'' I've been able to do that on my blackberry for over 3 years now. ''
Apple builds stuff for people who appreciate the tiny difference between "I've been able to do that for over 3 years now" and "I've been doing this for over 3 years now".
'' The point you bring up about the number of songs is laughable, by the way. It's an example of Apple turning tech specs into something people actually understand. They're using average song length and bitrate to determine how many songs a typical user can store on the iPod. Nothing nefarious about it. ''
I have the impression that everyone else (Creative, Microsoft etc. ) uses the same method nowadays. The only sad, sad exception was Sony who claimed 13,000 songs in the same storage where everyone else claimed 5,000 because they based their measurements on 48KBit/sec compression.
'' If I have GPLed code and proprietary code, I have to follow the rules of the proprietary code developer. I have no choice other than to use that proprietary code since it is a security system which is required for a product to work on a specific network. I cannot combine them because the GPL would infect the proprietary code and I don't own the proprietary code. ''
Actually, you got that exactly wrong: You cannot combine them because the proprietary code would infect the GPL'd code and you don't own the GPL'd code.
'' Am I going to put the files up on bittorent? No. But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes. That's what people who love music do. Is that technically illegal? Yea, it is. But God forbid that we actually show some enthusiasm for the bands we like and discover. And I can't even fathom how many music sales that's lead to. It's a HUGE number.
But now, I have to be careful with these. If I give one to a friend as a "check out this song" thing, I have to worry what he'll do with it. It's got MY info in it. And what if he's equally enthused by the song and tries to introduce someone else to it and THEY go and do the wrong thing and spread it wide and far? ''
If you give music to your friends that way, you have to tell them that _your_ name is in the music files and if these files get out into the wild, they will burn in hell. Now there are two possibilities: A. Your friends don't have shit for brains - you are fine. B. Your friends have shit for brains - When the RIAA knocks on your door, you give them the name and address of everyone you gave these songs to. I can't see the point in taking the rap for "friends" who behave in such an idiotic way.
'' Technically I don't think the first-sale doctrine applies. It only applies to the specific legally-made copy. Unless you actually give your hard drive to your friend, you are creating a second copy by transferring it to him, and the first-sale doctrine wouldn't apply (it's not a copy given to you by the rights-holder, but created by you). ''
That _is_ actually covered: You are allowed to make any copies that _have_ to be made to get the thing working. For example, you buy Microsoft Office on a DVD. You install it on your Mac (copy made legally); when you start the program it gets copied to RAM (legally), into various caches, on an Intel Mac the OS creates a derivative work by translating PPC code to Intel code, all that is perfectly legal. Making a copy as a necessary part of the sale is legal.
'' It really isn't a very good point. What if I want to give someone else my IPOD? I give/sell my ipod with some songs on it, they upload them, I get sued. "
Then you just show them the bill "sold one iPod 30 GB, including 2700 songs, to James Smith for $1500".
I mean you didn't just leave copies of your songs on the iPod, right, because that would have been completely illegal, you sold the iPod with the songs which you then carefully removed from your harddisk and from any backup copies, right?
'' lets take a guy at university buys a number of tracks for his girl friend for her ipod. 5 years later they broke up moved to different parts of the world maybe she or the new man in her life decides to share the tracks p2p and then the RIAA comes knocking on the door. ''
In that case: First, they can't search anything. If they know that songs with his name and address are available, then they would need to find out if they are actually his songs, which they can do by printing a list of songs and asking him "did you buy these songs", and if the answer is yes, there is nothing else a search could find that is relevant.
And then he would obviously point out to them that the songs that are getting shared are exactly those that he gave to his girlfriend when they split up.
'' Except you didn't file a police report, because it wasn't stolen - you left an ipod on the crosstown bus. ''
If you left your iPod on a bus, just write a letter to your insurance asking them to replace it. They will either send you cheque for a new iPod, or a letter telling you that it is your own stupidity to forget your iPod and they won't pay. Either way, you have documentation that shows your iPod is gone.
''What happens when your computer or mp3 player gets stolen and 6 months later there's files all over the p2p nets with your name on them. How could you prove you weren't the one that put them on there in the first place?''
