The ability to offer iPod-compatible tracks? Sheesh the iPod can play
MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store, M4A, M4B, M4P), Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4) and WAV. Specs
and that's the cheap Shuffle. Unprotected AAC is often described as mp4. If eMusic is the only outfit that can make a business model of this, then the others deserve to die...
My big regret is that Fraunhofer gave up the fight and MP3 became the de facto standard, rather than the technically superior MP4.
Now I ask you, how many times during your school days did you write programs that essentially just crunched some numbers for you to solve some sort of mathematical problem?
My school days were too long ago for that;-) 30 years ago I got one of the first HP programmable calculators, Reverse Polish Notation, I forget how few registers now, but it was fun. In my day job I was using Bessel functions looked up from a book of tables. Then came the opportunity for evening classes to learn Fortran. I see other posts here proud of their Fortran skills. Lucky them. The syntax just never got to me. Added to which we had to leave marked up worksheets for a punch operator to turn into cards, which were then batch processed, and we got the card stack and printout at next week's class. Mine were mostly syntax errors or missing operators. Over the 8 week course I never did get to print out a more detailed higher order set of bessel functions.
When I finished up at that job I left for a lengthy voyage home to the other side of the planet, by land and sea. I took with me a HP-41CX with the Astronomical ROM plugin, and my own program for resolving sun or star sextant shots to latitude and longitude, with no need to carry the Nautical Almanac. The on-off switch on that HP41 failed 3 years ago. But to this day a page of C code makes my eyes go all foggy. I now have Apple's Developer Tools installed. From time to time I download tarballs of interesting things from sourceforge. Then I usually spend several days chasing recursive dependencies and massaging makefiles. I haven't kept a running total of home runs, but it feels like less than 0.2 average. And after a couple of days cooling off there is the ritual washing of hands, by deleting avery traceable vestige of the failed project.
My teenage daughter thinks her knowledge of XHTML, PHP is so cool, and she can whip up pages loaded with hideous Flash animation. I guess there's an insatiable demand for that crap. Then I look at the endless re-invention of wheels that goes on in the Open Source area, and I ask myself, how many programmers do we really need?
There's a sig-line around that says
Give a man a program, you will frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, you will frustrate him for the rest of his life.
Many years ago a girl in our college maths class asked the teacher: "What is the use of quadratic equations?" His reply was that she would find them very useful next time she wanted to paint a brick house. I'm getting to the point where I might just go plant some orange trees, get a few chickens, and leave the programming to those who have learned because they want to, not because somebody decided the nation will get more programmers by making it compulsory at school.
of Cringely's balloon, but I don't know how far it'll fly:
Now if Apple's old cross-licensing deal with Microsoft also gives them compatibility with the older binary Office formats, it could give them something not even Microsoft has at the moment -- support for ALL Microsoft Office formats, past, present, and future.
My emphasis added. So Cringeley is admitting he doesn't know the detail of permitted backwards compatability in the cross-licensing deal. And I have a curley one for him: I have people in this office who are still using MS Word 5.1 in Classic mode on MacOS 10.4, because it is faster and more reliable than Office 11. I would dearly love to move these people to OOo, yes even the clunky X-11 version. But while Office 11 & 2k3 can read Word 5 files, OOo 2.0 cannot....
link shows 3rd Q sales. Just supposing they are averaged over whole year, then sorry, I have to drag out the old saw that Apple hardware lasts longer, gets handed on, say 4 years average life against 3 years for a typical PC. Then the surviving user base is ~4%. Don't beleive me.
Genelec 1030 aren't exactly el cheapo, but any GSM phone will bore straight thru 'em. With 100 feet of balanced screened audio line feeds into a Sony HVR-Z1P camera, a GSM phone 10 feet away gives full level in the headphones. It's something to do with the spectral output of GSM phones in their status check and ring mode. Doesn't seem to do anything while actually talking on the phone, go figure. We are investigating what else might break in our venue if we put a blocking transmitter in to catch those who won't switch off.
