"They don't understand vinyl, either. Led Zeppelin's Presence album sounds far better than the equivalent CD; it has more, well, presence. It has sharper highs and deeper lows than the CD version (that is, if you have a good turntable). But the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than the vinyl. Zeppelin was mastered in analog, Nirvana was mastered in digital. If you make an analog recording from a digital source, or a digital recording for an analog source, you get the worst aspects of both mediums and the advantages of neither."
You wrote that here in 2004: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152.... the current release of Zep's "Presence" is digitally mastered... I can't locate any info on the original CD... I had this on LP, before CDs caught on. But it's ridiculous anyway... and "Nevermind" was certainly digitally mastered for the CD. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is one song from "Nevermind", not the whole album... the title does come from that song, the last verse "I find it hard, it's hard to find. Oh well, whatever, nevermind". It was recorded (Butch Vig) and mixed (by Andy Wallace) in analog, and mastered (by Howie Weinberg) separately for LP, CD, and cassette. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab released a custom analog remix of Nevermind on vinyl as part of its ANADISQ 200 series in 1996.
There's a misunderstanding about the concept of "mastering". A recording engineer, the band, whomever, create a final mix, on digital or analog, it doesn't really matter. That's the copy that they submit as the "final" edition of the work. This then goes to a mastering engineer, who prepares it for the specific medium in use. This is true for any recorded medium, whether analog or digital, audio or video, and includes very subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle EQ and other "sweeting" of the work for that particular medium. In the case of making an LP, for example, the mastering engineer also applies the RIAA companding used on all LPs. This is a full curve of cuts and boosts, but specifically, lows are cut by 20dB, and highs are boosted by 20dB, during the mastering process. This allows a full 22 minutes of audio to fit per LP side... full bass would produce gigantic groves, lowering the time considerable, and also causing most tone arms to be sent skating across the disc. As well, highs are boosted by 20dB, to eliminate (on playback, when the 20dB cut is applied) much of the terrible high frequency hiss you pick up at high frequencies on an LP (this is the same basic principle used on Dolby noise reduction used on tape).
Completely different things are done taking a final digital mix (probably at 24/32-bit at 96/192kHz sampling these days) and producing a CD master: different EQ, downsampling with dithering and noise shaping, etc. Now technically, you could do most of the CD master in analog... and there are plenty of recording and mastering engineers who still use analog gear in the process, going from digital, though analog EQ or other gear, then back to digital... that's actually more of a point of controversy between engineers these days than the use of non-linear digital for recording and storage. The point is, you're still mastering FOR the CD, not simply taking an existing master for another medium onto that CD. And similarly, no one would take a CD master and just drop that on LP, either... they create a new master from the original final mix.
So yeah, if you did take an analog master, made for an LP or even cassette, just digitize it, and stamp it on a CD, it's going to sound poor. And this was done, sometimes by supposed "accident", other times just to get stuff out for the CD "gold rush".... but [hopefully] not in recent times. And many of those early fails have been digital remastered for CD (occasionally even for the better formats, SACD, DVD-Audio, or Blu-Ray), and
Yeah, that did it for me as well, on the Kindle, forever.
But that's only one among many problems. Another big thing on the Kindle -- non-replaceable battery and memory. So I'm at Amazon's mercy if the battery fails, and dependent on their servers as my library, not local storage. No good.
But the real problem with all of these is that they're trying to change the definition of "book", in going to ebooks. I have no problem with the idea of a book as it exists in physical space: it can only be read by one person at a time... I'm good with that. But with a real book, I can lend it all I want... not just once, ever, per book (nook) or never (Kindle). I can also sell it, or give it away... nope, not with these. Sure, these properties apply to all the free stuff, but it's not even necessary... if it's available free, you can get your own free copy, you don't need to borrow mine.
Until ebooks really behave like books, forget about it. Also, I've found my Android Phone (moto DROID) acceptable enough as an eBook reader (smaller screen, less battery life of course, but only slightly lower resolution). All the free stuff works there, already...
From what I've read of the Nook, the situation is EXACTLY like it was in the earlier days of the MP3 player, and particularly the iPod.
You can read any ePub book on the Nook... as long as it's not DRMed... just like the iPod and every other MP3 plays unDRMed MP3 files. It also supports PDB and PDF, after a fashion (fully page PDF is generally unreadable on today's relatively low-rez eBook readers). But it also reads DRMed ePub or PRC.
For reference, the very first iPods played non-DRMed MP3s... that was never the problem. They also played non-DRMed AAC.
The problem was that most of the commercially available content was only on AAC files protected with Apple's proprietary DRM. Which is also just the situation today in eBooks. The thing about ePub... it lets any old DRM live inside it. There's a more or less standard DRM from Adobe, and supposedly, the Nook support this... this is also the one used in Sony readers (along with Sony's own proprietary format). But there's also the proprietary B&N DRM, which is based on the Adobe DRM but different in some ways, supposedly. The big problem is that B&N content will presumably only be released in this proprietary format... so it's only readable on the Nook (and whatever PC or PDA based readers B&N decides to release). And some other eBook readers that have content agreements with B&N.
This is similar to what Amazon did with the Kindle. Their AZW format is a customized version of the Mobipocket file format. The Kindle can read AZW, or unprotected Mobipocket books (MOBI, PRC). Oh yeah, and plain old text files. Thus, while you can read a number of free books, anything commerically available is going to be Kindle only right now, in both directions.
Sometimes it's price fixing, sometimes it's market observation. It's not just the Kindle, but Sony and others being sold at or around this price point. That shows B&N that such hardware will move at that price, but also, that the will likely have trouble selling it at a higher price. So they set the price based on the competition... and yeah, this has very little to do with the actual cost.