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Britain, if your computer or iPod gets stolen, you call the police and tell them. They will give you a piece of paper saying that you reported your property as stolen, which you will need to get money for a new computer or iPod off your home insurance. No police report, no insurance money.
If -whatever the RIAA is called is Britain- asks you why songs with your name and email address are all over the internet, you tell them that your computer was stolen and you have a police report to prove it. And if they find out who posted the songs, you and the police and your insurance would like to hear from them.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
'' I hate the iTunes DRM. I hate the Sony CD's rootkit. I hate the DRM files in Rhapsody/Napster. Why is it that we never hear about those much anymore? Don't we all HATE them with every fiber of our being? ''
There is not a single song with DRM in my iTunes library. There is not a single song with DRM on my iPod. My wife got one CD-like music container which I had to import on my four year old PowerMac because the MacBook would just eject it; it was made by Sony and no "CD" sign anywhere on it. This might have been a close encounter with DRM; I don't know.
I don't hate DRM at all. I just haven't purchased and won't purchase music with DRM.
'' I think you're mistaking for what market-driven means. If the government imposes tariffs on certain products/ services, then the government is actively changing the market by endorsing certain products (i.e. not letting the market regulate itself). In a true free market capitalism world, the government would stay out of this kinda business and let the consumer decide. If the consumers purchase environmentally-friendly products en masse (which will probably be more expensive), then companies will start catering to those people, and then the market will regulate itself into making more environmentally conscious products. ''
The government is changing markets anyway, for example by not allowing companies to shoot their competitors. Or by preventing them from burning your house down if you can't meet the payments for your car. Or by preventing them from burning your house down if you bought a competitor's products. Or by preventing them from putting stuff into your food that makes it last longer, but makes you sick.
And you will find that companies are actually quite happy with these rules, especially the first one. They can make profits whatever regulations are in place. The only thing that would be bad would be regulations that give preference to one company above another.
There are situations where pure capitalism doesn't work. There are situations where if everybody tries to look after himself only, the outcome is worse for everyone. Like "environmentally conscious products": An environmentally better product may cost $1 more to produce, but save $10 in damage to the environment. If I buy the product, I lose $1, but a million people each save one millionth of $10 in damages. Not a good deal for me. But if each of the one million people does the same, each loses one dollar in cost, but makes 10 dollars in less damages. So what I say and what each of the million will say once they think about it: I don't want to buy the environmentally friendly product myself. But it would be good if everybody (maybe excluding me) were forced to buy it. Everybody would be better off, including myself.
That is where regulations are useful. In capitalism, everyone works within the rules to maximise their profit. (That includes breaking laws; breaking laws usually gives you a chance of increasing profits but adds a risk of punishment). What a government should do is to set up the rules so that by maximising their profits within these rules, companies produce the best result for everyone. This just has to be done in an intelligent way.
An example: Lead in computers is harmful. So some states made it completely illegal to have any lead in a computer. This has disadvantages; in some cases lead has been replaced by stuff that is much more expensive, much more harmful, but currently not illegal (not illegal because nobody thought of using it before lead was outlawed). It would have been better to allow a computer to have any amount of lead, but with a lead tax calculated to reduce the amount. So in the course of profit maximising, companies would reduce the amount of lead automatically.
And there is no reason why this should make products more expensive. If for example a lead tax was very high, then the amount of lead used would automatically go down, so not much would be paid. And since such a lead tax would increase government income, other taxes could be reduced accordingly. That, I believe, gives the best results for everybody: Carefully selected taxation of undesirable things, designed so that capitalistic companies are free to optimise their profits, but by doing so will automatically produce things that are better for everybody.
'' So a transmission hidden in noise is new again? ''
No, there is nothing hidden in the noise. What A and B and anyone listening in can measure is whether there is a small amount of noise, a medium amount of noise, or a huge amount of noise. There is nothing hidden in the noise. But if there is a medium amount of noise, then all I know as someone listening in is that one side sent a 0 and the other side sent a 1. I don't know _which_ side sent the 0 and which one sent the 1. A and B who were sending the data know of course what they sent themselves and therefore can figure out what the other side did. I can't.
All you need to do is find a physical effect where two sides A and B each produce an input of 0 or 1, and where you can find that one chose 0 and one chose 1, but not which one chose which. In this case, the effect is noise.