I run a quicktime streaming server. I would dearly love to have simple web pages, fast to load, standards compliant, with links to my media rtsp://my.server/path/to/movie.mov Most browsers, including IE on Macintosh, will recognise rtsp as a "foreign" protocol and call a helper program. OK, user intervention is now required to set application preferences so that eg. QuickTimePlayer opens.mov.mp4.m4v etc, and RealPlayer opens.ram.
But on Windows the filetype/application associations are controlled by Registry Keys, and any app. can overwrite the settings for any other. IE cannot call a helper for rtsp even if one exists. It will always attempt (& fail) to retrieve the url above as http://my.server/path/to/movie.mov One could believe on Windows you're not supposed to use anything else except WindowsMediaPlayer and.mms
So we have subterfuges, like loading plugins via ActiveX calls, and using <object> & <embed> tags. To satisfy the Eolas patent we now have to wrap the whole fudge pie in jscript? No way. This straw has broken this camel's back. I'm dropping back to plain simple text url links, and a help page with a short script people can read, (maybe understand?;-) and paste into Notepad to make themselves a qt-hack.reg file, which a simple double click should install via regedit. Yes, I expect every WMP, RP, and SP to fiddle with it, but after a couple of restores, I expect folks who want to continue using my site will Get A Proper Browser(TM)
Australia, the U.S., and the EU have moved to block the idea
Now I RTFA and I didn't see that phrase. Our local press put on a wry grin and said
A bid to create a virtual red light district on the internet has been blocked by a "coalition of the unwilling" consisting of unlikely bedfellows the United States, Australia and Iran.
The point is, in spite of all the protestations earlier about who controls ICANN, here it is in headlines, ICANN is controlled by governments, bureaucrats, born-again Southern Christians, and mullahs.
the C116 is sold all over the world -- except for the United States.
In some markets like New Zealand it is a grey market item, for the same reasons that Americans have to stoop to the dim corners of Walmart. Local GSM provider Vodaphone offered a "Simple Phone" that had a color screen, was twice the size, twice as ugly, and twice the price of all the cool models. Needless to say it fizzed. Note also C116 seems to be a discontinued item in Australia.
Support. I can make Linux work for me and my company but not every company can. Where is the Linux Geek Squad? Yea all those scan-disk, defrag, run adaware and scan for virus "techies" give me the creeps but they seem to fill a need. Where can the mythical grandmother go to get a DVD installed in her Linux box or find out how to fix Thunderbird if the mail folder blows up? I will not even go into the poor state of some documentation for open source programs.
Reminds me of when as a noob, I reported an error in a man page to a project mailing list, hoping somebody close to the project might pick it up and fix it. Nah, the response was: OK, write yourself a new man page.
That attitude still pervades most OSS projects. The result is open source is regarded as by geeks for geeks, and IMHO this, more than any perceived security risks, will keep it off the desktop for a long time yet. Sure, I see quite a few specialist applications coming thru now packaged for MacOS-X. Here's an example (names obscured to protect the ignorant): a multimedia application, gui built on GTK, equal to commercial products of several hundred dollars, well worthy of the suggested paypal donation. But it requires access to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, which is provided by a different oss project, whose raw binaries will do what's needed from the command line, but no gui interface yet, unless you build it, in Qt.
Security problems in OSS are multiplied by forking, and geekishness for its own sake.
My first glance thru the tutorial saw mysql being run with the default root acct, no password:-( And last time I looked it was necessary to start mysql with a directive to listen localhost only, otherwise port 3306 is open to the world. Apple's (in)famous secure systems again...
The Moving Picture Experts Group has been around for a decade and a half, and most media players support their stuff religiously. AAC / MP4 is not going anywhere.
Excuse me? MP4, mpeg4, the base format for HDVD, not going where? mp3 is a fifteen year old technology, dead on its feet. People predicting the demise of AAC/MP4 had better start digging graves for MP3 first.
No, I think pink noise would be more likely. For those who have already posited that the first encoding will have removed everything that needed removing: each re-encoding (mp3, mp4, whatever) will again attempt to remove parts of the signal the the algorithm deems redundant. If you start with a concert A sinewave, then it will probably survive a large number of encoding-decoding cycles. I haven't done the experiment with white noise, but "real" music is somewhere between those two extremes.