In fact, if the cost were half of what Amazon's paying, they might still launch at the higher price, just to be taken seriously as a Kindle alternative. Like Amazon, B&N will be making lots of money on eBook sales if this is successful, so even if they're paying much more than Amazon, or even selling at cost, they're not going to charge more.
What is clear, so far, is that B&N's eBook prices do seem to be a bit higher than Amazon's. Anyone looking seriously at these devices has to consider the cost and availability of content... the price of the eBook reader will ultimately be a drop in the bucket.
4) Capture via HD analog component. That's pretty easy these days.. something like the Blackmagic Intensity Pro is a PCIe 1x card, which can capture analog or HDMI (which would be useless, if your cable company is doing HDCP) in realtime. These run $200, but of course, you'll have to so something with the video on capture. H.264 is going to be a realtime thing, but a fast PC could do MJPEG or Cineform in realtime, if not MPEG-2, more than likely. If they're also downrezzing your analog, then you're SOL with this approach.
For TiVo, sure. On the satellite, though, they charge about $7.00 a month for "lease", and another for "programming access" (of course, you get the EPG on a normal sat box anyway). However, on Dish anyway, they waive one of these fees if you keep the STB on a phone line (which allows you to make impulse buys of PPV stuff, rather than having to dial in). If the unit fails, they replace it or upgrade it for no additional charge (in theory, anyway). So that's $84 a year for someone else to maintain the DVR for me.
With that said, I've had my model 1 TiVo since the later 1990s, with lifetime subscription. It's still going... the HDD failed once, but I got a many-time-larger replacement from Weaknees, preformatted and relatively cheap. The TiVo hardware is pretty reliable. Of course, if it finally failed, I would replace it with some kind of media PC, more than likely.
The IR-blaster-or-not depends largely on the STB you're trying to control. You can interface standard TiVos to the serial control port of cable/satellite receivers that support them (at one point anyway, DirecTV models usually did, Dish Network didn't, though it's possible to hack... the serial signal is the same thing you get via IR once you filter out the IR modulation carrier, and on Dish models, the UHF carrier as well... very easy to hack, albeit a pain in the butt to have to do).
Actually, that's something of a good thing, the FCC itself not being more forceful here. The problem is, many of these things are on the very edge of where the FCC ought to be involved. Satellite slots themselves are a limited public resource after a fashion, and these were auctioned in the usual way. The satellite downlink, though, isn't really traditional "public airwaves" that the FCC is supposed to regulate. Cable is further still... proprietary cabling over existing cable runs... also not really a limited public resource.
The cable open access stuff is a good thing, don't get me wrong (despite how poorly implemented), but this needs to be through Congress. Once you start letting the FCC mess with these for one reason, it's easy to imagine they'll step in to put on the same kind of content regulations you get OTA... no good will come of that.
I would also like to see more consumer protections here.. when a company is allowed to service a town, they should be forced to provide same-cost service to everyone in town. The way things are today, they cherry pick the areas they service. Thus, you get some areas with multiple services in competition (cable, FiOS, DSL, etc), and others with no services at all. The actual agreements vary by town, and unfortunately, the local lawyers are usually bumpkins in places coverage actually matters, versus the slick corporate lawyers. So access remains problematic in rural areas.
Silverlight is not built-in on the PS3, though support for WMV/VC-1, WMA, and at least some version of the Microsoft DRM is.
With that said... you don't get automatic support of Netflix on the PS3, you have to send for a Blu-Ray disc, which presumably, loads up the PS3 player, perhaps as a BD-Java application. Given that the Windows Media components are already native in the PS3, this is probably a thin version of Silverlight. At least, I don't think you'd need this disc if they were just using the normal Windows pieces.
I'm not using it... my PS3 works just dandy with Blu-Rays, no need to stream low resolution "HD" with 10x more compression.
Last I looked into it, Netflix has always been using Microsoft CODECs, but it wasn't obviously Silverlight... thus, it's running on things like the PS3, Roku, and some other "Netflix Ready" devices. So, I looked it up... yup, they have moved to using Silverlight. There might actually be a good reason for this.
Netflix has always used Windows Media formats and, as one might expect, the Windows Media DRM. The original format is using WMV3 and WMA, along with Windows Media DRM-10. They encode from 500 to 2200kb/s, and occasionally up to 3400kb/s for select video material. The resolutions vary up to 720x480, 4:3 or 16:9, progressive, at either 24p (film) or 25p/30p (video). The new "HD" format (HD, in their imagination anyway) is streaming in VC-1 (Windows Media 9) and WMA at between 2.6Mb/s and 3.8Mb/s, 720/24p for films, 720/30p for video-derived sources.... apparently, they started using Silverlight and standard VC-1 for the HD stuff.
The argument for using Silverlight, rather than just "a mess of Microsoft CODECs and DRMs" is that all of these things are united under Silverlight. I think that translates to mean "Microsoft is doing the work of putting Silverlight on platforms like PS3, X-Box 360, Mac, etc... so we have no extra work to do to support these things. And clearly, since Netflix was already Microsoft based, they would be prone to accepting a "better" solution from Microsoft.