'' How would one go about learning COBOL today? After reading about it off and on for years, I have become interested in learning some basic COBOL. What books or resources would you recommend, and what compilers are available for Linux that generate good COBOL? ''
I bought a book about Cobol a few (maybe three years ago), reduced from £34.95 to £5, thought it would make some fun reading while sitting in the garden enjoying a bit of sunshine. After a few pages I thought "WTF? What kind of nonsense is this? What sane person would use that create that kind of language?" dBase and Clipper were sane. Cobol isn't.
'' Now you're just trying to conflate relatively simple metallurgy with rather intensely complicated organic chemistry. The patent system should serve to make it more likely that Edison style filament experimentation will occur. If the sort of invention/discovery is not of that kind then it's of dubious value to grant a patent for it. ''
Actually, Edison got a patent for the idea of taking a thin wire, heating it up in a vacuum, and have it produce light. The hard hard work going through hundreds of materials until he found one that worked well is not patentable, it is the idea.
'' I haven't read all the patents referenced by Target Technology Company's patent but if they have a case, this looks like TTC built a slight logical advancement on top of Sony's (and a vast number of other company's) work in optical discs and optical drives then they waited for someone to make this logical step. Here, it looks to be using a certain chemical to make the discs more reflective. Ok, so maybe they spent a lot of research and maybe they didn't... I don't know. Is it a specific chemical? Could one patent the specific use of a chemical? Did Sony just read the patent and use the chemical? I'm sure the court case will have to examine all that. I just hope some kind of justice can be found that seems right and logical in this case between the two companies. ''
I have a suspicion that this might fall very very well into the new definition of "obviousness". If a very thin silver cover has some nice properties, then it is obvious that creating an alloy of silver combined with some other material might have even better properties. It is then just a matter of trying out different materials to add and different percentages. This is of course a lot of work, but it is in no way inventive. You don't get a patent for the hard work, you get a patent for the brilliant idea. Trying different alloys is not a brilliant idea, it is obvious (it wasn't a few weeks ago, but it is now).
'' The battery life is partly because they are using the Ultra Low Volt (ULV) chips, which run at about 1.33GHz at most now, but they take a third the power of the 2.33GHz chips. Intel's ULV chips start with a letter "U", so if you can find the processor model, that's an easy way to tell. ''
Any idea how they compare to a 2.33 GHz chip temporarily clocked down to 1.33 GHz?
'' Out of curiosity, how did they come up with 16.2 million? That's close enough to 16.7 million that I can't figure which numbers they must be multiplying to get it. ''
Six bit with dithering gives you values from 0 to 63 with 1/4 resolution in each component, that is 253 different levels. 253 x 253 x 253 = 16.2 million.
'' And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? ''
Doesn't make any sense. On an LCD screen, one third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of red, another third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of green, and the last third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of blue. Fortunately, an LCD screen has three times as many pixels than the advertised number.
What most of the industry does is quite sneaky: If it is an 8 bit panel, then each pixel can display 256 x 256 x 256 different colors, that is about 16.7 million colors.
If it is a 6 bit panel, then you can use dithering with four pixels to achieve 253 different values in each color component (that is 253, not 256), so you can display 253 x 253 x 253 different colors using dithering, that makes 16.2 million colors. 16.2 million, not 16.7 million. Check the specs on any LCD monitor that you see, and you won't find any advertising 262,000 colors but plenty advertising 16.2 millions.
Well, Apple claims "millions" which is completely in line with industry practice both for 6 bit and 8 bit panels.
'' Any time a standard has been changed, you will have some outdated, but perfectly correct software. Hence, two pieces of software may not agree on the meaning of a Unicode string even without a software error. ''
Actually, the normalisation functions are defined to be unaffected by future changes.
'' Oh, I don't dispute that Unicode is a good idea for Text representation. It just has no place in anything that is carrying executable code or commands. If you allow Unicode in command languages, then there is no way to secure them with human possible effort, since filters essentially stop working. ''
Why would they stop working? As two examples, the bash shell and the Perl language don't assign any special meaning to any character with a code above 0x80, so Unicode using UTF8 encoding would be completely transparent. (For example, a Perl script that reads a file name and generates a valid bash shell command that would delete that file or copy it to another directory would work without any changes).
