The additional effort and time needed to convert MP3 to Atrac3 format might not be a popular.
Perhaps more importantly (seeing as this conversion will be pretty much invisible to the user) the loss of quality in the conversion won't be popular. It's not just audiophiles with perfect pitch who can hear the compression artifacts in a tune subjected to two different compressions.
As long as magazines point this out, the Walkman is doomed to failure unless Sony do a U-turn and rewrite their ROMs to handle native MP3.
[That said, I feel obliged to point out that I quite like ATRAC. The time-based compression saves all the guessing over how big any given MP3 will turn out and the sound quality is better than most -- if not all -- of the MP3s that I've heard.]
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that... didn't open when you pushed the button. So [...] I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
You were also very lucky that the eject button didn't work -- otherwise you would have been under it....
When I were a lad, VIC stood for Video Interface Chip.
Why didn't they make a portable video player and call it the Video Interface Companion or something.
Highly crass.
Note also that Tulip/Ironstone don't own any copyright on C64 firmware, so any C64 emulators they make will be as illegal as any on the net.
Níall.
Interesting, as it seems to be getting at the idea of launching different applications based on how long you hold down a hardware button, rather than how long you click and hold on the screen.
Even more specifically than that: it talks about "application buttons" -- buttons that are dedi
Therefore, as an alternative to launching applications by using the stylus, the Palm-size PC contains a plurality of buttons (called application buttons) that are used to launch the more common applications installed on a Palm-size PC.
The claim of this patent is on pressing buttons that exist solely for the purpose of launching applications. (Why do they insist on the term "clicking"? I've been pressing buttons for years.) This means that they can't sue you for using multiple key/button-presses on any general use keyboard/device.
It does mean, though, that they can sue you if you write a freeware patch for an "internet keyboard" or the like to added double-click or hold functionality to the browser button....
This ties in with the sentence further on which pertains to it being relevant to devices with limited resources, i.e. not very many buttons.
Their term "limited resource computer" is meaningless -- all computers have finite resources. In fact, further into the patent it expands the grounds thus:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates generally to computer systems, and more particularly to increasing the functionality of application buttons on a limited resource computing device.
Note: generally to computer systems. They did the old "pretend it relates to those new-fangled pocket thingies to confuse the judge whilst it does in fact relate to all computers" ruse.
But maybe there should be. Take Disney's handling of folk tales and out-of-copyright stories.
In the case of Snow White, everyone now calls the Dwarves by the names in the film -- Disney owns a copyright in those names.
Pinocchio -- Disney added the stupid little cricket, and consequently have copyright on it. Many of the Italians hate what has been done to their classic children's book.
The Little Princess -- Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale of "Can't always get what you want" -- characters renamed, happy ending added, and (a lesson learned from previous releases) the name changed to The Little Mermaid to stop other kids video companies releasing a competing product.
...and now children worldwide refuse the original versions of each of these tales because they're convinced that the Disney way is "the right way," and Disney thus has appropriated the rights to some of the most enduring Public Domain works known to man.
A similar thing happens with folk/public domain music. Do a popular arrangement, and suddenly people will refuse to listen to the original way -- the new way is the "right way". Then anyone wanting to sing it has to buy it off the arranger.
Public domain work misappropriated. Not technically theft, but I contest that it should be.
I really think we're asking for trouble if we start introducing these so-called 3D screens into common use.
A childhood peppered with 3D glasses and stereoscopic dot images has done some exceedingly funny things with my eyes -- I often find myself looking at shelves in bookshops and chemists' and see the items on the shelves popping out at me.
The reason? My brain has been trained to ignore the naturally-trained link between the focussing distance of the eyes' lenses and the angle my eyes are pointing at (binocular triangulation).
This can occur whenever there is any repeating pattern and is extremely disorientating. (And sometimes headache inducing.)
Some people were physically sick when they tried to use Virtual Reality (remember that?).
Now, I know they are adding some levels of variable focus into these things, but these just don't match the natural range the eye focuses to.
Portable means you can take it with you -- not that it's a good idea to wear it when walking. In fact, I'd put good money on the user manual saying not to use it when walking -- my MiniDisc player's manual does. After all, people wearing headphones while crossing the road are more likely to be hit by cars than people not wearing them.
But isn't world oil production determined by the large cartels -- OPEC et al -- and not by the amount of oil left? Is there any oil-field in the world being mined at maximum speed?