From TFA would it be possible to go down to Amoeba records, buy it for $14, take it home and rip it, then return it within 7 days to get 75% credit back?
Not in my country, friend. For over 2 years now our local version of Walmart, & several other smaller chains, has had a strict no returns policy for CD and DVD. Big signs in the stores advise shoppers to Choose wisely. Due to copyright reasons, we cannot accept returns of CD, DVD, or PC Games. Hey, it's no big deal, all DVD players sold here are Region 0.
Forget about the DRM for a moment, that may come or go or be circumvented. The plain unassailable fact is that for any given bitrate AAC is superior audio quality to mp3. And so it should be, it's part of the mp4 audio structure.
And while I'm here, somebody tell me one of the big losers to music piracy? That's right, Fraunhoffer, who for years kept a tight grip on the mp3 spec, and the license revenue stream. Sure, one day AAC will be superseded by an even better codec, and when that day comes you'd better be ready to trash all your other Brand X mp3 players.
There was comment on the security pages when people looked at MacOS 10.0: OMG they haven't FTFF (Fixed The Fscking Finder) Worse Apple decoupled the executing app for files from the type/creator metadata, which had to stay for backwards compatability with Classic. The desktop icon and filename extension (if any) will usually follow the type/creator. You can change these with/Developer/Tools/SetFile. But the executing app. is determined from other metadata.
Even worse: Welcome to the World of Unix. Any File can be Executable. Open your favorite text editor. Type in
Note there should be a Return at the end of that line, &/.'s submit script has thrown an unwanted space in the middle of the line. Now save it on your desktop as strange.txt Select it, GetInfo, change Open with... to Terminal.app. Now comes the tricky (for Mac weenies;-) part: in a Terminal session,
sudo chmod 755 strange.txt
You have just recreated the Secunia PoC, no zipping, no downloading, mail it to your friends as a joke - no don't, that's just stupid. Apple have had 5 years of being stupid on our behalf about this...
The problem occurs when you have a shell script without the shebang line, and it's given Type/Creator codes so that it will open in Terminal.app
It doesn't need the type/creator codes, and it doesn't matter if it has shebang or not. Set it in a GetInfo window to open with Terminal.app, and chmod 755 to make it executable. The dirty work is done. A pretty icon and enticing filename extension are just icing. It doesn't need to be zipped as some security sites are suggesting. It just needs to get to your current working directory somehow, email attachment, <meta http refresh, whatever, and you double-click it. Only the truly paranoid right-click every file to GetInfo, then again to Open with...
Can you think how else to do live webcasting? Sure somebody mentioned multicasting, and I can see the ISP's eyes rolling from here. But Torrents, Podcasts, and all the other fancy schemes folks are rambling about here, just won't work for live material.
We operate a small cluster of servers from a data centre with good connectivity and a highly-rated ISP, who will occasionally allow us to burst to unlimited bandwidth.
How small is that cluster? and what value is unlimited and burst? You don't say which brand of streaming you're running. It wouldn't be meaningful for me to extrapolate from my single QuickTime X-Serve experience, but I have saturated a 100mb/s link between my site and a test site with multiple streams, and no sign of stress on the box. The last test clients to connect got the worst service, and there was no noticeable dropoff in quality for those already connected. Our ISP could have given us a 1G link, but they were afraid we'd find a problem with the link before our box choked.
If you're doing live webcasting then disk access is not an issue, providing you've got a truckload of ram in each box. Bandwidth at client end is often overlooked. How many clients are simultaneously connected thru a single concentrator point? NAT at client end can be a killer. And if the problem is caused by excessive demand from outside your intended catchment (small community broadcasting organization) then the solution may be difficult for a non-profit. You don't need a network like Akamai. You might get away with one independent dedicated unicast link to a small reflector server cluster somewhere geographically well away from your local target.
There's another problem which has only recently appeared. Your qos flag settings will be now be fighting with VOIP, and whether/how the intervening routers respect them. I have seen a medium sized corporate installation put its voice traffic onto the data fiber backbone, and "private" jabber videoconferencing suffered in consequence.
