Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use.
Media shifting is still perfectly legal in this country (the US). However, thanks to our good friend the DMCA, it is now illegal to break any system designed to prevent copying, no matter what the reason.
So it boils down to this: a standard redbook CD has no copy protection on it. Thus, it is perfectly legal for you to rip the CD to your computer and make a mix CD for your car, compress to mp3 for your iPod, and print out the raw bits and wallpaper your living room. However, almost all commercially-produced DVDs contain copy protection in the form of CSS. So while it is legal for you to copy the content of a DVD you own to another media (DVD, DVR, VHS, SVCD, whatever), the act of bypassing the CSS in order to get to the content is illegal. Most DVD players paid a licensing fee for the DeCSS algorithm, and likely signed a contract stating that they will not allow someone to use that algorithm to make a copy. So you can't hook a DVD player up to a DVD+R player and make a copy of your favorite movie (by design), nor does PowerDVD include a dumpvideo function. Any player which did not purchase a license and sign a contract is illegal, including every player available for Linux.
However, I'm pretty sure that clause of the DMCA has never been tested in court in the context of Fair Use, so it's hard to say whether it will stay legal for long.
I use mplayer on Linux, and fully exercise my fair use rights by watching the DVD I rightfully purchased. Sometimes I even dump the video to the hard drive and flip a few bits to convert from VOB to MPEG-2, for backup purposes on my RAID data server. Except for the fact that mplayer's DeCSS algorithm is illegal in this country (and only illegal because of a law on shaky ground), everything I do with my DVD video is perfectly legal under both my fair use rights and precidents set in the Betamax and Rio mp3 court cases.
As I've said before, this is a very nonsensical parallel.
Ok, I'll buy that, but that means your parallel was nonsensical as well, and we should abandon comparisons to democracy (representative or otherwise) altogether.
Of course... the father (state) knows best.
That's not what I said. The EFF is not the state; they are a private organization of consumers' rights advocates. How is what they are doing (protecting the consumer from rights violations) bad?
And my point was that there are better alternatives than market regulation.
Can you name a few?
If you want to talk about regulation, I'll gladly talk about them when they apply to certain externalities (e.g. preventing morons from dumping Mercury in my drinking water), but that can also be viewed through the lens of the tresspassing/private property model.
So you think all regulation is bad? And you're ok with monopolistic practices of corporations? And that the Almighty Dollar is the One True Way?
However, if this is true, it would pretty much make Flash useless, as flash based GUIs would become irritating, flash based start pages wouldnt work right, etc
Saying that the market does not work because the consumer does not have perfect access to all information is akin to saying that democracy does not work because the voter does not have perfect access to all information.
Yes, absolutely. Economics 101: one of the assumptions of the free market model is perfect information access on the demand side. Government 101: One of the assumptions of the true democracy is perfect information access on the voter side. Lucky for us, our economy is not a perfect free market, and we don't live in a perfect democracy. Our market is partially regulated, and our democracy is representative. These both try to correct information disparities.
Furthermore, the fact that the voter does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish democracy.
Correct. I guess that's why our representative democracy elects people whose job it is to gather more information than the general voter, and make decisions on our behalf. No one is abolishing democracy, but we are tweaking it a little to fit our non-perfect situation.
Likewise, the fact that the consumer does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish the market (or meddle with it, as may be the case).
It sure does. Perfect free markets only work if the consumer does have perfect information, so a little bit of regulation (meddling, to use your word) helps invigorate the market when the perfect free market is unattainable, which is basically all the time. The degree of regulation is of course a debatable subject, but to leave it out altogether is foolishness. We are (again) tweaking the free market model to fit our non-perfect situation.
If you think the consumer (or voter) lacks information that they should have, write about it, contact the media, or take out an add in a news paper.
That's exactly what they're doing. Did you read the article?
Competitors (/opposition parties) offering other products (/platforms) not suffering from the deficiency you are concerned with should already be doing this, but somethimes they make mistakes and it never hurts to help them out if you believe in the cause.
So competitors should do this for every single tiny difference between them and the other companies? Should they publish books? Competitors will advertise the things they think are more likely to sway people. There are many other things that would be better for the customer, but are not advertised because they are small. If one of those things affects the rights of the consumer, then the EFF and their ilk will spend money to let people know about it, even if the company does not. This is generally considered a Good Thing(tm).
As long as freedom of speech exists, meddling with the free market directly (through the use of coercive means) is not the optimal solution. Anyways, remember that the most important freedom (aside from freedom of speech) is the freedom to make mistakes (which applies to both consumers and voters).
I don't think you read the article at all. You're correct about the right to make mistakes, of course, but this is a tiny mistake with possibly big ramifications, that most people will not notice and the companies are not advertising against. Thus, the EFF is stepping up to educate people and help generate market regulation that corrects the information disparity between companies and consumers. They are helping the little guy, and not stepping on any business' toes. Are you so blinded by the concept of deregulation that you cannot see that certain regulation is necessary in our non-perfect market model, just like representation is necessary in our non-perfect democratic model?
I analyzed the source of the result page for "w3c recommendations". After looking at the page in the validator, I decided the following things were missing:
Two <img> tag src= attributes. Assuming a three-letter filename, that's (src="xxx.gif")*2 = 26 bytes.
Three <script> tag type= attributes. That's (type="text/javascript")*3 = 66 bytes.
Two <style> tag type= attributes. That's (type="text/css")*2 = 30 bytes.
205 attributes in the header and footer with missing quotes. That's 410 bytes.
12 attributes in each result with missing quotes. That's 10 results per page = 240 bytes.
Grand total: 772 bytes per page of results.
Using the highly non-authoritative figure of 200 million queries a day, that means that Google saves almost 144 GB of data transfer EVERY DAY, just by leaving out the quotation marks. I imagine leaving out all the unnecessary whitespace saves them at least double that.
Despite this, the same critics say it will be a big money-maker.
So? Most of Slashdot is in agreement that the Star Wars prequels were giant flaming piles of crap, but they were some of the highest grossing movies in years.
The best analogy to intellectual (or artificial) property I could come up with is fire. The first person to build a fire could claim to "own" the fire, but the moment he sells some of the fire to someone else, the fire he originally had is not diminished, while another fire is created. As much as the original creator of the fire would like to think he has control over who gets fire and how, the people he already gave it to could very easily give it to others outside the creator's control, without diminishing their own fire. Unless everyone agrees to get fire only from the original creator, he ultimately has no control. An artificial fire conservation rule is needed to maintain control.
And for the record, I don't think artificial property laws are wrong; on the contrary, in this monetarily-driven society, I think they are a great incentive to creativity, when used properly. However, most of the artificial property laws in the United States have gotten out of hand, simply because many people don't care enough about them to be enraged, leaving the people who DO care (the IP owners and their lobbyists) in a position to influence the law for their own benefit.
