some guy claims that he has access to the neccessary docus, but the rockbox-developer don't even consider looking at it, unless they get official permission to use it.
Why not use the old, tried-and-tested method of clean-room reverse-enginering? Recruit several people with no Rockbox programming exposure to look at the documents and write their own version of the specs, noting entry points, API calls, and so on. Get them to publish the documentation using some version of the GPL. Then fire them, put them out to pasture. Ensure they never communicate directly with any of the Rockbox programmers regarding what they read.
Then get people who have never read the original documents to create code implementing the published doduments.
Because of increasing restrictions on reverse engineering in the US, the document analysis team should be based in the EU or Asia. Or preferably Russia or China.
What you people should be doing is hacking one of those DVD-based video players with the 10 inch screens, adding a USB port or something.
Every time the great Rockbox guys get a mention on/. there's always some poster who tells them to go do something that the poster is more interested in.
If it means so much to you then why don't you go do something with one of these DVD players? Nobody's stopping you. The Rockbox code is even GPLd so you can start from there.
This is analogous to what happens when people post in cool hacks for old 8-bit pcs, or for tiny web servers, or for bizarre WiFi rigs. Sometimes people just do stuff because they already have the hardware, they know it well, and it gives them a buzz.
The Belkin add-on costs $50, records at 8KHz mono, drains your battery, and sounds like crap. It also has terible recording and UI options. Edison got better fidelity with wax cylinders, and probably more flexibility.
Well, with the $1,000+ I'd have saved by buying a PC instead of a Mac, I'm sure I could buy one or two cool packages that might outperform your OSX freeware.
he is carefully choosing his words... he has to play nice with the RIAA
I agree with you, Steve Jobs always carefully chooses his words. But that's because he has to play nice with the idealists of the world. He isn't just selling computers, or sugared water - he's selling the dream that by consuming his product you are somehow entering a niche world of elite aesthetics and awareness. That's the crux of Apple's marketing since its inception.
For me the most eye-opening part of the interview is when he states that jailing unauthorised music swappers is a reasonable proposition.
This from a guy who got started stealing long distance service and reselling it on the Berkeley campus.
You've come a long way, baby.
the recording industry has been threatening to throw anyone caught illegally downloading music in jail. Is that a smart approach... I think that they're within their rights to try to keep people from stealing their product.
What's to keep you from buying, say, a 10GB iPod ($299), and a 40GB 2.5" HDD
Em, because the iPod uses 1.8" drives? You want to easily swap out hard drives, get an Archos with 2.5". A friend of mine upgraded her 15GB to 80GB.
FYI, although the iPod gains a lot of its compactness from its smaller hard drive, it's been surpassed by the Nitrus, MuVo, and others using the new 1" drives from Cornice. Only 1.5GB at the moment, but they will be 5GB by next year. They enable very compact players that make the iPod seem oversized and so, well, last year.
A workmate of mine bought an iPod a couple weeks ago (mainly for Audible support). He tried replacing his iRiver in the gym with the iPod. Gave it his best shot. It skipped too many times and he returned it to Circuit City. There's only so much you can do with a spinning magnetic disk.
Some people have had battery problems
The worst issue with the iPod battery is its small capacity. Apple have trimmed it right down. The PortalPlayer design is incredibly parsimonious with how it does read-ahead into the RAM to limit access, but it's still a huge factor.
I notice that the iPod's cousins, the other handhelds based on PortalPlayer (Samsung and Philips) get around 15 hours on their batteries at the cost of a couple of cc extra volume over the iPod.
US Voting Is Archaic, Unfair, & Undemocratic
on
Cringley on E-voting
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote
I'm from Ireland - I grew up in a country with one of the more complex votings systems in the world. We're talking 10+ rounds of elimination rounds and recounts, and much anguish by marginal politicians over a few minor votes.
It's not perfect -- you still get arseholes elected to office - but at least most people's votes are counted... unlike the US where the majority of votes seem to be instantly cast away and you get candidates elected by minorities of voters.
With a preference system politicians at least have to make efforts to reach out to minorities and divergent viewpoints. Sometimes this leads to nasty political compromises, but oftne it leads to coalitions with similar viewpoints and ethics.