None of which removes the problem with Netflix: their video quality is crap. Buy or rent the Blu-Ray, don't worry about Netflix streaming video. Even easier, if you're not a fan of advanced Microsoft's heavily walled DRM. I got sick of them long ago, and the the crap they pulled with the DRM. They basically only trust PCs. Long before standardized HD players, I had this little red-laser DVD player from IOData in Japan. It could play MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, DivX 5/6, and Microsoft Windows Media 9 video in HD, up to 1080/30p or 1080/60i (though it did only YPrPb output up to 1080/60i), from normal red laser DVDs or streaming over 100-Base-T. They had actually gone to the trouble of supporting WMA, supporting the Microsoft DRMs, etc.
Or so you'd think. Microsoft was, at the time, selling high-def DVDs, using a "standard" they hacked together from HTML, Javascript, and Windows Media 9, which they called WMV/HD DVD. You could buy unprotected WMV/HD discs from folks like HD-Net, and this player would auto start, display menus, behave just like you had a DVD, only of course, in actual quasi-decent HD. I figured out how to make my own, even DVD + WMV/HD hybrids for short videos... the player was clever enough to ask which one you'd like to see when it detected such a disc.
But, even with the MS DRM in there, I couldn't play the DRMed versions on my player. I could authorize the disc on my PC, drop it in my player, no go. I could authorize it, try to play remotely on the IOData from a shared DVD drive on the player, no go. HOWEVER, if I copied the data to hard drive space on the PC, after authorizing it, the IOData player actually could get authorization to play it... though it lost all concept of the WMV/HD authoring... it just played individual WMV files.
In other words, Microsoft were just being idiots here. That was enough for me... if the thing is using the Microsoft DRM, I'll use their competitor's thing instead.
The basic idea of using high frequencies across a wide spectrum as well penetrating radar of a sort has been known for quite awhile, even if the "simple matter of an implementation" may have lagged behind. The FCC was really worried about this becoming possible over approved UWB (Ultra WideBand) frequencies... thus, they put really serious power level limitations on UWB radios approved so far. Not that strictly nefarious use of such technology necessarily follows FCC guidelines anyway. But if nothing else, it's an effective means of ensuring that the "see through your apartment walls" device doesn't show up in SkyMall anytime soon.
And longer. But they're all VLIW processors, and each 128-bit or longer instruction is actually made up of smaller instruction fields. Addressing in not 128-bit, at least not in anything getting popular use outside of a lab.
Of course, all modern x86 chips have 128-bit instrucations.. SSE. But they're vector instructions, and again, no 128-bit addressing.
Thing is, 128-bit addressing isn't even remotely necessary for "hard drives go away, and it's all just NV-RAM", at least for most applications. 2^64 bytes is a crapload of storage space. You could map 9,223,372 of those nice Western Digital 2TB HDDs into memory, and have a little room left over for other things. I only have three of these... some ways to go yet.
There's a big difference. The most salient one is that Linux distros are not trying to re-invent the whole environment... stuff from Ubuntu 7 is likely to work just dandy in Ubuntu 9 or 10 or whatever. They have no vested interest in either arbitrarily changing driver models to force hardware people into lock-step (and, curiously, make Linux all of a sudden better on driver support, across the last 10 years of hardware, than Windows... check it out, it's true), nor do they have any intention of holding users hostage for new feature support. There's no cash involved, eg?
There can an advantage to building a new base, rather than layering on update after update. That's more than likely easier for smaller development teams to deal with... I only need six months worth of updates to Ubuntu X, then I release a new thing and follow up on it. Naturally, updates do show up for the older versions, but there's not normally a big problem with updates. And as well, they update in place.. none of this "re-install Windows" drek. So the user resistance to updates changes, since the meaning of "updated version" is not fundamentally the same as on Windows.
I just don't trust Windows 7. It's simply Vista + 0.1 incremented version number, which is why I'm still hanging on to my old machine.
Got two old machines.. just put Windows 7 on them. One was Vista anyway, so really... could get it any worse? No, it didn't. They both also run Ubuntu 9.05, which I was going to upgrade, but decided against. And the laptop also has CentOS 5 on it, for perverse work-related reasons. Ok, I had higher end machines anyway.. I'm not sure I'd want Vista on a P4. Win7 is probably a bit better... it's not JUST a Vista + 0.1.. more like Vista with Microsoft in a panic about the fact that people don't actually want to upgrade just because MS says so to an OS that's only features are designed to self-serve Microsoft at the expense of the user so if we stop doing that for one revision and just fix the bloody thing maybe people will actually upgrade.
I just wanted OS support for partitions over 2TB, and ok, 64-bit OS not a bad idea, I have a few things that really might run better with more RAM. Yes, I know Linux already did that, but my video and audio tools are all in Windows, so save us both the grief (not you, C64lvr, just the instant Linux zealot who will materialize and point this out to me, even though I did just mention using two different versions of Linux on a regular basis).
MY MAC'S DEAD. I installed Security update 2009-005, rebooted, and now I have a spinning circle of death. FRAKKIN A!
Just doin' it's job, man.. protecting you from fryin' your brains on a Mac. First Law. Offer thanks.. saved you from that intelligence distortion field.. bad place. I've lost relatives in that.
Well.. they don't HAVE to re-design the driver model each and every time. They do this mainly to force hardware companies into obeying a new set of rules (eg, the Windows XP rules didn't require 64-bit drivers, the Vista rules did). If you disagree with this, I have prepared arguments in advance:
Argument #1: Now, sure, one can claim that this is necessary for new features. But hey, doesn't Linux get new features... these days, well in advance of Windows, sometimes. And they're largely using a driver model hashed out back in the 70s.
Argument #2: Unless everyone at Microsoft involved in driver design is a complete and total moron, you would think they could have come up with the idea of extensible drivers. AmigaOS 1.0 had this, back in 1985... there was never a need to change the driver model.. you could simply add new driver messages if you needed new features. But I digress. They have what, now, a half-dozen driver revisions. I'd even given them three or four to get it right, but there should never be another need to change the Windows driver model. Other than to control the hardware companies, as stated.
