But metadata is hard to convey over the internet. HTTP doesn't have a standard mechanism for telling me what's really in the file and webservers usually determine the MIME type by looking at the extension. Of course the latter could be rectified by scanning the file, but that would take up much more resources than just looking at the file name.
Actually, zip files are an example of a format where people eventually started to use a more user-friendly designation..jar,.xpi,.smzip,.cbz... those are all zipfiles, but the extensions mark them as zipfiles containing certain contents. The same could be done for Ogg (and indeed has been done by the nonstandard Ogg Media format): Use.ogv for Ogg Vorbis,.ogt for Ogg Theora... Or, more generic,.ogm for music and.ogv for video, even though the.ogm extension conflicts with Ogg Media.
Even though the file format is the same, having different extensions by convention can avoid confusion.
Microsoft isn't exactly making friends everywhere. The EU is pissed off about how they conduct themselves with regard to the API documentation issue. This demonstration of what happens when you give a corporation too much power surely doesn't improve Microsoft's position in the battle for the next standard document format.
Also, city governments are eyeing F/OSS because it's cheaper than even free licenses from Microsoft, which still come with strings like possible audits attached, and considering the budget a typical city government has to work with even that translates into a major incentive, especially when the currently used version of office becomes obsolete and an upgrade would cause retraining costs anyway (and even more so when the new version of Office would only run on a new version of windows, which pushes the cost even further).
Copyright is great - as long as it's limited. The human mind works best when building on something and that also applies to creative people. Thus fair use, copyright limitations etc. However, when some corporation creates something and then has absolute control over it indefinitely that doesn't help creativity - and that's exactly what DRM makes possible. As long as it's not broken it makes content accessible only when the rights owner allows you to access it and even when copyright has run out the work is in the public domain, but using it might be impossible without (illegal) ripping, for example when said owner simply refuses to lift the DRM restrictions.
Copyright is great, but only if both sides of it work. DRM undermines one side (the one that makes past work accessible for future artists).
It's just Un-German not to trust your president to have sweeping and uncheckable power to protect the children from terrorists.
Actually it's just un-German to not expect the chancellor (the president has comparatively little political power) to be a bumbling fool/malevolent wannabe dictator who only got into office to line his/her own pockets with cash. Trust is a mental disorder other nations suffer from.;)
Phh. What we'll see is that within months a fire-and-forget honeypot system will spring into existence that detects any unusual connections and slows them down. P2P will continue and the **AA/police will be caught in a technological battle with the OSS crowd. And I think I know who's better at network security...
I don't disparage people who don't like or know what I listen to. Actually, I take pride in having a collection that will sooner or later disgust anyone.
I guess permissiveness is one of the traits one develops being an omnivore concerning music (given any musical style I can usually find a band or at least a song I like). Even if I don't like someone else's taste I don't flame them for it; that's best left to the idiots participating in the neverending HipHop vs. Metal flamewar.
You: Can I have your raw data and methods please? MPAA: No, because of privacy concerns. You: Ah, well, then you can surely give me the samples you worked with? MPAA: No, those are private as well. As are our methods. You: Can I at least see the results? MPAA: No, those are especially private. You: Well, what can you give me? MPAA: Nothing. There never was a statistic. These are not the droids you are looking for. We're not here. *hides behind a tree*
Rerenting a movie:
1. Drive to store
2. Locate movie
3. Rent it
4. Drive home
5. Watch movie
6. Return movie and pay
Watching a ripped movie:
1. Start media PC/XBMC
2. Start media player/navigate to "Video"
3. Navigate to movie file and open it
4. Watch movie
5. Shut down media PC/XBox
Watching the ripped movie saves you two drives and some time - I think that is an advantage.
You have a copyright case because the person you talk about accepted your licence agreement and then proceeded to violate it, thus voiding the licence and depriving them of the right to redistribute the content. Unless the artist has a similar licence agreement that covers the dance (including performances) this does not apply here.
