Here's a letter I sent to CNN.com regarding the AP article (the same one on the Yahoo link in this thread):
In your recent CNN.com article "Floppy disk nears obsolescence", you overlooked a couple of key details that might discredit an otherwise interesting article.
Firstly, you mentioned Dell computers eliminating the floppy drive from some of their machines in 2003. It should be noted, however, that Apple Computer, Inc., was actually the first to completely exclude the floppy drive. In 1999, Apple rolled out the blue & white G3 Macintosh without a floppy drive. Instead, the G3 featured the much larger capacity Zip Drive.
Secondly, Apple didn't actually pioneer the floppy drive. Sony developed the technology. Apple purchased and installed Sony drives in the first Macintosh computers.
The decision to eliminate the floppy from all future Macintosh computers was a rather interesting maneuver on Steve Jobs' part.
In the early days of the Mac's development, Steve Jobs insisted that Apple make their own microfloppy drive. When Apple couldn't develop their own drive in time for the launch date of the Macintosh, they went with Plan B--the Sony drives.
Jobs' much publicized return to Apple in 1997 began the second revolution of the Macintosh, and with it, he pushed for the redesign of the Power Macintosh from the corporate "beige box" design... and threw out a few other things too... namely, the floppy drive he helped standardize.
Larger machines from SGI were already floppy-less prior to Apple's decision to ax the drive... but Apple was extremely successful pushing the floppy-free concept on consumers.
Apple may have had success in large part because of a clever bundling strategy... The replacement of the floppy with the Zip and eventually the CD/DVD burners that are now standard in Macintosh computers seems to have gone hand in hand with their gradual integration of proprietary multimedia content creation software--most of which produces files far too large for floppy drives.
The software was introduced, you'll note, right around the time that digital peripherals like digital cameras, video cameras, PDAs and the like were becoming functional,practical, cost-effective and--above all--desirable. Apple found the perfect opportunity to re-brand the personal computer not as simply a word processor and e-mail surfer, but as a hub in which the content from all these digital appliances would seamlessly converge.
With the incredible success of Apple's "digital hub" strategy, everyone else followed in their shadow... attempting to emulate, but never quite able to duplicate--everything from PnP ports (USB, Firewire), to the evolutionary case design, to even the operating system. Windows XP, though, wouldn't be the first time Bill Gates has cribbed from the Mac OS, and probably not the last... Look for Longhorn, slated for release sometime this century. I predict it will look, less-than-mysteriously, even MORE like OS X than WinXP does.
It seems Apple has come full circle with their original all-in-one concept, now in the form of the iMac G5... but this time, the computer features an LCD screen and a DVD burner.
Some day, somewhere in the future, Macintosh computers may come equipped with a Star Trek-style matter replicator. When and if they do, look for an iTunes Music/Amazon.com-style store where you buy products and then materialize them at home...
No. MPAA, RIAA, BSA, ESA, IDSA and other organizations that send DMCA notices do not hack into anyone's computer. They don't have to. They can send bots out to IRC, to P2P networks, and webcrawlers out on the net to see the published directories.
Then they simply obtain the IP of the fileserver and send the IP/timestamp information to the ISP responsible for user identifying the user... etc. etc.
As an internet security engineer and an audio/visual content creator, and a registered copyright holder, I have many problems with the DMCA... but if you're stupid enough to knowingly publish a directory of pirated material either through your own fileserver, a fileshare application, an IRC DCC fileserver, or on the web, you deserve to be sued.
If Apple will hire me on as a telemarketer, why won't they give me (or anyone else) the keys to the warehouse so I can go in at night and take whatever I want?
Do you see the fundamental flaw in that line of reasoning? Furthermore, there's an entirely different scope and purpose behind recruiting sales agents vs. franchisees or resellers.
The entire goal of internet music distribution, if viewed from efficient-markets theory as a weapon against RIAA's 50-year old distribution monopoly, was to eliminate unnecessary links in the chain.
When you have a presence on the internet, you don't need a zillion retailers, rack jobbers, one-stops, sub-distributors, distributors... you just need promoters to get the word out. Every additional link in the chain means additional costs that get passed, inevitably, to the consumer.
That would especially be the case with iTunes because of their miniscule margins. Apple makes very little money off iTunes songs... it is, in fact, by Steve Jobs' own admission, a loss leader so they can sell iPods that have enormous profit margins.
Apple is recruiting independent contractors as sales agents. That's it. They're not licensing the DRM because they shouldn't have to. It's theirs.
As someone else astutely pointed out, Apple's particular incarnation of AAC with DRM is proprietary. AAC itself, however, is a technology jointly developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group, Dolby Labs, and Fraunhofer... and anyone can license it.
So, in conclusion, I think what Apple is doing is both brilliant and very threatening to the status quo. It's giving iTunes more exposure, putting more linkages across the internet to get people quickly to the one place that has the largest legally-downloadable repertoire, and costing Apple and consumers nothing extra for an assload of convenience with which RIAA cannot strategically compete.
In addition, Apple, which is in the business of high-quality products, doesn't have to deal with the nightmare of ensuring that a zillion stores and inventories of resellers/franchisees are compliant with their quality control standards.
The added weight of supporting resellers and franchises is not in anyone's best interest, even the customer's, especially because, unlike, say, hamburgers, there's no logistics issues that require retail presence in multiple locations.