That's true. However, it might be better if it did -- Mark Thomas' exposé on Sellafield showed that seagulls were soiling the towns and countryside for miles around with excrement that breached regulations on radioactivity.
I don't know about you, but I say "better dead than shitting uranium".
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you with exhibit A: Windscale, a powerplant so disastrous and badly designed that they spared no expense in making it safe -- they changed its name to Sellafield.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Now, if your honour will allow, I present exhibit B: the waste facility at Douneray.
A large shaft was dug during construction to allow the pumping of seawater to the construction site. After construction finished, the sea end was plugged, and permission given to use it for the disposal of remaining building rubble.
This shaft, half full of water and of rubble, was then used for low level waste, both radioactive and non radioactive. Until one day there was a fire in it and the solid concrete lid was blown several yards away (who puts magnesium in a pit filled with water?)
Subsequent safety checks determined that the heat generated by the amount of radioactive materials was breaking up the pit and the sea cliff and would result in an environmental disaster as all this material leaked.
They had to empty the pit that they should never have been using in the first place.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
When Obi-Wan was faced with the proposition that a Sith Lord had infiltrated the senate and that Count Duku was trying to stop this, what if Duku had been telling the truth? What if Obi-Wan had had the opportunity to save the Republic but had instead given the soon-to-be-Emperor his clone army and a method of defeating the only effective resistance? [b]How would you feel watching the original trilogy knowing that it was Obi-Wan's fault?[b]
Tragedy of Greek proportions. Instead, all we had was inevitable failure. Dull
This does not mean that single photons lose energy on their way: they don't. A photon's energy is related with light's frequency (color), while the apparent brightness of the star is related to the number of photons that get here.
OK: E=hf
but
Doesn't the Doppler shift reduce the frequency of the light? In that case as f drops so does E -- the energy of the photon decreases. (In addition to the very low number of photons, of course.)
(Unless I've completely misunderstood the Doppler shift.)
If in doubt, call the fuzz. If you know where it is, the police can get in touch with the genuine owner, whether he is the poster or the person in the car.
Be careful there... round here you get modded down for not talking as if you're from the USA.
(In a recent example, a case about French musicians going after Apple for iPod royalties: someone started going on about the DMCA. I pointed out the poster was being US-centric and that the DMCA didn't apply in this case. That poster was not modded Offtopic, but I was modded Flamebait. Atrocious.)
Because plutonium is quite expensive, quite rare and quite unstable. You wouldn't want to put plutonium anywhere near a nuclear device for fear of premature ejac^H^H^Hxplosions.
HAL.
Actually, it isnt just CDR's that get this tax in Canada... its almost all storage devices.... I believe Australia and Britain pay very similar fee's.
In the UK, there was never such a levy on analogue media. However, I believe we introduced a levy to cope with the "perfect digital copy" in sound recordings. All this has done is made people use write-once CDRs instead of rewritable DATs as the CDR is not an audio-only format, so is exempt.
Instead of blaming the teachers for letting those kids be teased everyday, or blaming the kids themselves for venting their frustrations in an unacceptable manner (ie shooting up the place) the media and the parents had to blame doom.
They could have also blamed a national gun machismo, or more crucially the idiotic parents who stored lethal weapons where messed up, confused teenagers could get their hands on them. So they had to break locks, so what? All that shows is that the cases/locks weren't strong enough.
I do feel that violence in the media has a part to play, but having several projectile weapons in the house is certain to generate more familiarity and comfort with the devices than a pixelated BFG waving around a screen....
Young minds do not need violent video games to give them ideas.
Strictly, no. But games/films/comics/music/novels/plays/operas/philo sophy/politics will give them particular ideas. (Culture is no barrier to corruption.)
For example, there is an interesting phenomenon in the UK arising from a series of adverts for a Chocolate bar: Cadbury's flake. These adverts involved beautiful women eating the bar rather provocatively. For a man who went through puberty while these adverts were being shown, you can often get a rough estimate of his age by matching his sexual fantasy to a particular Flake advert. Is it the bath advert? The waterfall one? Etc.
A pubescent boy will have fantasies regardless of what he sees on TV, but what he sees on TV will doubtless affect what those fantasies are. I imagine there's a whole new generation of fantasies based on Lara Croft doing handstands....
What they need is decent supporting social contexts to show them the alternatives.
They need that too.
Be careful of stating "They don't need X, they need Y" as quite often X and Y are complementary and should both be supplied.
