You did not define them, you listed a lot of wooly characteristics and didn't give examples apart from Slate and/.
It seems that what you are really talking about is latency.
Conventional media have a high latency in the feedback loop, because of their long deadlines. (Byte magazine was notorious for this, as it had a 3 month lag between submission and publication, whcih meant it had to be given products 3 months before their planned launch date, so it was always publishing reviews of things that were postponed); daily newspapaers have a 1 day latency for readers comment, but a weekly/monthly latency for circulation figures and ad revenues, and insufficient granularity to tell whose column is attracting readers.
By this reading, Salon is acting in a very Open way by firing low-rated columnists. Personally, I find Salon a better read than slashdot, especilly the excellent Ruth Shalit, who writes wittily and thoughtfully about advertising and media excesses.
Tish Williams' old column at Upside was a great example of mediated feedback, when she would quote and heckle her readers emails every Friday.
You, on the other hand, can't even get your replies into the right thread.
Chapter 3 mentions skins which is weird as they have nothing to do with MP3 per se, they're just an annoying trend in UI design that some MP3 players have adopted.
John, you are trying to split media into two categories withut really defining them, which is a classic 'us and them' trick of demagogues (see Tony Blair's 'tforces of conservatism' speech, when he defined the latter as anyone who disagreed with him). You say that subsidised media is anomalous, but surely slashdot is subsidised by Andovers stock float. Also, many online news sites are subsidised by sales of print versions (and the ads therein), such as the excellent www.telegraph.co.uk, which has great UK and international news and editorial, derived from large UK sales.
Did you read the article? Cringely's position is that MS didn't push back too hard in the trial, as it realised that the DoJ had not clearly shown consumer harm. If they had pushed back there, the DoJ would have dug further, and Jackson would have helped. The basis of the appeal will be lack of consumer harm, but MS want it to happen in front of a more sympathetic judge.
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
The IFF file format family, originally defined by Electronic Arts, and forming the basis of AIFF, AVI and MOV files does exactly this.
MS is aware of this technique (after all it used it in AVI), but either through poor engineering or malice chose to impose frequent file format incompatibilities on users of Office.
XML is not a panacea - having to express all embedded images in a textual form is more than a little cumbersome. I'm sure this flexibility had a lot to do with the MPEG4 committee adopting the QuickTime file format.
Maybe the right response is a class action suit by people like the original author harmed by this.
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
The IFF file format family, originally defined by Electronic Arts, and forming the basis of AIFF, AVI and MOV files does exactly this.
MS is aware of this technique (after all it used it in AVI), but either through poor engineering chice or malice chose to impose frequent file format incompatibilities on users of Office.
Maybe the right response is a class action suit by people like the original author harmed by this.
This is a key question. PowerPC chips have enough to keep a matrix, vector and result in registers. Pentiums don't. Altivec PPCs have even more. This makes a huge difference to lots of mathematical calculations, iff your compiler respects the register keyword or allocates them sensibly (eg for parameter passing).
CDs have 16-bit resolution - one part in 65536, That is a signal to quantisation noise level of 100dB+ Vinyl has a S/N ratio of 50dB if you have a perfect pressing and play it on a $20,000 deck in a vacuum mounted in gimbals.
Or are you claiming that mass-stamped vinyl is accurate to 10 nanometers?
As to 50KHz frequency range that gives a mean horizontal resolution of a micron or so; more believeable, but hardly likely to make it though a mechanical tranducer and back out through a speaker unblemished.
As your ears have afrequency response that tails off around 18 KHz, but amplitude sensitivity of about 80dB, CDs are usually making a better tradeoff.
I don't know what digital sound you have been listening to over a phone line, but DSL lets the same line carry uncompressed CD-quality audio with ease, or full-motion video with stereo sound using compression.
Modems suck because they are converting digits to squeaks and bleeps to pass through analogue switching (and, these days, digital switching at 8kHz sample rates).
Go to the QuickTime front page and click on the NPR channel button.
Or choose NPR from the Favorites menu in QuickTime Player, assuming you already have it.
This is served through the Akamai network, so should be proof against the slashdot effect...
How about rack mounting PowerBooks?
on
Rack An iMac
·
· Score: 5
You could fit a PowerBook inside a 19" rack completely. All you'd have to do is let the ports poke out the back. Then you could open up the front of the rack and take it home at the end of the day.
