Here's the link to the MobileRead thread - be warned that it's over 300 posts, and most of them are just complaining about DRM and/or Amazon's returns policy:
Interestingly, Chris Walters (who wrote the commentary at Consumerist) actually seems to know how a Kindle works, and that it's possible to store copies of purchased books both on the Kindle itself and on your computer, so that you can continue to read them even after your Amazon account's been canceled.
You can find the other links yourself - I've already done *much* more research on this than either Mike or the author of the original article that Mike commented on. I guess being "bloggers" rather than "journalists" absolves them of any responsibility when it comes to fact-checking or research. Instead, all they have to do is come up with the most incendiary headline/commentary possible to keep those ad clicks coming.
First, stop being pedantic - DIVX was never an "open standard", but it was still a "standard" in the sense that it was a prescribed method of encoding data onto medium.
Second, I didn't have a DIVX player, but I believe I got the story straight. I found several articles from the period when DIVX was discontinued that confirmed that DIVX discs that users had upgraded to "silver" status to allow unlimited plays still worked after the format was discontinued. Of course, you couldn't do the $4.99 "rental" thing with DIVX discs after the discontinuation, but that makes sense, since no one was renting the discs after that point anyway.
Also, the DIVX players at the time were fairly close in price to regular DVD players, usually within $50-100. The DIVX players could play regular DVDs just fine, so the $100 rebate was essentially compensation for the DIVX players out there being only useful as regular DVD players. The players weren't rendered "useless" when DIVX was discontinued.
As I suspected, the original article (and Mike's commentary) are basically just sound and fury, based largely on a poor understanding of how the Kindle works.
If you go on the "Mobileread" forum or the Amazon Kindle forum, you can find out more about the subject's story (his username is "Ian".
Basically, here's what happened:
1) Ian's habit of "excessive" returns set off an automated flag on Amazon's computer, and his account was suspended. As a related consequence, he also couldn't access Kindle books that were stored in Amazon's "cloud".
2) He complained to Amazon using the special customer service email address **that was included in the form email he got from Amazon notifying him of his account cancellation**, and Amazon reinstated his account.
Amazon never "bricked" his Kindle in any real sense of the word. The device still booted up and worked normally (other than not being able to access the Kindle Store), and all the content that was stored locally on his Kindle (even Kindle books) was still accessible. The first customer-service agent he spoke with even pointed out that there were other ways to get content on the Kindle other than buying it from the Kindle Store.
Importantly, there's still no evidence that the Kindle DRM includes any kind of "poison pill" that allows Amazon to remotely disable a Kindle, or even render purchased books unreadable, as long as you have a copy on your computer or on the Kindle itself.
How many people were really left with DIVX discs they couldn't play? The way I remember it, when the DIVX standard died in 1999, all of the discs that had already been sold were "opened up" permanently, and people that had bought a player before a certain date received a $100 refund.
Of course, when their DIVX players eventually die, they'll be out of luck, but the same is true of any older format that's become obsolete. If you needed to buy a Betamax or laserdisc player today, you'd probably face the same problems.
Skip over Mike's commentary and read the original article again dispassionately. See if you can find anything that actually says that Amazon rendered the guy's Kindle unusable (or even that the could if they wanted to).
Completely different animals, although to my knowledge, Apple has never remotely "bricked" an iPhone, either - firmware/software updates that are incompatible with "jailbroken" or otherwise hacked iPhones don't count.
But the Kindle never needs to "phone home" to Amazon to work. In fact, other than the initial setup when you first buy it, you can turn the wireless capability off and never use it again, and continue to buy books from the Kindle Store. Having the wireless turned off just means that when you buy a book, you have to download it to your computer instead of the Kindle. Then you mount the Kindle on your desktop like an external drive and copy the book over. You can even be disconnected from the internet when you do the transfer, so no "phoning home" is required at this step, either.
Well excuuuuuuse me for not jumping on the "Oh noes - Amazon's gunna brick R Kindlez" bandwagon like Mike and the author of the original article seem to have done.
Re-read the original article, and tell me if there's anything there that says that the guys lost access to content that was already on his Kindle/computer. Or find anything anywhere that says that the DRM on purchased Kindle books enables Amazon to deny you the use of books that are stored locally on the Kindle or on your computer.