Of course, the day that we can place internet orders for hamburgers and materialize them with a PnP Star Trek-ish matter replicator, that will be the end of franchises, resellers and retailers entirely.
If you're getting the Grey Screen of Death, you've got bigger problems that you aren't solving.
The only time I've ever gotten the Grey Screen of Death was when there was a major driver problem (solved by installing an update), or a hardware conflict (I run 3 different sound cards...), or a power issue (I once had my power supply plugged into a really loose wall socket, and when it arced, the computer freaked... as I would expect it to.)
The GSOD is an extraordinarily rare occurrence, and if it continues to happen on your system, get it checked out.
Other than that, for users who don't tweak with things as irresponsibly and frequently as I like to (I'm an internet security admin), I can certainly say that a "clean" configuration with no goofy hacks will run much more smoothly than XP... and when problems do occur, there's usually a very good explanation with a very logical solution (see above).
XP, on the other hand, likes to lock up frequently and both mouse and display drivers freak out with no pattern of consistency, identifiable cause, or known fix... even though our company pushes updates weekly.
From a network security point of view, I do, however, find it extremely hilarious that even XP pro ships with all ports wide friggin' open by default.
"My iBook has an LCD screen and is portable!" (Laptops have been available less expensively than iBooks and run Windows or Linux, depending on your preferences)
If you've seen just how mediocre PC displays are, you might realize why PC laptops are cheaper.
Nevermind the fact that Apple displays are SWOP-certified... but Windows has always lacked decent color management.
If you're referring to UDP checksum, UDP error checking only reports errors... it alone can't actually recover from them.
Higher level protocols then provide retransmission, reassembly, flow control, collision avoidance, etc... but I concede to your point if these error recovery are in fact provided at some level of the OS (possibly within iTunes Streaming Music Server itself).
Depends on how busy your network is. I mean, TCP will use Header Error Control, but if the UDP packets have loss-recovery, loss recovery only works as long as there's bandwidth to support it, IIRC.
I can easily use up the full available throughput of my 100baseT network, but then I move around some humongous amounts of data (mainly video).
You may have a point for less busy networks, though.
If it's wireless and they're not transmitted as UDP packets, then I'll agree that it'll be sufficient. However, depending on how much traffic you've got routing over your network, what else you've got taxing your computer's resources, you could experience dropouts at at least the application, transport and data layers (of the OSI model).
For the record, most streaming media protocols use UDP and not the error-checked TCP. I'll have to take a look once I get home to see what the case is here, specifically. iTunes Streaming Music Server may support either-or, depending on whether you prefer less packet loss or less network latency.
My comments regarding clarity... there are no audio specs to give for anything but the analog output on the Airport Express.
If you're telling me you want audio specs, you must be intending to use the analog out... under what circumstances would you prefer the analog out on the Airport Express over the optical?
If your receiver has a powerful DAC with a very reliable sample & hold buffer, you're going to want to go optical from the Airport Express to your stereo receiver.
With regard to 16-bit PCM audio... If your ears can't distinguish between 16-bit PCM and, say, Mp3, then why do you care what the specs are? Chances are, unless the Airport Express is terribly inconsistent with the quality of their other products, I'm assuming they designed a decent enough DAC so that the average person isn't going to be able to tell the difference between the Airport Express' analog out and any other analog out at their immediate disposal...
But then that begs another question... What other analog output anywhere on the average listener's computer network is going to give them a significantly perceptible advantage?
Or is the purpose merely to appear the part of an educated audiophile who can recite the specs of his system, but still can't notice the difference?
If your ears can distinguish between 16-bit PCM and MP3, chances are, you're not going to care what the specs are because you'll be the kind of person, more than likely, to use the optical out.
However, I would venture to say the difference between Dolby AAC and 24-bit PCM is far more noticeable than the difference between Dolby AAC and 16-bit PCM. Even the difference between 16-bit PCM and 24-bit PCM is more noticeable than the difference between 16-bit PCM and Dolby AAC.
If iTunes supported 24-bit PCM, I'd feed it through iTunes on my laptop, over 802.11g, and specify (if I could) that iTunes Music Server use TCP instead of UDP, and then go optical in from the Airport to my receiver.
Depends, if the data are transmitted as UDP packets, it's not error-corrected.
Most multimedia is transmitted as UDP, not TCP, because it's slightly faster but sacrifices header error control for transmission speed.
On the issue of whether the optical interface supporrts 5.1, 7.1, etc. An optical interface will support whatever's being digitally streamed through it. Whether it's Dolby ProLogic, Dolby Digital 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS, DTS-ES, etc. all depends on your OS and the application from which the music is being streamed.
Also depends on the format of the recording... which really makes this a moot point. Last I checked, WinAMP, iTunes and the like do not support playback of AC-3 or DTS files... not yet, anyway.
In the future, it's possible iTunes could support AC-3 and DTS playback for critical listeners, but right now the main purpose behind the digital out is so that you can stream digital straight to your receiver's DAC.
Secondly, where I said "whatever's being digitally streamed through it", I should clarify that I'm referring to the fact that a fiber optic interface sends digital data as pulses of light. The fiber I/O itself is not limited by what the data represents. It could be audio, video, computer code, or a text-format recipe for tandoori chicken.
In the case of Airport Express, iTunes determines what the data is that is being sent, sends it as binary data... it could be one channel or a hundred channels of audio.
Part of that data would be information recognizable to the integrated circuits in the receiver unit.