The Ogg Vorbis problem is with iTunes/OS X; I don't use an iPod as for now my CF-based player works well enough for me. The crashes actually got better when I tried it again yesterday; apparently one of the latest QuickTime updates seems to have fixed some bug I was running into. I'll have to perform some more testing.
As for the codecs: I do have Flip4Mac, but apart from that I don't really need any video codecs; VLC is a decent media player on OS X and comes with pretty much every codec under the sun. Audio codecs, however, are what iTunes is short on compared to other players like XMMS and Winamp...
For comparison, how many Linux and FOSS-in-general fans run Windows on their primary desktop machine? I, for one, will admit that I do, because Linux quite simply hurts to use as a desktop on a daily basis. I absolutely love it for anything running behind the scenes (NAS, routers, webservers, mailservers, etc), but when it comes to sitting down and getting real work done at a workstation (or even just wasting time playing a game), Windows has Linux beat hands-down.
I used to, until an unstable mainboard made running Linux undesirable (Linux makes it crash more often than Windows does). Now I use my iBook.
In my opinion, Windows is inferior to both OS X and Linux in terms of giving me an environment that lets me focus on work. On Linux I can do much on the shell and with Yakuake I can have the shell drop down when needed and disappear when not, all with a single keypress. I value that. I have excellent editors with KWrite and Kile (I'm a CS student so I need LaTeX a lot) and the OS doesn't constantly pester me about trivial issues. Also, in case I suddenly need something I don't already have installed, package management makes installation a fire-and-forget background task.
Multimedia-wise I have XMMS (and no matter what the Gentoo maintainers say, I'll stick with it). Thanks to KMilo I can control that using single key presses as well.
Of course now I work on OS X. While I don't have Yakuake, KWrite and Kile I gain Exposé and Preview plus the innate ability to export anything to PDF. And software installation is reduced to drag and drop in most cases. Plus no pestering plus VASTLY superior WLAN management over both Linux and Windows (to be honest, in both cases I think the WLAN interface is half-assed at best).
Okay, music-wise I have to stick with iTunes, which has a nice interface (plus system-wide keyboard hotkey if you use SizzlingKeys), but doesn't support a lot of formats. That's a drawback.
Both OSes have significant advantages over Windows - at least for me.
By the way, the sound/video argument doesn't really apply anymore, at least if you use a somewhat modern distro and don't buy hardware that's too exotic. If it's from NVidia or ATI and not cutting-edge it will work. The same applies to Creative and pretty much all onboard sound chips. With 90% of the A/V stuff a regular user will ever encounter covered I think we can safely assume that sound and graphics on Linux are not exceptional.
As for documentation issues... I use Gentoo. There isn't much that hasn't yet been documented by the Gentoo crowd. If it can be documented, some Gentoo user will eventually document it. (This should be made a Law...)
True. Linux doesn't win by competing strongly in one market, it wins by competing in all markets at once, including ones that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to think about if they were caught in a sea of excruciating boredom. Putting their OS on a USB stick-sized computer with the raw power of a 1996 gaming rig isn't sexy to Microsoft, but there are companies who make money that way (google "gumstix").
Microsoft might own the desktop, but when you build, say, an autonomous blimp for a research project, you're not going to use Windows Mobile as the operating system. When you build your own Cell-based monster audio processor you're not going to use it either. Or when setting up a Playstation 2 cluster. Or when gutting an old CRT monitor, replacing the tube with an LCD screen and putting in everything you need to turn the thing into a combintaion TV/DVD player/PVR.
Linux is everywhere. It doesn't need to win against Microsoft, because it doesn't even need to compete - there are dozens of other playing fields it's already plaing on.
Is it really that much extra effort for you to download a codec and just drop it in your '/Library/QuickTime/' folder??? I've more than half a dozen *other* codecs in there, as well, that also were not supported "out of the box". Adding them was no trying experience for me. It's simplicity itself, so far as I'm concerned.