One effect I've noticed on a personal level however is that because of the tragically simple plurality voting used in most of the US, people in the US are honestly baffled by anythiong that resembles fair voting. Most of them just don;t get it. Mired in an artifically bipolar system designed to promote competition and bilateral conflict, many people seem to view compromise and multilateralism with suspicion or misunderstanding.
The way you learn to vote undoubtedly influences your social universe -- you form unspoken but deeply held opinions about what is possible and what is impossible within a "democracy". THe US needs a more modern voting system as part of a first step towards engaging people once more with the democratic environment rather than engaging in identity politics and the elimination of dissent.
Why are USians so obsessed with this quackery known as "polygraph"? Why is taxpayer money used to pay these charlatans, these modern-day phrenologists? Polygraphing is a joke in the rest of the world, much as the Japanese obsession with matching stable personality traits to blood types strikes every non-Japanese person as absurd.
Video codecs my dear, video. Once I was blind but now I can see. It's a multimedia application. Ignoring the external codec API handler, how many formats does MC support OOTB? 80+ Here are some of them:
AAC AIFF AU AA APE AVI BMP BPL CDA DIVX GIF JPG MPL MID MPC MP3 M1V JMX OGG PNG MOV MP4 QT RAM RA RM SMIL RV SWF SHN WMA
enjoyed sharing playlists with other iTunes users in the building for weeks now
As a J River Media Center User, I've been enjoying sharing playlists, audio, and video streaming and transcoding for years now. Welcome to the party. Tell me when iTunes grows up a bit to the point where it can handle rich, varied media.
The 19th century expansion of the British Empire's industrial capacity required the forcible opening of Asian and South American markets through military means. Within a couple of generations, Britain had acquired an Empire and was using social engineering, famines, and mass-scaled drug addicted coercion to "rationalize" foreign markets - some into producers, others consumers, others excluded through tariffs and unequal bilateral treaties.
This was the essence of "free trade" - new markets had to be seized for the output of the British factories. This was the eninger that drove Imperialism.
DeLong mention some of the disruption caused to weavers and spinners, but he takes an a priori classic laissez faire position that such transformation was somehow inevitable and happened as a natural consequence of technological proicesses. On the contrary, it was both produced and magnified by incredibly destructive military processes and sociological famine engineering. Tens of millions of people were effectively sacrificed on the altar of "free trade". China, Brazil, and India were reduced from a pre-eminent members of the global economy to balkanized, marginal shells full of starving, impoverished masses and their level of technological and social development reduced to pre-17th Century levels. The "Third World" was invented.
I have no doubt that these new nano technological producers, should they emerge, will similarly use unilateral and multilateral pressures and organizations to forcible eradicate nativist and local resistance to their products and trade.
The interested reader is referred to Mike Davis' impressive Late Victorian Holocausts for further information.
Flac will quickly drain your battery, as Karma doesn't have a very large flash buffer, and it ends up constantly spinning up and spinning down the hard drive.
All the hard drive players have this problem when playing large files that demand continuous, prolonged disk access. The iPod does a good job of conserving its tiny battery when playing MP3s due to its 32MB buffer and 2-3 song read-ahead. But when it plays AIFF, this quickly drains its battery. There is no easy solution to this problem for small form factor devices with limited battery capacity.
You've brought up several point and several different players, confirming my point that not one player matches the iPod as a whole.
Each product has positives and negatives.There are many more fine and sub-par points associated with each product offering. We could mention Creative's excellent EQs and DACs, Karma's cool crossfading and pitchshifting, Archos' low price points and expandability, the Lyra's video and recording, the DellDJ's battery life and low cost. Und so weiter.
What I take away from this is an iPod is very similar to other handhelds, being a mix of some very well implemented aspects, and some very poor in relation to others. I don't think it's as simple as a "single" point. I also don't think you can say "best" for any of them. They are all obviously very early generation products.