As others have posted this is being done by Stanford, MIT, Wisconsin, Duke, and in some form or other by a list of colleges longer than both your arms. It is happening in the most litigious nation on Earth, where Intellectual Property is sacrosanct, yet Apple can still rake off $0.02 on every deal thru its shop.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Apple fanboy from way back. We have the technology, we have the trained personell, faculty are rearin' to go, but on this side of the Pacific we don't have a local iTunes store. We also seem to have a less than pushy local Apple office. The Dept that runs our satellite TV reception streaming on campus went wmv because MS wanted the business and Apple didn't. Are we too small? 30,000 students?
P'raps Apple are tainted with the current epidemic of rancid Political Correctness. Photos in newspapers must be vetted to make sure no student's face is identifiable... We were told to adjust our firewall so our streaming student concerts and class videos did not go off campus. I s'pose in that climate Apple may be right to wait for our lawyers to give them the nod.
Yet on the straight technical side we cannot find answers. We have the legal papers, we have the secure sites, we have the bandwidth, but we do not have the budget for a turnkey end to end ISDN video conferencing solution. We know iChat could do exactly what we want if we could just tweak the audio & video frame and bitrates. Hello Apple? Nobody home:-(
Slashdot Mirror
My big regret is that Fraunhofer gave up the fight and MP3 became the de facto standard, rather than the technically superior MP4.
Which also goes to show why Linux is not ready for the desktop, and can't make a sound business case.
My school days were too long ago for that
When I finished up at that job I left for a lengthy voyage home to the other side of the planet, by land and sea. I took with me a HP-41CX with the Astronomical ROM plugin, and my own program for resolving sun or star sextant shots to latitude and longitude, with no need to carry the Nautical Almanac. The on-off switch on that HP41 failed 3 years ago. But to this day a page of C code makes my eyes go all foggy. I now have Apple's Developer Tools installed. From time to time I download tarballs of interesting things from sourceforge. Then I usually spend several days chasing recursive dependencies and massaging makefiles. I haven't kept a running total of home runs, but it feels like less than 0.2 average. And after a couple of days cooling off there is the ritual washing of hands, by deleting avery traceable vestige of the failed project.
My teenage daughter thinks her knowledge of XHTML, PHP is so cool, and she can whip up pages loaded with hideous Flash animation. I guess there's an insatiable demand for that crap. Then I look at the endless re-invention of wheels that goes on in the Open Source area, and I ask myself, how many programmers do we really need?
There's a sig-line around that says Many years ago a girl in our college maths class asked the teacher: "What is the use of quadratic equations?" His reply was that she would find them very useful next time she wanted to paint a brick house. I'm getting to the point where I might just go plant some orange trees, get a few chickens, and leave the programming to those who have learned because they want to, not because somebody decided the nation will get more programmers by making it compulsory at school.
link shows 3rd Q sales. Just supposing they are averaged over whole year, then sorry, I have to drag out the old saw that Apple hardware lasts longer, gets handed on, say 4 years average life against 3 years for a typical PC. Then the surviving user base is ~4%. Don't beleive me.
into a matching display. Apple already has the patent
but let's just say the web-based word processor has some catching up to do.
like working on any browser, of my choice?
Genelec 1030 aren't exactly el cheapo, but any GSM phone will bore straight thru 'em. With 100 feet of balanced screened audio line feeds into a Sony HVR-Z1P camera, a GSM phone 10 feet away gives full level in the headphones. It's something to do with the spectral output of GSM phones in their status check and ring mode. Doesn't seem to do anything while actually talking on the phone, go figure. We are investigating what else might break in our venue if we put a blocking transmitter in to catch those who won't switch off.
I run a quicktime streaming server. I would dearly love to have simple web pages, fast to load, standards compliant, with links to my media rtsp://my.server/path/to/movie.mov Most browsers, including IE on Macintosh, will recognise rtsp as a "foreign" protocol and call a helper program. OK, user intervention is now required to set application preferences so that eg. QuickTimePlayer opens .mov .mp4 .m4v etc, and RealPlayer opens .ram.