So, for example... let's say you could stream an AC-3... the data in the AC-3 is sent as digital pulses via the optical fiber, the receiver's circuitry identifies specific portions of data that identify it as an AC-3 file. Then the receiver processes the AC-3 file according to however many channels were originally multiplexed into the AC-3 stream when it was encoded by the manufacturer of that recording.
This is kind of a self-defeating question for several reasons.
Firstly, no self-respecting audio professional would use a wireless connection of any kind for critical listening. It's well-shielded, unidirectionally (or bi-directionally) grounded cabling, and fiber optics where applicable.
If you are serious about audio, you're going to use the optical interface, in which case your receiver's DAC is doing all the work.
If you're really serious about audio, you're not going to be doing any of your critical listening through any computer player software like iTunes, WinAMP, or what have you... If you're like me, even raw 16-bit PCM is unacceptable for critical listening. In fact, I went back and digitally remastered my last solo album in 24-bit PCM DVD Audio, and plan to produce all future releases in that format and nothing else.
As much as I love MPEG-4 AAC, anything you have stored as MPEG-4 AAC, MP3, LAME, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or any other multimedia codec short of 24-bit uncompressed AIFF/WAV, is not sufficient enough quality to warrant complaints about the DAC in the Airport Express.
In short, if you're streaming music through a computer and it's not 16- or 24-bit PCM, a DAC is the least of your worries.
On the issue of whether the optical interface supporrts 5.1, 7.1, etc. An optical interface will support whatever's being digitally streamed through it. Whether it's Dolby ProLogic, Dolby Digital 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS, DTS-ES, etc. all depends on your OS and the application from which the music is being streamed.
Of course I always purchase an AppleCare extended plan on any big ticket item (such as a computer...). I have three G4s... one of them was DOA, and I took it in to the Apple Store, and they replaced it no questions asked.
The laptop I recently purchased had a slight imperfection in the LCD screen so tiny that most people would ignore it.. but I picked up on it since I do a lot of still image and video work where a proper display is critical.
Still, they replaced it, no questions asked, even though they were unsure how they'd execute the RMA to Apple. They wanted, for simplicity, to classify the machine "DOA", but weren't sure if they could... despite all that, they didn't pass that problem on to me.
I cannot say I've had the same luck with other brands or stores.
I purchased a copy of Schindler's List on DVD the day it came out, and there were scratches and dust all over the surface of the disk when I opened it. So, I go back, and they scrutinize for a bit, offer to exchange it... I find another one... same problem.
When I went back the second time, their customer service people started giving me a hard time presumably because the process of satisfying my needs with an acceptable product required more effort than they wanted to put in...
One employee even disputed the effect the dust and scratches would have on playback. As a creator of professional DVD content and as a Dolby Laboratories trademark licensee, I'm required to observe certain minimum standards... so, needless to say, I was not impressed or amused by this guy's line of reasoning.
The difficulty of going the extra mile is never a basis for denying a customer exchange on a defective product, period.
It took a fair amount of escalation just to get a senior shift manager who knew I would not leave the store until they gave me a copy that worked, or refunded my money... knowing that they prefer not to refund on DVDs. They went through three or four copies until they found a good one, but it was like pulling teeth just to get them to ensure customer satisfaction.
Wow, in all the years I'd done pre-press, I've never used this application.
I've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]...
Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle.
It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets.
So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
All things being equal, if you read and understood that Apple's "custom configuration" means anything other than the standard configuration, even if they install it themselves... then you complained because you refuse to acknowledge that you implictly accepted those terms upon purchasing the product... then the quandary isn't a moral one, it's a simple legal one... and the answer is... read the fine print next time.
Whenever I am late on a credit card bill and I damned well know it, I don't waste time or energy trying to argue my way out of a late fee because I know I won't win. On the other hand, I've won a few small one-offs here and there from Apple and other companies... and I take them as they come, but I don't come to expect them. Why not? Because I accept responsibility for the agreements into which I enter.
Next time, I would check to see if any Apple Care plans extend the warranty coverage to items you had them install. Note that the Apple Care coverage doesn't cover your own modifications performed by yourself... but it may very well cover modifications installed by Apple... presumably the coverage applies if the coverage purchased is for the MODIFIED package, and not the express or implied warranties associated with the separate components.
The challenge here comes in the definition of a product. Say I have product A and product B... Product A has a warranty... Product B has a warranty. Now I put Product A and Product B... legally, neither manufacturer of A or B is required to provide a warranty of mercantability guaranteeing the functionality of the products put together, nor are they required to protect against damages incurred by the combining of the products.
It is their right, however, to offer a service coverage for the combined product (Let's call it "AB".), apart from the legally-required warranties of mercantability. This is why there are extended warranties... partly... not just because they make extra money, but because a warranty of mercantability will only go as far as it's legally required to go... Logically...
How many people drive below the speed limit, as opposed to at the speed limit? When you understand why everyone tends to push all the way to the speed limit, then you'll understand why companies don't offer free coverages that they aren't legally required to... and why should they?
More legislation won't fix this, either. Why? When companies are forced to spend more on R&D and RMA processes to satisfy such legislation, they will do it... and pass the increased costs on to every consumer... whereas extended warranties or service plans allow the costs to pass on to only those customers who think they might benefit from it.
Litigation also pours gasoline on the fire... the increased legal costs are passed on to the customer base, as well. So, next time you buy a product... read the fine print. If the company doesn't offer what you want... don't waste time complaining, go to a company that does.
