aspect of my system, but I need SSH or Apache during that week, why should I be held liable for damages resulting from someone illegally hijacking my computer? Let's keep the blame where it belongs, here.
You've obviously never used Windows Media Player for Mac OS X. RealOne is orders of magnitude more tolerable.
Though, with IE blocking pop-ups, the advertisers will be forced to find new, more invasive ways of cluttering up web browsing. I've already been subjected to a few Flash ads here and there.