.mms
;-) and paste into Notepad to make themselves a qt-hack.reg file, which a simple double click should install via regedit. Yes, I expect every WMP, RP, and SP to fiddle with it, but after a couple of restores, I expect folks who want to continue using my site will Get A Proper Browser(TM)
But on Windows the filetype/application associations are controlled by Registry Keys, and any app. can overwrite the settings for any other. IE cannot call a helper for rtsp even if one exists. It will always attempt (& fail) to retrieve the url above as http://my.server/path/to/movie.mov One could believe on Windows you're not supposed to use anything else except WindowsMediaPlayer and
So we have subterfuges, like loading plugins via ActiveX calls, and using <object> & <embed> tags. To satisfy the Eolas patent we now have to wrap the whole fudge pie in jscript? No way. This straw has broken this camel's back. I'm dropping back to plain simple text url links, and a help page with a short script people can read, (maybe understand?
Now I RTFA and I didn't see that phrase. Our local press put on a wry grin and said The point is, in spite of all the protestations earlier about who controls ICANN, here it is in headlines, ICANN is controlled by governments, bureaucrats, born-again Southern Christians, and mullahs.
the C116 is sold all over the world -- except for the United States.
In some markets like New Zealand it is a grey market item, for the same reasons that Americans have to stoop to the dim corners of Walmart. Local GSM provider Vodaphone offered a "Simple Phone" that had a color screen, was twice the size, twice as ugly, and twice the price of all the cool models. Needless to say it fizzed. Note also C116 seems to be a discontinued item in Australia.
Reminds me of when as a noob, I reported an error in a man page to a project mailing list, hoping somebody close to the project might pick it up and fix it. Nah, the response was: OK, write yourself a new man page.
That attitude still pervades most OSS projects. The result is open source is regarded as by geeks for geeks, and IMHO this, more than any perceived security risks, will keep it off the desktop for a long time yet. Sure, I see quite a few specialist applications coming thru now packaged for MacOS-X. Here's an example (names obscured to protect the ignorant): a multimedia application, gui built on GTK, equal to commercial products of several hundred dollars, well worthy of the suggested paypal donation. But it requires access to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, which is provided by a different oss project, whose raw binaries will do what's needed from the command line, but no gui interface yet, unless you build it, in Qt.
Security problems in OSS are multiplied by forking, and geekishness for its own sake.
My first glance thru the tutorial saw mysql being run with the default root acct, no password :-( And last time I looked it was necessary to start mysql with a directive to listen localhost only, otherwise port 3306 is open to the world. Apple's (in)famous secure systems again...
The Moving Picture Experts Group has been around for a decade and a half, and most media players support their stuff religiously. AAC / MP4 is not going anywhere.
Excuse me? MP4, mpeg4, the base format for HDVD, not going where? mp3 is a fifteen year old technology, dead on its feet. People predicting the demise of AAC/MP4 had better start digging graves for MP3 first.
No, I think pink noise would be more likely. For those who have already posited that the first encoding will have removed everything that needed removing: each re-encoding (mp3, mp4, whatever) will again attempt to remove parts of the signal the the algorithm deems redundant. If you start with a concert A sinewave, then it will probably survive a large number of encoding-decoding cycles. I haven't done the experiment with white noise, but "real" music is somewhere between those two extremes.
From TFA would it be possible to go down to Amoeba records, buy it for $14, take it home and rip it, then return it within 7 days to get 75% credit back?
Not in my country, friend. For over 2 years now our local version of Walmart, & several other smaller chains, has had a strict no returns policy for CD and DVD. Big signs in the stores advise shoppers to Choose wisely. Due to copyright reasons, we cannot accept returns of CD, DVD, or PC Games. Hey, it's no big deal, all DVD players sold here are Region 0.
Forget about the DRM for a moment, that may come or go or be circumvented. The plain unassailable fact is that for any given bitrate AAC is superior audio quality to mp3. And so it should be, it's part of the mp4 audio structure.