The problem is using character sets that can represent huge amounts of different characters, and among them characters that have similar looking glyphs. That is at the same time a feature that people really really want.
So spam filters will have a problem. They filter out "Viagra" but they don't filter out sequences of letters that look the same. Well, tough. If you follow the rule not to follow any links in emails but type them in yourself, that gets you mostly around it.
The other "problem" is filtering to prevent SQL injection and all that crap. There I'd have to say two things: 1. It is just common sense if you accept Unicode to translate it into a canonical form first, either precomposed canonical or predecomposed canonical (by the way, predecomposed canonical UTF8 is what the MacOS X file system uses). Once that is done, nothing unexpected should slip through. 2. Why would you need to filter out anything at all? This is a completely brain-damaged approach in the first place, using user input to form commands that could potentially be dangerous and filtering out user input that would produce dangerous commands. Instead, there shouldn't be any commands that could be dangerous in the first place.
'' I personally doubt most Mac owners will care too much about running the competition's OS. ''
If they run Windows, they run it to access some Windows-only application, not to get a flashy, tasteless user-interface, so Macintosh users are much better off with Windows XP anyway.
A price of 50 cents per song that you hope for is obviously not going to happen, since the big companies charge 70 cents for the right to sell songs with DRM, and EMI charges an unknown higher amount for the right to sell songs without DRM (in any format and quality the seller wants).
'' Yes, MP3 is an aging format. But it is almost universally supported... ''
AAC is almost universally supported. All iPods play it.
And since Microsoft has released a dark-brown AAC player, all those companies who went with Microsoft's PlayForSure and were afraid to support AAC because they didn't want to upset Microsoft will switch over very soon as well.
There is also the slight matter of MP3 patent trolls, who have already won a judgement against Microsoft for more than $1bn.
Slashdot Mirror
'' I've been able to do that on my blackberry for over 3 years now. ''
Apple builds stuff for people who appreciate the tiny difference between "I've been able to do that for over 3 years now" and "I've been doing this for over 3 years now".
'' The point you bring up about the number of songs is laughable, by the way. It's an example of Apple turning tech specs into something people actually understand. They're using average song length and bitrate to determine how many songs a typical user can store on the iPod. Nothing nefarious about it. ''
I have the impression that everyone else (Creative, Microsoft etc. ) uses the same method nowadays. The only sad, sad exception was Sony who claimed 13,000 songs in the same storage where everyone else claimed 5,000 because they based their measurements on 48KBit/sec compression.
'' If I have GPLed code and proprietary code, I have to follow the rules of the proprietary code developer. I have no choice other than to use that proprietary code since it is a security system which is required for a product to work on a specific network. I cannot combine them because the GPL would infect the proprietary code and I don't own the proprietary code. ''
Actually, you got that exactly wrong: You cannot combine them because the proprietary code would infect the GPL'd code and you don't own the GPL'd code.
'' Am I going to put the files up on bittorent? No. But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes. That's what people who love music do. Is that technically illegal? Yea, it is. But God forbid that we actually show some enthusiasm for the bands we like and discover. And I can't even fathom how many music sales that's lead to. It's a HUGE number.
But now, I have to be careful with these. If I give one to a friend as a "check out this song" thing, I have to worry what he'll do with it. It's got MY info in it. And what if he's equally enthused by the song and tries to introduce someone else to it and THEY go and do the wrong thing and spread it wide and far? ''
If you give music to your friends that way, you have to tell them that _your_ name is in the music files and if these files get out into the wild, they will burn in hell. Now there are two possibilities: A. Your friends don't have shit for brains - you are fine. B. Your friends have shit for brains - When the RIAA knocks on your door, you give them the name and address of everyone you gave these songs to. I can't see the point in taking the rap for "friends" who behave in such an idiotic way.