They're Intel... they have this buzzword department, and those kiddies have to make a living, too. Remember the Intel Pentium 4 "Netburst" architecture. Nothing whatsoever to do with nets, networking, the internet, etc.... other than the fact Intel Marketroids were trying to convince all the Mundanes (Muggles, to you kiddies) that this CPU would magically make their internet go faster. Yup, that's it.. not the fact you're on a frickin' POTS modem.
Yeah, ok, Martin Goetz defends software patents. That's like Neil Armstrong defending moon missions, Adam Osborne defending the Osborne-1, or George W. Bush defending Iraq -- there's no other possible answer from this guy. That doesn't make him wise, or correct.
But reality sets in and there are many, many questions. First of all, every software patent issued before the mid-to-late 1980s should be invalidated, or at least, subject to re-evaluation. Why? One acid test of patentability is supposedly "is this obvious to one skilled in the art?" Well, the PTO didn't have any software people until some time in the mid 1980s. So no prior software patents could possibly have passed that test, simply because the examiner was not one "skilled in the art".
Not that any of this is unique to software patents.. the whole idea of many business method patent approval is possibly worse. I mean, really, if you look at these, there's a whole class of prior art that's existed for decades, perhaps millenia.... at the phrase "on the internet" to it, and violia, it's a frackin' invention. NOT. That's an insult to actual inventors, and the idea that the USA is (or at least once was) an innovater on the global scale. This was nothing more than a gift to large companies with huge piles of cash to go around patenting all of these prior inventions. That's not even a guess, it's a fact... many big companies have whole departments with the express goal of hacking the patent system to their advantage.
I was involved in the other side of this, back in the 1980s. Back then, IBM had decided to start using their patent portfolio as a means to esentially claim cross licenses to all of humanity's inventions, and/or big piles of cash, from, well, everyone else in the computer business. So they went, quietly, after each and every PC company.. there were actually fairly reasonable hardware patents covering much of the IBM PC.. some clever enough, some stupid, but either way, it was hard to make a PC without this. Under the IBM plan, you licensed one, two, or three+ patents.
My involvement was when they came after Commodore for the Amiga. Now, it was pretty obvious... no one involved had a remote inkling of IBM's patent portfolio. No one working on this level of new stuff bothered studying IBM, anymore than a modern zoologist needs to study dinosaurs to understand today's lions, tigers, or bears. Probably less so. But they hit us up with all kinds of stuff. I read the patents, about 35 they threw at us, and wrote up why our stuff was different -- it always was. Or, why the patents were drek. For example, IBM got a patent on "cut and paste between buffers in a text editor", dated 1984. They showed us how we violated that by running cut and paste in MicroEmacs... the very same set of keystokes did the same thing in TECO Emacs back in 1979. Probably earlier.. but that's when I used it. I'd say about 80% of the patents fell into that category... really, really obvious prior art. The others were decent enough, we just didn't violate them.
It was all for show, anyway... once a patent is granted, it's assumed valid -- you have to defeat it in court. Of course, IBM would never let this happen, as they have thousands of licensees, and, if a pile of patents were suddenly overturned, those licensees would be at IBM's door. With their legal teams. So, you go and fight these, claim you don't violate them, claim they're bogus... they can hit you up with another pile of 35. And another, and... well, you get the idea.
Salient point: you could not possibly be an actual software engineer in 1984 without knowing full well that such things were commonplace. They simply hacked the system, pushed through anything that COULD be patented. And IBM's people, I'm certain, just lied through their teeth about their own personal knowledge of prior art. Without any actual software people in the PTO, they evaluated patents largerly based on prior patents... they didn't even bother with prior art. And there are thous
My D-Link something-or-other (Wireless-N, Gigabit Ethernet) started dying last month, so I upgraded to a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH. The main reason I went for the Buffalo is extended range... this sucker really does put out 500mW or more, rather than the usual wimpy http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/30889-buffalo-nfiniti-wireless-n-high-power-router-a-access-point-reviewed
I live in New Jersey... ok, not the part everyone knows, but still, New Jersey. The only wired internet connection I can get is POTS... they wouldn't even speak to me about ISDN, even ten years ago. Ok, maybe I could order up a T1 or something if I had the budget for it.
I'm sure the only reason we have land-line is that old compromise between the Feds and the pre-breakup AT&T... they had to given anyone who asked phone service, and in return, got to be a monopoly and rape you on long distance charges (which funded cheap local service, in fairness).
So I'm satellite, $120 a month for 1500kb/s down, 500kb/s up, peak... technically, my smart phone has faster peak performance. A there's a daily cap on that at 500MB (go beyond, and you get to enjoy dial-up performance for 24 hours). There is an "unlimited" block of time in the middle of the night, which used to be fairly decent, but now they're actually telling all the REGULAR users about this (eg, not just those of us who re-read the Fair Access document once a month, just in case they slip in any changes).
Also, "seriously deflected" isn't the same as "protected". Any space junk with random heading passing close enough to Jupiter to be deflected, not close enough to be captured, might also be deflected toward earth as away from it.
Historians in a thousand years will look back on us and say "most of their predictions were fairly logical given their limited data set... but they still seem so silly!"