The first HD-based player, the Archos, was quite poor with questionable quality control. Benefitting from a higher price point and several years of development, Apple's implementation of the PP520x design was quite well done, and they obviously paid for a higher QC. Current generation players have added more features with lower price points than Apple's. But until I can get a handheld media player that does video, recording, bluetooth, 15 hour battery, and 3G streaming, I will consider them all lacking.
I believe the Karma now has this distinction (for 5GB+) while an array of devices using the new Cornive 1" HDs are even smaller.
The interface is best-in-class. If you've ever used one for more than a few minutes you'd know this right away.
Using a linear scroll and jump points to navigate an on-device array of the ID3 tags is a nice idea, but it demands a lot of attention and falls down for non-genre or mixed-authorship vinyl rips. Which I like. So I prefer playlists.
It allows you to store digital photos with an add-on.
I believe there are quite a few devices nowwith built-in photo/video recording *and* viewing and flash media slots. Some cost moree than an iPod, some less.
The aesthetics on it are stunning.
It's distinctive, I'll give Apple that. But it's a limited design with little choice. I notice there's a huge market in after-market mods for the iPod in skins and cases. Seems like many people want different aesthetics.
On-the-go playlists. Smart playlists. Solitaire!!
My girlfriend has all this on her Rockbox, and more games. Am I missing something?
The screen is super-crisp and the bright white backlight and lit buttons make it wonderful to operate at night.
It's a fairly mediocre player, but the new DellDJ has a backlight to die for. It's possibly the best I've seeon on a device with this form factor.
nice sound quality. Very powerful built-in amp is activated through the dock connecter, allowing you to use it high end equipment without having to boost the signal.
For a small device. When I output to a real amp, I prefer to output digitally. The old Archos already did coax digital output (and input for recording) some years back. Newer handhelds like the iRiver do optical output, ensuring optimal reproduction of the bitstream. Why settle for analog?
Excellent iTunes integration....
My girlfriend uses iTunes on her Mac to manage her Archos. It's a nice program, but a bit lacking in media handling and responsiveness.
I'm a demanding media consumer. I like a handheld that does recording, digital output, video/audio, and FM. The iPod just lacks to omany high-end features for me to consider as "best in class".
I'm not saying this is a good thing (though that is also true, but requires a much longer discourse on price theory), but it is as true as gravity.
Your elegant argument in favour of economic rationality only works in a society where we are all perfectly rational and prices and availabilty are not generated and constrained by culture and social practice.
It's obvious that if you look around, you find many examples of artificially high prices for goods or services that are maintained through social contracts. My favourite example is religion.
Now, most religions present the idea of a supreme being, usually some variety of Sky God, to which people can owe allegience in return for unspecified favours and considerations. Most hold that a personal relationship with this Sky God is possible. Yet most religions features a stratified hierarchy, with membership dues and fees tacked on.
In fact, many institutional religions have codified the financial obligations of their believers into law or custom and many people are extremely willing to keep paying money for something that, logically, they could obtain for free.
Throughout history, faced with falling membership and diminishing fees, many established or state religions have been forced to move from comfortable, unspoken legitimacy to bold, in your face regulations and legal manoeuvring to force people to pay their dues, on pain of legal sanction, torture, or death.
Religion is one social practice that is both created and consumed, and whose entry fees are maintained above zero through sanction, custom, and "tradition". Music is another.
Despite several centuries of especial religious market development, and the development of many hundreds and thousands of individualistic cults and "new age" spiritual movements, most developed nations are still characterized by large populations that willingly pay above-zero fees to organizations in order to reach some accommodation with the Sky God. It's not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.
Re:Write About People Pooping With Their iPods Nex
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ever see Walkman owners randomly share their music
No, nobody ever listeneed to another person's Walkman in the 1980s/19902. There were no boomboxes, no ghetto blasters, no tricked-out car stereos. Nobody ever made mix tapes, or DJd at College Radio stations, or broadcast bizarre video selections on Public Access.
There were no digital music players, no hard disk music players, no Internet streaming audio apps, no MP3s, and certainly no random sharing of music.
No, in fact we were all living in the Dark Ages of No Music Sharing Ever until Saint Steve showed us the way with the Holy iPod!
