...more recent posts
There's been a lot happening in the intellectual property wars lately. I haven't been able to write anything informative. But I am digesting, so something will come out eventually.
One thing I can't pass over is that the music recording industry has quiety started distributing "CDs" with "copy protection" mechanisms built in. I put those words in quotes because these are not CDs (they do not conform to the Red Book standard that defines audio CDs) and it's questionable whether what they are doing is really copy protection. I can think of a few better descriptions, but none of them are too polite.
Here's the slashdot story.
Seems like the copy protection consists of inserting small errors all throughout the CD. An audio CD player (a good one at least) has all sorts of error correction circuitry built into it so that when an error is encountered the player looks at the data on both sides of the error and interpolates what it thinks should be in place of the error. So the error filled (I mean "copy protected") CD will play correctly (well, not theoretically correctly because all the information is not there, but apparently you can't hear the difference, so practically correctly.) But a CD drive in your computer is just making exact copies of the data. If you try to rip one of these CDs into MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis, or Windows Media Format, or whatever) the computer will dutifully copy all the errors as well which will now destroy the sound of the music (because your MP3 - or whatever - player isn't doing this same sort of error correction.)
The solution is just a software release away. Someone just has to write a software ripper that does this sort of error correction. And, in fact, cdparanoia is a software decoder that does just that. It was written for the obvious reason of enabling people to rip audio tracks from scratched CDs. The comments on /. are saying it will work for these new disks, and that seems to make sense. The catch, of course, is that cdparanoia is a free software product and only runs on linux. And this is the whole battle in a nutshell.
Digital information is copyable by definition. The only way to control the ability of people to make copies is to control the entire consumer electronics industry. And this is what is being attempted, although I fear not many believe such a campaign is underway. If we all used Microsoft (or Apple) operating systems, and can only buy CPRM hard drives, and all our monitors, TV's, stereo speakers, headphones, etc... have built in protection mechanisms - then they could make an attempt to control this stuff. Linux would have to be illegal (and it could be made so by arguing that linux is a "circumvention device" under the DMCA.) All old stereo and computer equipment would have to be made illegal. All new equipment would have to have these electronic protections built in.
But that's impossible you say. People won't stand for it. But they made plants illegal, and that's even more ridiculous. These things happen. Word to the wise: don't throw out your old computers. You may need them to fight the good fight some day.
Steve Jobs announces new Macs tomorrow at the annual MacWorld New York conference. [update: coverage of the keynote is below] The faithful, as usual, have whipped themselves into a frothy speculative frenzy trying to predict exactly what the new offerings will be, but this year there seems to be almost no leaked information to go by. New iMacs, for sure, but all the flat panel rumors that had been floating around for weeks (including the outlandish wireless detachable tablet screen iMac) have dried up. Could they really deliver a mere speed bump and new color choices? (Again?) That machine is getting very tired.
New Powermacs, again for sure, but how interesting can these be? New cases seem like a good bet, but nothing else is really on deck to surprise. Almost everyone seems to agree on 733, 866, 933 mhz for the desktop machines with the possibility of 1 ghz to be announced but not shipping for a few months. Dual processors somewhere in there, but probably not across the entire line (and probably not at the highest clock speed.)
The powerbook G4 (TiBook) won't be updated until September. The rumor from the Merril Lynch analyst about 14 inch display iBooks has to be wrong (who'd buy a TiBook if the iBook had a 14 inch screen?) But that leaves you wondering what could the source at Alpha Top have been talking about? Almost makes you want to start speculating about that tablet thing again, but I just don't see it. Probably the source was just wrong.
We'll see tomorrow. But I've got a bad feeling about this one. Steve better pull something out of his, uhhh... hat.
What happened to lemonyellow?
acute.org has some nice photos of the greenpoint gas tank implosions. Brooklynkid has some pictures of the tanks before hand, including one showing where the explosives were attached. Rumor has it that Steve has some film of this same event.
Here's two great resources I've found lately (well, they're great if you maintain macs and/or epson printers.) First is the amazing epson inkjet printer resource. If that's not more info than you could ever want then you are a serious geek and should probably take a vacation. And the macgurus tech support page is a great place to find answers to mac hardware issues. Their ftp software archive is breathtaking.
A brief history of @.
My sister Elisabeth and her husband Tom and my amazing niece Mary arrive today. Looking forward to a nice meal tonight.
Brunch here at noon on Sunday if anyone wants to come by.
Feelin' lucky today.
The BBC has a story about a new, and much more accurate atomic clock design.
Clocks have come a long way in the past one thousand years. In 1088, the Chinese developed a water clock accurate to about 100 seconds a day.So how accurate is it? Supposedly it is accurate to within one second over the lifetime of the universe. Cool short explanation if you click through.
In the 17th Century, pendulum clocks were accurate to about 10 seconds a day. By the 1930s, the most accurate clocks kept time to within a second over a three-day interval.
But it was with the introduction of atomic clocks, based on precisely measured microwaves emitted by specific atoms, that the precision of timekeeping became astronomical.
Atomic clock technology enabled scientists in 1967 to define the second as the period equal to 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation that corresponds to the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.
By 1995, the best atomic clocks were accurate to a second every 15 million years - and now they have become even better with the new NISTL timepiece.
Complete frustration. I just spent several hours weeding through my incredibly poor code to find a simple bug in the subscription function. I got it finally, but what a freakin' mess. I haven't looked under the hood in so long I'd forgotten. Hope I don't have to go back in there again. I almost threw my computer out the window. Going to go walk around for a bit.