And they maybe could add some region encoding so that people couldn't read a book in England that was meant for sale to Americans.
.. it would probably be the other way around, since most of the Harry Potter books have been censored for US consumption - ref: the fact that the film and book in the US is called "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" whereas the "correct" title (almost everywhere else in the world) is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".
This is why it is so essential to make the distinction between so-called "intellectual" property and physical property. If I steal a car from a dealer, that dealer has lost something tangible and is worse off. If I copy a CD for a friend, the artist (and more particularly the media companies involved) haven't lost anything tangible. You can argue that they've lost a potential sale, but you can also argue that they may gain more potential sales in the future when that friend decides they like the CD. It's the latter argument that the Napster statistics quoted in the article are trying to point out.
Even more important is that if I make a copy of the CD for myself, for personal use only, no-one has lost any money, not even a potential sale. This is highly relevant to me - with mroe and more copy protection it gets harder to rip CDs to MP3 which is how I listen to all my music currently.
The latest version of ExactAudio copy ripped White Lilies Island perfectly using a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive, after enabling C2 error correction.
I don't know if this is the drive or the new version of the software making this possible, but it is definitely one of the CDS protected CDs since it won't rip with anything else (and has the CDS logo on the back cover).
Um, no.. I'm just in a position where I have an Archos and it meets my needs, and has done for some time now, whereas the iPod doesn't do what I want out of an MP3 player, however nice, new and shiny it looks. Even if it worked happily with my operating system choice (which it may do soon, perhaps) and was half the price (to compare with the AJB) it would still be too limited on disk space.
My comments were genuine.. I'm not trying to take away from other people's viewpoints - some people like the iPod, some people like the Archos, that's just life, but there was never this fuss made about the Archos, which in my view was the real revolutionary product which paved the way for a number of other similar devices, of which the iPod is just one - see also the Treoplayer and the Classic XP3, both of which are small, light and (reportedly) easy to use, but don't get this level of attention because they don't have the marketing weight of Apple.
I just think it's sad to see Slashdot jumping on someone else's marketing bandwagon, that's all..
Just for info the Archos has French and German as language options in addition to English - I believe there is a third-party firmware hack for Dutch as well.
I wish Archos had added firewire support - they obviously have the technology since their portable hard disks have it. Must have been the additional cost which prevented them I would guess.
I don't actually disagree with these comments - I don't have the recorder but the Archos Jukebox as I don't have a need to record, but then you get the jukebox for a lot cheaper - I was comparing like-for-like prices.
For me the main features are the openness of the hardware (able to upgrade hard disk easily) and the ability to copy whatever files I want onto the player - firewire would have been great (since I could use it from my Vaio) but it's not essential since I spend much more time listening to music than transferring it..
I have well over 600 CDs so the hard disk size is a big issue - I upgraded my Archos to a 30Gb drive, which is just enough for now, but I'm looking seriously at a 40Gb drive from Toshiba which is known to work, and presumably bigger in the not-too-distant future.
The Archos is heavier and bigger but then it's been around for a year longer and I guess that's the price you pay - I've had this device for a year now, whereas the iPod fanatics are only just beginning to realise how revolutionary ir is to carry your whole music collection around in your pocket.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the iPod is not revolutionary, so why such a fuss? It may have a few things better than other devices, but it's also worse in a number of areas. Nothing to shout about, IMNSHO.
I can't understand why Slashdot is focussed on this device, which doesn't support most operating systems and is non-hardware upgradeable and therefore limited to a tiny 5gb of storage space.
For those who don't wish to follow the link - it points to the Archos jukebox recorder 20, which has a 20Gb disk drive and can record from analog or digital sources direct to MP3. The disk drive is a standard 9.5mm height 2.5" IDE drive (why do we always specify height in metric but diameter/width in imperial?) and so can be replaced with a 40Gb drive if required, and presumably bigger ones in a fe months time as they become available..
It's no more expensive than the iPod and works with Mac, Windows or Linux, doubling as an external hard drive.
I just don't get it..
Q.
Re:Just buy a sunblade 100? HELL NO
on
No Solaris 9 for x86
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Huh? The networking is built in, as pointed out by another reply. Also, the big advantage of the Sun Blade 100 systems is that you don't need to buy any other Sun hardware - they take commodity PC133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS, standard IDE hard disks, standard PC monitors and use a USB keyboard and mouse.. so don't look at Suns' inflated prices for these components.