Apple introduced the Cinema display at Seybold. It is 22" diagonal with 1600x1024 pixels, 160 degrees viewing angle and 300:1 contrast ratio. It is a beautiful piece of engineering - the and the G4 plays DVDs on it like a dream - way better than any TV display I've ever seen, including tradeshow HDTV demos.
The tilt adjustment has an ingenious pivot in the stand that is stable at all angles, so you just push it back with one hand to change the angle.
It does cost $3999, and you can only buy it with a G4, but it is absolutely beautiful. Just the thing to blow your slashdot IPO money on...
'A large company is going to be able to capitalize on a new idea faster than a startup'
You don't have much experience with large companies, do you? The startup will be in second round-financing or bust before the large company has got enough managers to agree to approve a costing for a feasibility study into a pilot project. Generally they prefer to let the start-ups do the risk-taking and buy the successful ones.
I notice that Bjarne mentions this in passing, but doesn't elaborate. It is this issue that prevents a solid ABI based on C++ that sues calss inheritance.
The most compelling argument against the use of C++ is the Fragile Base Class problem. With all C++ implementations I know of, you cannot change a library class to add a method or member variable without causing all code that links with it to crash (or at least radically misbehave). With C structs and functions, this is far easier to avoid. However, this could be an incentive to go the Open Source route, as if you have to recompile anyway to avoid crashing, providing source as opposed to binary librarues is encouraged. What do you think?
Mac OS 9 includes multiple language kits, so you can mix Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Korean and more in a single document. (They aren't in the default install, but they are there in Custom).
The APIs have been in MacOS for years, but the language kits used to be hard to get - now they are in the shipping OS.
The PET was the first computer I owned - my Dad 'lent' me the money and I paid him back with a paper round. It came with 8k of RAM, and the part of the motherboard where there was space for more had quarter-inch holes drilled in it to stop you upgrading it - fortunately we found someone who could upgrade it to 32K by piggybacking 2 lots of RAM chips on top of each other, bending out one of the pins to distingish that address line!
The BASIC in the PET was by Microsoft (If you don't believe me, type WAIT 6502,100 into a PET to see Bill's Easter Egg).
I learnt a lot on this machine, writing game routines in Assembler (3 registers only A, X & Y), synthesizing music via the parallel port; even writing software for a programmable charcter generator expansion kit that sold about 4 copies...
This is a good point - the patent system is an attempt to encourage publication, rather than 'security through obscurity' by granting a time-limited monopoly. For mechanical inventions, a 17-year expiration is probably reasonable; now we are living on 'internet time' an accelerated decay seems highly appropriate, to prevent someone buying up patents to supress their use. How about: Mechanical invention: 17 years Medical: 15 years (Given the FDA approval lag) Circuitry: 8 years Software Algorithm: 4 years Internet Business Model: 1 year
Then, add a clause that lets you challenge for non-exploitation, like the Trademark one Linus cited, and we're closer to what we need.
You can play from Linux, but only for an hour
on
MP3.com's Beam-It
·
· Score: 2
They only have Windows & Mac versions of the 'upload' software, but you can play the m3u playlists with any MP3 player, whether Linux, Be or OS X, as long as it can cope with the long URLs they use. This is good for me as I can 'beam' the CDs in from home, and play them at work, without taking them in and possibly losing them.
Note that the URLs for individual tracks expire after an hour, and then they play you a speech message saying "go and make a new playlist". They weren't smart enough to offset the expiration window by the duration of each track, so you can't play an indefinite playlist. They also forgot the 'shuffle' button. However this does mean you have an hour to download the MP3s they have of your CD, which (assuming you have a good connection) is significantly faster than ripping them yourself.
I suspect CmdrTaco's scripts are more like myplay.com, which is a similar legal MP3 repository, but requires you to do your own ripping.
Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds? Looks like my.mp3.com are about to test this. They have ripped 10,000 CDs and wil give you access to the MP3s if you prove you have the original - either by putting it in your CD-ROM drive or buying it online. Should be an interesting court case.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn it over and pop out the handle - voila!
You did not define them, you listed a lot of wooly characteristics and didn't give examples apart from Slate and /.
It seems that what you are really talking about is latency.