That type of consumer accountability is what forces companies to be more competitive in their offerings.
The reason the bills fry in the microwave has nothing to do with an embedded "RFID" chip.
It may have more to do with the composite makeup of the special paper and inks on the bill itself.
You can scorch a dry carrot to a charred pulp in a microwave if you leave it in there long enough (about three minutes in a glassful of water)... I've done this by accident.
The government doesn't need to embed chips in 20 dollar bills to track us, anyway. They're getting far more dirt on us by reading all our emails with Echelon/Carnivore.
I can't believe no one suggested this...
on
Quieting Your G5?
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· Score: 3, Informative
BANDPASS FILTER
Yes, that's right, children... any LF or HF hum can be squeezed out with a bandpass filter. ProTools has em, so does Final Cut Pro. So use it.
So, we've got four viable steps, none of which include screwing with the heat management of the G5:
1. Bandpass filter - the ultimate weapon. A combination of low-pass and high-pass filters with the right tweaking will narrow the frequency range right down to the envelope you need. Combined with limiters, compressors and other standard ProTools post-production weaponry, you can make even Britney Spears' asinine voice sound bearable (if it weren't already so obviously post-processed to hell).
2. Mic placement - If you need to be near your monitor but not near your box, get an extension cable for the monitor and keep the box as far away from the mic as possible.
3. Dead room - an acoustically-padded portable chamber for recording vocals... you can get these but they are quite expensive. If cost is a factor, try the cheaper solutions first.
4. Unidirectional mic - In other words, don't use a Shure SM58 or some such omnidirectional piece of crap. Get a good unidirectional mic and place its head diametrically opposed to the direction from which the fan noise is coming.
There is a certain engineering logic behind why the cables are designed that way... unidirectional grounding forces does remove line noise... but the levels of line noise in an already massively-shielded cable are so miniscule that the typical audience for these expensive cables (rich people with bad ears), can't tell the difference anyway.
I have over 24 channels of audio cabling running around my studio and I do find unidirectional grounding makes a difference... but then I'm actually recording music.
For the chemical formula for internal combustion? No.
Likewise, I wouldn't go to the local audiophile shop to ask them about audio engineering-related issues.
After being accosted by about ten salespeople in ten minutes at a local audio store that sells everything from Sony ES, to Krell, Wadia, Sunfire and the like... I caught a sales rep in a bold-faced lie.
I was looking for a receiver without many bells and whistles, and he tried steering me towards Denon.
When I asked why Denon is "better", he replied, "Because they focus solely on making audio components unlike Sony."
I chuckled and asked him to explain to me the funadamental difference between the sample & hold buffers on a Sony DAC vs. a Denon DAC... Naturally, he had no clue what I was talking about.
The "double-blind" survey is somewhat misleading... but that being said, it's clearly not measuring which format is superlative... it's only measuring people's perceptions. And people were pretty much even on those various formats.
The study in question just shows that people cannot consistently tell the difference between AAC formats.
Now, I've read articles in audiophile magazines that insisted that SACD (Super Audio CD) was brilliant in comparison to CD. And every one of those articles was a load of crap.
Fundamentally, even the most "discriminating" audiophiles cannot tell the difference between 16-bit, 44.1kHz PCM (Pulse Code Modulation - e.g. AIFF, WAV, in the computer world) and the 1-bit, 2.7GHz DSD bitstream of SACD... nevermind the minute differences betweeen various AAC-enabled codecs.
Hell, I would challenge anyone to be able to tell the difference between 16-bit PCM and MPEG-4 AAC.
The AES (Audio Engineering Society) has stated that MPEG-4 AAC is perceptibly indistinguishable from uncompressed 16-bit, dual channel PCM (e.g. CD-DA spec audio).and I would wager any experienced audio engineer's pair of ears (my own included) against any consumer "audiophile" any day of the week.
My advice to the idle rich? Don't buy the $45,000 pair of speakers... instead buy yourself better hearing and some common sense.
My personal preference? MPEG-4 AAC. As a content creator intensely familiar with a variety of media standards including AES, NTSC, ISO, ITU-R/CCIR, etc. I believe MPEG-4 w/AAC (not Quicktime MPEG-4, mind you, but straight MPEG-4) is the superlative format for compressed audiovisual media.
However, for critical listening, only uncompressed audio is the way to go. The general rule of thumb is that higher bitrates are preferable over higher sampling frequencies. Frequency response roll-off is what you want to avoid. But in order to support the higher bitrates, you need a D/A Converter (DAC, Digital-to-Analog Converter) with an effective sample-hold buffer that can crunch the necessary data to make an accurate conversion of the digital source.
That being said, I'm going to begin digitally remastering my own compositions soon... and go straight from the 24-bit master to a 24-bit multichannel DVD-Audio format. Why? Even an audiophile deafened by the sound of their money burning a hole in their wallet can actually tell the difference between my 24-bit master recordings and the dithered 16-bit CD audio.
There is no standard specification for transmitting the 25Mbps DV stream across USB... PC or Mac, it doesn't matter. DV NTSC deck control, audio and video channels are transmitted via Firewire, period.
There are very few applications that have issues with the TRV22 (I have a DCR-TRV18... even older), except perhaps Adobe Premiere, which is rather peculiar. All MiniDV cameras use the same DV stream, audio stream, and DV timecode stream parameters... so why Premiere only supports select DV cameras is entirely beyond me.