It cost me around £1200 for a fully working 64-bit system with 2Gb RAM at home (the boxes are much more expensive here in the UK as usual) which is easily comparable to a "reasonable" development-standard PC workstation with the same levels of stability.
(I have two - one at work and one at home - they're great - try them!)
It's just a few screws but the outer ones are "torx" so you need a slightly unusual screwdriver - it's not that hard to get hold of one of these though. You also need a really small philips screwdriver for some of the other screws.
Other than that it's a relatively easy process - the hard bit is getting the blue plastic bumpers on and off without bending the case, since the case itself is very thin metal. I don't think you'd want to do it on a regular basis though, i.e. for transferring files, since the risk of bending the metal case is too high. If you have a static collection of MP3s and you want to do a single transfer you'd probably be OK.
I posted a brief description on the archos yahoogroup, and there is a much better description (with pictures) at this site. There's a good FAQ at the same site which might answer your questions.
I second this - I'm listening to my jukebox 6000 as I write. I've ripped out the original 6Gb hard disk (you can now get a 20Gb version too, called the "studio 20") and inserted a 30Gb one - since it takes standard 9.5mm height 2.5" drives this is quite a simple operation, and it uses a normal FAT filesystem so you can use all the normal tools on it (defrag, scandisk, whatever..) The PC sees it as an extra drive using the standard USB hard disk mechanism so it works under Windows or Linux, and I believe Mac as well (I don't have a Mac so I can't test it..)
It has a few idiosyncrasies so it's well worth reading the list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archosjukebox6000 (requires registration) to pick up all the necessary hints and tips - the support there is probably better than you will get from Archos themselves.
The JB6K has the advantage that you can copy whatever files you want onto it - if they're MP3 format it will play them, if not it will ignore them so you can use it just as an external portable hard disk. It'll cope with MP3's encoded up to 320kbit/s CBR or VBR. It also has upgradable firmware so theoretically it could be made to support other sound formats although there doesn't seem to be any sign that Archos are moving towards this.
So, I'm about to leave the office en-route to Heathrow for a flight to JFK in a few hours time - would you fly? (that's assuming that the flight will be going ahead, which it may not..)
"So if someone breaks your anti-copying technology, are you going to sue?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits users from circumventing copy protection. It's now a crime in America to do that. Having said that, it's certainly up to the record companies to decide how they're going to manage hackers that circumvent the technology in the future. "
I may be naive but I was under the impression that if you've broken the DMCA the record companies no longer have any say in how you are prosecuted - isn't this what happened to Dmitry?
"if you unplug your PC and then ground your strap to the case - it doesn't help much sinc ethe case is only grounded when its plugged in! You have ot ground your strap to somethign thats grounded!"
I've never quite understood this. Current only flows when you have a potential difference, right? So if you equalise yourself against the case using a strap, regardless of whether or not it is at real "ground", you still won't get any sparks generated between you and your equipment because you are both at the same potential. Or am I missing something?
Yes, very much so. It is trying to solve a huge problem, and it's a nice try.
Where people are missing the point is in that they are assuming that academic journal publishers are nice, happy people who live in the academic world and believe in sharing information. This just doesn't happen in real life.
I work on a project involving linking abstract information to full text. Some publishers won't even allow "deep-linking" to individual articles on their web sites - I'm talking about one of the major scientific journal publishers here - their URLs have an encrypted hash at the end to prevent anyone from producing deep links.
Publishers are incredibly protective of their copyright and I just don't see something like this taking off for major journals. The article I read was talking about JStor - well that's a not-for-profit organisation and they only store back issues anyhow (a very useful service, don't get me wrong, but they're not a primary publisher).
The desire of more researchers to be published has resulted in additional journals being formed. Because publishing a journal on the web is dirt cheap, it makes sense that with the Internet available, more of these journals will appear.
The reason this isn't happening as quickly as it would appear is that existing scientific journals have a great "kudos" and prestige associated with them. Every article in those journals is peer-reviewed by respected academics in the same field. Having an article published in one of these big journals can greatly affect an academic's career prospects and pay.
Doing this independently over the web is not impossible but it's a bit more difficult than just throwing up journal articles on a web site.
I'd love to see a "Slashdot" style journal where people put up articles and otehrs within the field replied with comments, but we're a bit of a way away from this yet.
If they can do this they have solved the other major problem in the electronic publishing industry right now, sometimes called "the Harvard problem" or the "appropriate copy" problem, which is how on earth to tell whether a user has access rights to a given bit of text..
