hobgoblin

for some reason i belive my local electronics shop still have a d600 available, maybe ill grab that as i think it was on sale, cheap still, that unit looks damn sexy now, if i could get myself a bluetooth splitter so that i can use a music player and have it cut the sound when my phone rings...

i welcome the day when one can pick up a box of 10-20 small chips that can store 1GB a pop, all for a nice "small" sum...

think your last b is missing a / there...

that rootkit bit was in a third party tool that sony had "bought" wihtout checking all its capabilitys. or atleast it looks that way given how they reacted to the discovery... oh, its simpler then one think. it all depends on how the encryption algorithm works given the input data. it amy well be that some silly bug creates a odd-ball result if the "right" amount of data is inserted. most likely it was originaly designed to work with atrac data. data that do not produce results in that value range or something similar. but then they apply it to the mp3 data (thereby not requiring a new decryption chip), maybe without properly checking the output beyond finding that it can play the music. 99% of the time, stuff like this isnt intentional. its side-effects of other actions. actions that have not been properly screened. sony may be amoral about anthing but the allmighty bottom line, but its not intentionaly evil (atleast i hope not).

nocando on 1, but the other two would be nice trow on my personal fav, mp3 playback without the need to go via SS...

no can do with using the ATRAC engine to decode mp3's. thats basicly like trying to run a petrol engine on diesel... if i should guess, its something to do with the "encryption", and most likely unintended. somehow it screws up the datastream of the mp3 so that the codec firmware/hardware of the player gets some strange data. basicly i cant see any corp doing something like that intentionaly, as the risk of backlash would be to great...

err, i would say drag and drop is simpler then using itunes. i allready have a music folder with sorted subfolders. all i need to do is copy over the music i want to listen to. ok, so its a bit harder to set up playlists. but last time i checked, my two fav drag and drop hardrive-based players supported playlists copyed from winamp and itunes is a proprietary app, it only works with ipods... apple managed with ipod to make it a fashion statement. i think that talks more about the crowd that apple normaly sells to, and their marketing department then anything about their device.

fear the dark side, it have a bad habbit of corrupting anyone it gets in contact with... ok so maybe im overly pesimistic. but a wise man hope for sun and dress for rain, or something like that. i dont belive it until i see it...

and lets watch the portable audio devices become more and more swamped by draconian DRM...

hmm, figures that i had missed something, and that sony would not make it easy to download said app and use "old" hardware... alltho, i wonder if not its only about having some sort of id sendt over from the device to the app, and the app only working with a list of id's. so if one could get in and alter said list, i would expect it to work fine with older devices to... but this is only guesswork...

from what i understand they are more or less rebundeld versions of the "old" models, but with a mic and a special mac app that allow the upload of wav/pcm recording to mac.

the more memory we have, the more data we generate or gather to put into that memory. its allmost insane in a way. we are so outstripping the ability to create backups that its not even fun...

heh, about RMI's. if you have access to discovery channel, there was a mtyhbusters episode where they tested of iron-based tatoo ink would react to the magnetic field. at one time hey had some boxes of ink (one with some extra strong mix of the iron based one) sitting on the "bed" while they powerd up the magnet. the box of heavy ink was flying thru the air. basicly, those things would destroy the very player, so worrying about the discs at that point is just silly.

im guessing the correct word is resiliant (alltho im not 100% sure about the spelling ). if it was data-resistant it would refuse to have data written to it hmm, i think i have to look more into that dvd-ram format. problem is that i like the MD system for its size, and the portability/usb-storage-media of the drive/player. or can the dvd-ram act as a "floppy"? insert, drag and drop write, eject? and can i get a writer thats usb attachable? as for MO vs flash. flash have a limited number of write cycles pr memory cell, often as low as 1000 or there about. alltho its increasing all the time, mostly by putting reduntant areas of memory cells on them, and a controller that rotate the use of them. still, i dont know about its reliability for long time storage, as its still about maintaining a electrical charge (from what i understand). flash are iirc a poor cusion of something know as NV ram, non-volatile ram. its expensive to make and therefor only available in low quantitys. about the only time i have encounterd them is in cisco rotuers, where its used to store the routers os. when it comes to MO And reliability i think its very high (hell, some high-end backup systems use MO media). rember that its only magnetic when heated within a specific temprature range. and the magnet is only used to alter the reflectiveness of the surface (kinda like on a cd/dvd). therefor there is no need to maintain a magnetic field or electrical change like a hardrive or flash do. so for long time storage, MO is close to king. its said however that there is a limited number of write cycles. but sony claims that its in the million or higher... still, if you want to be sure. make multiple copys, on top of the copy you maintain on the computer...

given the limited write-speed, how long would it take to fill one of those? the 1TB ones that is... and yes, im fully aware that they dont exist. im just bored...

still, you cant just drag and drop files over. you still need specific software to transfer the files...

strange realy, as hi-md is a MO based media, same stuff that they use for some backup systems these days. still, there is allways a chance that a media will fail (but several, both hi and normal. sounds a bit strange). thats why, unless you keep a copy on the computer, a backup isnt a backup unless you have it on two seperate storage devices...

well i theory it could actualy work, if one could only heat one write side at at time. but that means you have to put some sort of insulator between them. i wonder how thick it would make the disc. rember that the material is magneticaly inert when not heated to a specific temprature...

outside of the bundle-sets of hi-md, mic and mac pcm upload app? none that i have seen, but then i have not realy looked...

to bad its only sony that makes hi-md media

but that drive is probably hooked into a 12v power connection. usb can only deliver 5v at best. so i would say that its not a wish list (a wish is to something that can be done) but rather a dream list...

sure its sony BMG that put the whole stuff in motion. but it still carrys there sony name and therefor it dirtys the sony brand. if the son of a movie star gets into trouble, it will still make the movie star look bad. basicly, the parent company will allways get shit trown at it as long as the child have the same name. why? people see who the parent is so two ways of fixing the issue is, change the name of sony BMG so that i no longer carry the sony name, or get more control/oversight over the internal desisions made by sony BMG.

given recent trends i would say that they are dropping minidisc alltogether...

well i recall reading that current dvd players pull of the cd read trick thanks to having two laser emitters, one for the dvd wavelength and one for the cd wavelength. it was in connection to a blu-ray/hd-dvd discussion where the question of backwards compatiblity came up. someone commented that as there is allready some issued with dvd players having two lasers, he wonderd what kind of engineering issues there would be to stuff yet another laser emitter in there. if this is true, then think about trying to stuff two or more lasers into something the size of the avarage portable minidisc player... i hope your aware of it but i repeat it anyways: the media puts a physical limit on the transfer speed. i dont know if they do two passes to erase and write but in any case, as it needs to be heated to a specific temprature before anything can be written, it will allways be slower then even a hardrive, forget about flash level speeds.

i wonder about that opening of the atrac stuff. most likely its not the same as opening up the drm of sonicstage and hi-md. still, its a bit of wet dream edit: oops, outsmarted by a rabbit