The simplest scenario that fits all of the facts in the article is that this guy just lost his Amazon account and his access to his purchased book that were stored in the Amazon "cloud".
Yeah - that would be horrible. I'd be limited to only reading the content I've already purchased and stored locally, plus the hundreds of thousands of books out there in other formats that the Kindle can read.
Seriously, there's nothing in the article that says that Amazon disabled this guy's Kindle or kept him from opening content that was already on his Kindle or stored on his computer - he just lost access to Whispernet and the copies of his purchased books that existed solely on Amazon's servers.
I don't think the Kindle store is like a subscription music service where you lose the ability to play all of your songs if the service is ever discontinued. I suspect that if the Kindle store ever goes away, we won't be able to purchase any new content, but the content we've already purchased will continue to work fine, as long as we had enough foresight to keep a copy of it on the Kindle itself or at least on our computer.
I suspect you're right as to what happened - Amazon didn't remotely "brick" this guy's Kindle or erase purchased content stored on it, he just lost access to the "backup" copies of his purchased books that resided on Amazon's servers as a consequence of having his account closed.
Since even the built-in memory on my first-gen Kindle holds hundreds of books, never mind what I can fit on an SD card (or my computer' hard drive), there's no reason for the *sole* copy of my purchased content to be the one on the Amazon server. Like you said, that's just poor planning.
It's much more likely that the differences you're hearing in your CD/vinyl/tape comparison are the result of the fact that the original studio tapes are mastered differently for each medium, and not the result of any particular limitations in the media themselves.
I have multiple copies of several albums on different formats. If I take the same album on vinyl, mass-market CD, and the remastered CD from Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, they all sound different to me. The mass-market CD usually sounds the worst (back to that whole dynamic compression/"loudness wars" thing we've both mentioned). The vinyl generally comes in second place, with the MFSL CD routinely sounding the best to me. Basically, the MFSL discs have all the careful mastering of the vinyl releases, no dynamic compression or added loudness, and the lower noise floor and higher dynamic range of CD.
If you honestly believe that there's all sorts of ultrasonic content in the original music that you're hearing when you play back the music on vinyl, then you've got an awesome PhD dissertation (and several awards as well) in the bag if you can give any evidence.
Think about it this way - anything above 22 kHz is well beyond what any voices or instruments can produce, and is even above the 2nd and 3rd harmonics of just about any instrument. Then there's the fact that you're beyond the range of the studio microphones, and above the threshold of the high-pass filter used in the studio. Then, although the vinyl cutting machines can theoretically cut grooves for ultrasonic frequencies, you're assuming that your stylus, amplifier and speakers can all reproduce the sounds accurately. Lastly, the frequency response of even a young person with good hearing doesn't extend much past 20 kHz, so even if the frequencies managed to survive the entire recording/playback process, it's doubtful you'd actually hear them anyway.
Not sure what you mean about "digital-to-digital converter" in your post, but digital sampling has been well-understood for many years. Just because you're only sampling the original waveform at fixed intervals, that doesn't mean that information about the waveform is necessarily being lost.
Just as you can completely and perfectly describe a straight line by sampling just two points, you can completely and perfectly describe any arbitrary waveform with maximum frequency F by using a sampling rate of at least 2F. It's true that the low-pass filters used in the conversion cause you to lose a little bit of the highest frequency information, but that's why the CD sampling rate is 44.1 kHz - so even after the filter, everything up to at least 20 kHz is reproduced accurately.
If you're complaining that ALE only has limited support among playback devices, that's a valid point, but you're still incorrect about ALE-ripped tracks in iTunes being "saddled with DRM, which it next to useless".
If you rip a disc using ALE, you can turn around and burn it to disc as many times as you'd like with no restrictions, and you can play it on any computer/device that supports ALE. Playback isn't restricted to "authorized computers" the way iTunes-purchased tracks used to be.
Study up on Fourier transform and the "Nyquist limit". As long as the original waveform doesn't have any frequency components higher than 22 kHz, sampling at 44.1 kHz doesn't cause a loss of *any* information about the original waveform at all. You can re-create the original waveform from the samples *exactly*, with no ambiguity or aliasing. And while there are quantization errors introduced *after* the sampling, those errors are nothing compared to the errors introduced when storing a waveform on vinyl (wow/flutter, higher noise floor, etcetera). Plus, when dealing with vinyl, you have to apply RIAA equalization both during the recording and the playback phases.