If there is a better solution out there that lets you view it without logging on to the internet every time, and protects us from priracy, I'd like to here it so I can tell my tech people.
Look, all you corporate media types seem to think that security is a binary situation: either your content is secure, or it isn't. The real world doesn't work that way, and "protecting yourself from piracy" is actually not a technological question, it's a social one.
I like your idea, and want to see it succeed, so hear me out.
Nothing is 100% secure. Period. There will always be a way to break whatever security you have placed on it. In the area of audio/video piracy, there's a mantra of, "if I can hear/see it, I can pirate it," even if that means placing a video camera in front of the screen and a microphone in front of the speakers.
That being said, there will always be people out there who will take whatever they want, without respecting your wishes, and without paying for it, simply because they are bastards. However, you cannot cripple your product, and alienate all your law-abiding and respectful customers, just to try and protect against the 0.01% of the population who are obsessed with 0-day releases. You cannot protect your product from piracy.
What you CAN do is to make your product attractive enough that obtaining it through proper channels has more value than pirating it. Most people don't want to break the law, so if you make doing things legally easy and painless, they will. Most people only pirate because of two reasons: a) they are poor and wouldn't have bought your product anyway, or b) they are the aforementioned bastards who will steal it even if they can afford it. Both groups can be safely ignored, as long as you don't piss off your customer base with overly restrictive DRM.
I am excited about the prospect of an online, pay-to-download media company actually listening to what its customers want, so let's take a look at your service, based on what you said earlier in the thread:
Encrypting your video stream: good. As long as the decryption is completely transparent to the user, and does not in any way interfere with watching the video (more on that later). Encrypting your video puts a roadblock in front of all the casual piraters, the ones who would just burn a copy to DVD and give it to all their friends. Most people will see that messing with the encryption would be a bigger pain in the ass than just downloading it legally. It won't stop the hardcore 0-day people, but then again, nothing will.
Ability to resell: very good. This lets the customer know that if they don't like what they downloaded, there is recourse for returning the product. Not even CD and DVD makers can make this claim.
Having to connect to the internet every time you watch: bad. It may sound like a beautiful dream, where people only watch videos if they have your permission, but this will likely be a sticking point for many people. It will drive customers away. As one of the grandparent posters pointed out, I don't always have internet access in all the places I would watch this video, such as with a laptop on an airplane or a long car trip. Storing the encryption key locally is slightly less secure, but not so much that everyone and their brother will start copying. Most people have no idea how encryption even WORKS, let alone how to look for a keypair hidden somewhere on their computer. It will not increase piracy appreciably. Locally stored decryption keys are used in iTunes, and Apple seems to be doing quite well. Again, you cannot stop those determined to undermine your protection systems, so don't worry about them. Worry about your user experience; add value, not protection.
Custom video player: not bad, but definitely not good. As has been stated before, I don't want to have multiple media players for multiple download services. I realize that it may strengthen your control over the media a bit, and many users will probab
I think we're running into a few semantic issues here.
The way I see it, there are two distinct types of property, and many of the discussions involving IP are hindered because people don't make the distinction between the two. To avoid the semantic pitfalls, we will call them Type I and Type II, and define them as such:
Type I: Anything that can be conserved. This could be called physical or natural property, but such terms have exceptions (such as your radio spectrum example) and are not very useful. Basically, this includes anything that you are not capable of possessing if I possess it, and is the most intuitive form of property. If I carve a statue, and I am in possession of the statue, then you cannot also be in possession of it; therefore, it is my property. Certain exceptions can be made by law, as with contract agreements to joint ownership, but they do not alter the definition.
Type II: Anything not conservable, onto which we artificially confer properties of conservation, for the purpose of achieving a goal. This I will call artificial property, and includes all the ephemerous things under the heading of IP: copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. Referring to the statue carved in the previous definition, we agreed that it was my property, since I was in possession of it. However, the *design* of the statue is not physical/natural/Type I property since it cannot be conserved. You can carve a second statue to look exactly like mine, and not diminish my possession of the original statue. However, we, as a society, might agree (via laws) to confer the idea that the design of the statue ought to be conserved. Thus, you would be prohibited from copying the design of the statue, and would be punished by law if you tried. Our goal in giving the design of the statue conservation-like qualities would be to provide some financial incentive to create the design in the first place. If I am the only person allowed to create statues like that for a limited amount of time, then I am guaranteed that if people want to buy the statue, they will buy it from me. Presumably, I could also give you permission to create statues that are identical, perhaps for a fee, but that would have to be part of the social agreement. My work in designing the statue will not be used for profit by someone else without my permission, and that is an incentive for me to create more statues and more statue designs. If I do not care about financial incentives, then as owner of the artificial property I am free to give the statue design away to anyone who asks for it, just as it is my right to give away the physical statue as owner of the physical/natural property. (Questions of whether or not artificial property is appropriate in our society come up occasionally, but they are not relevant to this discussion.)
So, to fulfill your request for a definition of property:
Anything that can be conserved, or agreed upon by society to be given qualities of conservation.
Anything not meeting the criteria in 1.
I hope that was philosophical and abstract enough for you.
From what I can tell, they're removing some of the suck, and a few incremental improvements, what motivates me as a consumer to want it?
The truly sad part is that it doesn't matter, because they're going to sell millions of units anyway. Every single new Dell sold in 2008+, and every computer at companies that uses Windows desktops (which is almost all of them) is going to have Vista installed on them, and Microsoft is going to be paid for every one of those copies.
Just because no one will go out and purchase a $400 upgrade from a Best Buy shelf doesn't mean Microsoft isn't going to sell any. They have a captive audience. For the majority of the world, Microsoft Windows is inseparable from the computer. (I realise this sentiment is not true on Slashdot, but the people who read this site are of a slightly different breed.) Telling people they can buy a computer without an operating system, and that they can install their own, is like telling people they can go buy a car without an engine, and then download a free one from the internet. Even if it's technically possible, it doesn't even occur to them. And as for MacOSX: most people who buy Dells are looking for the equivalent of a Honda Civic. A Mac is like buying a BMW.
And keep in mind that we (of the Slashdot kind) have been beating into people for years the need to keep their Windows machines all patched and updated. Well, isn't Vista just an update? Of course they will upgrade; their data needs to be protected from the evil identity thieves and hackers lurking in the intarweb!
In short, Vista will be everywhere as soon as Microsoft releases it, whether it's better than XP or not. And they're going to make a bundle.
So, we just install a few million of these tiny spinning superconductors under the floorboards of a spaceship, and eureka! artificial gravity.