'' Technically I don't think the first-sale doctrine applies. It only applies to the specific legally-made copy. Unless you actually give your hard drive to your friend, you are creating a second copy by transferring it to him, and the first-sale doctrine wouldn't apply (it's not a copy given to you by the rights-holder, but created by you). ''
That _is_ actually covered: You are allowed to make any copies that _have_ to be made to get the thing working. For example, you buy Microsoft Office on a DVD. You install it on your Mac (copy made legally); when you start the program it gets copied to RAM (legally), into various caches, on an Intel Mac the OS creates a derivative work by translating PPC code to Intel code, all that is perfectly legal. Making a copy as a necessary part of the sale is legal.
'' It really isn't a very good point. What if I want to give someone else my IPOD? I give/sell my ipod with some songs on it, they upload them, I get sued. "
Then you just show them the bill "sold one iPod 30 GB, including 2700 songs, to James Smith for $1500".
I mean you didn't just leave copies of your songs on the iPod, right, because that would have been completely illegal, you sold the iPod with the songs which you then carefully removed from your harddisk and from any backup copies, right?
'' lets take a guy at university buys a number of tracks for his girl friend for her ipod.
5 years later they broke up moved to different parts of the world maybe she or the new man in her life decides to share the tracks p2p and then the RIAA comes knocking on the door. ''
In that case: First, they can't search anything. If they know that songs with his name and address are available, then they would need to find out if they are actually his songs, which they can do by printing a list of songs and asking him "did you buy these songs", and if the answer is yes, there is nothing else a search could find that is relevant.
And then he would obviously point out to them that the songs that are getting shared are exactly those that he gave to his girlfriend when they split up.
'' Except you didn't file a police report, because it wasn't stolen - you left an ipod on the crosstown bus. ''
If you left your iPod on a bus, just write a letter to your insurance asking them to replace it. They will either send you cheque for a new iPod, or a letter telling you that it is your own stupidity to forget your iPod and they won't pay. Either way, you have documentation that shows your iPod is gone.
''What happens when your computer or mp3 player gets stolen and 6 months later there's files all over the p2p nets with your name on them. How could you prove you weren't the one that put them on there in the first place?''
I don't know how it works in the USA, but in Britain, if your computer or iPod gets stolen, you call the police and tell them. They will give you a piece of paper saying that you reported your property as stolen, which you will need to get money for a new computer or iPod off your home insurance. No police report, no insurance money.
If -whatever the RIAA is called is Britain- asks you why songs with your name and email address are all over the internet, you tell them that your computer was stolen and you have a police report to prove it. And if they find out who posted the songs, you and the police and your insurance would like to hear from them.
'' I hate the iTunes DRM. I hate the Sony CD's rootkit. I hate the DRM files in Rhapsody/Napster. Why is it that we never hear about those much anymore? Don't we all HATE them with every fiber of our being? ''
There is not a single song with DRM in my iTunes library. There is not a single song with DRM on my iPod. My wife got one CD-like music container which I had to import on my four year old PowerMac because the MacBook would just eject it; it was made by Sony and no "CD" sign anywhere on it. This might have been a close encounter with DRM; I don't know.
I don't hate DRM at all. I just haven't purchased and won't purchase music with DRM.
'' I think you're mistaking for what market-driven means. If the government imposes tariffs on certain products/ services, then the government is actively changing the market by endorsing certain products (i.e. not letting the market regulate itself). In a true free market capitalism world, the government would stay out of this kinda business and let the consumer decide. If the consumers purchase environmentally-friendly products en masse (which will probably be more expensive), then companies will start catering to those people, and then the market will regulate itself into making more environmentally conscious products. ''
The government is changing markets anyway, for example by not allowing companies to shoot their competitors. Or by preventing them from burning your house down if you can't meet the payments for your car. Or by preventing them from burning your house down if you bought a competitor's products. Or by preventing them from putting stuff into your food that makes it last longer, but makes you sick.
And you will find that companies are actually quite happy with these rules, especially the first one. They can make profits whatever regulations are in place. The only thing that would be bad would be regulations that give preference to one company above another.
There are situations where pure capitalism doesn't work. There are situations where if everybody tries to look after himself only, the outcome is worse for everyone. Like "environmentally conscious products": An environmentally better product may cost $1 more to produce, but save $10 in damage to the environment. If I buy the product, I lose $1, but a million people each save one millionth of $10 in damages. Not a good deal for me. But if each of the one million people does the same, each loses one dollar in cost, but makes 10 dollars in less damages. So what I say and what each of the million will say once they think about it: I don't want to buy the environmentally friendly product myself. But it would be good if everybody (maybe excluding me) were forced to buy it. Everybody would be better off, including myself.