Very 1st Walkman Ever Had Dual Headphone Ability
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As an aside, the very first Walkman *ever* introduced by Sony had a dual headphone setup. It cam equipped with a "Hotline" switch that either listener could push that would mute both headphones, so they could say something. For couples jogging close together or something like that.
The dual headphone feature remained for a couple of product iterations but was then dropped to save a few pennies on production when they realised virtually nobody ever used this music sharing feature.
The thinking is that Sony were wary of introducing an exclusively personal electronic device and wanted to be able to market as having *some* social aspect.
Slashdot Mirror
some guy claims that he has access to the neccessary docus, but the rockbox-developer don't even consider looking at it, unless they get official permission to use it.
Why not use the old, tried-and-tested method of clean-room reverse-enginering? Recruit several people with no Rockbox programming exposure to look at the documents and write their own version of the specs, noting entry points, API calls, and so on. Get them to publish the documentation using some version of the GPL. Then fire them, put them out to pasture. Ensure they never communicate directly with any of the Rockbox programmers regarding what they read.
Then get people who have never read the original documents to create code implementing the published doduments.
Because of increasing restrictions on reverse engineering in the US, the document analysis team should be based in the EU or Asia. Or preferably Russia or China.
What you people should be doing is hacking one of those DVD-based video players with the 10 inch screens, adding a USB port or something.
/. there's always some poster who tells them to go do something that the poster is more interested in.
Every time the great Rockbox guys get a mention on
If it means so much to you then why don't you go do something with one of these DVD players? Nobody's stopping you. The Rockbox code is even GPLd so you can start from there.
This is analogous to what happens when people post in cool hacks for old 8-bit pcs, or for tiny web servers, or for bizarre WiFi rigs. Sometimes people just do stuff because they already have the hardware, they know it well, and it gives them a buzz.
The iPod can record with a Belkin add-on mic
1 4_0_6_0_C
The Belkin add-on costs $50, records at 8KHz mono, drains your battery, and sounds like crap. It also has terible recording and UI options. Edison got better fidelity with wax cylinders, and probably more flexibility.
Want to know more?
http://www.ipodlounge.com/reviews_more.php?id=P17
does the eMachine come with equivalent software
Well, with the $1,000+ I'd have saved by buying a PC instead of a Mac, I'm sure I could buy one or two cool packages that might outperform your OSX freeware.
he is carefully choosing his words ... he has to play nice with the RIAA
I agree with you, Steve Jobs always carefully chooses his words. But that's because he has to play nice with the idealists of the world. He isn't just selling computers, or sugared water - he's selling the dream that by consuming his product you are somehow entering a niche world of elite aesthetics and awareness. That's the crux of Apple's marketing since its inception.
Can't you understand what you read
Let me break it down for you. It's about implication.
What was said:
A wants to imprison B.
Is that right?
A has that right.
(to imprison B)
The last conclusion is implied by the framing of the sentence. Only an Apple fanboy could think otherwise.
This from a guy who got started stealing long distance service and reselling it on the Berkeley campus.
You've come a long way, baby.
What's to keep you from buying, say, a 10GB iPod ($299), and a 40GB 2.5" HDD
Em, because the iPod uses 1.8" drives? You want to easily swap out hard drives, get an Archos with 2.5". A friend of mine upgraded her 15GB to 80GB.
FYI, although the iPod gains a lot of its compactness from its smaller hard drive, it's been surpassed by the Nitrus, MuVo, and others using the new 1" drives from Cornice. Only 1.5GB at the moment, but they will be 5GB by next year. They enable very compact players that make the iPod seem oversized and so, well, last year.
I suppose skipping could become an issue
A workmate of mine bought an iPod a couple weeks ago (mainly for Audible support). He tried replacing his iRiver in the gym with the iPod. Gave it his best shot. It skipped too many times and he returned it to Circuit City. There's only so much you can do with a spinning magnetic disk.
Some people have had battery problems
The worst issue with the iPod battery is its small capacity. Apple have trimmed it right down. The PortalPlayer design is incredibly parsimonious with how it does read-ahead into the RAM to limit access, but it's still a huge factor.