So what would the gyroscopic effects of millions of tiny spinning masses be on the spaceship? Would these effects be bigger or smaller than the gyroscopic effects of a large spinning habitation module creating artificial gravity through centripital means?
What would happen if we spun all the little buggers the other way? Would they go from suck to blow?
So how do we convince owners of web sites to fix their broken CSS, JavaScript, user agent sniffing, and multimedia playback?
At this point, as a general web surfer, the only thing you can do is evangelize. When you find a website that does not have standards-compliant code, drop the webmaster a short note pointing them to the Webstandards.org FAQ, and perhaps (politely) point out where in their code they are non-compliant. Please note that there is a very big difference between "non-compliant" and "poorly designed." Flash, which is considered very poor form in web design, is compliant with the W3C spec as a valid <embed> object, and it does have its uses.
Unfortunately, user agent sniffing is a necessary evil, until such time as a certain unnamed browser (*cough*IE*cough*) decides to support webstandards properly. But since all that happens server-side, it should be trivial for a webmaster to impliment, and thoroughly transparent to the user. The way I see it is this: the webmaster can identify all the browsers which do not support web standards, and code a seperate stylesheet specifically for them (currently only IE). Everyone else gets the standard, and compliant, stylesheet. Hacks should not be used, since they rely on known bugs and could break with updates (such as in IE 7, which fixes bugs webmasters use to hack the broken box model in IE, but does not fix the box model). Many of these broken box model issues can be fixed with extra markup as well (nested, empty <div>s), which is not wrong per spec, but certainly clutters the page and goes against the intention of CSS.
Get out there and tell people why web standards are important. Standards of any kind are only useful if people adhere to them.
Nasa failed with a team of hundreds and a 9 figure budget.
The first much-ballyhooed flight may have failed (because the Pegasus rocket exploded, not because of a problem with the scramjet), but the Hyper-X program is considered a rousing success, with two successful hypersonic flights and a new jet-powered speed record of Mach 9.6.
That being said, I applaud the efforts of the University of Queensland, who is helping push the limits of aerospace knowledge. If they can do that on a shoestring budget, then that's all the better.
Both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer base use of quirks mode vs. standards mode on the presence and content of the document's <!DOCTYPE declaration.
Yes, and that only deals with HTML. I was discussing CSS (and I noticed you deftly avoided talking about the boxmodel issue I raised, choosing instead to discuss conversion of sugar to ethanol. Since the analogy is no longer valid and is obviously confusing the issue, I will stop using it). The differences between W3C HTML and non-spec HTML are not mutually exclusive; basically, non-spec HTML adds tags that are not in the spec. (Mozilla recently did this with the addition of the <canvas> tag, but they are working with the W3C to make it part of the next spec; Microsoft does no such thing when they add tags. Both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation are members of the consortium, but only one's products actually follow the specs. Hmmm.) The analog with the broken box model would be if the <font> tag affected the typeface of text in W3C browsers, but in Microsoft IE it created a text box much like a <div>. These two usages would be mutually exclusive renderings of the exact same definition, and would effectively render the tag broken in one of the two browsers. If they both followed a spec instead of making up their own definitions, these things wouldn't happen.
And for the record, all of your "broken" websites that you demand be fixed right now are only broken because of either CSS rendering inconsistencies such as the aforementioned box model, or they are using JavaScript methods that are not part of the official JavaScript spec and are exclusive to IE. No matter how crazy nasty your HTML is, there are no mutual incompatibilities between versions, and quirks mode is possible. This is not true for CSS and JavaScript.
If most filling stations in the area where you plan to operate your car have sugar drink and not gasoline, then it would be a good idea to have your car converted to run on sugar drink in addition to gasoline.
That's very practical of you, but unfortunately, CSS rendering does not work that way. To continue the car analogy, gasoline and sugar water are mutually exclusive fuels. Pouring sugar in the fuel tank of a standard internal combustion engine will gum up the works, and designing an engine to run on sugar water will mean it won't run on gasoline. One fuel requires vapor explosions, and the other would require chemical reactions.
Likewise, the broken CSS in Internet Explorer is mutually exlusive to spec CSS. Take, for example, the box model. In the spec, the "width" property is the width of the content area, and the border, padding, and margins are extra. In IE, the "width" property is the width of the entire box, border, padding, and margins included.
Take this statement: #box {
width: 100px;
padding: 10px;
border: 1px;
margin: 10px; }
In W3C browsers, the box will be 100 + (2*10 + 2*10 + 2*1) = 142px wide, with 100px for the content, according to the spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#formatting-model). In IE, the box will be 100px wide, with only 100 - (2*10 + 2*10 + 2*1) = 58px for the content, because IE ignores the spec.
Browsers cannot support both; they are mutually exclusive. The browser cannot tell whether the webmaster wanted "width" to mean the entire box, or just the content area. It has to assume one and use it. If the browser chooses the wrong one, then the website is "broken." But it's not the browser's fault, as long as the browser rendered correctly according to spec.
This is not a systemic problem: the spec works. This is Microsoft being a bunch of bastards and refusing to follow the spec.
The car won't run on both sugar and gasoline; it has to choose one. Asking browsers to support both box models is asking them to read the webmasters' minds, and don't think Firefox has an extension for that yet. Of course, the workaround now is to have the filling stations stock both sugar and gasoline, and dispense the correct one based on the type of car you drive. But it would be easier for everyone if all the car manufacturers just supported gasoline instead of their own brand of sugar fuel.
You have to support old code, broken code, and new code all at the same time.
No, I don't. If it's not HTML, then my HTML renderer does not have to render it properly. And unless it conforms to the HTML spec, it's not HTML. Period.
Old code is different from broken code, if it's compliant with an old standard. Hopefully the newer standard would include provisions for backwards compatibility (which HTML does), and thus old code becomes a non-issue for fully compliant renderers, because it's still valid. But I still have no obligation to properly render broken code, ever.
Sometimes supporting one 100% right can imply breaking another. I don't want 100% CSS2 support that nobody uses if it means I find older pages that I actually visit are broken.
Only if the spec is poorly written, which is not the case with HTML/CSS. CSS2 is fully backwards-compatible with CSS1. If a browser fully supports CSS2, and the pages you visit are still not rendered properly, then the pages are broken, not the renderer. And if all browsers supported CSS2 (well... if IE supported CSS2, since the rest of them already do) then people would use it. There are some very powerful features in there.
The "well they should fix their code" argument doesn't hold water with me. I want to see them now. I want the widest amount of support possible for what I encounter. If that happens at the expense of some esoteric CSS2 processing, so be it.