Yes, it is. No matter what Xiph says, I've never managed to get the Ogg Vorbis QT component to work reliably. iTunes can read the metadata just fine, but playing a file often results in a crash.
By the way, where have you managed to find other codecs? I'd really like stuff like Modplug or a SID codec for QT, so I can listen to chiptunes on the Mac. Google searches for "quicktime codecs" or something similar obviously don't return anything useful.
My sig is a reference to both LucasArts' SCUMM-based games and two Slashdot memes (a statue of Natalie Portman (naked and petrified) and hot grits). I'd tell you to look it up on Wikipedia, but the entries regarding/. culture have been "cleaned up".
"The Third Place" does indeed carry a meaning*, but only to sociologists. The target demographic has about as much of a chance of getting it as if they'd used slogans like "voice the radicals"** or "left shift by three"***.
Ironically, the PS2 is used in exactly one of the social surroundings that the term "the third place" does not describe (see footnotes). Then again, Microsoft advertises Vista as an OS that makes you go "wow". In PR land, every day is opposite day.
* In sociology, the "third place" is any sociological surrounding except for those at work and at home.
** Radical consonants are a group of, well, consonants. Most consonants can be pronounced voiced or unvoiced, so the slogan tells us to pronounce voiced radical consonants. I have no idea how to, since the most familiar language that even uses radicals is an ancient Hebrew language.
*** This is Slashdot. Who here doesn't know what a bit shift is?
Slashdot Mirror
Argumentative... check.
But metadata is hard to convey over the internet. HTTP doesn't have a standard mechanism for telling me what's really in the file and webservers usually determine the MIME type by looking at the extension. Of course the latter could be rectified by scanning the file, but that would take up much more resources than just looking at the file name.
Actually, that's a much better idea than cramming everything into one extension. However, I don't expect this practice to really take up, sadly.
That depends on how expensive a Hi-Speed USB chip is and how easy it is to add it do the board.
Unfortunately I have absolutely no experience in building my own stuff; this chip makes me want to try building my own MP3/Ogg Vorbis player.
Actually, zip files are an example of a format where people eventually started to use a more user-friendly designation. .jar, .xpi, .smzip, .cbz... those are all zipfiles, but the extensions mark them as zipfiles containing certain contents. The same could be done for Ogg (and indeed has been done by the nonstandard Ogg Media format): Use .ogv for Ogg Vorbis, .ogt for Ogg Theora... Or, more generic, .ogm for music and .ogv for video, even though the .ogm extension conflicts with Ogg Media.
Even though the file format is the same, having different extensions by convention can avoid confusion.
Microsoft isn't exactly making friends everywhere. The EU is pissed off about how they conduct themselves with regard to the API documentation issue. This demonstration of what happens when you give a corporation too much power surely doesn't improve Microsoft's position in the battle for the next standard document format.
Also, city governments are eyeing F/OSS because it's cheaper than even free licenses from Microsoft, which still come with strings like possible audits attached, and considering the budget a typical city government has to work with even that translates into a major incentive, especially when the currently used version of office becomes obsolete and an upgrade would cause retraining costs anyway (and even more so when the new version of Office would only run on a new version of windows, which pushes the cost even further).
However, even one installation of Vista is well above LD50 in geeks.
Copyright is great - as long as it's limited. The human mind works best when building on something and that also applies to creative people. Thus fair use, copyright limitations etc. However, when some corporation creates something and then has absolute control over it indefinitely that doesn't help creativity - and that's exactly what DRM makes possible. As long as it's not broken it makes content accessible only when the rights owner allows you to access it and even when copyright has run out the work is in the public domain, but using it might be impossible without (illegal) ripping, for example when said owner simply refuses to lift the DRM restrictions.
Copyright is great, but only if both sides of it work. DRM undermines one side (the one that makes past work accessible for future artists).
Tokyo already has space-efficient parking garages that stack cars using turntables[...]
Yeah, but after the Giant Discjockey Incident people are getting weary of all the scratching.