Don't present running down pedestrians as entertainment to 13 year olds while also saying why safe road use is A Good Thing (TM).
I've heard nothing but good words for Koss' "The Plug" earphones. They're set into those squidgy foam ear-plugs used by so many professionals in loud environments so have excellent blocking ability.
They're also surprisingly cheap. (Approx $50(US) equivalent, IIRC.)
Word of warning with these and all well-sealed earphones: the relatively small volume of air increases efficiency by a huge amount, particularly with an in-the-ear-canal pair. When using these, start with the volume *very low* and turn up *slowly*.
Before he got a C64 he was writing for the Speccy (with games such as Headbanger's Heaven) and Atari. Since then, he has worked with the Amiga, the ST, the Jaguar, PCs...
Retro outfit Retrospec have made a number of tributes to his games.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps more importantly (seeing as this conversion will be pretty much invisible to the user) the loss of quality in the conversion won't be popular. It's not just audiophiles with perfect pitch who can hear the compression artifacts in a tune subjected to two different compressions.
As long as magazines point this out, the Walkman is doomed to failure unless Sony do a U-turn and rewrite their ROMs to handle native MP3.
[That said, I feel obliged to point out that I quite like ATRAC. The time-based compression saves all the guessing over how big any given MP3 will turn out and the sound quality is better than most -- if not all -- of the MP3s that I've heard.]
HAL
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
You were also very lucky that the eject button didn't work -- otherwise you would have been under it....
HAL.When I were a lad, VIC stood for Video Interface Chip. Why didn't they make a portable video player and call it the Video Interface Companion or something. Highly crass. Note also that Tulip/Ironstone don't own any copyright on C64 firmware, so any C64 emulators they make will be as illegal as any on the net. Níall.
WMP 9 can't play these files or find the codec. Any hints
Apparently the CPU overclocks easily to 8MHz. Presumably the 4MHz synch is a was chosen to save batteries....
Even more specifically than that: it talks about "application buttons" -- buttons that are dedi
The claim of this patent is on pressing buttons that exist solely for the purpose of launching applications. (Why do they insist on the term "clicking"? I've been pressing buttons for years.) This means that they can't sue you for using multiple key/button-presses on any general use keyboard/device.It does mean, though, that they can sue you if you write a freeware patch for an "internet keyboard" or the like to added double-click or hold functionality to the browser button....
This ties in with the sentence further on which pertains to it being relevant to devices with limited resources, i.e. not very many buttons.
Their term "limited resource computer" is meaningless -- all computers have finite resources. In fact, further into the patent it expands the grounds thus:
Note: generally to computer systems. They did the old "pretend it relates to those new-fangled pocket thingies to confuse the judge whilst it does in fact relate to all computers" ruse.But maybe there should be. Take Disney's handling of folk tales and out-of-copyright stories.
In the case of Snow White, everyone now calls the Dwarves by the names in the film -- Disney owns a copyright in those names.
Pinocchio -- Disney added the stupid little cricket, and consequently have copyright on it. Many of the Italians hate what has been done to their classic children's book.
The Little Princess -- Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale of "Can't always get what you want" -- characters renamed, happy ending added, and (a lesson learned from previous releases) the name changed to The Little Mermaid to stop other kids video companies releasing a competing product.
...and now children worldwide refuse the original versions of each of these tales because they're convinced that the Disney way is "the right way," and Disney thus has appropriated the rights to some of the most enduring Public Domain works known to man.
A similar thing happens with folk/public domain music. Do a popular arrangement, and suddenly people will refuse to listen to the original way -- the new way is the "right way". Then anyone wanting to sing it has to buy it off the arranger.
Public domain work misappropriated. Not technically theft, but I contest that it should be.
HAL.
A childhood peppered with 3D glasses and stereoscopic dot images has done some exceedingly funny things with my eyes -- I often find myself looking at shelves in bookshops and chemists' and see the items on the shelves popping out at me.
The reason? My brain has been trained to ignore the naturally-trained link between the focussing distance of the eyes' lenses and the angle my eyes are pointing at (binocular triangulation).
This can occur whenever there is any repeating pattern and is extremely disorientating. (And sometimes headache inducing.)
Some people were physically sick when they tried to use Virtual Reality (remember that?).
Now, I know they are adding some levels of variable focus into these things, but these just don't match the natural range the eye focuses to.