Please... our robot overlords will have long since come to expect that of us. But they like us anyway... we make great pets.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152
"They don't understand vinyl, either. Led Zeppelin's Presence album sounds far better than the equivalent CD; it has more, well, presence. It has sharper highs and deeper lows than the CD version (that is, if you have a good turntable). But the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than the vinyl. Zeppelin was mastered in analog, Nirvana was mastered in digital. If you make an analog recording from a digital source, or a digital recording for an analog source, you get the worst aspects of both mediums and the advantages of neither."
You wrote that here in 2004: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152. ... the current release of Zep's "Presence" is digitally mastered... I can't locate any info on the original CD... I had this on LP, before CDs caught on. But it's ridiculous anyway... and "Nevermind" was certainly digitally mastered for the CD. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is one song from "Nevermind", not the whole album... the title does come from that song, the last verse "I find it hard, it's hard to find. Oh well, whatever, nevermind". It was recorded (Butch Vig) and mixed (by Andy Wallace) in analog, and mastered (by Howie Weinberg) separately for LP, CD, and cassette. Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab released a custom analog remix of Nevermind on vinyl as part of its ANADISQ 200 series in 1996.
There's a misunderstanding about the concept of "mastering". A recording engineer, the band, whomever, create a final mix, on digital or analog, it doesn't really matter. That's the copy that they submit as the "final" edition of the work. This then goes to a mastering engineer, who prepares it for the specific medium in use. This is true for any recorded medium, whether analog or digital, audio or video, and includes very subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle EQ and other "sweeting" of the work for that particular medium. In the case of making an LP, for example, the mastering engineer also applies the RIAA companding used on all LPs. This is a full curve of cuts and boosts, but specifically, lows are cut by 20dB, and highs are boosted by 20dB, during the mastering process. This allows a full 22 minutes of audio to fit per LP side... full bass would produce gigantic groves, lowering the time considerable, and also causing most tone arms to be sent skating across the disc. As well, highs are boosted by 20dB, to eliminate (on playback, when the 20dB cut is applied) much of the terrible high frequency hiss you pick up at high frequencies on an LP (this is the same basic principle used on Dolby noise reduction used on tape).
Completely different things are done taking a final digital mix (probably at 24/32-bit at 96/192kHz sampling these days) and producing a CD master: different EQ, downsampling with dithering and noise shaping, etc. Now technically, you could do most of the CD master in analog... and there are plenty of recording and mastering engineers who still use analog gear in the process, going from digital, though analog EQ or other gear, then back to digital... that's actually more of a point of controversy between engineers these days than the use of non-linear digital for recording and storage. The point is, you're still mastering FOR the CD, not simply taking an existing master for another medium onto that CD. And similarly, no one would take a CD master and just drop that on LP, either... they create a new master from the original final mix.
So yeah, if you did take an analog master, made for an LP or even cassette, just digitize it, and stamp it on a CD, it's going to sound poor. And this was done, sometimes by supposed "accident", other times just to get stuff out for the CD "gold rush".... but [hopefully] not in recent times. And many of those early fails have been digital remastered for CD (occasionally even for the better formats, SACD, DVD-Audio, or Blu-Ray), and
Yeah, that did it for me as well, on the Kindle, forever.
But that's only one among many problems. Another big thing on the Kindle -- non-replaceable battery and memory. So I'm at Amazon's mercy if the battery fails, and dependent on their servers as my library, not local storage. No good.
But the real problem with all of these is that they're trying to change the definition of "book", in going to ebooks. I have no problem with the idea of a book as it exists in physical space: it can only be read by one person at a time... I'm good with that. But with a real book, I can lend it all I want... not just once, ever, per book (nook) or never (Kindle). I can also sell it, or give it away... nope, not with these. Sure, these properties apply to all the free stuff, but it's not even necessary... if it's available free, you can get your own free copy, you don't need to borrow mine.
Until ebooks really behave like books, forget about it. Also, I've found my Android Phone (moto DROID) acceptable enough as an eBook reader (smaller screen, less battery life of course, but only slightly lower resolution). All the free stuff works there, already...
At least initially, though, you won't be able to buy any books from B&N when you're outside the USA, even via WiFi.
From what I've read of the Nook, the situation is EXACTLY like it was in the earlier days of the MP3 player, and particularly the iPod.
You can read any ePub book on the Nook... as long as it's not DRMed... just like the iPod and every other MP3 plays unDRMed MP3 files. It also supports PDB and PDF, after a fashion (fully page PDF is generally unreadable on today's relatively low-rez eBook readers). But it also reads DRMed ePub or PRC.
For reference, the very first iPods played non-DRMed MP3s... that was never the problem. They also played non-DRMed AAC.
The problem was that most of the commercially available content was only on AAC files protected with Apple's proprietary DRM. Which is also just the situation today in eBooks. The thing about ePub... it lets any old DRM live inside it. There's a more or less standard DRM from Adobe, and supposedly, the Nook support this... this is also the one used in Sony readers (along with Sony's own proprietary format). But there's also the proprietary B&N DRM, which is based on the Adobe DRM but different in some ways, supposedly. The big problem is that B&N content will presumably only be released in this proprietary format... so it's only readable on the Nook (and whatever PC or PDA based readers B&N decides to release). And some other eBook readers that have content agreements with B&N.
This is similar to what Amazon did with the Kindle. Their AZW format is a customized version of the Mobipocket file format. The Kindle can read AZW, or unprotected Mobipocket books (MOBI, PRC). Oh yeah, and plain old text files. Thus, while you can read a number of free books, anything commerically available is going to be Kindle only right now, in both directions.
Sometimes it's price fixing, sometimes it's market observation. It's not just the Kindle, but Sony and others being sold at or around this price point. That shows B&N that such hardware will move at that price, but also, that the will likely have trouble selling it at a higher price. So they set the price based on the competition... and yeah, this has very little to do with the actual cost.