Playing back music on vinyl sometimes sounds better than a CD (especially in conjunction with a tube amplifier), but that's because a) the audio engineers that re-master the original tapes for CD usually do stupid things like adding dynamic compression and b) the even-order harmonics (distortion) added by a tube amp are actually quite pleasant-sounding. So even though the amp isn't faithfully reproducing the original waveform, the end result can actually sound *better* than a perfect reproduction.
Actually, it's nowhere near that bad. Going from 96 kHz to 44.1 kHz only "throws away" the frequencies in the original signal that are between 22 kHz and 48 kHz, and that's a tiny, tiny portion of the original signal, considering the frequency response of the microphones used during the performance, the frequencies/overtones produced by the instruments, etcetera.
Going from 24-bit to 16-bit doesn't "throw away" *any* data - it just introduces additional quantization error, because rather than having 16.7 million identically-sized "buckets" to represent the signal level, you *only* have 65,000 buckets. So your theoretical signal-to-noise ratio drops from 144 dB to *only* 96 dB - still better than any of the analog media out there.
Maybe there would be less confusion/antagonism if Zappa had been quoted correctly in the article. The actual quote is:
MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC, NOT SPECIFICALLY THE VINYL ARTIFACT WRAPPED IN CARDBOARD.
It seems pretty clear to me that all he's saying is it's the music itself that's important, no necessarily one specific delivery method (vinyl, in this case).
The sampling process in a CD introduces no errors (as long as the input waveform doesn't contain frequencies higher than 22 kHz). The quantization process, on the other hand, does introduce errors, but those errors are generally no larger than one part in 65,000. While still not perfect, this is better than any of the analog storage media.
So while CDs are technically not "lossless", neither is any other format, so it's kind of a trivial distinction.
Yep - you're talking about the "Personics" system. Pretty impressive, considering that it was before big hard drives in personal computers were common. The songs were stored on CDs in a compressed format, and then copied to tapes via high-speed dubbing machines. (the one I went to had a Nakamichi Dragon for the cassette deck). You even got your labels printed on a laser printer, which weren't commonplace at the time, either.
Re: Re: Re: Re: one of the most massive security holes in the world,
Security goes beyond simply preventing unauthorized access to a platform. Look up "security" as it pertains to messaging systems, and the terms "privacy", "authenticity" and "integrity" are widely-used and well-defined.
Standard "out of the box" e-mail doesn't have provisions for any of the three. There have been add-on extensions to the e-mail standard that help, such as encryption and digital signatures, but they're neither required nor widespread.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but here goes:
You can't get copyright protection for a fictional character name. A character name in and of itself is not a literary work, and is only protected as part of the work that the character appears in. I could write a western novel and name the ranch hands "Travis Bickle", "Forrest Gump" and "Jack Sparrow", and there's not a damn thing anyone could do about it.
Even if you could copyright a character name, misuse would be infringement, not theft.
It is possible to get *trademark* protection for a fictional character name, but Bill Cosby's "Weird Harold" character doesn't qualify for such protection. The *visual likeness* of Weird Harold from the TV show & movies might be protected, but WH isn't using the visual likeness in his posts.
And on an unrelated note, Cosby's "Weird Harold" character actually pre-dates "Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids" by quite a while. He's mentioned on the 1966 album "Wonderfulness" (in the "Go-Karts" routine), as well as 1967's "Revenge" (He's a big part of the "9th Street Bridge" skit). He may be on the older albums as well, but "Wonderfulness" is the oldest BC album I own.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re: Re: Much ado about nothing.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44350
And here's one to a Consumerist thread about the same person:
http://consumerist.com/5213774/amazon-can-ban-you-from-your-kindle-account-whenever-it-likes
Interestingly, Chris Walters (who wrote the commentary at Consumerist) actually seems to know how a Kindle works, and that it's possible to store copies of purchased books both on the Kindle itself and on your computer, so that you can continue to read them even after your Amazon account's been canceled.