Conventional media have a high latency in the feedback loop, because of their long deadlines. (Byte magazine was notorious for this, as it had a 3 month lag between submission and publication, whcih meant it had to be given products 3 months before their planned launch date, so it was always publishing reviews of things that were postponed); daily newspapaers have a 1 day latency for readers comment, but a weekly/monthly latency for circulation figures and ad revenues, and insufficient granularity to tell whose column is attracting readers.
By this reading, Salon is acting in a very Open way by firing low-rated columnists. Personally, I find Salon a better read than slashdot, especilly the excellent Ruth Shalit, who writes wittily and thoughtfully about advertising and media excesses.
Tish Williams' old column at Upside was a great example of mediated feedback, when she would quote and heckle her readers emails every Friday.
You, on the other hand, can't even get your replies into the right thread.
Chapter 3 mentions skins which is weird as they have nothing to do with MP3 per se, they're just an annoying trend in UI design that some MP3 players have adopted.
John, you are trying to split media into two categories withut really defining them, which is a classic 'us and them' trick of demagogues (see Tony Blair's 'tforces of conservatism' speech, when he defined the latter as anyone who disagreed with him).
You say that subsidised media is anomalous, but surely slashdot is subsidised by Andovers stock float. Also, many online news sites are subsidised by sales of print versions (and the ads therein), such as the excellent www.telegraph.co.uk, which has great UK and international news and editorial, derived from large UK sales.
Do they ahve some prototype we don't?
Or do they perhaps mean the iBook?
Certainly I have found that different Apple LCD screens have different pixel orders
Box phonetically equivocates to baw-ks. Boxes phonetically converts to Baw-k-ses
/b/ /o/ /ks/ /schwa/ /z/ or bokziz in your phonetix. Divided by a common languae? I'll say.
Bawks? What kind of strangualted phonetics are these?
Boxes is
Did you read the article? Cringely's position is that MS didn't push back too hard in the trial, as it realised that the DoJ had not clearly shown consumer harm. If they had pushed back there, the DoJ would have dug further, and Jackson would have helped. The basis of the appeal will be lack of consumer harm, but MS want it to happen in front of a more sympathetic judge.
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
The IFF file format family, originally defined by Electronic Arts, and forming the basis of AIFF, AVI and MOV files does exactly this.
MS is aware of this technique (after all it used it in AVI), but either through poor engineering or malice chose to impose frequent file format incompatibilities on users of Office.
XML is not a panacea - having to express all embedded images in a textual form is more than a little cumbersome.
I'm sure this flexibility had a lot to do with the MPEG4 committee adopting the QuickTime file format.
Maybe the right response is a class action suit by people like the original author harmed by this.
It is perfectly possible to define a file format that is both forward and backward compatible.
The IFF file format family, originally defined by Electronic Arts, and forming the basis of AIFF, AVI and MOV files does exactly this.
MS is aware of this technique (after all it used it in AVI), but either through poor engineering chice or malice chose to impose frequent file format incompatibilities on users of Office.
Maybe the right response is a class action suit by people like the original author harmed by this.
This is a key question. PowerPC chips have enough to keep a matrix, vector and result in registers. Pentiums don't.
Altivec PPCs have even more. This makes a huge difference to lots of mathematical calculations, iff your compiler respects the register keyword or allocates them sensibly (eg for parameter passing).
CDs have 16-bit resolution - one part in 65536,
That is a signal to quantisation noise level of 100dB+
Vinyl has a S/N ratio of 50dB if you have a perfect pressing and play it on a $20,000 deck in a vacuum mounted in gimbals.
Or are you claiming that mass-stamped vinyl is accurate to 10 nanometers?
As to 50KHz frequency range that gives a mean horizontal resolution of a micron or so; more believeable, but hardly likely to make it though a mechanical tranducer and back out through a speaker unblemished.
As your ears have afrequency response that tails off around 18 KHz, but amplitude sensitivity of about 80dB, CDs are usually making a better tradeoff.
I don't know what digital sound you have been listening to over a phone line, but DSL lets the same line carry uncompressed CD-quality audio with ease, or full-motion video with stereo sound using compression.
Modems suck because they are converting digits to squeaks and bleeps to pass through analogue switching (and, these days, digital switching at 8kHz sample rates).
