"it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior)"
Expensive test instruments might be able to tell the difference between Ogg and MP3 at the same bitrate, but my ears struggle to, and I work in the audio industry. None of my friends (many musicians and hifi buffs among them) can pick any difference.
The advantage that the MPEG formats, and even Doze media, have is wide industry backing, but until Ogg gets that sort of backing it's going to remain problematic alienware. This move by W3C might help improve Ogg's position, but it has a long way to go. Until it plays nicely with Quicktime (I've yet to find an Ogg plugin that doesn't crash my Mac) and my iTunes library, it's forbidden on my home network.
I won't brick them, they just won't but under boot camp, reboot under the install disk, select the start up disk and platform, then reboot under Mac OS.
Sheesh, talk about an effing beat up.
There's MacIDOL.com (my fave), macjams.com and icompositions.com - you have to be a Mac user to put your original composition on them, but the music is downloadable in MP3 format by anybody. There's an enormous range of genres and you don't have to wade through too much junk to find great stuff. 99% of it is free download, too.
Artists to check out are James Bouchard, Talking Ape, Slumbering, iFingers, Paul Brazier, Deadman Turner and Bill Josey to name just a tiny, tiny few. A big fave of mine in the non-RIAA stakes, too, are The Sunray Estate and you might find a bit of good rock'n'roll to download at The Breed's site.
I've got to say I'm impressed with anybody looking for music from sources other than the record industry. They're the real supporters of music. Record labels don't care about the artists, just the money.
Seriously guys, after watching Mike Moore's "Sicko", and reading this discussion about insurance not covering this and that and something else (oh, you farted? hmm, your bowel cancer was probably a pre-existing condition) the US needs a second revolution. Rise up, overthrow the monkeyboy, overthrow the corporations!
Because you "yanks" don't have compulsory voting, like here in Australia, most of you give up your vote for no return at all.
Mind you, in Oz, the politicians spend all of their campaign value on the last minute, undecided, "swinging" voters, so it's arguable that the majority of Australian votes are worthless, too, because the only people who actually change a government are the self-interested, middle-class whingers.
Leaves me wondering... Does democracy actually work?
Apple are doing 3 because they are primarily a hardware seller, not an OS seller. I doubt they believe they can stop the leak to 3rd party hardware completely, but they have to try because they make their money out of Macs, not Mac OS. The Apple hardware lock-in works in favour of 99% of Mac users, anyway, because the OS is tweaked and optimised to a limited hardware set, and is therefore more reliable than the "any ol' mix" you get outside the Apple world.
Yes, it does matter, because if you haven't closed the road to all but you, you can't control the road conditions.
The other factor cited in speeding-is-safe arguments, the worn out "but cars are safer these days", is erroneous, because while we're driving Car 99.7, we're still Human 0.8.5 and it's always the nut holding the wheel that's the problem.
The environment movement has been taken over by ferals, not hippies, and the loony fringe. The planet will die as much because of the backlash against environmentalism caused by the ratbags in the frontline movement.
Yes, there are some good and true believers, but so many are anti-science (we cannot save the planet without science), ill-informed or just plain contrarianists. Unless the activist organisations can regain some mainstream cred, the earth is as surely fucked as if we just give up and burn coal as dirty as ever until the party's over.
> Apple knows how many iPhones have been sold > and how many have been activated with ATT. > The difference is the number that are unlocked.
Or, maybe some are just being used as iPods with wifi access. A lot of people claimed to be buying them for this reason... before Apple released the iPod Touch.
The DUMB thing with iPhone is not the lock in, many phones are sold on lockins, it's what makes them affordable (My boring, basic Nokia was locked in to the carrier that sold it to me - to have it as an unlocked phone would have cost me 4 times as much.) iPhone's truly dumb thing is the lockout of third party apps. By not allowing the user to choose when they run local apps and when they run remote apps creates a goldmine for AT&T.
FFS, when will the madness stop?:-(
We invent swords and archery, so someone invents armour.
So we invent fire arms and ballistic missiles, then somebody invents thicker armour.
So we invent armour piercing weapons and some stupid chimp defends against that with anti ballistic ballistics.
So we use rocket propelled missiles to deliver the "punch" quicker than a human can respond, and some clown builds a robot that can keep up.
Then that robot jams and kills people.
I'm an atheist, but there's a line in a book that I'm not supposed to quote from - something about beating swords into ploughs?
Then I remember some of the worst chimps for building the above-mentioned shit do it for god and country.
Stop this god forsaken, miserable excresence called Earth, I want to get off.