What's the problem here..? Everything I wrote refers to scientific journals..
Copyright issues are paramount for publishers, even for material which they get for free from scientific researchers. Try asking a major publisher for permission to quote from an article in a major scientific journal..
This kind of information is currently provided commercially by any number of tools, most of which have web-based interfaces. SilverPlatter Information, Ovid, Dialog (amongst others) distribute large numbers of abstract/indexing databases of this kind of information which are fully searchable on keywords and many different indexes, thesaurus terms etc. Once you've found your record you'll generally get a URL link which will take you directly to the full text of the article you're looking for, assuming that the relevant publisher has made it available, and that your organisation has bought access.
Although these databases are normally subject-specific. the above tools will allow you search across databases and get unified results, which will pretty much achieve what you're looking for.
The problem is that you have to pay for this - you can't just get it for free. It takes vast amounts of time compiling this kind of data and it isn't feasible to do it for nothing. Most (if not all) academic libraries will have bought one or other of these solutions so if you're a student or researcher you'll most likely be able to access databases of this kind, and if you're lucky the library will also have bought web-based access to the full text of the articles as well.
I'll be amazed if they can get a significant number of major publishers to agree to this. I work in a company related to the electronic publishing industry and I know that publishers are just as fussy about their copyright as any other industry, if not more so.
I would suspect that libraries participating in this kind of project leave themselves open to all kinds of action in similar ways to the Napster issue. Since most if not all libraries have a limited budget any threat from a publisher is likely to cause the software to be removed, which doesn't really produce a confident, secure archiving solution.
It is certainly true that this is one of the biggest issues in the electronic publishing industry at the moment though, if not THE biggest.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep computers out of my bathroom!
"I'm sorry Dave, but you really shouldn't have eaten all those beans earlier..."
Q.
And they maybe could add some region encoding so that people couldn't read a book in England that was meant for sale to Americans.
.. it would probably be the other way around, since most of the Harry Potter books have been censored for US consumption - ref: the fact that the film and book in the US is called "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" whereas the "correct" title (almost everywhere else in the world) is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".
Q.
This is why it is so essential to make the distinction between so-called "intellectual" property and physical property. If I steal a car from a dealer, that dealer has lost something tangible and is worse off. If I copy a CD for a friend, the artist (and more particularly the media companies involved) haven't lost anything tangible. You can argue that they've lost a potential sale, but you can also argue that they may gain more potential sales in the future when that friend decides they like the CD. It's the latter argument that the Napster statistics quoted in the article are trying to point out.
Even more important is that if I make a copy of the CD for myself, for personal use only, no-one has lost any money, not even a potential sale. This is highly relevant to me - with mroe and more copy protection it gets harder to rip CDs to MP3 which is how I listen to all my music currently.
Q.
The latest version of ExactAudio copy ripped White Lilies Island perfectly using a Toshiba DVD-ROM drive, after enabling C2 error correction.
I don't know if this is the drive or the new version of the software making this possible, but it is definitely one of the CDS protected CDs since it won't rip with anything else (and has the CDS logo on the back cover).
Q.
Well hey, at least it doesn't take up as much space in the "to be fixed" pile .. so you can fit more of them in! ;)
Q.
Are you deliberately trying to miss the point?
Um, no.. I'm just in a position where I have an Archos and it meets my needs, and has done for some time now, whereas the iPod doesn't do what I want out of an MP3 player, however nice, new and shiny it looks. Even if it worked happily with my operating system choice (which it may do soon, perhaps) and was half the price (to compare with the AJB) it would still be too limited on disk space.
My comments were genuine.. I'm not trying to take away from other people's viewpoints - some people like the iPod, some people like the Archos, that's just life, but there was never this fuss made about the Archos, which in my view was the real revolutionary product which paved the way for a number of other similar devices, of which the iPod is just one - see also the Treoplayer and the Classic XP3, both of which are small, light and (reportedly) easy to use, but don't get this level of attention because they don't have the marketing weight of Apple.
I just think it's sad to see Slashdot jumping on someone else's marketing bandwagon, that's all..
Q.
Just for info the Archos has French and German as language options in addition to English - I believe there is a third-party firmware hack for Dutch as well.
I wish Archos had added firewire support - they obviously have the technology since their portable hard disks have it. Must have been the additional cost which prevented them I would guess.
Q.
I don't actually disagree with these comments - I don't have the recorder but the Archos Jukebox as I don't have a need to record, but then you get the jukebox for a lot cheaper - I was comparing like-for-like prices.