Stick to iMovie, Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro... and use the specified interface (firewire) for all import/export with DV.
The strategic competitive advantage iPod and iPod mini bot have that affords Apple the opportunity to charge a premium for their product, not including capacity, design, ease of use, and interfaceability with Itunes Music Stores, is also the fact that they appear to be the only digital music player that uses the AAC MPEG-4 format.
MPEG-4 with Dolby AAC is discernably superior to MP3, and was rated by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) to be perceptibly indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio.
As an audio engineer with experience mastering professional audio CDs, I have to say that this is a huge selling point which will also help push internet music distribution beyond the RIAA monopoly of traditional retail distribution.
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In your recent CNN.com article "Floppy disk nears obsolescence", you overlooked a couple of key details that might discredit an otherwise interesting article.
Firstly, you mentioned Dell computers eliminating the floppy drive from some of their machines in 2003. It should be noted, however, that Apple Computer, Inc., was actually the first to completely exclude the floppy drive. In 1999, Apple rolled out the blue & white G3 Macintosh without a floppy drive. Instead, the G3 featured the much larger capacity Zip Drive.
Secondly, Apple didn't actually pioneer the floppy drive. Sony developed the technology. Apple purchased and installed Sony drives in the first Macintosh computers.
The decision to eliminate the floppy from all future Macintosh computers was a rather interesting maneuver on Steve Jobs' part.
In the early days of the Mac's development, Steve Jobs insisted that Apple make their own microfloppy drive. When Apple couldn't develop their own drive in time for the launch date of the Macintosh, they went with Plan B--the Sony drives.
Jobs' much publicized return to Apple in 1997 began the second revolution of the Macintosh, and with it, he pushed for the redesign of the Power Macintosh from the corporate "beige box" design... and threw out a few other things too... namely, the floppy drive he helped standardize.
Larger machines from SGI were already floppy-less prior to Apple's decision to ax the drive... but Apple was extremely successful pushing the floppy-free concept on consumers.
Apple may have had success in large part because of a clever bundling strategy... The replacement of the floppy with the Zip and eventually the CD/DVD burners that are now standard in Macintosh computers seems to have gone hand in hand with their gradual integration of proprietary multimedia content creation software--most of which produces files far too large for floppy drives.
The software was introduced, you'll note, right around the time that digital peripherals like digital cameras, video cameras, PDAs and the like were becoming functional ,practical, cost-effective and--above all--desirable. Apple found the perfect opportunity to re-brand the personal computer not as simply a word processor and e-mail surfer, but as a hub in which the content from all these digital appliances would seamlessly converge.
With the incredible success of Apple's "digital hub" strategy, everyone else followed in their shadow... attempting to emulate, but never quite able to duplicate--everything from PnP ports (USB, Firewire), to the evolutionary case design, to even the operating system. Windows XP, though, wouldn't be the first time Bill Gates has cribbed from the Mac OS, and probably not the last... Look for Longhorn, slated for release sometime this century. I predict it will look, less-than-mysteriously, even MORE like OS X than WinXP does.
It seems Apple has come full circle with their original all-in-one concept, now in the form of the iMac G5... but this time, the computer features an LCD screen and a DVD burner.
Some day, somewhere in the future, Macintosh computers may come equipped with a Star Trek-style matter replicator. When and if they do, look for an iTunes Music/Amazon.com-style store where you buy products and then materialize them at home...
Retailers, beware!
Then they simply obtain the IP of the fileserver and send the IP/timestamp information to the ISP responsible for user identifying the user... etc. etc.
As an internet security engineer and an audio/visual content creator, and a registered copyright holder, I have many problems with the DMCA... but if you're stupid enough to knowingly publish a directory of pirated material either through your own fileserver, a fileshare application, an IRC DCC fileserver, or on the web, you deserve to be sued.
If Apple will hire me on as a telemarketer, why won't they give me (or anyone else) the keys to the warehouse so I can go in at night and take whatever I want?
Do you see the fundamental flaw in that line of reasoning? Furthermore, there's an entirely different scope and purpose behind recruiting sales agents vs. franchisees or resellers.
The entire goal of internet music distribution, if viewed from efficient-markets theory as a weapon against RIAA's 50-year old distribution monopoly, was to eliminate unnecessary links in the chain.
When you have a presence on the internet, you don't need a zillion retailers, rack jobbers, one-stops, sub-distributors, distributors... you just need promoters to get the word out. Every additional link in the chain means additional costs that get passed, inevitably, to the consumer.
That would especially be the case with iTunes because of their miniscule margins. Apple makes very little money off iTunes songs... it is, in fact, by Steve Jobs' own admission, a loss leader so they can sell iPods that have enormous profit margins.
Apple is recruiting independent contractors as sales agents. That's it. They're not licensing the DRM because they shouldn't have to. It's theirs.
As someone else astutely pointed out, Apple's particular incarnation of AAC with DRM is proprietary. AAC itself, however, is a technology jointly developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group, Dolby Labs, and Fraunhofer... and anyone can license it.
So, in conclusion, I think what Apple is doing is both brilliant and very threatening to the status quo. It's giving iTunes more exposure, putting more linkages across the internet to get people quickly to the one place that has the largest legally-downloadable repertoire, and costing Apple and consumers nothing extra for an assload of convenience with which RIAA cannot strategically compete.