I know that not all Americans are stupid, just like all Australians aren't bleach-blonde surfers with Sandman panel vans, but this guy is truly doing his bit to give you yanks the reputation that most of you don't deserve. This guy deserves the epithet "loonie" though, for certain.
Speeding on public roads is just dumb. It doesn't matter what gadgets you have to elude speed cameras, bypass traffic or pick the quickest route, speed kills. This is not pushing the boundaries of the pioneering spirit, like a speed record set on a salt pan, this is just your common or garden moving violation, endangering lives along the way.
Those countries will probably never get iPhone:-/
I'm an Apple fanboi, I despise the Dozer my employer inflicts on me as it falls over every 5 minutes and I love my G4 iBook, but the whole iPhone thing is... well, it's completely Macroslop. Give me any smart phone over this crap from Apple.
Um, simpler than any military manual or the Anarchist's Cookbook, go to a good antiquarian book shop and pick up a nineteenth century set of encyclopedia, particularly one with a good engineering and science focus. A knowledge base of all sorts of exothermic chemistry, ranging from trinitro cellulose to black powder to production of acids, caustics and all manner of potentially explosive materials.
Is ownership of a shelf-full of these volumes illegal? My mum and dad are screwed, then.
Bloody luddites. The stupid thing about the knob claiming to have to forego reading time to update applications is that's his CHOICE! How often do we need to update our word processors? Can't have read much before computers, I roll my eyes at them all.
> drunken drugged up minstrals Actually, don't blame ALL the musos. Yeh, the wankers in Metallica thought it was a great idea to sue their fans, but Trent Resnor has explicitly said, "Steel my music!" in protest against the REAL culprits of the "intellectual property" scam: the labels and distributors.
The vast majority of musicians, while wanting to get paid, value their fans enough to not want them ripped off, either.
Oh FFS, this is what radio is for. That's got to be the ultimate definition of vexatious litgation!
The radio industry spends money on demographic studies to reliably estimate their audience size, then pay royalties to the record labels based on that audience and the songs played. (...and in the case of commercial radio, sometimes the amount of ad revenue gets factored into rights returns, too.)
This case is as stupid as litigation gets, and I suspect even the lawyers don't understand how the law works anymore:-/
...but exercise is better. The single biggest cause of type 2 diabetes after genetic disposition is bad diet and lack of exercise. This is not judgement on those with type 2 (I have it), there is much that we're brought up to think is healthy food that actually isn't in the quantities we eat it, and the modern lifestyle is VASTLY lower exertion than a pre-industrial lifestyle.
At the lower end of seriousness, diabetes can be pretty much controlled without drugs, simply by eating a wide variety of fresh fruit and veg in appropriate quantities for your exercise level and increasing your daily exercise levels. I cycle or walk regularly and that with a sensible diet manages my blood sugar levels really well.
Mind you, if they know the enzyme that is the problem, we don't necessarily need a drug to block the enzyme. It may be better to look at what in the diet enhances production of this enzyme.
If you choose to use unsupported firmware and software on a product, you risk bricking it and should accept your responsibility for any loss or damage. If a firmware update, crafted with reasonable care and attention to reasonable use, incidentally bricks your non-standard device, that bit is your fault.
If Apple deliberately set out to brick the altered phones, by writing malicious code to cause damage, or even take insufficient care crafting new code in the full knowledge of the modifications out there (don't for a minute believe they didn't do some reverse engineering of their own!), then Apple have committed a crime under most nations' communications and commerce laws.
The only issue is "Did they, and if so, how to prove it?"
And there you've hit the nail on the head with the music industry's REAL reason for wanting stamp out downloading. Once all music is virtual, the majors have no advantage over indies. Digital distribution is low cost high volume. Physical distribution is high cost any volume, only majors can afford it.
...find an alternative. If you think iPhone is the only tech gadget that does what it does, you're deluded. It may be the coolest, but it's hardly unique.
I went iPod because it has the best _Mac_ support of all players, but I don't like the standard operating model (just that it's the best of a bad bunch on Mac OS X) I mean, if Fairplay is such a great DRM, why not make iPod just a simple external drive and allow easy 2-way music transfer like cheaper units? Why not make iTunes recognise USB devices with MP3s?
There, you heard it from a fanboi, iPod: best of a bad bunch on Mac side, not even that on other platforms. It's still sexy shiney, though (and I love my aging, pink mini, despite its flaws.)
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"it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior)"
Expensive test instruments might be able to tell the difference between Ogg and MP3 at the same bitrate, but my ears struggle to, and I work in the audio industry. None of my friends (many musicians and hifi buffs among them) can pick any difference.