And while I'm here, somebody tell me one of the big losers to music piracy? That's right, Fraunhoffer, who for years kept a tight grip on the mp3 spec, and the license revenue stream. Sure, one day AAC will be superseded by an even better codec, and when that day comes you'd better be ready to trash all your other Brand X mp3 players.
Blogger admits he has never used service.
/. frontpage
Instant pass to
Even worse: Welcome to the World of Unix. Any File can be Executable. Open your favorite text editor. Type in
Note there should be a Return at the end of that line, &
You have just recreated the Secunia PoC, no zipping, no downloading, mail it to your friends as a joke - no don't, that's just stupid. Apple have had 5 years of being stupid on our behalf about this...
The problem occurs when you have a shell script without the shebang line, and it's given Type/Creator codes so that it will open in Terminal.app
It doesn't need the type/creator codes, and it doesn't matter if it has shebang or not. Set it in a GetInfo window to open with Terminal.app, and chmod 755 to make it executable. The dirty work is done. A pretty icon and enticing filename extension are just icing. It doesn't need to be zipped as some security sites are suggesting. It just needs to get to your current working directory somehow, email attachment, <meta http refresh, whatever, and you double-click it. Only the truly paranoid right-click every file to GetInfo, then again to Open with...
It should read: Russian Exchange trades in Computer Viruses
acording to this story on Arstechnica. Altho' I'm getting a 500 error on their eweek reference...
More items for your checklist -
Can you think how else to do live webcasting? Sure somebody mentioned multicasting, and I can see the ISP's eyes rolling from here. But Torrents, Podcasts, and all the other fancy schemes folks are rambling about here, just won't work for live material.
We operate a small cluster of servers from a data centre with good connectivity and a highly-rated ISP, who will occasionally allow us to burst to unlimited bandwidth.
How small is that cluster? and what value is unlimited and burst? You don't say which brand of streaming you're running. It wouldn't be meaningful for me to extrapolate from my single QuickTime X-Serve experience, but I have saturated a 100mb/s link between my site and a test site with multiple streams, and no sign of stress on the box. The last test clients to connect got the worst service, and there was no noticeable dropoff in quality for those already connected. Our ISP could have given us a 1G link, but they were afraid we'd find a problem with the link before our box choked.
If you're doing live webcasting then disk access is not an issue, providing you've got a truckload of ram in each box. Bandwidth at client end is often overlooked. How many clients are simultaneously connected thru a single concentrator point? NAT at client end can be a killer. And if the problem is caused by excessive demand from outside your intended catchment (small community broadcasting organization) then the solution may be difficult for a non-profit. You don't need a network like Akamai. You might get away with one independent dedicated unicast link to a small reflector server cluster somewhere geographically well away from your local target.
There's another problem which has only recently appeared. Your qos flag settings will be now be fighting with VOIP, and whether/how the intervening routers respect them. I have seen a medium sized corporate installation put its voice traffic onto the data fiber backbone, and "private" jabber videoconferencing suffered in consequence.
As others have posted this is being done by Stanford, MIT, Wisconsin, Duke, and in some form or other by a list of colleges longer than both your arms. It is happening in the most litigious nation on Earth, where Intellectual Property is sacrosanct, yet Apple can still rake off $0.02 on every deal thru its shop.
:-(
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Apple fanboy from way back. We have the technology, we have the trained personell, faculty are rearin' to go, but on this side of the Pacific we don't have a local iTunes store. We also seem to have a less than pushy local Apple office. The Dept that runs our satellite TV reception streaming on campus went wmv because MS wanted the business and Apple didn't. Are we too small? 30,000 students?
P'raps Apple are tainted with the current epidemic of rancid Political Correctness. Photos in newspapers must be vetted to make sure no student's face is identifiable... We were told to adjust our firewall so our streaming student concerts and class videos did not go off campus. I s'pose in that climate Apple may be right to wait for our lawyers to give them the nod.
Yet on the straight technical side we cannot find answers. We have the legal papers, we have the secure sites, we have the bandwidth, but we do not have the budget for a turnkey end to end ISDN video conferencing solution. We know iChat could do exactly what we want if we could just tweak the audio & video frame and bitrates. Hello Apple? Nobody home