That is where regulations are useful. In capitalism, everyone works within the rules to maximise their profit. (That includes breaking laws; breaking laws usually gives you a chance of increasing profits but adds a risk of punishment). What a government should do is to set up the rules so that by maximising their profits within these rules, companies produce the best result for everyone. This just has to be done in an intelligent way.
An example: Lead in computers is harmful. So some states made it completely illegal to have any lead in a computer. This has disadvantages; in some cases lead has been replaced by stuff that is much more expensive, much more harmful, but currently not illegal (not illegal because nobody thought of using it before lead was outlawed). It would have been better to allow a computer to have any amount of lead, but with a lead tax calculated to reduce the amount. So in the course of profit maximising, companies would reduce the amount of lead automatically.
And there is no reason why this should make products more expensive. If for example a lead tax was very high, then the amount of lead used would automatically go down, so not much would be paid. And since such a lead tax would increase government income, other taxes could be reduced accordingly. That, I believe, gives the best results for everybody: Carefully selected taxation of undesirable things, designed so that capitalistic companies are free to optimise their profits, but by doing so will automatically produce things that are better for everybody.
'' So a transmission hidden in noise is new again? ''
No, there is nothing hidden in the noise. What A and B and anyone listening in can measure is whether there is a small amount of noise, a medium amount of noise, or a huge amount of noise. There is nothing hidden in the noise. But if there is a medium amount of noise, then all I know as someone listening in is that one side sent a 0 and the other side sent a 1. I don't know _which_ side sent the 0 and which one sent the 1. A and B who were sending the data know of course what they sent themselves and therefore can figure out what the other side did. I can't.
All you need to do is find a physical effect where two sides A and B each produce an input of 0 or 1, and where you can find that one chose 0 and one chose 1, but not which one chose which. In this case, the effect is noise.
'' How would one go about learning COBOL today? After reading about it off and on for years, I have become interested in learning some basic COBOL. What books or resources would you recommend, and what compilers are available for Linux that generate good COBOL? ''
I bought a book about Cobol a few (maybe three years ago), reduced from £34.95 to £5, thought it would make some fun reading while sitting in the garden enjoying a bit of sunshine. After a few pages I thought "WTF? What kind of nonsense is this? What sane person would use that create that kind of language?" dBase and Clipper were sane. Cobol isn't.
'' Now you're just trying to conflate relatively simple metallurgy with rather intensely complicated organic chemistry. The patent system should serve to make it more likely that Edison style filament experimentation will occur. If the sort of invention/discovery is not of that kind then it's of dubious value to grant a patent for it. ''
Actually, Edison got a patent for the idea of taking a thin wire, heating it up in a vacuum, and have it produce light. The hard hard work going through hundreds of materials until he found one that worked well is not patentable, it is the idea.
'' I haven't read all the patents referenced by Target Technology Company's patent but if they have a case, this looks like TTC built a slight logical advancement on top of Sony's (and a vast number of other company's) work in optical discs and optical drives then they waited for someone to make this logical step. Here, it looks to be using a certain chemical to make the discs more reflective. Ok, so maybe they spent a lot of research and maybe they didn't ... I don't know. Is it a specific chemical? Could one patent the specific use of a chemical? Did Sony just read the patent and use the chemical? I'm sure the court case will have to examine all that. I just hope some kind of justice can be found that seems right and logical in this case between the two companies. ''
I have a suspicion that this might fall very very well into the new definition of "obviousness". If a very thin silver cover has some nice properties, then it is obvious that creating an alloy of silver combined with some other material might have even better properties. It is then just a matter of trying out different materials to add and different percentages. This is of course a lot of work, but it is in no way inventive. You don't get a patent for the hard work, you get a patent for the brilliant idea. Trying different alloys is not a brilliant idea, it is obvious (it wasn't a few weeks ago, but it is now).