You can find the other links yourself - I've already done *much* more research on this than either Mike or the author of the original article that Mike commented on. I guess being "bloggers" rather than "journalists" absolves them of any responsibility when it comes to fact-checking or research. Instead, all they have to do is come up with the most incendiary headline/commentary possible to keep those ad clicks coming.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
DIVX
Second, I didn't have a DIVX player, but I believe I got the story straight. I found several articles from the period when DIVX was discontinued that confirmed that DIVX discs that users had upgraded to "silver" status to allow unlimited plays still worked after the format was discontinued. Of course, you couldn't do the $4.99 "rental" thing with DIVX discs after the discontinuation, but that makes sense, since no one was renting the discs after that point anyway.
Also, the DIVX players at the time were fairly close in price to regular DVD players, usually within $50-100. The DIVX players could play regular DVDs just fine, so the $100 rebate was essentially compensation for the DIVX players out there being only useful as regular DVD players. The players weren't rendered "useless" when DIVX was discontinued.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Much ado about nothing.
If you go on the "Mobileread" forum or the Amazon Kindle forum, you can find out more about the subject's story (his username is "Ian".
Basically, here's what happened:
1) Ian's habit of "excessive" returns set off an automated flag on Amazon's computer, and his account was suspended. As a related consequence, he also couldn't access Kindle books that were stored in Amazon's "cloud".
2) He complained to Amazon using the special customer service email address **that was included in the form email he got from Amazon notifying him of his account cancellation**, and Amazon reinstated his account.
Amazon never "bricked" his Kindle in any real sense of the word. The device still booted up and worked normally (other than not being able to access the Kindle Store), and all the content that was stored locally on his Kindle (even Kindle books) was still accessible. The first customer-service agent he spoke with even pointed out that there were other ways to get content on the Kindle other than buying it from the Kindle Store.
Importantly, there's still no evidence that the Kindle DRM includes any kind of "poison pill" that allows Amazon to remotely disable a Kindle, or even render purchased books unreadable, as long as you have a copy on your computer or on the Kindle itself.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re:
Of course, when their DIVX players eventually die, they'll be out of luck, but the same is true of any older format that's become obsolete. If you needed to buy a Betamax or laserdisc player today, you'd probably face the same problems.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Mike -
From your commentary:
"First, it's worrisome that Amazon would just cancel this guy's account with no warning, no full explanation and no method to appeal the decision."
From the original article:
"Ultimately, the user appealed to Amazon and it reinstated his account..."
Where exactly did you come up with "no method to appeal the decision"?
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re: Kindle Bricks
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re:
But the Kindle never needs to "phone home" to Amazon to work. In fact, other than the initial setup when you first buy it, you can turn the wireless capability off and never use it again, and continue to buy books from the Kindle Store. Having the wireless turned off just means that when you buy a book, you have to download it to your computer instead of the Kindle. Then you mount the Kindle on your desktop like an external drive and copy the book over. You can even be disconnected from the internet when you do the transfer, so no "phoning home" is required at this step, either.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re:
Re-read the original article, and tell me if there's anything there that says that the guys lost access to content that was already on his Kindle/computer. Or find anything anywhere that says that the DRM on purchased Kindle books enables Amazon to deny you the use of books that are stored locally on the Kindle or on your computer.
The simplest scenario that fits all of the facts in the article is that this guy just lost his Amazon account and his access to his purchased book that were stored in the Amazon "cloud".
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Re:
Seriously, there's nothing in the article that says that Amazon disabled this guy's Kindle or kept him from opening content that was already on his Kindle or stored on his computer - he just lost access to Whispernet and the copies of his purchased books that existed solely on Amazon's servers.
I don't think the Kindle store is like a subscription music service where you lose the ability to play all of your songs if the service is ever discontinued. I suspect that if the Kindle store ever goes away, we won't be able to purchase any new content, but the content we've already purchased will continue to work fine, as long as we had enough foresight to keep a copy of it on the Kindle itself or at least on our computer.
On the post: Amazon Uses DRM To Turn Kindle Into A Very Expensive Paperweight
Yep-
Since even the built-in memory on my first-gen Kindle holds hundreds of books, never mind what I can fit on an SD card (or my computer' hard drive), there's no reason for the *sole* copy of my purchased content to be the one on the Amazon server. Like you said, that's just poor planning.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Much more likely...