The advantage that the MPEG formats, and even Doze media, have is wide industry backing, but until Ogg gets that sort of backing it's going to remain problematic alienware. This move by W3C might help improve Ogg's position, but it has a long way to go. Until it plays nicely with Quicktime (I've yet to find an Ogg plugin that doesn't crash my Mac) and my iTunes library, it's forbidden on my home network.
I won't brick them, they just won't but under boot camp, reboot under the install disk, select the start up disk and platform, then reboot under Mac OS. Sheesh, talk about an effing beat up.
There's MacIDOL.com (my fave), macjams.com and icompositions.com - you have to be a Mac user to put your original composition on them, but the music is downloadable in MP3 format by anybody. There's an enormous range of genres and you don't have to wade through too much junk to find great stuff. 99% of it is free download, too. Artists to check out are James Bouchard, Talking Ape, Slumbering, iFingers, Paul Brazier, Deadman Turner and Bill Josey to name just a tiny, tiny few. A big fave of mine in the non-RIAA stakes, too, are The Sunray Estate and you might find a bit of good rock'n'roll to download at The Breed's site. I've got to say I'm impressed with anybody looking for music from sources other than the record industry. They're the real supporters of music. Record labels don't care about the artists, just the money.
Seriously guys, after watching Mike Moore's "Sicko", and reading this discussion about insurance not covering this and that and something else (oh, you farted? hmm, your bowel cancer was probably a pre-existing condition) the US needs a second revolution. Rise up, overthrow the monkeyboy, overthrow the corporations!
Or take the coyboyneil option...
That'd be one of Frank Herbert's Mentats from the Dune series.
Because you "yanks" don't have compulsory voting, like here in Australia, most of you give up your vote for no return at all.
Mind you, in Oz, the politicians spend all of their campaign value on the last minute, undecided, "swinging" voters, so it's arguable that the majority of Australian votes are worthless, too, because the only people who actually change a government are the self-interested, middle-class whingers.
Leaves me wondering... Does democracy actually work?
I'm an Apple fanboi, but I have to agree with you (even if it is a nitpick) To call iPhone an "invention" is sort of diluting the value of the term.
Apple are doing 3 because they are primarily a hardware seller, not an OS seller. I doubt they believe they can stop the leak to 3rd party hardware completely, but they have to try because they make their money out of Macs, not Mac OS. The Apple hardware lock-in works in favour of 99% of Mac users, anyway, because the OS is tweaked and optimised to a limited hardware set, and is therefore more reliable than the "any ol' mix" you get outside the Apple world.
Yes, it does matter, because if you haven't closed the road to all but you, you can't control the road conditions.
The other factor cited in speeding-is-safe arguments, the worn out "but cars are safer these days", is erroneous, because while we're driving Car 99.7, we're still Human 0.8.5 and it's always the nut holding the wheel that's the problem.
The environment movement has been taken over by ferals, not hippies, and the loony fringe. The planet will die as much because of the backlash against environmentalism caused by the ratbags in the frontline movement.
Yes, there are some good and true believers, but so many are anti-science (we cannot save the planet without science), ill-informed or just plain contrarianists. Unless the activist organisations can regain some mainstream cred, the earth is as surely fucked as if we just give up and burn coal as dirty as ever until the party's over.
> Apple knows how many iPhones have been sold
> and how many have been activated with ATT.
> The difference is the number that are unlocked.
Or, maybe some are just being used as iPods with wifi access. A lot of people claimed to be buying them for this reason... before Apple released the iPod Touch.
The DUMB thing with iPhone is not the lock in, many phones are sold on lockins, it's what makes them affordable (My boring, basic Nokia was locked in to the carrier that sold it to me - to have it as an unlocked phone would have cost me 4 times as much.) iPhone's truly dumb thing is the lockout of third party apps. By not allowing the user to choose when they run local apps and when they run remote apps creates a goldmine for AT&T.
FFS, when will the madness stop? :-(
We invent swords and archery, so someone invents armour.
So we invent fire arms and ballistic missiles, then somebody invents thicker armour.
So we invent armour piercing weapons and some stupid chimp defends against that with anti ballistic ballistics.
So we use rocket propelled missiles to deliver the "punch" quicker than a human can respond, and some clown builds a robot that can keep up.
Then that robot jams and kills people.
I'm an atheist, but there's a line in a book that I'm not supposed to quote from - something about beating swords into ploughs?
Then I remember some of the worst chimps for building the above-mentioned shit do it for god and country.
Stop this god forsaken, miserable excresence called Earth, I want to get off.