For me the main features are the openness of the hardware (able to upgrade hard disk easily) and the ability to copy whatever files I want onto the player - firewire would have been great (since I could use it from my Vaio) but it's not essential since I spend much more time listening to music than transferring it..
I have well over 600 CDs so the hard disk size is a big issue - I upgraded my Archos to a 30Gb drive, which is just enough for now, but I'm looking seriously at a 40Gb drive from Toshiba which is known to work, and presumably bigger in the not-too-distant future.
The Archos is heavier and bigger but then it's been around for a year longer and I guess that's the price you pay - I've had this device for a year now, whereas the iPod fanatics are only just beginning to realise how revolutionary ir is to carry your whole music collection around in your pocket.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the iPod is not revolutionary, so why such a fuss? It may have a few things better than other devices, but it's also worse in a number of areas. Nothing to shout about, IMNSHO.
Q.
I can't understand why Slashdot is focussed on this device, which doesn't support most operating systems and is non-hardware upgradeable and therefore limited to a tiny 5gb of storage space.
How many times do we have to say Archos Archos Archos!!
For those who don't wish to follow the link - it points to the Archos jukebox recorder 20, which has a 20Gb disk drive and can record from analog or digital sources direct to MP3. The disk drive is a standard 9.5mm height 2.5" IDE drive (why do we always specify height in metric but diameter/width in imperial?) and so can be replaced with a 40Gb drive if required, and presumably bigger ones in a fe months time as they become available..
It's no more expensive than the iPod and works with Mac, Windows or Linux, doubling as an external hard drive.
I just don't get it..
Q.
Huh? The networking is built in, as pointed out by another reply. Also, the big advantage of the Sun Blade 100 systems is that you don't need to buy any other Sun hardware - they take commodity PC133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS, standard IDE hard disks, standard PC monitors and use a USB keyboard and mouse.. so don't look at Suns' inflated prices for these components.
It cost me around £1200 for a fully working 64-bit system with 2Gb RAM at home (the boxes are much more expensive here in the UK as usual) which is easily comparable to a "reasonable" development-standard PC workstation with the same levels of stability.
(I have two - one at work and one at home - they're great - try them!)
Q.
"...actors that do especially well with blue-screens..."
;)
.. you mean they use MS Windows for CGI work these days?
Q.
It's just a few screws but the outer ones are "torx" so you need a slightly unusual screwdriver - it's not that hard to get hold of one of these though. You also need a really small philips screwdriver for some of the other screws.
Other than that it's a relatively easy process - the hard bit is getting the blue plastic bumpers on and off without bending the case, since the case itself is very thin metal. I don't think you'd want to do it on a regular basis though, i.e. for transferring files, since the risk of bending the metal case is too high. If you have a static collection of MP3s and you want to do a single transfer you'd probably be OK.
I posted a brief description on the archos yahoogroup, and there is a much better description (with pictures) at this site. There's a good FAQ at the same site which might answer your questions.
Q.
I second this - I'm listening to my jukebox 6000 as I write. I've ripped out the original 6Gb hard disk (you can now get a 20Gb version too, called the "studio 20") and inserted a 30Gb one - since it takes standard 9.5mm height 2.5" drives this is quite a simple operation, and it uses a normal FAT filesystem so you can use all the normal tools on it (defrag, scandisk, whatever..) The PC sees it as an extra drive using the standard USB hard disk mechanism so it works under Windows or Linux, and I believe Mac as well (I don't have a Mac so I can't test it..)
It has a few idiosyncrasies so it's well worth reading the list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archosjukebox6000 (requires registration) to pick up all the necessary hints and tips - the support there is probably better than you will get from Archos themselves.
The JB6K has the advantage that you can copy whatever files you want onto it - if they're MP3 format it will play them, if not it will ignore them so you can use it just as an external portable hard disk. It'll cope with MP3's encoded up to 320kbit/s CBR or VBR. It also has upgradable firmware so theoretically it could be made to support other sound formats although there doesn't seem to be any sign that Archos are moving towards this.
Q.
For anyone who is interested I'm now in NYC - my plane was delayed two hours but that's all..
I decided I couldn't think of a rational reason not to go, only irrational ones.
Q.
Well, looks like I'm going now anyway - Airline says we should check in..
Why not? Because although my head syas it's fine, my gut is telling me I should be scared and my girlfriend is unhappy..
Q.