Because you are a lazy person who would rather patch the symptom than fix the problem. What would the internet be like if every ethernet card manufacturer supported a slightly different protocol, and some cards couldn't even talk to each other? We have standards for a reason. This is no different. Just because Microsoft has ignored the published HTML spec (which has existed since before Microsoft even decided to write an internet browser) as part of their "embrace, extend, extinguish" activities, it does not mean that MSHTML is the standard. Please keep in mind that the only reason that compliance is even an issue is that Microsoft purposefully breaks compliance in the interest of keeping people using their technology. If that didn't happen, then everyone would be using the same standard (just like TCP/IP in networks or gasoline in cars) and it would be totally transparent.
Non-compliant HTML is perhaps like music that exceeds the dynamic range that the lossless encoder does, or something like that (I know nothing about sound).
Non-compliant HTML is code that does not conform to the spec. If you wanted to talk about it in musical terms, it would be like a music file that was recorded with a variable sample rate*, but it was given a wav file header that specifies a fixed sample rate of 44.1kHz, as per the spec. This file is NOT a wav file, since it does not meet the spec, but it declares itself as one anyway. If this file is fed to a lossless encoder that assumes it's a wav file based on it's header, and the encode-decode process does not produce an exact copy of the original, then it's not the encoder's fault. The file is mal-formed. Many files are declared by a webserver to be HTML files (and thus proporting to conform to the HTML standard) when they are in fact not HTML files, since they don't conform to the spec. If they are not processed properly by an HTML renderer, then it's not the renderer's fault.
Anyone who claims that renderers should correctly render improperly formatted files is simply too lazy to write well-formed files, and thus their opinion does not matter. Should I demand that my car run properly on Kool-Aid(tm) instead of gasoline, even though Kool-Aid(tm) clearly does not conform to the automobile fuel spec?
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*Perhaps 96kHz during complicated sections, and 16kHz during silence or pure tones, with the range adjusting throughout the file. I leave the technical details as an exercise for the reader.
I cannot quite tell if you are being serious or not with your md5 signed sig, but i have not been able to verify it. Are you including html formatting?
Well, it's not the real hash, if that was what you meant by "serious." But it's not really a joke, either.
I put that statement in my sig to provoke thought about possible recursive message digests. Given a message m, a hash function h(), and a hash string k, is it possible to find a k such that h(m+k)=k? What about finding a k such that h(m1+k+m2)=k?
I'm not very well-versed in the mathematics of cryptography, so I can't answer that question in an abstract way, and in my very rudimentary searching in Google and Wikipedia, I can't find any information about it. Since I'm an engineer, my solution would probably be to set up an iterative program to brute-force a solution, using some popular root-finding method, but it would take forever, and there's no guarantee that it would work for every possible m, which is why I haven't done it yet.
IMO, the important question for a browser is can it render the kind of HTML you are likely to find on the net well. That includes broken, incorrect HTML.
But the Acid 2.0 Test was designed to test this, as well. There are several purposefully incorrect CSS statements in the Acid 2.0 Test that any standards-compliant CSS rendering engine should correctly ignore or gracefully degrade in a prespecified way, according to the spec.
You're right, passing the Acid 2.0 Test is not an end-all. Passing the Acid 2.0 Test does not imply perfect CSS standards compliance, but having perfect CSS standards compliance implies you will pass the Acid 2.0 Test. It is simply a goal to strive for, and should certainly not be the only goal you have for reaching compliance.
if he actually did anything interesting, that would fly in the face of everything he says and does in ep 4.
Like George Lucas has ever given a damn about continuity. Didn't Yoda mention that he taught Obi-Wan? How does Vader not recognize R2-D2 and C3P0?
Lucas doesn't care about the story. He puts in familiar characters just so you'll say, "Hey! I recognize him!" and go buy the action figure. If you thought any further than that about it, you're out of Lucas's league. This TV show will be no different.
I don't understand why people don't like the look of slashdot. I've been visiting this site for several years and I'm not sick of the layout. It works. The design is simple, fast (most of the time), and works in any browser.
Have to agree with you there. Slashdot is one of the few forum sites out there that manage to squeeze comments into vertical space effectively. It's very frustrating to read a forum topic on other sites and have each post be a single line of text in a box that is 600px tall to accomodate all the various user info on the left, a giant animated avatar, and a huge signature graphic.
It's also hard to read blog sites that manage to cram all their info in a column 400px wide.
I think sites like Slashdot do a fantastic job of placing a lot of information on the screen at once, scaling nicely to different browser window sizes, and doing it all without feeling cluttered.
Now, if I only had the ability to set a user-specific skin on Slashdot... but that's a topic for another thread.
Putting aside for a moment that the article itself is more about battery life of various players than about the affect of DRM on battery life, the few statements made about DRM and battery life came from a very flawed test. The authors never tested un-DRMed AAC or WMA, to account for the higher processing needed to decode the more complicated file formats.
But, in the interest of science, I would like to see DRM's real affect on battery life in portable music players. Here is the test I propose:
Purchase a 128kbps AAC/Fairplay track from iTunes. Purchase the same track as a 192kbps WMA/DRM 10 from Napster. Rip the same track from CD, and create five versions: - 44.1kHz wav - 128kbps mp3 - 192kbps mp3 - 128kbps AAC (clean - no FairPlay) - 192kbps WMA (clean - no DRM 10)
Now we have seven tracks to test, two with DRM, two identical without DRM, one as a control, and two for bitrate studies. For each track: - set the volume on max - turn off the backlight - plug in a set of standard earbud headphones - load the track on the player while the player is plugged in - make sure the track is the only thing on the hard drive - place the track in its own playlist and set to infinite repeat - press play at the moment you unplug the power cord - time how long it takes for the battery to run out - plug the player back in and charge to full
Ideally, this test should be run several times for each track on the exact same player, in the same order every time, to correct for possible changes in the amount of charge the battery can hold. It might be interesting to run the test on many different players, as well, and see how they fare.
Does anyone at Slashdot own a player that can handle all three formats, and would be willing to conduct the tests?
(disclaimer, not bashing Opera, just found the previous comment to lack perspective.)
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In all seriousness, Opera is a fantastic browser. I used it for a while and enjoyed the experience immensely. However, I prefer to use Open Source apps whenever possible, and since Firefox is as good as Opera and open source to boot, I prefer it. Personally, I don't care whether people use Firefox or Opera or Professor Whantunkel's Fantastical Whizz-Bang Browser, as long as the browser they use strives to be standards-compliant. IE purposefully breaks compliance.
The Acid 2.0 Test is not the end-all of compatibility. It is merely a goal to strive for. And, for the record, Safari beat us both.
Slashdot Mirror
Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use.
Media shifting is still perfectly legal in this country (the US). However, thanks to our good friend the DMCA, it is now illegal to break any system designed to prevent copying, no matter what the reason.