In addition, Apple, which is in the business of high-quality products, doesn't have to deal with the nightmare of ensuring that a zillion stores and inventories of resellers/franchisees are compliant with their quality control standards.
The added weight of supporting resellers and franchises is not in anyone's best interest, even the customer's, especially because, unlike, say, hamburgers, there's no logistics issues that require retail presence in multiple locations.
Of course, the day that we can place internet orders for hamburgers and materialize them with a PnP Star Trek-ish matter replicator, that will be the end of franchises, resellers and retailers entirely.
Let me add that OS X is the other way around.
The only time I've ever gotten the Grey Screen of Death was when there was a major driver problem (solved by installing an update), or a hardware conflict (I run 3 different sound cards...), or a power issue (I once had my power supply plugged into a really loose wall socket, and when it arced, the computer freaked... as I would expect it to.)
The GSOD is an extraordinarily rare occurrence, and if it continues to happen on your system, get it checked out.
Other than that, for users who don't tweak with things as irresponsibly and frequently as I like to (I'm an internet security admin), I can certainly say that a "clean" configuration with no goofy hacks will run much more smoothly than XP... and when problems do occur, there's usually a very good explanation with a very logical solution (see above).
XP, on the other hand, likes to lock up frequently and both mouse and display drivers freak out with no pattern of consistency, identifiable cause, or known fix... even though our company pushes updates weekly.
From a network security point of view, I do, however, find it extremely hilarious that even XP pro ships with all ports wide friggin' open by default.
If you've seen just how mediocre PC displays are, you might realize why PC laptops are cheaper.
Nevermind the fact that Apple displays are SWOP-certified... but Windows has always lacked decent color management.
If you're referring to UDP checksum, UDP error checking only reports errors... it alone can't actually recover from them. Higher level protocols then provide retransmission, reassembly, flow control, collision avoidance, etc... but I concede to your point if these error recovery are in fact provided at some level of the OS (possibly within iTunes Streaming Music Server itself).
Depends on how busy your network is. I mean, TCP will use Header Error Control, but if the UDP packets have loss-recovery, loss recovery only works as long as there's bandwidth to support it, IIRC. I can easily use up the full available throughput of my 100baseT network, but then I move around some humongous amounts of data (mainly video). You may have a point for less busy networks, though.
For the record, most streaming media protocols use UDP and not the error-checked TCP. I'll have to take a look once I get home to see what the case is here, specifically. iTunes Streaming Music Server may support either-or, depending on whether you prefer less packet loss or less network latency.
My comments regarding clarity... there are no audio specs to give for anything but the analog output on the Airport Express.
If you're telling me you want audio specs, you must be intending to use the analog out... under what circumstances would you prefer the analog out on the Airport Express over the optical?
If your receiver has a powerful DAC with a very reliable sample & hold buffer, you're going to want to go optical from the Airport Express to your stereo receiver.
With regard to 16-bit PCM audio... If your ears can't distinguish between 16-bit PCM and, say, Mp3, then why do you care what the specs are? Chances are, unless the Airport Express is terribly inconsistent with the quality of their other products, I'm assuming they designed a decent enough DAC so that the average person isn't going to be able to tell the difference between the Airport Express' analog out and any other analog out at their immediate disposal...
But then that begs another question... What other analog output anywhere on the average listener's computer network is going to give them a significantly perceptible advantage?
Or is the purpose merely to appear the part of an educated audiophile who can recite the specs of his system, but still can't notice the difference?
If your ears can distinguish between 16-bit PCM and MP3, chances are, you're not going to care what the specs are because you'll be the kind of person, more than likely, to use the optical out.
However, I would venture to say the difference between Dolby AAC and 24-bit PCM is far more noticeable than the difference between Dolby AAC and 16-bit PCM. Even the difference between 16-bit PCM and 24-bit PCM is more noticeable than the difference between 16-bit PCM and Dolby AAC.
If iTunes supported 24-bit PCM, I'd feed it through iTunes on my laptop, over 802.11g, and specify (if I could) that iTunes Music Server use TCP instead of UDP, and then go optical in from the Airport to my receiver.
Depends, if the data are transmitted as UDP packets, it's not error-corrected. Most multimedia is transmitted as UDP, not TCP, because it's slightly faster but sacrifices header error control for transmission speed.
When I say "receiver unit", I mean the stereo receiver.
On the issue of whether the optical interface supporrts 5.1, 7.1, etc. An optical interface will support whatever's being digitally streamed through it. Whether it's Dolby ProLogic, Dolby Digital 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS, DTS-ES, etc. all depends on your OS and the application from which the music is being streamed.
Also depends on the format of the recording... which really makes this a moot point. Last I checked, WinAMP, iTunes and the like do not support playback of AC-3 or DTS files... not yet, anyway.
In the future, it's possible iTunes could support AC-3 and DTS playback for critical listeners, but right now the main purpose behind the digital out is so that you can stream digital straight to your receiver's DAC.
Secondly, where I said "whatever's being digitally streamed through it", I should clarify that I'm referring to the fact that a fiber optic interface sends digital data as pulses of light. The fiber I/O itself is not limited by what the data represents. It could be audio, video, computer code, or a text-format recipe for tandoori chicken.