'' The battery life is partly because they are using the Ultra Low Volt (ULV) chips, which run at about 1.33GHz at most now, but they take a third the power of the 2.33GHz chips. Intel's ULV chips start with a letter "U", so if you can find the processor model, that's an easy way to tell. ''
Any idea how they compare to a 2.33 GHz chip temporarily clocked down to 1.33 GHz?
'' Out of curiosity, how did they come up with 16.2 million? That's close enough to 16.7 million that I can't figure which numbers they must be multiplying to get it. ''
Six bit with dithering gives you values from 0 to 63 with 1/4 resolution in each component, that is 253 different levels. 253 x 253 x 253 = 16.2 million.
'' And this isn't being pedantic - surely it's long established that "number of colours" refers to the number of possible colours an individual pixel can display, and not using tricks like dithering? ''
Doesn't make any sense. On an LCD screen, one third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of red, another third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of green, and the last third of the pixels is capable of displaying either 64 or 256 shades of blue. Fortunately, an LCD screen has three times as many pixels than the advertised number.
6 bit panels are in fact not advertised as 8 bit.
What most of the industry does is quite sneaky: If it is an 8 bit panel, then each pixel can display 256 x 256 x 256 different colors, that is about 16.7 million colors.
If it is a 6 bit panel, then you can use dithering with four pixels to achieve 253 different values in each color component (that is 253, not 256), so you can display 253 x 253 x 253 different colors using dithering, that makes 16.2 million colors. 16.2 million, not 16.7 million. Check the specs on any LCD monitor that you see, and you won't find any advertising 262,000 colors but plenty advertising 16.2 millions.
Well, Apple claims "millions" which is completely in line with industry practice both for 6 bit and 8 bit panels.
'' Any time a standard has been changed, you will have some outdated, but perfectly correct software. Hence, two pieces of software may not agree on the meaning of a Unicode string even without a software error. ''
Actually, the normalisation functions are defined to be unaffected by future changes.
'' Oh, I don't dispute that Unicode is a good idea for Text representation. It just has no place in anything that is carrying executable code or commands. If you allow Unicode in command languages, then there is no way to secure them with human possible effort, since filters essentially stop working. ''
Why would they stop working? As two examples, the bash shell and the Perl language don't assign any special meaning to any character with a code above 0x80, so Unicode using UTF8 encoding would be completely transparent. (For example, a Perl script that reads a file name and generates a valid bash shell command that would delete that file or copy it to another directory would work without any changes).
Unicode is of course not the problem at all.
The problem is using character sets that can represent huge amounts of different characters, and among them characters that have similar looking glyphs. That is at the same time a feature that people really really want.
So spam filters will have a problem. They filter out "Viagra" but they don't filter out sequences of letters that look the same. Well, tough. If you follow the rule not to follow any links in emails but type them in yourself, that gets you mostly around it.
The other "problem" is filtering to prevent SQL injection and all that crap. There I'd have to say two things: 1. It is just common sense if you accept Unicode to translate it into a canonical form first, either precomposed canonical or predecomposed canonical (by the way, predecomposed canonical UTF8 is what the MacOS X file system uses). Once that is done, nothing unexpected should slip through. 2. Why would you need to filter out anything at all? This is a completely brain-damaged approach in the first place, using user input to form commands that could potentially be dangerous and filtering out user input that would produce dangerous commands. Instead, there shouldn't be any commands that could be dangerous in the first place.
'' I personally doubt most Mac owners will care too much about running the competition's OS. ''
If they run Windows, they run it to access some Windows-only application, not to get a flashy, tasteless user-interface, so Macintosh users are much better off with Windows XP anyway.
A price of 50 cents per song that you hope for is obviously not going to happen, since the big companies charge 70 cents for the right to sell songs with DRM, and EMI charges an unknown higher amount for the right to sell songs without DRM (in any format and quality the seller wants).
'' Yes, MP3 is an aging format. But it is almost universally supported... ''
AAC is almost universally supported. All iPods play it.
And since Microsoft has released a dark-brown AAC player, all those companies who went with Microsoft's PlayForSure and were afraid to support AAC because they didn't want to upset Microsoft will switch over very soon as well.
There is also the slight matter of MP3 patent trolls, who have already won a judgement against Microsoft for more than $1bn.