So it boils down to this: a standard redbook CD has no copy protection on it. Thus, it is perfectly legal for you to rip the CD to your computer and make a mix CD for your car, compress to mp3 for your iPod, and print out the raw bits and wallpaper your living room. However, almost all commercially-produced DVDs contain copy protection in the form of CSS. So while it is legal for you to copy the content of a DVD you own to another media (DVD, DVR, VHS, SVCD, whatever), the act of bypassing the CSS in order to get to the content is illegal. Most DVD players paid a licensing fee for the DeCSS algorithm, and likely signed a contract stating that they will not allow someone to use that algorithm to make a copy. So you can't hook a DVD player up to a DVD+R player and make a copy of your favorite movie (by design), nor does PowerDVD include a dumpvideo function. Any player which did not purchase a license and sign a contract is illegal, including every player available for Linux.
However, I'm pretty sure that clause of the DMCA has never been tested in court in the context of Fair Use, so it's hard to say whether it will stay legal for long.
I use mplayer on Linux, and fully exercise my fair use rights by watching the DVD I rightfully purchased. Sometimes I even dump the video to the hard drive and flip a few bits to convert from VOB to MPEG-2, for backup purposes on my RAID data server. Except for the fact that mplayer's DeCSS algorithm is illegal in this country (and only illegal because of a law on shaky ground), everything I do with my DVD video is perfectly legal under both my fair use rights and precidents set in the Betamax and Rio mp3 court cases.
As I've said before, this is a very nonsensical parallel.
Ok, I'll buy that, but that means your parallel was nonsensical as well, and we should abandon comparisons to democracy (representative or otherwise) altogether.
Of course... the father (state) knows best.
That's not what I said. The EFF is not the state; they are a private organization of consumers' rights advocates. How is what they are doing (protecting the consumer from rights violations) bad?
And my point was that there are better alternatives than market regulation.
Can you name a few?
If you want to talk about regulation, I'll gladly talk about them when they apply to certain externalities (e.g. preventing morons from dumping Mercury in my drinking water), but that can also be viewed through the lens of the tresspassing/private property model.
So you think all regulation is bad? And you're ok with monopolistic practices of corporations? And that the Almighty Dollar is the One True Way?
However, if this is true, it would pretty much make Flash useless, as flash based GUIs would become irritating, flash based start pages wouldnt work right, etc
How is this different, again?
Saying that the market does not work because the consumer does not have perfect access to all information is akin to saying that democracy does not work because the voter does not have perfect access to all information.
Yes, absolutely. Economics 101: one of the assumptions of the free market model is perfect information access on the demand side. Government 101: One of the assumptions of the true democracy is perfect information access on the voter side. Lucky for us, our economy is not a perfect free market, and we don't live in a perfect democracy. Our market is partially regulated, and our democracy is representative. These both try to correct information disparities.
Furthermore, the fact that the voter does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish democracy.
Correct. I guess that's why our representative democracy elects people whose job it is to gather more information than the general voter, and make decisions on our behalf. No one is abolishing democracy, but we are tweaking it a little to fit our non-perfect situation.
Likewise, the fact that the consumer does not have perfect access to information does not give anyone the right to abolish the market (or meddle with it, as may be the case).
It sure does. Perfect free markets only work if the consumer does have perfect information, so a little bit of regulation (meddling, to use your word) helps invigorate the market when the perfect free market is unattainable, which is basically all the time. The degree of regulation is of course a debatable subject, but to leave it out altogether is foolishness. We are (again) tweaking the free market model to fit our non-perfect situation.
If you think the consumer (or voter) lacks information that they should have, write about it, contact the media, or take out an add in a news paper.
That's exactly what they're doing. Did you read the article?
Competitors (/opposition parties) offering other products (/platforms) not suffering from the deficiency you are concerned with should already be doing this, but somethimes they make mistakes and it never hurts to help them out if you believe in the cause.
So competitors should do this for every single tiny difference between them and the other companies? Should they publish books? Competitors will advertise the things they think are more likely to sway people. There are many other things that would be better for the customer, but are not advertised because they are small. If one of those things affects the rights of the consumer, then the EFF and their ilk will spend money to let people know about it, even if the company does not. This is generally considered a Good Thing(tm).
As long as freedom of speech exists, meddling with the free market directly (through the use of coercive means) is not the optimal solution. Anyways, remember that the most important freedom (aside from freedom of speech) is the freedom to make mistakes (which applies to both consumers and voters).
I don't think you read the article at all. You're correct about the right to make mistakes, of course, but this is a tiny mistake with possibly big ramifications, that most people will not notice and the companies are not advertising against. Thus, the EFF is stepping up to educate people and help generate market regulation that corrects the information disparity between companies and consumers. They are helping the little guy, and not stepping on any business' toes. Are you so blinded by the concept of deregulation that you cannot see that certain regulation is necessary in our non-perfect market model, just like representation is necessary in our non-perfect democratic model?
Some quick math:
I analyzed the source of the result page for "w3c recommendations". After looking at the page in the validator, I decided the following things were missing:
Two <img> tag src= attributes. Assuming a three-letter filename, that's (src="xxx.gif")*2 = 26 bytes.
Three <script> tag type= attributes. That's (type="text/javascript")*3 = 66 bytes.
Two <style> tag type= attributes. That's (type="text/css")*2 = 30 bytes.
205 attributes in the header and footer with missing quotes. That's 410 bytes.
12 attributes in each result with missing quotes. That's 10 results per page = 240 bytes.
Grand total: 772 bytes per page of results.
Using the highly non-authoritative figure of 200 million queries a day, that means that Google saves almost 144 GB of data transfer EVERY DAY, just by leaving out the quotation marks. I imagine leaving out all the unnecessary whitespace saves them at least double that.
So yeah, probably for bandwidth.
Despite this, the same critics say it will be a big money-maker.
So? Most of Slashdot is in agreement that the Star Wars prequels were giant flaming piles of crap, but they were some of the highest grossing movies in years.
Agreed.
The best analogy to intellectual (or artificial) property I could come up with is fire. The first person to build a fire could claim to "own" the fire, but the moment he sells some of the fire to someone else, the fire he originally had is not diminished, while another fire is created. As much as the original creator of the fire would like to think he has control over who gets fire and how, the people he already gave it to could very easily give it to others outside the creator's control, without diminishing their own fire. Unless everyone agrees to get fire only from the original creator, he ultimately has no control. An artificial fire conservation rule is needed to maintain control.
And for the record, I don't think artificial property laws are wrong; on the contrary, in this monetarily-driven society, I think they are a great incentive to creativity, when used properly. However, most of the artificial property laws in the United States have gotten out of hand, simply because many people don't care enough about them to be enraged, leaving the people who DO care (the IP owners and their lobbyists) in a position to influence the law for their own benefit.