I notice that the iPod's cousins, the other handhelds based on PortalPlayer (Samsung and Philips) get around 15 hours on their batteries at the cost of a couple of cc extra volume over the iPod.
Australia, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic (among others) use single transferable vote
I'm from Ireland - I grew up in a country with one of the more complex votings systems in the world. We're talking 10+ rounds of elimination rounds and recounts, and much anguish by marginal politicians over a few minor votes.
It's not perfect -- you still get arseholes elected to office - but at least most people's votes are counted... unlike the US where the majority of votes seem to be instantly cast away and you get candidates elected by minorities of voters.
With a preference system politicians at least have to make efforts to reach out to minorities and divergent viewpoints. Sometimes this leads to nasty political compromises, but oftne it leads to coalitions with similar viewpoints and ethics.
One effect I've noticed on a personal level however is that because of the tragically simple plurality voting used in most of the US, people in the US are honestly baffled by anythiong that resembles fair voting. Most of them just don;t get it. Mired in an artifically bipolar system designed to promote competition and bilateral conflict, many people seem to view compromise and multilateralism with suspicion or misunderstanding.
The way you learn to vote undoubtedly influences your social universe -- you form unspoken but deeply held opinions about what is possible and what is impossible within a "democracy". THe US needs a more modern voting system as part of a first step towards engaging people once more with the democratic environment rather than engaging in identity politics and the elimination of dissent.
If it means I can get a clean picture on my telly, the I for one welcome our new Wavelet Encoded HDTV Masters.
Why are USians so obsessed with this quackery known as "polygraph"? Why is taxpayer money used to pay these charlatans, these modern-day phrenologists? Polygraphing is a joke in the rest of the world, much as the Japanese obsession with matching stable personality traits to blood types strikes every non-Japanese person as absurd.
iTunes is not a multimedia application, it's an audio player
Exactly my point. It's difficult to be a "digital hub" when you don't have a full-function client/server multimedia application.
Video codecs my dear, video. Once I was blind but now I can see. It's a multimedia application. Ignoring the external codec API handler, how many formats does MC support OOTB? 80+ Here are some of them:
AAC AIFF AU AA APE AVI BMP BPL CDA DIVX GIF JPG MPL MID MPC MP3 M1V JMX OGG PNG MOV MP4 QT RAM RA RM SMIL RV SWF SHN WMA
enjoyed sharing playlists with other iTunes users in the building for weeks now
As a J River Media Center User, I've been enjoying sharing playlists, audio, and video streaming and transcoding for years now. Welcome to the party. Tell me when iTunes grows up a bit to the point where it can handle rich, varied media.
The 19th century expansion of the British Empire's industrial capacity required the forcible opening of Asian and South American markets through military means. Within a couple of generations, Britain had acquired an Empire and was using social engineering, famines, and mass-scaled drug addicted coercion to "rationalize" foreign markets - some into producers, others consumers, others excluded through tariffs and unequal bilateral treaties.
This was the essence of "free trade" - new markets had to be seized for the output of the British factories. This was the eninger that drove Imperialism.
DeLong mention some of the disruption caused to weavers and spinners, but he takes an a priori classic laissez faire position that such transformation was somehow inevitable and happened as a natural consequence of technological proicesses. On the contrary, it was both produced and magnified by incredibly destructive military processes and sociological famine engineering. Tens of millions of people were effectively sacrificed on the altar of "free trade". China, Brazil, and India were reduced from a pre-eminent members of the global economy to balkanized, marginal shells full of starving, impoverished masses and their level of technological and social development reduced to pre-17th Century levels. The "Third World" was invented.
I have no doubt that these new nano technological producers, should they emerge, will similarly use unilateral and multilateral pressures and organizations to forcible eradicate nativist and local resistance to their products and trade.
The interested reader is referred to Mike Davis' impressive Late Victorian Holocausts for further information.
Google is rapidly becoming useless as a web shopping search tool. Which is more than annoying, as I haven't managed to find a useful replacement.
Yahoo Shopping. Sort-by-price. Cross reference merchant ratings with BizRate if in doubt.
Flac will quickly drain your battery, as Karma doesn't have a very large flash buffer, and it ends up constantly spinning up and spinning down the hard drive.