*ba-dum pshh*
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitress.
It's just Un-German not to trust your president to have sweeping and uncheckable power to protect the children from terrorists.
;)
Actually it's just un-German to not expect the chancellor (the president has comparatively little political power) to be a bumbling fool/malevolent wannabe dictator who only got into office to line his/her own pockets with cash. Trust is a mental disorder other nations suffer from.
Phh. What we'll see is that within months a fire-and-forget honeypot system will spring into existence that detects any unusual connections and slows them down. P2P will continue and the **AA/police will be caught in a technological battle with the OSS crowd. And I think I know who's better at network security...
I mean Adobe Reader is not OSS, but it is better then the OSS PDF viewers out there.
I assume you have never worked with Adobe Reader.
I don't disparage people who don't like or know what I listen to. Actually, I take pride in having a collection that will sooner or later disgust anyone.
I guess permissiveness is one of the traits one develops being an omnivore concerning music (given any musical style I can usually find a band or at least a song I like). Even if I don't like someone else's taste I don't flame them for it; that's best left to the idiots participating in the neverending HipHop vs. Metal flamewar.
You: Can I have your raw data and methods please?
MPAA: No, because of privacy concerns.
You: Ah, well, then you can surely give me the samples you worked with?
MPAA: No, those are private as well. As are our methods.
You: Can I at least see the results?
MPAA: No, those are especially private.
You: Well, what can you give me?
MPAA: Nothing. There never was a statistic. These are not the droids you are looking for. We're not here. *hides behind a tree*
Rerenting a movie:
1. Drive to store
2. Locate movie
3. Rent it
4. Drive home
5. Watch movie
6. Return movie and pay
Watching a ripped movie:
1. Start media PC/XBMC
2. Start media player/navigate to "Video"
3. Navigate to movie file and open it
4. Watch movie
5. Shut down media PC/XBox
Watching the ripped movie saves you two drives and some time - I think that is an advantage.
/. filters out everything not contained in ISO-8859-1. Pretty annoying when talking about Euro prices, too.
You have a copyright case because the person you talk about accepted your licence agreement and then proceeded to violate it, thus voiding the licence and depriving them of the right to redistribute the content. Unless the artist has a similar licence agreement that covers the dance (including performances) this does not apply here.
Have you tried lynx? It comes without baggage like CSS, JavaScript or images and its memory footprint is much smaller than that of Fx, Opera or IE.
The Ogg Vorbis problem is with iTunes/OS X; I don't use an iPod as for now my CF-based player works well enough for me. The crashes actually got better when I tried it again yesterday; apparently one of the latest QuickTime updates seems to have fixed some bug I was running into. I'll have to perform some more testing.
As for the codecs: I do have Flip4Mac, but apart from that I don't really need any video codecs; VLC is a decent media player on OS X and comes with pretty much every codec under the sun. Audio codecs, however, are what iTunes is short on compared to other players like XMMS and Winamp...
For comparison, how many Linux and FOSS-in-general fans run Windows on their primary desktop machine? I, for one, will admit that I do, because Linux quite simply hurts to use as a desktop on a daily basis. I absolutely love it for anything running behind the scenes (NAS, routers, webservers, mailservers, etc), but when it comes to sitting down and getting real work done at a workstation (or even just wasting time playing a game), Windows has Linux beat hands-down.
I used to, until an unstable mainboard made running Linux undesirable (Linux makes it crash more often than Windows does). Now I use my iBook.
In my opinion, Windows is inferior to both OS X and Linux in terms of giving me an environment that lets me focus on work. On Linux I can do much on the shell and with Yakuake I can have the shell drop down when needed and disappear when not, all with a single keypress. I value that. I have excellent editors with KWrite and Kile (I'm a CS student so I need LaTeX a lot) and the OS doesn't constantly pester me about trivial issues. Also, in case I suddenly need something I don't already have installed, package management makes installation a fire-and-forget background task.