If there is a better solution out there that lets you view it without logging on to the internet every time, and protects us from priracy, I'd like to here it so I can tell my tech people.
Look, all you corporate media types seem to think that security is a binary situation: either your content is secure, or it isn't. The real world doesn't work that way, and "protecting yourself from piracy" is actually not a technological question, it's a social one.
I like your idea, and want to see it succeed, so hear me out.
Nothing is 100% secure. Period. There will always be a way to break whatever security you have placed on it. In the area of audio/video piracy, there's a mantra of, "if I can hear/see it, I can pirate it," even if that means placing a video camera in front of the screen and a microphone in front of the speakers.
That being said, there will always be people out there who will take whatever they want, without respecting your wishes, and without paying for it, simply because they are bastards. However, you cannot cripple your product, and alienate all your law-abiding and respectful customers, just to try and protect against the 0.01% of the population who are obsessed with 0-day releases. You cannot protect your product from piracy.
What you CAN do is to make your product attractive enough that obtaining it through proper channels has more value than pirating it. Most people don't want to break the law, so if you make doing things legally easy and painless, they will. Most people only pirate because of two reasons: a) they are poor and wouldn't have bought your product anyway, or b) they are the aforementioned bastards who will steal it even if they can afford it. Both groups can be safely ignored, as long as you don't piss off your customer base with overly restrictive DRM.
I am excited about the prospect of an online, pay-to-download media company actually listening to what its customers want, so let's take a look at your service, based on what you said earlier in the thread:
Encrypting your video stream: good. As long as the decryption is completely transparent to the user, and does not in any way interfere with watching the video (more on that later). Encrypting your video puts a roadblock in front of all the casual piraters, the ones who would just burn a copy to DVD and give it to all their friends. Most people will see that messing with the encryption would be a bigger pain in the ass than just downloading it legally. It won't stop the hardcore 0-day people, but then again, nothing will.
Ability to resell: very good. This lets the customer know that if they don't like what they downloaded, there is recourse for returning the product. Not even CD and DVD makers can make this claim.
Having to connect to the internet every time you watch: bad. It may sound like a beautiful dream, where people only watch videos if they have your permission, but this will likely be a sticking point for many people. It will drive customers away. As one of the grandparent posters pointed out, I don't always have internet access in all the places I would watch this video, such as with a laptop on an airplane or a long car trip. Storing the encryption key locally is slightly less secure, but not so much that everyone and their brother will start copying. Most people have no idea how encryption even WORKS, let alone how to look for a keypair hidden somewhere on their computer. It will not increase piracy appreciably. Locally stored decryption keys are used in iTunes, and Apple seems to be doing quite well. Again, you cannot stop those determined to undermine your protection systems, so don't worry about them. Worry about your user experience; add value, not protection.
Custom video player: not bad, but definitely not good. As has been stated before, I don't want to have multiple media players for multiple download services. I realize that it may strengthen your control over the media a bit, and many users will probab
I dispute that Windows is like a Civic. Honda has a reputation for making reliable, well-engineered cars that Windows does not deserve.
Ok then, a used, crappy Civic.
And Windows MCE is like a used, crappy Civic with $1500 rims, a wooden spoiler, visible bondo, and a crack in the windshield.
The way I see it, there are two distinct types of property, and many of the discussions involving IP are hindered because people don't make the distinction between the two. To avoid the semantic pitfalls, we will call them Type I and Type II, and define them as such:
Type I: Anything that can be conserved. This could be called physical or natural property, but such terms have exceptions (such as your radio spectrum example) and are not very useful. Basically, this includes anything that you are not capable of possessing if I possess it, and is the most intuitive form of property. If I carve a statue, and I am in possession of the statue, then you cannot also be in possession of it; therefore, it is my property. Certain exceptions can be made by law, as with contract agreements to joint ownership, but they do not alter the definition.
Type II: Anything not conservable, onto which we artificially confer properties of conservation, for the purpose of achieving a goal. This I will call artificial property, and includes all the ephemerous things under the heading of IP: copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc. Referring to the statue carved in the previous definition, we agreed that it was my property, since I was in possession of it. However, the *design* of the statue is not physical/natural/Type I property since it cannot be conserved. You can carve a second statue to look exactly like mine, and not diminish my possession of the original statue. However, we, as a society, might agree (via laws) to confer the idea that the design of the statue ought to be conserved. Thus, you would be prohibited from copying the design of the statue, and would be punished by law if you tried. Our goal in giving the design of the statue conservation-like qualities would be to provide some financial incentive to create the design in the first place. If I am the only person allowed to create statues like that for a limited amount of time, then I am guaranteed that if people want to buy the statue, they will buy it from me. Presumably, I could also give you permission to create statues that are identical, perhaps for a fee, but that would have to be part of the social agreement. My work in designing the statue will not be used for profit by someone else without my permission, and that is an incentive for me to create more statues and more statue designs. If I do not care about financial incentives, then as owner of the artificial property I am free to give the statue design away to anyone who asks for it, just as it is my right to give away the physical statue as owner of the physical/natural property. (Questions of whether or not artificial property is appropriate in our society come up occasionally, but they are not relevant to this discussion.)
So, to fulfill your request for a definition of property:
I hope that was philosophical and abstract enough for you.
From what I can tell, they're removing some of the suck, and a few incremental improvements, what motivates me as a consumer to want it?
The truly sad part is that it doesn't matter, because they're going to sell millions of units anyway. Every single new Dell sold in 2008+, and every computer at companies that uses Windows desktops (which is almost all of them) is going to have Vista installed on them, and Microsoft is going to be paid for every one of those copies.
Just because no one will go out and purchase a $400 upgrade from a Best Buy shelf doesn't mean Microsoft isn't going to sell any. They have a captive audience. For the majority of the world, Microsoft Windows is inseparable from the computer. (I realise this sentiment is not true on Slashdot, but the people who read this site are of a slightly different breed.) Telling people they can buy a computer without an operating system, and that they can install their own, is like telling people they can go buy a car without an engine, and then download a free one from the internet. Even if it's technically possible, it doesn't even occur to them. And as for MacOSX: most people who buy Dells are looking for the equivalent of a Honda Civic. A Mac is like buying a BMW.
And keep in mind that we (of the Slashdot kind) have been beating into people for years the need to keep their Windows machines all patched and updated. Well, isn't Vista just an update? Of course they will upgrade; their data needs to be protected from the evil identity thieves and hackers lurking in the intarweb!
In short, Vista will be everywhere as soon as Microsoft releases it, whether it's better than XP or not. And they're going to make a bundle.
So, we just install a few million of these tiny spinning superconductors under the floorboards of a spaceship, and eureka! artificial gravity.