In fact, if the cost were half of what Amazon's paying, they might still launch at the higher price, just to be taken seriously as a Kindle alternative. Like Amazon, B&N will be making lots of money on eBook sales if this is successful, so even if they're paying much more than Amazon, or even selling at cost, they're not going to charge more.
What is clear, so far, is that B&N's eBook prices do seem to be a bit higher than Amazon's. Anyone looking seriously at these devices has to consider the cost and availability of content... the price of the eBook reader will ultimately be a drop in the bucket.
4) Capture via HD analog component. That's pretty easy these days.. something like the Blackmagic Intensity Pro is a PCIe 1x card, which can capture analog or HDMI (which would be useless, if your cable company is doing HDCP) in realtime. These run $200, but of course, you'll have to so something with the video on capture. H.264 is going to be a realtime thing, but a fast PC could do MJPEG or Cineform in realtime, if not MPEG-2, more than likely. If they're also downrezzing your analog, then you're SOL with this approach.
For TiVo, sure. On the satellite, though, they charge about $7.00 a month for "lease", and another for "programming access" (of course, you get the EPG on a normal sat box anyway). However, on Dish anyway, they waive one of these fees if you keep the STB on a phone line (which allows you to make impulse buys of PPV stuff, rather than having to dial in). If the unit fails, they replace it or upgrade it for no additional charge (in theory, anyway). So that's $84 a year for someone else to maintain the DVR for me.
With that said, I've had my model 1 TiVo since the later 1990s, with lifetime subscription. It's still going... the HDD failed once, but I got a many-time-larger replacement from Weaknees, preformatted and relatively cheap. The TiVo hardware is pretty reliable. Of course, if it finally failed, I would replace it with some kind of media PC, more than likely.
The IR-blaster-or-not depends largely on the STB you're trying to control. You can interface standard TiVos to the serial control port of cable/satellite receivers that support them (at one point anyway, DirecTV models usually did, Dish Network didn't, though it's possible to hack... the serial signal is the same thing you get via IR once you filter out the IR modulation carrier, and on Dish models, the UHF carrier as well... very easy to hack, albeit a pain in the butt to have to do).
Actually, that's something of a good thing, the FCC itself not being more forceful here. The problem is, many of these things are on the very edge of where the FCC ought to be involved. Satellite slots themselves are a limited public resource after a fashion, and these were auctioned in the usual way. The satellite downlink, though, isn't really traditional "public airwaves" that the FCC is supposed to regulate. Cable is further still... proprietary cabling over existing cable runs... also not really a limited public resource.
The cable open access stuff is a good thing, don't get me wrong (despite how poorly implemented), but this needs to be through Congress. Once you start letting the FCC mess with these for one reason, it's easy to imagine they'll step in to put on the same kind of content regulations you get OTA... no good will come of that.
I would also like to see more consumer protections here.. when a company is allowed to service a town, they should be forced to provide same-cost service to everyone in town. The way things are today, they cherry pick the areas they service. Thus, you get some areas with multiple services in competition (cable, FiOS, DSL, etc), and others with no services at all. The actual agreements vary by town, and unfortunately, the local lawyers are usually bumpkins in places coverage actually matters, versus the slick corporate lawyers. So access remains problematic in rural areas.
Silverlight is not built-in on the PS3, though support for WMV/VC-1, WMA, and at least some version of the Microsoft DRM is.
With that said... you don't get automatic support of Netflix on the PS3, you have to send for a Blu-Ray disc, which presumably, loads up the PS3 player, perhaps as a BD-Java application. Given that the Windows Media components are already native in the PS3, this is probably a thin version of Silverlight. At least, I don't think you'd need this disc if they were just using the normal Windows pieces.
I'm not using it... my PS3 works just dandy with Blu-Rays, no need to stream low resolution "HD" with 10x more compression.
Last I looked into it, Netflix has always been using Microsoft CODECs, but it wasn't obviously Silverlight... thus, it's running on things like the PS3, Roku, and some other "Netflix Ready" devices. So, I looked it up... yup, they have moved to using Silverlight. There might actually be a good reason for this.
Netflix has always used Windows Media formats and, as one might expect, the Windows Media DRM. The original format is using WMV3 and WMA, along with Windows Media DRM-10. They encode from 500 to 2200kb/s, and occasionally up to 3400kb/s for select video material. The resolutions vary up to 720x480, 4:3 or 16:9, progressive, at either 24p (film) or 25p/30p (video). The new "HD" format (HD, in their imagination anyway) is streaming in VC-1 (Windows Media 9) and WMA at between 2.6Mb/s and 3.8Mb/s, 720/24p for films, 720/30p for video-derived sources.... apparently, they started using Silverlight and standard VC-1 for the HD stuff.
The argument for using Silverlight, rather than just "a mess of Microsoft CODECs and DRMs" is that all of these things are united under Silverlight. I think that translates to mean "Microsoft is doing the work of putting Silverlight on platforms like PS3, X-Box 360, Mac, etc... so we have no extra work to do to support these things. And clearly, since Netflix was already Microsoft based, they would be prone to accepting a "better" solution from Microsoft.
None of which removes the problem with Netflix: their video quality is crap. Buy or rent the Blu-Ray, don't worry about Netflix streaming video. Even easier, if you're not a fan of advanced Microsoft's heavily walled DRM. I got sick of them long ago, and the the crap they pulled with the DRM. They basically only trust PCs. Long before standardized HD players, I had this little red-laser DVD player from IOData in Japan. It could play MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, DivX 5/6, and Microsoft Windows Media 9 video in HD, up to 1080/30p or 1080/60i (though it did only YPrPb output up to 1080/60i), from normal red laser DVDs or streaming over 100-Base-T. They had actually gone to the trouble of supporting WMA, supporting the Microsoft DRMs, etc.