All the hard drive players have this problem when playing large files that demand continuous, prolonged disk access. The iPod does a good job of conserving its tiny battery when playing MP3s due to its 32MB buffer and 2-3 song read-ahead. But when it plays AIFF, this quickly drains its battery. There is no easy solution to this problem for small form factor devices with limited battery capacity.
You are insane!
And there I was thinking you thought the iPod was "insanely great".
You've brought up several point and several different players, confirming my point that not one player matches the iPod as a whole.
Each product has positives and negatives.There are many more fine and sub-par points associated with each product offering. We could mention Creative's excellent EQs and DACs, Karma's cool crossfading and pitchshifting, Archos' low price points and expandability, the Lyra's video and recording, the DellDJ's battery life and low cost. Und so weiter.
What I take away from this is an iPod is very similar to other handhelds, being a mix of some very well implemented aspects, and some very poor in relation to others. I don't think it's as simple as a "single" point. I also don't think you can say "best" for any of them. They are all obviously very early generation products.
The first HD-based player, the Archos, was quite poor with questionable quality control. Benefitting from a higher price point and several years of development, Apple's implementation of the PP520x design was quite well done, and they obviously paid for a higher QC. Current generation players have added more features with lower price points than Apple's. But until I can get a handheld media player that does video, recording, bluetooth, 15 hour battery, and 3G streaming, I will consider them all lacking.
I'm a demanding media consumer. I like a handheld that does recording, digital output, video/audio, and FM. The iPod just lacks to omany high-end features for me to consider as "best in class".
I'd hardly call the iPod an idiot player. It's better than anything else on the market...
How is it "better"? Apple people often trot out this reflexive phrase but I rarely see much to back it up.
It's obvious that if you look around, you find many examples of artificially high prices for goods or services that are maintained through social contracts. My favourite example is religion.
Now, most religions present the idea of a supreme being, usually some variety of Sky God, to which people can owe allegience in return for unspecified favours and considerations. Most hold that a personal relationship with this Sky God is possible. Yet most religions features a stratified hierarchy, with membership dues and fees tacked on.
In fact, many institutional religions have codified the financial obligations of their believers into law or custom and many people are extremely willing to keep paying money for something that, logically, they could obtain for free.
Throughout history, faced with falling membership and diminishing fees, many established or state religions have been forced to move from comfortable, unspoken legitimacy to bold, in your face regulations and legal manoeuvring to force people to pay their dues, on pain of legal sanction, torture, or death.
Religion is one social practice that is both created and consumed, and whose entry fees are maintained above zero through sanction, custom, and "tradition". Music is another.
Despite several centuries of especial religious market development, and the development of many hundreds and thousands of individualistic cults and "new age" spiritual movements, most developed nations are still characterized by large populations that willingly pay above-zero fees to organizations in order to reach some accommodation with the Sky God. It's not inconceivable that the music business will also evolve in this fashion, with large factions breaking off into zero-price consumption cultures, but also large factions remaining engaged in above-zero-price consumption practices, constrained by legal and moral sanction.
Ever see Walkman owners randomly share their music
No, nobody ever listeneed to another person's Walkman in the 1980s/19902. There were no boomboxes, no ghetto blasters, no tricked-out car stereos. Nobody ever made mix tapes, or DJd at College Radio stations, or broadcast bizarre video selections on Public Access.
There were no digital music players, no hard disk music players, no Internet streaming audio apps, no MP3s, and certainly no random sharing of music.
No, in fact we were all living in the Dark Ages of No Music Sharing Ever until Saint Steve showed us the way with the Holy iPod!
As an aside, the very first Walkman *ever* introduced by Sony had a dual headphone setup. It cam equipped with a "Hotline" switch that either listener could push that would mute both headphones, so they could say something. For couples jogging close together or something like that.
The dual headphone feature remained for a couple of product iterations but was then dropped to save a few pennies on production when they realised virtually nobody ever used this music sharing feature.
The thinking is that Sony were wary of introducing an exclusively personal electronic device and wanted to be able to market as having *some* social aspect.