Go to the QuickTime front page and click on the NPR channel button.
Or choose NPR from the Favorites menu in QuickTime Player, assuming you already have it.
This is served through the Akamai network, so should be proof against the slashdot effect...
You could fit a PowerBook inside a 19" rack completely. All you'd have to do is let the ports poke out the back. Then you could open up the front of the rack and take it home at the end of the day.
The tilt adjustment has an ingenious pivot in the stand that is stable at all angles, so you just push it back with one hand to change the angle.
It does cost $3999, and you can only buy it with a G4, but it is absolutely beautiful. Just the thing to blow your slashdot IPO money on...
You don't have much experience with large companies, do you?
The startup will be in second round-financing or bust before the large company has got enough managers to agree to approve a costing for a feasibility study into a pilot project.
Generally they prefer to let the start-ups do the risk-taking and buy the successful ones.
I notice that Bjarne mentions this in passing, but doesn't elaborate. It is this issue that prevents a solid ABI based on C++ that sues calss inheritance.
The most compelling argument against the use of C++ is the Fragile Base Class problem. With all C++ implementations I know of, you cannot change a library class to add a method or member variable without causing all code that links with it to crash (or at least radically misbehave). With C structs and functions, this is far easier to avoid.
However, this could be an incentive to go the Open Source route, as if you have to recompile anyway to avoid crashing, providing source as opposed to binary librarues is encouraged. What do you think?
Sorry, couldn't resist the obvious pun
Mac OS 9 includes multiple language kits, so you can mix Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Korean and more in a single document. (They aren't in the default install, but they are there in Custom).
The APIs have been in MacOS for years, but the language kits used to be hard to get - now they are in the shipping OS.
The PET was the first computer I owned - my Dad 'lent' me the money and I paid him back with a paper round. It came with 8k of RAM, and the part of the motherboard where there was space for more had quarter-inch holes drilled in it to stop you upgrading it - fortunately we found someone who could upgrade it to 32K by piggybacking 2 lots of RAM chips on top of each other, bending out one of the pins to distingish that address line!
The BASIC in the PET was by Microsoft (If you don't believe me, type
WAIT 6502,100
into a PET to see Bill's Easter Egg).
I learnt a lot on this machine, writing game routines in Assembler (3 registers only A, X & Y), synthesizing music via the parallel port; even writing software for a programmable charcter generator expansion kit that sold about 4 copies...
He formed the HI Group at Apple after the Mac shipped, and helped document and dogmatise the Mac UI.
Jobs was a lot closer to the Mac UI design than Tog ever was.
This is a good point - the patent system is an attempt to encourage publication, rather than 'security through obscurity' by granting a time-limited monopoly. For mechanical inventions, a 17-year expiration is probably reasonable; now we are living on 'internet time' an accelerated decay seems highly appropriate, to prevent someone buying up patents to supress their use.
How about:
Mechanical invention: 17 years
Medical: 15 years (Given the FDA approval lag)
Circuitry: 8 years
Software Algorithm: 4 years
Internet Business Model: 1 year
Then, add a clause that lets you challenge for non-exploitation, like the Trademark one Linus cited, and we're closer to what we need.
They only have Windows & Mac versions of the 'upload' software, but you can play the m3u playlists with any MP3 player, whether Linux, Be or OS X, as long as it can cope with the long URLs they use. This is good for me as I can 'beam' the CDs in from home, and play them at work, without taking them in and possibly losing them.
Note that the URLs for individual tracks expire after an hour, and then they play you a speech message saying "go and make a new playlist". They weren't smart enough to offset the expiration window by the duration of each track, so you can't play an indefinite playlist. They also forgot the 'shuffle' button.
However this does mean you have an hour to download the MP3s they have of your CD, which (assuming you have a good connection) is significantly faster than ripping them yourself.
I suspect CmdrTaco's scripts are more like myplay.com, which is a similar legal MP3 repository, but requires you to do your own ripping.
Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds?
Looks like my.mp3.com are about to test this. They have ripped 10,000 CDs and wil give you access to the MP3s if you prove you have the original - either by putting it in your CD-ROM drive or buying it online. Should be an interesting court case.
Stuart Cheshire already patched Linux to improve modem latency 4 years ago, but it wasn't accepted into the distribution. It's on this webpage.