HAL.
HAL.
But isn't world oil production determined by the large cartels -- OPEC et al -- and not by the amount of oil left? Is there any oil-field in the world being mined at maximum speed?
I don't know about you, but I say "better dead than shitting uranium".
HAL.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Now, if your honour will allow, I present exhibit B: the waste facility at Douneray.
A large shaft was dug during construction to allow the pumping of seawater to the construction site. After construction finished, the sea end was plugged, and permission given to use it for the disposal of remaining building rubble.
This shaft, half full of water and of rubble, was then used for low level waste, both radioactive and non radioactive. Until one day there was a fire in it and the solid concrete lid was blown several yards away (who puts magnesium in a pit filled with water?)
Subsequent safety checks determined that the heat generated by the amount of radioactive materials was breaking up the pit and the sea cliff and would result in an environmental disaster as all this material leaked.
They had to empty the pit that they should never have been using in the first place.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
HAL.
Tragedy of Greek proportions. Instead, all we had was inevitable failure. Dull
HAL
OK: E=hf
but
Doesn't the Doppler shift reduce the frequency of the light? In that case as f drops so does E -- the energy of the photon decreases. (In addition to the very low number of photons, of course.)
(Unless I've completely misunderstood the Doppler shift.)
HAL
(In a recent example, a case about French musicians going after Apple for iPod royalties: someone started going on about the DMCA. I pointed out the poster was being US-centric and that the DMCA didn't apply in this case. That poster was not modded Offtopic, but I was modded Flamebait. Atrocious.)
Because plutonium is quite expensive, quite rare and quite unstable. You wouldn't want to put plutonium anywhere near a nuclear device for fear of premature ejac^H^H^Hxplosions. HAL.
There are plenty of Z80-compatible high-speed chips available. Problem solved.
HAL
Do you know the finer points of French fair-use legislation? It's likely to be quite different from your own.
HAL
In the UK, there was never such a levy on analogue media. However, I believe we introduced a levy to cope with the "perfect digital copy" in sound recordings. All this has done is made people use write-once CDRs instead of rewritable DATs as the CDR is not an audio-only format, so is exempt.
Bit of a waste, that.
Hal.
They could have also blamed a national gun machismo, or more crucially the idiotic parents who stored lethal weapons where messed up, confused teenagers could get their hands on them. So they had to break locks, so what? All that shows is that the cases/locks weren't strong enough.
I do feel that violence in the media has a part to play, but having several projectile weapons in the house is certain to generate more familiarity and comfort with the devices than a pixelated BFG waving around a screen....
HAL.
Strictly, no. But games/films/comics/music/novels/plays/operas/philo sophy/politics will give them particular ideas. (Culture is no barrier to corruption.)
For example, there is an interesting phenomenon in the UK arising from a series of adverts for a Chocolate bar: Cadbury's flake. These adverts involved beautiful women eating the bar rather provocatively. For a man who went through puberty while these adverts were being shown, you can often get a rough estimate of his age by matching his sexual fantasy to a particular Flake advert. Is it the bath advert? The waterfall one? Etc.
A pubescent boy will have fantasies regardless of what he sees on TV, but what he sees on TV will doubtless affect what those fantasies are. I imagine there's a whole new generation of fantasies based on Lara Croft doing handstands....
What they need is decent supporting social contexts to show them the alternatives.
They need that too.
Be careful of stating "They don't need X, they need Y" as quite often X and Y are complementary and should both be supplied.
Don't present running down pedestrians as entertainment to 13 year olds while also saying why safe road use is A Good Thing (TM).
HAL
I've heard nothing but good words for Koss' "The Plug" earphones. They're set into those squidgy foam ear-plugs used by so many professionals in loud environments so have excellent blocking ability.
They're also surprisingly cheap. (Approx $50(US) equivalent, IIRC.)
Word of warning with these and all well-sealed earphones: the relatively small volume of air increases efficiency by a huge amount, particularly with an in-the-ear-canal pair. When using these, start with the volume *very low* and turn up *slowly*.
...human-powered distributed denial of service attack? (Slashdotting, to me and you....)
For a start, here's a list of the games he made on the C64.
Before he got a C64 he was writing for the Speccy (with games such as Headbanger's Heaven) and Atari. Since then, he has worked with the Amiga, the ST, the Jaguar, PCs...
Retro outfit Retrospec have made a number of tributes to his games.
HAL