I have multiple copies of several albums on different formats. If I take the same album on vinyl, mass-market CD, and the remastered CD from Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, they all sound different to me. The mass-market CD usually sounds the worst (back to that whole dynamic compression/"loudness wars" thing we've both mentioned). The vinyl generally comes in second place, with the MFSL CD routinely sounding the best to me. Basically, the MFSL discs have all the careful mastering of the vinyl releases, no dynamic compression or added loudness, and the lower noise floor and higher dynamic range of CD.
If you honestly believe that there's all sorts of ultrasonic content in the original music that you're hearing when you play back the music on vinyl, then you've got an awesome PhD dissertation (and several awards as well) in the bag if you can give any evidence.
Think about it this way - anything above 22 kHz is well beyond what any voices or instruments can produce, and is even above the 2nd and 3rd harmonics of just about any instrument. Then there's the fact that you're beyond the range of the studio microphones, and above the threshold of the high-pass filter used in the studio. Then, although the vinyl cutting machines can theoretically cut grooves for ultrasonic frequencies, you're assuming that your stylus, amplifier and speakers can all reproduce the sounds accurately. Lastly, the frequency response of even a young person with good hearing doesn't extend much past 20 kHz, so even if the frequencies managed to survive the entire recording/playback process, it's doubtful you'd actually hear them anyway.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Re: Re: It's not the sampling rate...
Just as you can completely and perfectly describe a straight line by sampling just two points, you can completely and perfectly describe any arbitrary waveform with maximum frequency F by using a sampling rate of at least 2F. It's true that the low-pass filters used in the conversion cause you to lose a little bit of the highest frequency information, but that's why the CD sampling rate is 44.1 kHz - so even after the filter, everything up to at least 20 kHz is reproduced accurately.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Re: Re: iTunes Store & Software
If you rip a disc using ALE, you can turn around and burn it to disc as many times as you'd like with no restrictions, and you can play it on any computer/device that supports ALE. Playback isn't restricted to "authorized computers" the way iTunes-purchased tracks used to be.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
It's not the sampling rate...
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Re:
Going from 24-bit to 16-bit doesn't "throw away" *any* data - it just introduces additional quantization error, because rather than having 16.7 million identically-sized "buckets" to represent the signal level, you *only* have 65,000 buckets. So your theoretical signal-to-noise ratio drops from 144 dB to *only* 96 dB - still better than any of the analog media out there.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Poorly-quoted
MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC, NOT SPECIFICALLY THE VINYL ARTIFACT WRAPPED IN CARDBOARD.
It seems pretty clear to me that all he's saying is it's the music itself that's important, no necessarily one specific delivery method (vinyl, in this case).
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Yep-
So while CDs are technically not "lossless", neither is any other format, so it's kind of a trivial distinction.
On the post: Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
Re:
On the post: As Long As People Keep Buying, Scams (and Spam) Will Keep On Coming
Re: Re: Re: Re: one of the most massive security holes in the world,
Standard "out of the box" e-mail doesn't have provisions for any of the three. There have been add-on extensions to the e-mail standard that help, such as encryption and digital signatures, but they're neither required nor widespread.
On the post: So Much For That Plan: Google CIO Doesn't Even Last A Year At EMI
RD & Jesse
You can't get copyright protection for a fictional character name. A character name in and of itself is not a literary work, and is only protected as part of the work that the character appears in. I could write a western novel and name the ranch hands "Travis Bickle", "Forrest Gump" and "Jack Sparrow", and there's not a damn thing anyone could do about it.
Even if you could copyright a character name, misuse would be infringement, not theft.
It is possible to get *trademark* protection for a fictional character name, but Bill Cosby's "Weird Harold" character doesn't qualify for such protection. The *visual likeness* of Weird Harold from the TV show & movies might be protected, but WH isn't using the visual likeness in his posts.
And on an unrelated note, Cosby's "Weird Harold" character actually pre-dates "Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids" by quite a while. He's mentioned on the 1966 album "Wonderfulness" (in the "Go-Karts" routine), as well as 1967's "Revenge" (He's a big part of the "9th Street Bridge" skit). He may be on the older albums as well, but "Wonderfulness" is the oldest BC album I own.
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