Multimedia-wise I have XMMS (and no matter what the Gentoo maintainers say, I'll stick with it). Thanks to KMilo I can control that using single key presses as well.
Of course now I work on OS X. While I don't have Yakuake, KWrite and Kile I gain Exposé and Preview plus the innate ability to export anything to PDF. And software installation is reduced to drag and drop in most cases. Plus no pestering plus VASTLY superior WLAN management over both Linux and Windows (to be honest, in both cases I think the WLAN interface is half-assed at best).
Okay, music-wise I have to stick with iTunes, which has a nice interface (plus system-wide keyboard hotkey if you use SizzlingKeys), but doesn't support a lot of formats. That's a drawback.
Both OSes have significant advantages over Windows - at least for me.
By the way, the sound/video argument doesn't really apply anymore, at least if you use a somewhat modern distro and don't buy hardware that's too exotic. If it's from NVidia or ATI and not cutting-edge it will work. The same applies to Creative and pretty much all onboard sound chips. With 90% of the A/V stuff a regular user will ever encounter covered I think we can safely assume that sound and graphics on Linux are not exceptional.
As for documentation issues... I use Gentoo. There isn't much that hasn't yet been documented by the Gentoo crowd. If it can be documented, some Gentoo user will eventually document it. (This should be made a Law...)
True. Linux doesn't win by competing strongly in one market, it wins by competing in all markets at once, including ones that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to think about if they were caught in a sea of excruciating boredom. Putting their OS on a USB stick-sized computer with the raw power of a 1996 gaming rig isn't sexy to Microsoft, but there are companies who make money that way (google "gumstix").
Microsoft might own the desktop, but when you build, say, an autonomous blimp for a research project, you're not going to use Windows Mobile as the operating system. When you build your own Cell-based monster audio processor you're not going to use it either. Or when setting up a Playstation 2 cluster. Or when gutting an old CRT monitor, replacing the tube with an LCD screen and putting in everything you need to turn the thing into a combintaion TV/DVD player/PVR.
Linux is everywhere. It doesn't need to win against Microsoft, because it doesn't even need to compete - there are dozens of other playing fields it's already plaing on.
Now it's completely broken (it generates a 302 redirect that points at itself, ad infinitum).
Is it really that much extra effort for you to download a codec and just drop it in your '/Library/QuickTime/' folder??? I've more than half a dozen *other* codecs in there, as well, that also were not supported "out of the box". Adding them was no trying experience for me. It's simplicity itself, so far as I'm concerned.
Yes, it is. No matter what Xiph says, I've never managed to get the Ogg Vorbis QT component to work reliably. iTunes can read the metadata just fine, but playing a file often results in a crash.
By the way, where have you managed to find other codecs? I'd really like stuff like Modplug or a SID codec for QT, so I can listen to chiptunes on the Mac. Google searches for "quicktime codecs" or something similar obviously don't return anything useful.
My sig is a reference to both LucasArts' SCUMM-based games and two Slashdot memes (a statue of Natalie Portman (naked and petrified) and hot grits). I'd tell you to look it up on Wikipedia, but the entries regarding /. culture have been "cleaned up".
"The Third Place" does indeed carry a meaning*, but only to sociologists. The target demographic has about as much of a chance of getting it as if they'd used slogans like "voice the radicals"** or "left shift by three"***.
Ironically, the PS2 is used in exactly one of the social surroundings that the term "the third place" does not describe (see footnotes). Then again, Microsoft advertises Vista as an OS that makes you go "wow". In PR land, every day is opposite day.
* In sociology, the "third place" is any sociological surrounding except for those at work and at home.
** Radical consonants are a group of, well, consonants. Most consonants can be pronounced voiced or unvoiced, so the slogan tells us to pronounce voiced radical consonants. I have no idea how to, since the most familiar language that even uses radicals is an ancient Hebrew language.
*** This is Slashdot. Who here doesn't know what a bit shift is?
Ah. That's either the Pirate Bay Edition or the DVD-R Premium Edition.