Or so you'd think. Microsoft was, at the time, selling high-def DVDs, using a "standard" they hacked together from HTML, Javascript, and Windows Media 9, which they called WMV/HD DVD. You could buy unprotected WMV/HD discs from folks like HD-Net, and this player would auto start, display menus, behave just like you had a DVD, only of course, in actual quasi-decent HD. I figured out how to make my own, even DVD + WMV/HD hybrids for short videos... the player was clever enough to ask which one you'd like to see when it detected such a disc.
But, even with the MS DRM in there, I couldn't play the DRMed versions on my player. I could authorize the disc on my PC, drop it in my player, no go. I could authorize it, try to play remotely on the IOData from a shared DVD drive on the player, no go. HOWEVER, if I copied the data to hard drive space on the PC, after authorizing it, the IOData player actually could get authorization to play it... though it lost all concept of the WMV/HD authoring... it just played individual WMV files.
In other words, Microsoft were just being idiots here. That was enough for me... if the thing is using the Microsoft DRM, I'll use their competitor's thing instead.
The basic idea of using high frequencies across a wide spectrum as well penetrating radar of a sort has been known for quite awhile, even if the "simple matter of an implementation" may have lagged behind. The FCC was really worried about this becoming possible over approved UWB (Ultra WideBand) frequencies... thus, they put really serious power level limitations on UWB radios approved so far. Not that strictly nefarious use of such technology necessarily follows FCC guidelines anyway. But if nothing else, it's an effective means of ensuring that the "see through your apartment walls" device doesn't show up in SkyMall anytime soon.
And longer. But they're all VLIW processors, and each 128-bit or longer instruction is actually made up of smaller instruction fields. Addressing in not 128-bit, at least not in anything getting popular use outside of a lab.
Of course, all modern x86 chips have 128-bit instrucations.. SSE. But they're vector instructions, and again, no 128-bit addressing.
Thing is, 128-bit addressing isn't even remotely necessary for "hard drives go away, and it's all just NV-RAM", at least for most applications. 2^64 bytes is a crapload of storage space. You could map 9,223,372 of those nice Western Digital 2TB HDDs into memory, and have a little room left over for other things. I only have three of these... some ways to go yet.
There's a big difference. The most salient one is that Linux distros are not trying to re-invent the whole environment... stuff from Ubuntu 7 is likely to work just dandy in Ubuntu 9 or 10 or whatever. They have no vested interest in either arbitrarily changing driver models to force hardware people into lock-step (and, curiously, make Linux all of a sudden better on driver support, across the last 10 years of hardware, than Windows... check it out, it's true), nor do they have any intention of holding users hostage for new feature support. There's no cash involved, eg?
There can an advantage to building a new base, rather than layering on update after update. That's more than likely easier for smaller development teams to deal with... I only need six months worth of updates to Ubuntu X, then I release a new thing and follow up on it. Naturally, updates do show up for the older versions, but there's not normally a big problem with updates. And as well, they update in place.. none of this "re-install Windows" drek. So the user resistance to updates changes, since the meaning of "updated version" is not fundamentally the same as on Windows.
I just don't trust Windows 7. It's simply Vista + 0.1 incremented version number, which is why I'm still hanging on to my old machine.
Got two old machines.. just put Windows 7 on them. One was Vista anyway, so really... could get it any worse? No, it didn't. They both also run Ubuntu 9.05, which I was going to upgrade, but decided against. And the laptop also has CentOS 5 on it, for perverse work-related reasons. Ok, I had higher end machines anyway.. I'm not sure I'd want Vista on a P4. Win7 is probably a bit better... it's not JUST a Vista + 0.1.. more like Vista with Microsoft in a panic about the fact that people don't actually want to upgrade just because MS says so to an OS that's only features are designed to self-serve Microsoft at the expense of the user so if we stop doing that for one revision and just fix the bloody thing maybe people will actually upgrade.
I just wanted OS support for partitions over 2TB, and ok, 64-bit OS not a bad idea, I have a few things that really might run better with more RAM. Yes, I know Linux already did that, but my video and audio tools are all in Windows, so save us both the grief (not you, C64lvr, just the instant Linux zealot who will materialize and point this out to me, even though I did just mention using two different versions of Linux on a regular basis).
MY MAC'S DEAD. I installed Security update 2009-005, rebooted, and now I have a spinning circle of death. FRAKKIN A!
Just doin' it's job, man.. protecting you from fryin' your brains on a Mac. First Law. Offer thanks.. saved you from that intelligence distortion field.. bad place. I've lost relatives in that.
Oh... that explains the smell. Thank you!!!!
Well.. they don't HAVE to re-design the driver model each and every time. They do this mainly to force hardware companies into obeying a new set of rules (eg, the Windows XP rules didn't require 64-bit drivers, the Vista rules did). If you disagree with this, I have prepared arguments in advance:
Argument #1: Now, sure, one can claim that this is necessary for new features. But hey, doesn't Linux get new features... these days, well in advance of Windows, sometimes. And they're largely using a driver model hashed out back in the 70s.