So what would the gyroscopic effects of millions of tiny spinning masses be on the spaceship? Would these effects be bigger or smaller than the gyroscopic effects of a large spinning habitation module creating artificial gravity through centripital means?
What would happen if we spun all the little buggers the other way? Would they go from suck to blow?
So how do we convince owners of web sites to fix their broken CSS, JavaScript, user agent sniffing, and multimedia playback?
At this point, as a general web surfer, the only thing you can do is evangelize. When you find a website that does not have standards-compliant code, drop the webmaster a short note pointing them to the Webstandards.org FAQ, and perhaps (politely) point out where in their code they are non-compliant. Please note that there is a very big difference between "non-compliant" and "poorly designed." Flash, which is considered very poor form in web design, is compliant with the W3C spec as a valid <embed> object, and it does have its uses.
Unfortunately, user agent sniffing is a necessary evil, until such time as a certain unnamed browser (*cough*IE*cough*) decides to support webstandards properly. But since all that happens server-side, it should be trivial for a webmaster to impliment, and thoroughly transparent to the user. The way I see it is this: the webmaster can identify all the browsers which do not support web standards, and code a seperate stylesheet specifically for them (currently only IE). Everyone else gets the standard, and compliant, stylesheet. Hacks should not be used, since they rely on known bugs and could break with updates (such as in IE 7, which fixes bugs webmasters use to hack the broken box model in IE, but does not fix the box model). Many of these broken box model issues can be fixed with extra markup as well (nested, empty <div>s), which is not wrong per spec, but certainly clutters the page and goes against the intention of CSS.
Get out there and tell people why web standards are important. Standards of any kind are only useful if people adhere to them.
Nasa failed with a team of hundreds and a 9 figure budget.
The first much-ballyhooed flight may have failed (because the Pegasus rocket exploded, not because of a problem with the scramjet), but the Hyper-X program is considered a rousing success, with two successful hypersonic flights and a new jet-powered speed record of Mach 9.6.
That being said, I applaud the efforts of the University of Queensland, who is helping push the limits of aerospace knowledge. If they can do that on a shoestring budget, then that's all the better.
Not a dupe. They tried this 5 years ago and it didn't work. Now they're trying it again.
FTA:
Both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer base use of quirks mode vs. standards mode on the presence and content of the document's <!DOCTYPE declaration.
Yes, and that only deals with HTML. I was discussing CSS (and I noticed you deftly avoided talking about the boxmodel issue I raised, choosing instead to discuss conversion of sugar to ethanol. Since the analogy is no longer valid and is obviously confusing the issue, I will stop using it). The differences between W3C HTML and non-spec HTML are not mutually exclusive; basically, non-spec HTML adds tags that are not in the spec. (Mozilla recently did this with the addition of the <canvas> tag, but they are working with the W3C to make it part of the next spec; Microsoft does no such thing when they add tags. Both Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation are members of the consortium, but only one's products actually follow the specs. Hmmm.) The analog with the broken box model would be if the <font> tag affected the typeface of text in W3C browsers, but in Microsoft IE it created a text box much like a <div>. These two usages would be mutually exclusive renderings of the exact same definition, and would effectively render the tag broken in one of the two browsers. If they both followed a spec instead of making up their own definitions, these things wouldn't happen.
And for the record, all of your "broken" websites that you demand be fixed right now are only broken because of either CSS rendering inconsistencies such as the aforementioned box model, or they are using JavaScript methods that are not part of the official JavaScript spec and are exclusive to IE. No matter how crazy nasty your HTML is, there are no mutual incompatibilities between versions, and quirks mode is possible. This is not true for CSS and JavaScript.
If most filling stations in the area where you plan to operate your car have sugar drink and not gasoline, then it would be a good idea to have your car converted to run on sugar drink in addition to gasoline.
That's very practical of you, but unfortunately, CSS rendering does not work that way. To continue the car analogy, gasoline and sugar water are mutually exclusive fuels. Pouring sugar in the fuel tank of a standard internal combustion engine will gum up the works, and designing an engine to run on sugar water will mean it won't run on gasoline. One fuel requires vapor explosions, and the other would require chemical reactions.
Likewise, the broken CSS in Internet Explorer is mutually exlusive to spec CSS. Take, for example, the box model. In the spec, the "width" property is the width of the content area, and the border, padding, and margins are extra. In IE, the "width" property is the width of the entire box, border, padding, and margins included.
Take this statement:
#box {
width: 100px;
padding: 10px;
border: 1px;
margin: 10px;
}
In W3C browsers, the box will be 100 + (2*10 + 2*10 + 2*1) = 142px wide, with 100px for the content, according to the spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1#formatting-model).
In IE, the box will be 100px wide, with only 100 - (2*10 + 2*10 + 2*1) = 58px for the content, because IE ignores the spec.
Browsers cannot support both; they are mutually exclusive. The browser cannot tell whether the webmaster wanted "width" to mean the entire box, or just the content area. It has to assume one and use it. If the browser chooses the wrong one, then the website is "broken." But it's not the browser's fault, as long as the browser rendered correctly according to spec.
This is not a systemic problem: the spec works. This is Microsoft being a bunch of bastards and refusing to follow the spec.
The car won't run on both sugar and gasoline; it has to choose one. Asking browsers to support both box models is asking them to read the webmasters' minds, and don't think Firefox has an extension for that yet. Of course, the workaround now is to have the filling stations stock both sugar and gasoline, and dispense the correct one based on the type of car you drive. But it would be easier for everyone if all the car manufacturers just supported gasoline instead of their own brand of sugar fuel.
You have to support old code, broken code, and new code all at the same time.
... if IE supported CSS2, since the rest of them already do) then people would use it. There are some very powerful features in there.
No, I don't. If it's not HTML, then my HTML renderer does not have to render it properly. And unless it conforms to the HTML spec, it's not HTML. Period.
Old code is different from broken code, if it's compliant with an old standard. Hopefully the newer standard would include provisions for backwards compatibility (which HTML does), and thus old code becomes a non-issue for fully compliant renderers, because it's still valid. But I still have no obligation to properly render broken code, ever.
Sometimes supporting one 100% right can imply breaking another. I don't want 100% CSS2 support that nobody uses if it means I find older pages that I actually visit are broken.
Only if the spec is poorly written, which is not the case with HTML/CSS. CSS2 is fully backwards-compatible with CSS1. If a browser fully supports CSS2, and the pages you visit are still not rendered properly, then the pages are broken, not the renderer. And if all browsers supported CSS2 (well
The "well they should fix their code" argument doesn't hold water with me. I want to see them now. I want the widest amount of support possible for what I encounter. If that happens at the expense of some esoteric CSS2 processing, so be it.