In the case of Airport Express, iTunes determines what the data is that is being sent, sends it as binary data... it could be one channel or a hundred channels of audio.Part of that data would be information recognizable to the integrated circuits in the receiver unit. So, for example... let's say you could stream an AC-3... the data in the AC-3 is sent as digital pulses via the optical fiber, the receiver's circuitry identifies specific portions of data that identify it as an AC-3 file. Then the receiver processes the AC-3 file according to however many channels were originally multiplexed into the AC-3 stream when it was encoded by the manufacturer of that recording.
Firstly, no self-respecting audio professional would use a wireless connection of any kind for critical listening. It's well-shielded, unidirectionally (or bi-directionally) grounded cabling, and fiber optics where applicable.
If you are serious about audio, you're going to use the optical interface, in which case your receiver's DAC is doing all the work.
If you're really serious about audio, you're not going to be doing any of your critical listening through any computer player software like iTunes, WinAMP, or what have you... If you're like me, even raw 16-bit PCM is unacceptable for critical listening. In fact, I went back and digitally remastered my last solo album in 24-bit PCM DVD Audio, and plan to produce all future releases in that format and nothing else.
As much as I love MPEG-4 AAC, anything you have stored as MPEG-4 AAC, MP3, LAME, WMA, Ogg Vorbis or any other multimedia codec short of 24-bit uncompressed AIFF/WAV, is not sufficient enough quality to warrant complaints about the DAC in the Airport Express.
In short, if you're streaming music through a computer and it's not 16- or 24-bit PCM, a DAC is the least of your worries.
On the issue of whether the optical interface supporrts 5.1, 7.1, etc. An optical interface will support whatever's being digitally streamed through it. Whether it's Dolby ProLogic, Dolby Digital 2.0, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Digital Surround EX, DTS, DTS-ES, etc. all depends on your OS and the application from which the music is being streamed.
The laptop I recently purchased had a slight imperfection in the LCD screen so tiny that most people would ignore it.. but I picked up on it since I do a lot of still image and video work where a proper display is critical.
Still, they replaced it, no questions asked, even though they were unsure how they'd execute the RMA to Apple. They wanted, for simplicity, to classify the machine "DOA", but weren't sure if they could... despite all that, they didn't pass that problem on to me.
I cannot say I've had the same luck with other brands or stores.
I purchased a copy of Schindler's List on DVD the day it came out, and there were scratches and dust all over the surface of the disk when I opened it. So, I go back, and they scrutinize for a bit, offer to exchange it... I find another one... same problem.
When I went back the second time, their customer service people started giving me a hard time presumably because the process of satisfying my needs with an acceptable product required more effort than they wanted to put in...
One employee even disputed the effect the dust and scratches would have on playback. As a creator of professional DVD content and as a Dolby Laboratories trademark licensee, I'm required to observe certain minimum standards... so, needless to say, I was not impressed or amused by this guy's line of reasoning.
The difficulty of going the extra mile is never a basis for denying a customer exchange on a defective product, period.
It took a fair amount of escalation just to get a senior shift manager who knew I would not leave the store until they gave me a copy that worked, or refunded my money... knowing that they prefer not to refund on DVDs. They went through three or four copies until they found a good one, but it was like pulling teeth just to get them to ensure customer satisfaction.
I've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]... Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle. It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets. So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
Whenever I am late on a credit card bill and I damned well know it, I don't waste time or energy trying to argue my way out of a late fee because I know I won't win. On the other hand, I've won a few small one-offs here and there from Apple and other companies... and I take them as they come, but I don't come to expect them. Why not? Because I accept responsibility for the agreements into which I enter.
Next time, I would check to see if any Apple Care plans extend the warranty coverage to items you had them install. Note that the Apple Care coverage doesn't cover your own modifications performed by yourself... but it may very well cover modifications installed by Apple... presumably the coverage applies if the coverage purchased is for the MODIFIED package, and not the express or implied warranties associated with the separate components.
The challenge here comes in the definition of a product. Say I have product A and product B... Product A has a warranty... Product B has a warranty. Now I put Product A and Product B... legally, neither manufacturer of A or B is required to provide a warranty of mercantability guaranteeing the functionality of the products put together, nor are they required to protect against damages incurred by the combining of the products.
It is their right, however, to offer a service coverage for the combined product (Let's call it "AB".), apart from the legally-required warranties of mercantability. This is why there are extended warranties... partly... not just because they make extra money, but because a warranty of mercantability will only go as far as it's legally required to go... Logically...
How many people drive below the speed limit, as opposed to at the speed limit? When you understand why everyone tends to push all the way to the speed limit, then you'll understand why companies don't offer free coverages that they aren't legally required to... and why should they?
More legislation won't fix this, either. Why? When companies are forced to spend more on R&D and RMA processes to satisfy such legislation, they will do it... and pass the increased costs on to every consumer... whereas extended warranties or service plans allow the costs to pass on to only those customers who think they might benefit from it.
Litigation also pours gasoline on the fire... the increased legal costs are passed on to the customer base, as well. So, next time you buy a product... read the fine print. If the company doesn't offer what you want... don't waste time complaining, go to a company that does.
That type of consumer accountability is what forces companies to be more competitive in their offerings.
It may have more to do with the composite makeup of the special paper and inks on the bill itself.
You can scorch a dry carrot to a charred pulp in a microwave if you leave it in there long enough (about three minutes in a glassful of water)... I've done this by accident.
The government doesn't need to embed chips in 20 dollar bills to track us, anyway. They're getting far more dirt on us by reading all our emails with Echelon/Carnivore.