Argument #2: Unless everyone at Microsoft involved in driver design is a complete and total moron, you would think they could have come up with the idea of extensible drivers. AmigaOS 1.0 had this, back in 1985... there was never a need to change the driver model.. you could simply add new driver messages if you needed new features. But I digress. They have what, now, a half-dozen driver revisions. I'd even given them three or four to get it right, but there should never be another need to change the Windows driver model. Other than to control the hardware companies, as stated.
They're Intel... they have this buzzword department, and those kiddies have to make a living, too. Remember the Intel Pentium 4 "Netburst" architecture. Nothing whatsoever to do with nets, networking, the internet, etc.... other than the fact Intel Marketroids were trying to convince all the Mundanes (Muggles, to you kiddies) that this CPU would magically make their internet go faster. Yup, that's it.. not the fact you're on a frickin' POTS modem.
Yeah, ok, Martin Goetz defends software patents. That's like Neil Armstrong defending moon missions, Adam Osborne defending the Osborne-1, or George W. Bush defending Iraq -- there's no other possible answer from this guy. That doesn't make him wise, or correct.
But reality sets in and there are many, many questions. First of all, every software patent issued before the mid-to-late 1980s should be invalidated, or at least, subject to re-evaluation. Why? One acid test of patentability is supposedly "is this obvious to one skilled in the art?" Well, the PTO didn't have any software people until some time in the mid 1980s. So no prior software patents could possibly have passed that test, simply because the examiner was not one "skilled in the art".
Not that any of this is unique to software patents.. the whole idea of many business method patent approval is possibly worse. I mean, really, if you look at these, there's a whole class of prior art that's existed for decades, perhaps millenia .... at the phrase "on the internet" to it, and violia, it's a frackin' invention. NOT. That's an insult to actual inventors, and the idea that the USA is (or at least once was) an innovater on the global scale. This was nothing more than a gift to large companies with huge piles of cash to go around patenting all of these prior inventions. That's not even a guess, it's a fact... many big companies have whole departments with the express goal of hacking the patent system to their advantage.
I was involved in the other side of this, back in the 1980s. Back then, IBM had decided to start using their patent portfolio as a means to esentially claim cross licenses to all of humanity's inventions, and/or big piles of cash, from, well, everyone else in the computer business. So they went, quietly, after each and every PC company.. there were actually fairly reasonable hardware patents covering much of the IBM PC.. some clever enough, some stupid, but either way, it was hard to make a PC without this. Under the IBM plan, you licensed one, two, or three+ patents.
My involvement was when they came after Commodore for the Amiga. Now, it was pretty obvious... no one involved had a remote inkling of IBM's patent portfolio. No one working on this level of new stuff bothered studying IBM, anymore than a modern zoologist needs to study dinosaurs to understand today's lions, tigers, or bears. Probably less so. But they hit us up with all kinds of stuff. I read the patents, about 35 they threw at us, and wrote up why our stuff was different -- it always was. Or, why the patents were drek. For example, IBM got a patent on "cut and paste between buffers in a text editor", dated 1984. They showed us how we violated that by running cut and paste in MicroEmacs... the very same set of keystokes did the same thing in TECO Emacs back in 1979. Probably earlier.. but that's when I used it. I'd say about 80% of the patents fell into that category... really, really obvious prior art. The others were decent enough, we just didn't violate them.
It was all for show, anyway... once a patent is granted, it's assumed valid -- you have to defeat it in court. Of course, IBM would never let this happen, as they have thousands of licensees, and, if a pile of patents were suddenly overturned, those licensees would be at IBM's door. With their legal teams. So, you go and fight these, claim you don't violate them, claim they're bogus... they can hit you up with another pile of 35. And another, and ... well, you get the idea.
Salient point: you could not possibly be an actual software engineer in 1984 without knowing full well that such things were commonplace. They simply hacked the system, pushed through anything that COULD be patented. And IBM's people, I'm certain, just lied through their teeth about their own personal knowledge of prior art. Without any actual software people in the PTO, they evaluated patents largerly based on prior patents... they didn't even bother with prior art. And there are thous
My D-Link something-or-other (Wireless-N, Gigabit Ethernet) started dying last month, so I upgraded to a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH. The main reason I went for the Buffalo is extended range... this sucker really does put out 500mW or more, rather than the usual wimpy http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/30889-buffalo-nfiniti-wireless-n-high-power-router-a-access-point-reviewed
Lucky you.
I live in New Jersey... ok, not the part everyone knows, but still, New Jersey. The only wired internet connection I can get is POTS... they wouldn't even speak to me about ISDN, even ten years ago. Ok, maybe I could order up a T1 or something if I had the budget for it.
I'm sure the only reason we have land-line is that old compromise between the Feds and the pre-breakup AT&T... they had to given anyone who asked phone service, and in return, got to be a monopoly and rape you on long distance charges (which funded cheap local service, in fairness).
So I'm satellite, $120 a month for 1500kb/s down, 500kb/s up, peak... technically, my smart phone has faster peak performance. A there's a daily cap on that at 500MB (go beyond, and you get to enjoy dial-up performance for 24 hours). There is an "unlimited" block of time in the middle of the night, which used to be fairly decent, but now they're actually telling all the REGULAR users about this (eg, not just those of us who re-read the Fair Access document once a month, just in case they slip in any changes).
It's a cookbook!
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it (not as we know it, not as we know it)
Also, "seriously deflected" isn't the same as "protected". Any space junk with random heading passing close enough to Jupiter to be deflected, not close enough to be captured, might also be deflected toward earth as away from it.
Historians in a thousand years will look back on us and say "most of their predictions were fairly logical given their limited data set... but they still seem so silly!"
Please... our robot overlords will have long since come to expect that of us. But they like us anyway... we make great pets.