Because you are a lazy person who would rather patch the symptom than fix the problem. What would the internet be like if every ethernet card manufacturer supported a slightly different protocol, and some cards couldn't even talk to each other? We have standards for a reason. This is no different. Just because Microsoft has ignored the published HTML spec (which has existed since before Microsoft even decided to write an internet browser) as part of their "embrace, extend, extinguish" activities, it does not mean that MSHTML is the standard. Please keep in mind that the only reason that compliance is even an issue is that Microsoft purposefully breaks compliance in the interest of keeping people using their technology. If that didn't happen, then everyone would be using the same standard (just like TCP/IP in networks or gasoline in cars) and it would be totally transparent.
Non-compliant HTML is perhaps like music that exceeds the dynamic range that the lossless encoder does, or something like that (I know nothing about sound).
Non-compliant HTML is code that does not conform to the spec. If you wanted to talk about it in musical terms, it would be like a music file that was recorded with a variable sample rate*, but it was given a wav file header that specifies a fixed sample rate of 44.1kHz, as per the spec. This file is NOT a wav file, since it does not meet the spec, but it declares itself as one anyway. If this file is fed to a lossless encoder that assumes it's a wav file based on it's header, and the encode-decode process does not produce an exact copy of the original, then it's not the encoder's fault. The file is mal-formed. Many files are declared by a webserver to be HTML files (and thus proporting to conform to the HTML standard) when they are in fact not HTML files, since they don't conform to the spec. If they are not processed properly by an HTML renderer, then it's not the renderer's fault.
Anyone who claims that renderers should correctly render improperly formatted files is simply too lazy to write well-formed files, and thus their opinion does not matter. Should I demand that my car run properly on Kool-Aid(tm) instead of gasoline, even though Kool-Aid(tm) clearly does not conform to the automobile fuel spec?
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*Perhaps 96kHz during complicated sections, and 16kHz during silence or pure tones, with the range adjusting throughout the file. I leave the technical details as an exercise for the reader.
I cannot quite tell if you are being serious or not with your md5 signed sig, but i have not been able to verify it. Are you including html formatting?
Well, it's not the real hash, if that was what you meant by "serious." But it's not really a joke, either.
I put that statement in my sig to provoke thought about possible recursive message digests. Given a message m, a hash function h(), and a hash string k, is it possible to find a k such that h(m+k)=k? What about finding a k such that h(m1+k+m2)=k?
I'm not very well-versed in the mathematics of cryptography, so I can't answer that question in an abstract way, and in my very rudimentary searching in Google and Wikipedia, I can't find any information about it. Since I'm an engineer, my solution would probably be to set up an iterative program to brute-force a solution, using some popular root-finding method, but it would take forever, and there's no guarantee that it would work for every possible m, which is why I haven't done it yet.
IMO, the important question for a browser is can it render the kind of HTML you are likely to find on the net well. That includes broken, incorrect HTML.
But the Acid 2.0 Test was designed to test this, as well. There are several purposefully incorrect CSS statements in the Acid 2.0 Test that any standards-compliant CSS rendering engine should correctly ignore or gracefully degrade in a prespecified way, according to the spec.
You're right, passing the Acid 2.0 Test is not an end-all. Passing the Acid 2.0 Test does not imply perfect CSS standards compliance, but having perfect CSS standards compliance implies you will pass the Acid 2.0 Test. It is simply a goal to strive for, and should certainly not be the only goal you have for reaching compliance.
if he actually did anything interesting, that would fly in the face of everything he says and does in ep 4.
Like George Lucas has ever given a damn about continuity. Didn't Yoda mention that he taught Obi-Wan? How does Vader not recognize R2-D2 and C3P0?
Lucas doesn't care about the story. He puts in familiar characters just so you'll say, "Hey! I recognize him!" and go buy the action figure. If you thought any further than that about it, you're out of Lucas's league. This TV show will be no different.
I don't understand why people don't like the look of slashdot. I've been visiting this site for several years and I'm not sick of the layout. It works. The design is simple, fast (most of the time), and works in any browser.
Have to agree with you there. Slashdot is one of the few forum sites out there that manage to squeeze comments into vertical space effectively. It's very frustrating to read a forum topic on other sites and have each post be a single line of text in a box that is 600px tall to accomodate all the various user info on the left, a giant animated avatar, and a huge signature graphic.
It's also hard to read blog sites that manage to cram all their info in a column 400px wide.
I think sites like Slashdot do a fantastic job of placing a lot of information on the screen at once, scaling nicely to different browser window sizes, and doing it all without feeling cluttered.
Now, if I only had the ability to set a user-specific skin on Slashdot... but that's a topic for another thread.
Putting aside for a moment that the article itself is more about battery life of various players than about the affect of DRM on battery life, the few statements made about DRM and battery life came from a very flawed test. The authors never tested un-DRMed AAC or WMA, to account for the higher processing needed to decode the more complicated file formats.
But, in the interest of science, I would like to see DRM's real affect on battery life in portable music players. Here is the test I propose:
Purchase a 128kbps AAC/Fairplay track from iTunes.
Purchase the same track as a 192kbps WMA/DRM 10 from Napster.
Rip the same track from CD, and create five versions:
- 44.1kHz wav
- 128kbps mp3
- 192kbps mp3
- 128kbps AAC (clean - no FairPlay)
- 192kbps WMA (clean - no DRM 10)
Now we have seven tracks to test, two with DRM, two identical without DRM, one as a control, and two for bitrate studies. For each track:
- set the volume on max
- turn off the backlight
- plug in a set of standard earbud headphones
- load the track on the player while the player is plugged in
- make sure the track is the only thing on the hard drive
- place the track in its own playlist and set to infinite repeat
- press play at the moment you unplug the power cord
- time how long it takes for the battery to run out
- plug the player back in and charge to full
Ideally, this test should be run several times for each track on the exact same player, in the same order every time, to correct for possible changes in the amount of charge the battery can hold. It might be interesting to run the test on many different players, as well, and see how they fare.
Does anyone at Slashdot own a player that can handle all three formats, and would be willing to conduct the tests?
When Opera opens its source, come back to me.
Sincerely,
Firefox Fan
(disclaimer, not bashing Opera, just found the previous comment to lack perspective.)
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In all seriousness, Opera is a fantastic browser. I used it for a while and enjoyed the experience immensely. However, I prefer to use Open Source apps whenever possible, and since Firefox is as good as Opera and open source to boot, I prefer it. Personally, I don't care whether people use Firefox or Opera or Professor Whantunkel's Fantastical Whizz-Bang Browser, as long as the browser they use strives to be standards-compliant. IE purposefully breaks compliance.
The Acid 2.0 Test is not the end-all of compatibility. It is merely a goal to strive for. And, for the record, Safari beat us both.