So, I'm about to leave the office en-route to Heathrow for a flight to JFK in a few hours time - would you fly? (that's assuming that the flight will be going ahead, which it may not..)
Serious question folks..
Q.
So now I can play NetHack in the bath - excellent!
"So if someone breaks your anti-copying technology, are you going to sue?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits users from circumventing copy protection. It's now a crime in America to do that. Having said that, it's certainly up to the record companies to decide how they're going to manage hackers that circumvent the technology in the future. "
I may be naive but I was under the impression that if you've broken the DMCA the record companies no longer have any say in how you are prosecuted - isn't this what happened to Dmitry?
Q.
"if you unplug your PC and then ground your strap to the case - it doesn't help much sinc ethe case is only grounded when its plugged in! You have ot ground your strap to somethign thats grounded!"
I've never quite understood this. Current only flows when you have a potential difference, right? So if you equalise yourself against the case using a strap, regardless of whether or not it is at real "ground", you still won't get any sparks generated between you and your equipment because you are both at the same potential. Or am I missing something?
Q.
I'm intrigued.. Could you counter-sue the RIAA for descrambling this piece of code to figure out what it does under the DMCA?
At what stage does obfuscation become "a form of encryption" as recognised by the DMCA?
Q.
Yes, very much so. It is trying to solve a huge problem, and it's a nice try.
Where people are missing the point is in that they are assuming that academic journal publishers are nice, happy people who live in the academic world and believe in sharing information. This just doesn't happen in real life.
I work on a project involving linking abstract information to full text. Some publishers won't even allow "deep-linking" to individual articles on their web sites - I'm talking about one of the major scientific journal publishers here - their URLs have an encrypted hash at the end to prevent anyone from producing deep links.
Publishers are incredibly protective of their copyright and I just don't see something like this taking off for major journals. The article I read was talking about JStor - well that's a not-for-profit organisation and they only store back issues anyhow (a very useful service, don't get me wrong, but they're not a primary publisher).
The desire of more researchers to be published has resulted in additional journals being formed. Because publishing a journal on the web is dirt cheap, it makes sense that with the Internet available, more of these journals will appear.
The reason this isn't happening as quickly as it would appear is that existing scientific journals have a great "kudos" and prestige associated with them. Every article in those journals is peer-reviewed by respected academics in the same field. Having an article published in one of these big journals can greatly affect an academic's career prospects and pay.
Doing this independently over the web is not impossible but it's a bit more difficult than just throwing up journal articles on a web site.
I'd love to see a "Slashdot" style journal where people put up articles and otehrs within the field replied with comments, but we're a bit of a way away from this yet.
Q.
If they can do this they have solved the other major problem in the electronic publishing industry right now, sometimes called "the Harvard problem" or the "appropriate copy" problem, which is how on earth to tell whether a user has access rights to a given bit of text..
This is one of the holy grails right now.
Q.
What's the problem here..? Everything I wrote refers to scientific journals..
Copyright issues are paramount for publishers, even for material which they get for free from scientific researchers. Try asking a major publisher for permission to quote from an article in a major scientific journal..
Q.
This kind of information is currently provided commercially by any number of tools, most of which have web-based interfaces. SilverPlatter Information, Ovid, Dialog (amongst others) distribute large numbers of abstract/indexing databases of this kind of information which are fully searchable on keywords and many different indexes, thesaurus terms etc. Once you've found your record you'll generally get a URL link which will take you directly to the full text of the article you're looking for, assuming that the relevant publisher has made it available, and that your organisation has bought access.
Although these databases are normally subject-specific. the above tools will allow you search across databases and get unified results, which will pretty much achieve what you're looking for.
The problem is that you have to pay for this - you can't just get it for free. It takes vast amounts of time compiling this kind of data and it isn't feasible to do it for nothing. Most (if not all) academic libraries will have bought one or other of these solutions so if you're a student or researcher you'll most likely be able to access databases of this kind, and if you're lucky the library will also have bought web-based access to the full text of the articles as well.
Q.
I'll be amazed if they can get a significant number of major publishers to agree to this. I work in a company related to the electronic publishing industry and I know that publishers are just as fussy about their copyright as any other industry, if not more so.
I would suspect that libraries participating in this kind of project leave themselves open to all kinds of action in similar ways to the Napster issue. Since most if not all libraries have a limited budget any threat from a publisher is likely to cause the software to be removed, which doesn't really produce a confident, secure archiving solution.
It is certainly true that this is one of the biggest issues in the electronic publishing industry at the moment though, if not THE biggest.
Q.