IMHO, BNetD is the single most threatening thing to blizzard's income from their current titles and any future titles that might be targettable by BNetD.
Two reasons for this:
1: If major BNetD servers are fast enough and public enough, people that don't want to pay will play on BNetD servers, if they are legally able to run, instead of buying.
2: The Battle.net player base will fragment if players decide they can do better on BNetD servers, or play with non-BNet friends. BNet may lose critical mass. Then BNet will become less of an incentive to buy the game.
I have no idea what morally ok purpose BNetD can serve as all the LANs I have been at have had 0 problems running WC3 or Diablo over TCP/IP, and anyone that wants to play over the net and doesn't want to connect to BNet because they can't spare the bandwidth or some other spurious reason, may use a VPN or many other means if they have problems.
I'm not saying that what Blizzard did is good, I'm saying that the BNetD team's motivation is worse.
A single channel with 64-bit precision at 1MHz (excessive) can be sent uncompressed over a standard 10Mbit line or less (and bandwidth for 10 very-high-quality channels could also be send over the same cable), why the big deal about compressing sound data (5.1) just to uncompress it at the amp a few metres away? If it's already compressed that's fine, but the only time where this technology actually makes sense to me is during recording or transmission over a network. Otherwise you're just losing a very small bit of quality (via compression), and gaining nothing at all.
Secondly, all these issues about extra processing can be cleared up by a little more CPU power, or better still, another CPU. All that putting features like Dolby 5.1 encoding on a card do is reduce flexibility, (eg, in this case a requirement to set up your system with 2 rear, 2 front, 1 center and a sub if you want to take advantage of it. It's easy enough to create an algorithm to work with most (eg not all speakers on the left) speaker layouts, so why not let us put them anywhere we like and just tell the software where they are?.)
I for one would like prefer a soundcard that was just, say, 8 DACs, 2 ADCs and 8 raw uncompressed digital outputs over the latest 5.1 card. Except for the additional processing requirements (which aren't negligeable but aren't terrible either) this card would be superior in all aspects (including price) to the latest and greatest from NVidia or whoever, and the drivers would be clean and would virtually write themselves.
I vote for putting less effort into GPU and APU power (although I know this article is about how little effort is being put into APUs) and start giving us decent-priced multi-processor setups.
It's not the similarity that's wrong, it's how the music was created. Was it copied or did it just through chance, turn out to be similar.
It is likely that a sample of, at a guess, 2000 amplitude samples, could be statistically shown to be identical (ie derived) to a certain other section of music, within an extremely thin margin of error, even if the sample has undergone simple changes (echo, stretching etc). If there was heavier morphing, say shifting the frequency without changing the length, or putting it through unusual filters, it would still be able to be shown that it was derived if the sample was long enough.
Once it has been shown to be (within reasonable doubt) derived, it is then illegal.
IMHO if an artist deliberately cuts, morphs, and pastes a piece of music without permission, whether it is a minute or a microsecond, he is doing wrong, just as stealing 1c from somebody's wallet is wrong.
Creating samples is bloody easy. I am surprised at the need to sample others music, unless it is done for the mere fact of gaining an association with the artist who you sampled.
If I were a decent music artist and some musician who I didn't like put some of my music on anything they sold or performed, I would feel justified in forcing them to give me everything they earned from the music, and also whatever fines resulted from the infringement.
If there was a song you liked, that you heard was sampled by someone else, would you be interested in checking out that song? Or would anyone you know? If so, in that, there is all the justification you need to show that sampling without permission is wrong, because they are gaining advertising and therefore possibly sales, through an association they were not legally allowed to make.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, BNetD is the single most threatening thing to blizzard's income from their current titles and any future titles that might be targettable by BNetD. Two reasons for this: 1: If major BNetD servers are fast enough and public enough, people that don't want to pay will play on BNetD servers, if they are legally able to run, instead of buying. 2: The Battle.net player base will fragment if players decide they can do better on BNetD servers, or play with non-BNet friends. BNet may lose critical mass. Then BNet will become less of an incentive to buy the game. I have no idea what morally ok purpose BNetD can serve as all the LANs I have been at have had 0 problems running WC3 or Diablo over TCP/IP, and anyone that wants to play over the net and doesn't want to connect to BNet because they can't spare the bandwidth or some other spurious reason, may use a VPN or many other means if they have problems. I'm not saying that what Blizzard did is good, I'm saying that the BNetD team's motivation is worse.
A single channel with 64-bit precision at 1MHz (excessive) can be sent uncompressed over a standard 10Mbit line or less (and bandwidth for 10 very-high-quality channels could also be send over the same cable), why the big deal about compressing sound data (5.1) just to uncompress it at the amp a few metres away? If it's already compressed that's fine, but the only time where this technology actually makes sense to me is during recording or transmission over a network. Otherwise you're just losing a very small bit of quality (via compression), and gaining nothing at all.
Secondly, all these issues about extra processing can be cleared up by a little more CPU power, or better still, another CPU. All that putting features like Dolby 5.1 encoding on a card do is reduce flexibility, (eg, in this case a requirement to set up your system with 2 rear, 2 front, 1 center and a sub if you want to take advantage of it. It's easy enough to create an algorithm to work with most (eg not all speakers on the left) speaker layouts, so why not let us put them anywhere we like and just tell the software where they are?.)
I for one would like prefer a soundcard that was just, say, 8 DACs, 2 ADCs and 8 raw uncompressed digital outputs over the latest 5.1 card. Except for the additional processing requirements (which aren't negligeable but aren't terrible either) this card would be superior in all aspects (including price) to the latest and greatest from NVidia or whoever, and the drivers would be clean and would virtually write themselves.
I vote for putting less effort into GPU and APU power (although I know this article is about how little effort is being put into APUs) and start giving us decent-priced multi-processor setups.
Anyone share my opinion?
Because it has a digital speedo with 3 digits before the decimal point.
It's not the similarity that's wrong, it's how the music was created. Was it copied or did it just through chance, turn out to be similar.
It is likely that a sample of, at a guess, 2000 amplitude samples, could be statistically shown to be identical (ie derived) to a certain other section of music, within an extremely thin margin of error, even if the sample has undergone simple changes (echo, stretching etc). If there was heavier morphing, say shifting the frequency without changing the length, or putting it through unusual filters, it would still be able to be shown that it was derived if the sample was long enough.
Once it has been shown to be (within reasonable doubt) derived, it is then illegal.
IMHO if an artist deliberately cuts, morphs, and pastes a piece of music without permission, whether it is a minute or a microsecond, he is doing wrong, just as stealing 1c from somebody's wallet is wrong.
Creating samples is bloody easy. I am surprised at the need to sample others music, unless it is done for the mere fact of gaining an association with the artist who you sampled.
If I were a decent music artist and some musician who I didn't like put some of my music on anything they sold or performed, I would feel justified in forcing them to give me everything they earned from the music, and also whatever fines resulted from the infringement.
If there was a song you liked, that you heard was sampled by someone else, would you be interested in checking out that song? Or would anyone you know? If so, in that, there is all the justification you need to show that sampling without permission is wrong, because they are gaining advertising and therefore possibly sales, through an association they were not legally allowed to make.