I know that not all Americans are stupid, just like all Australians aren't bleach-blonde surfers with Sandman panel vans, but this guy is truly doing his bit to give you yanks the reputation that most of you don't deserve. This guy deserves the epithet "loonie" though, for certain.
Speeding on public roads is just dumb. It doesn't matter what gadgets you have to elude speed cameras, bypass traffic or pick the quickest route, speed kills. This is not pushing the boundaries of the pioneering spirit, like a speed record set on a salt pan, this is just your common or garden moving violation, endangering lives along the way.
He's a tosser. Toss him in jail.
Yes, of course, I guess I was being Australocentric ;-)
;-)
The iphone as it's current product structure is a frightful rip off, though (However, I do grudgingly covet the technology it represents.
Those countries will probably never get iPhone :-/
I'm an Apple fanboi, I despise the Dozer my employer inflicts on me as it falls over every 5 minutes and I love my G4 iBook, but the whole iPhone thing is... well, it's completely Macroslop. Give me any smart phone over this crap from Apple.
Is this how programmers fart then leave the room?
Um, simpler than any military manual or the Anarchist's Cookbook, go to a good antiquarian book shop and pick up a nineteenth century set of encyclopedia, particularly one with a good engineering and science focus. A knowledge base of all sorts of exothermic chemistry, ranging from trinitro cellulose to black powder to production of acids, caustics and all manner of potentially explosive materials.
Is ownership of a shelf-full of these volumes illegal? My mum and dad are screwed, then.
Bloody luddites. The stupid thing about the knob claiming to have to forego reading time to update applications is that's his CHOICE! How often do we need to update our word processors? Can't have read much before computers, I roll my eyes at them all.
> drunken drugged up minstrals
Actually, don't blame ALL the musos. Yeh, the wankers in Metallica thought it was a great idea to sue their fans, but Trent Resnor has explicitly said, "Steel my music!" in protest against the REAL culprits of the "intellectual property" scam: the labels and distributors.
The vast majority of musicians, while wanting to get paid, value their fans enough to not want them ripped off, either.
Oh FFS, this is what radio is for. That's got to be the ultimate definition of vexatious litgation!
:-/
The radio industry spends money on demographic studies to reliably estimate their audience size, then pay royalties to the record labels based on that audience and the songs played. (...and in the case of commercial radio, sometimes the amount of ad revenue gets factored into rights returns, too.)
This case is as stupid as litigation gets, and I suspect even the lawyers don't understand how the law works anymore
...but exercise is better. The single biggest cause of type 2 diabetes after genetic disposition is bad diet and lack of exercise. This is not judgement on those with type 2 (I have it), there is much that we're brought up to think is healthy food that actually isn't in the quantities we eat it, and the modern lifestyle is VASTLY lower exertion than a pre-industrial lifestyle.
At the lower end of seriousness, diabetes can be pretty much controlled without drugs, simply by eating a wide variety of fresh fruit and veg in appropriate quantities for your exercise level and increasing your daily exercise levels. I cycle or walk regularly and that with a sensible diet manages my blood sugar levels really well.
Mind you, if they know the enzyme that is the problem, we don't necessarily need a drug to block the enzyme. It may be better to look at what in the diet enhances production of this enzyme.
If you choose to use unsupported firmware and software on a product, you risk bricking it and should accept your responsibility for any loss or damage. If a firmware update, crafted with reasonable care and attention to reasonable use, incidentally bricks your non-standard device, that bit is your fault.
If Apple deliberately set out to brick the altered phones, by writing malicious code to cause damage, or even take insufficient care crafting new code in the full knowledge of the modifications out there (don't for a minute believe they didn't do some reverse engineering of their own!), then Apple have committed a crime under most nations' communications and commerce laws.
The only issue is "Did they, and if so, how to prove it?"
And there you've hit the nail on the head with the music industry's REAL reason for wanting stamp out downloading. Once all music is virtual, the majors have no advantage over indies. Digital distribution is low cost high volume. Physical distribution is high cost any volume, only majors can afford it.
...find an alternative. If you think iPhone is the only tech gadget that does what it does, you're deluded. It may be the coolest, but it's hardly unique.
Fashion. Purely and simply fashion.
I went iPod because it has the best _Mac_ support of all players, but I don't like the standard operating model (just that it's the best of a bad bunch on Mac OS X) I mean, if Fairplay is such a great DRM, why not make iPod just a simple external drive and allow easy 2-way music transfer like cheaper units? Why not make iTunes recognise USB devices with MP3s?
There, you heard it from a fanboi, iPod: best of a bad bunch on Mac side, not even that on other platforms. It's still sexy shiney, though (and I love my aging, pink mini, despite its flaws.)