Yes, that's right, children... any LF or HF hum can be squeezed out with a bandpass filter. ProTools has em, so does Final Cut Pro. So use it.
So, we've got four viable steps, none of which include screwing with the heat management of the G5:
1. Bandpass filter - the ultimate weapon. A combination of low-pass and high-pass filters with the right tweaking will narrow the frequency range right down to the envelope you need. Combined with limiters, compressors and other standard ProTools post-production weaponry, you can make even Britney Spears' asinine voice sound bearable (if it weren't already so obviously post-processed to hell).
2. Mic placement - If you need to be near your monitor but not near your box, get an extension cable for the monitor and keep the box as far away from the mic as possible.
3. Dead room - an acoustically-padded portable chamber for recording vocals... you can get these but they are quite expensive. If cost is a factor, try the cheaper solutions first.
4. Unidirectional mic - In other words, don't use a Shure SM58 or some such omnidirectional piece of crap. Get a good unidirectional mic and place its head diametrically opposed to the direction from which the fan noise is coming.
Typo... replace "2.7GHz" with "2.7MHz".
There is a certain engineering logic behind why the cables are designed that way... unidirectional grounding forces does remove line noise... but the levels of line noise in an already massively-shielded cable are so miniscule that the typical audience for these expensive cables (rich people with bad ears), can't tell the difference anyway. I have over 24 channels of audio cabling running around my studio and I do find unidirectional grounding makes a difference... but then I'm actually recording music.
For the chemical formula for internal combustion? No. Likewise, I wouldn't go to the local audiophile shop to ask them about audio engineering-related issues. After being accosted by about ten salespeople in ten minutes at a local audio store that sells everything from Sony ES, to Krell, Wadia, Sunfire and the like... I caught a sales rep in a bold-faced lie. I was looking for a receiver without many bells and whistles, and he tried steering me towards Denon. When I asked why Denon is "better", he replied, "Because they focus solely on making audio components unlike Sony." I chuckled and asked him to explain to me the funadamental difference between the sample & hold buffers on a Sony DAC vs. a Denon DAC... Naturally, he had no clue what I was talking about. The "double-blind" survey is somewhat misleading... but that being said, it's clearly not measuring which format is superlative... it's only measuring people's perceptions. And people were pretty much even on those various formats. The study in question just shows that people cannot consistently tell the difference between AAC formats. Now, I've read articles in audiophile magazines that insisted that SACD (Super Audio CD) was brilliant in comparison to CD. And every one of those articles was a load of crap. Fundamentally, even the most "discriminating" audiophiles cannot tell the difference between 16-bit, 44.1kHz PCM (Pulse Code Modulation - e.g. AIFF, WAV, in the computer world) and the 1-bit, 2.7GHz DSD bitstream of SACD... nevermind the minute differences betweeen various AAC-enabled codecs. Hell, I would challenge anyone to be able to tell the difference between 16-bit PCM and MPEG-4 AAC. The AES (Audio Engineering Society) has stated that MPEG-4 AAC is perceptibly indistinguishable from uncompressed 16-bit, dual channel PCM (e.g. CD-DA spec audio).and I would wager any experienced audio engineer's pair of ears (my own included) against any consumer "audiophile" any day of the week. My advice to the idle rich? Don't buy the $45,000 pair of speakers... instead buy yourself better hearing and some common sense. My personal preference? MPEG-4 AAC. As a content creator intensely familiar with a variety of media standards including AES, NTSC, ISO, ITU-R/CCIR, etc. I believe MPEG-4 w/AAC (not Quicktime MPEG-4, mind you, but straight MPEG-4) is the superlative format for compressed audiovisual media. However, for critical listening, only uncompressed audio is the way to go. The general rule of thumb is that higher bitrates are preferable over higher sampling frequencies. Frequency response roll-off is what you want to avoid. But in order to support the higher bitrates, you need a D/A Converter (DAC, Digital-to-Analog Converter) with an effective sample-hold buffer that can crunch the necessary data to make an accurate conversion of the digital source. That being said, I'm going to begin digitally remastering my own compositions soon... and go straight from the 24-bit master to a 24-bit multichannel DVD-Audio format. Why? Even an audiophile deafened by the sound of their money burning a hole in their wallet can actually tell the difference between my 24-bit master recordings and the dithered 16-bit CD audio.
There is no standard specification for transmitting the 25Mbps DV stream across USB... PC or Mac, it doesn't matter. DV NTSC deck control, audio and video channels are transmitted via Firewire, period. There are very few applications that have issues with the TRV22 (I have a DCR-TRV18... even older), except perhaps Adobe Premiere, which is rather peculiar. All MiniDV cameras use the same DV stream, audio stream, and DV timecode stream parameters... so why Premiere only supports select DV cameras is entirely beyond me. Stick to iMovie, Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro... and use the specified interface (firewire) for all import/export with DV.
The strategic competitive advantage iPod and iPod mini bot have that affords Apple the opportunity to charge a premium for their product, not including capacity, design, ease of use, and interfaceability with Itunes Music Stores, is also the fact that they appear to be the only digital music player that uses the AAC MPEG-4 format. MPEG-4 with Dolby AAC is discernably superior to MP3, and was rated by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) to be perceptibly indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio. As an audio engineer with experience mastering professional audio CDs, I have to say that this is a huge selling point which will also help push internet music distribution beyond the RIAA monopoly of traditional retail distribution.