Andrew Luecke's dashboard

@David.

1) Why should AT&T buy them new phones? They probably don't offer insurance because they aren't an insurance company. I also know from experience barely anyone even get the extended warranty, let alone insurance! You can append them to your home and contents insurance.

2) No, the phone isn't hard to connect to someone else. Everyone jailbreaks their phones, and there are services available to easily unlock them. Any bum on the street can do it. And if they were actively tracking them, everyone would whinge (hell, people totally freaked out when they discovered Apple Dashboard connected to Apple's server every boot-up, claiming they were being tracked! Weeks later though, some pointed out it was a safeguard against viruses).

3) If the profit thing was true, don't you think they would implement your thing to brick iphones? That way the thief needs a new phone too..

4) There are two ways to brick an iphone.. By software (very easy to bypass) and hardware (very effective). Unfortunately, the problem with hardware bricking is that hackers who hate apple could create a virus to exploit iphones, and brick them permanently. Yep, that sounds great, a way for your enemies to destroy your possessions!

5) Finally, in terms of your tracing, etc, the police can track down your phones. Have you even tried to contact police? Also, there is software that is capable of tracking computers and phones (would probably require a jailbroken iPhone though to work well). But go contact police, and do it via valid channels. And give Apple your serial numbers and the police report ID. You should be thankful companies are protecting the privacy of its users, otherwise people would abuse it.

So yes, AT&T helping would be nice, but companies aren't required to offer insurance, or pay for your losses. If you buy a bottle of whisky and drop it 2 secs after walking out of the store, you wouldn't expect them to give you a new one for free. Furthermore, its no good blaming them because you dropped it.

Trunk could be just broken atm, but also make sure you have the vendor dependencies too..

Have you tried rebooting? – Andrew Luecke, on November 18, 2009 07:59

G'day,

Just wondering if you have any roxio products installed, such as easy CD creator...

1.5.0 is an early alpha version still, which is under active development. Crashes should be expected. To be honest, at this time, I personally wouldn't even bother reporting most bugs (I might only mention them on IRC). Because proper Quality Assurance hasn't been completed on 1.5.x yet..

Legally, I think that would be a BAD idea.. – Andrew Luecke, on November 17, 2009 14:34

Khari, you might want to have a look at http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t... . GeekShadow provides a solution for this problem.

Actually, Windows Media player does this too now (using Windows 7 Homegroups)

G'day, Actually, transcoding formats can be easily extended using recompiled gstreamer plugins and the same plugins should also extend transcoding formats available to devices.

I don't see any reason why someone who needs it, wont recompile one of the existing MP3 encoders available for gstreamer, to work on Songbird (on Linux, doing so is probably effortless. Maybe a bit harder on windows though).

But, I guess it comes down to finding people who need MP3 support to do it, because I personally rip everything to FLAC these days. – Andrew Luecke, on November 17, 2009 06:08

G'day,

Dunno, however, I should mention that 1.2 was the first version of songbird which supported Music management. In 1.4, music management is (apparently), much better :D – Andrew Luecke, on November 17, 2009 05:56

@Alex

Really? Ubuntu, OpenSolaris,. Fedora, etc, the list goes on for companies who don't even support opening MP3's files by default... Programs such as Audacity and foobar don't ship with LAME either, and you need to go download it as an extra. The only free players I can find that do, are Nullsofts/AOL's Winamp (who probably have a special licensing agreement) and iTunes on Windows (and they recover the costs by selling iPods and music). Neither are open source though, simply free

Not sure where your "facts" are coming from, because I am having serious difficulty finding any open source program at all which ships with MP3 encoding. Yes they come with support to do so, but you still need to download LAME anyway (and none seem to make that process as streamlined as it should be).

You also forget that Songbird uses Gstreamer, so there is nothing special about its extensions, whereas, with players such as foobar, encoding plugins are probably handled in a custom way (it probably isn't rocket science for songbird, as users simply need to compile an gstreamer MP3 encoding plugin, and dump it in the directory, with little coding knowledge required).

It would probably be MORE work to code a half baked plugin that lets you choose where LAME is, then simply compile an existing lame encoder designed for Gstreamer. So at the end of the day, if users need to download something anyway, it might as well be a proper codec.

Also, there is no reason why POTI couldn't link to it in the wiki (and maybe even under addons with a warning), so that users who require it can easily find it!

If POTI does it though without licensing, they would be setting themselves for an epic payout to the patent holders (despite the fact that a large number of people might not even use it).

I think when more of POTI's plans about working with other companies and such is revealed, the need for official MP3 encoding will seem less significant anyway. I'd like to see MP3 encoding eventually included by default, but once I throw away my iPod anyway and switch to android, I honestly will no longer have any use for it.

G'day, No errors/warnings in error console, but it happens in korn, and using Mp3 (Windows 7 X64 RTM, SPDIF, Realtek HD). It make have something to do with the buffer, because it happens reliably, when clicking forward on the time timeline (changing the position 2 or 3 times a second).

I have tested without the plugin, and it doesn't happen... Might be worth asking other people what their experience is though, because tbh, WASAPI isn't something I'd normally use ;)

Actually, I have found a bug with using it. If you click the time-line for a song to skip ahead, playback breaks.

I'll also add that if iTunes is having difficulty, you likely have something messed up with your iPod and should do a restore anyway.

G'day,

PVH may just have missed the response (it can happen). Firstly, how are you checking the metadata? Its worth noting that Songbird stores metadata using ID3 2.4, whilst many programs only support older versions. It may be that the metadata is being stored, but the program you are using doesn't support version 2.4. Many Windows XP explorer extensions apparently don't support 2.4.

You can confirm if the metadata is being stored, by using profile manager to create a second profile in Songbird, and checking if the metadata persists (because Songbird should be able to read its tags). Maybe check with MP3's first.

Now, its also worth mentioning that Ogg metadata writing was disabled in 1.2, because some people found it caused corruption, however, if you use 1.4.x, both Ogg and M4A should work. Wav's will probably never store the ID3 tags, because there is no standard way of doing so apparently! M4P files I don't think support writing, and FLAC's/MP3 support should just work.

Also, check the permissions of the files. In windows 7/Vista, especially during a clean upgrade, its very easy to have read-only media files, and it may not be as simple as unchecking the "read only" attribute box (you need to check the access control lists, which is messy and painful, but exists under the security tab of the directory). Unfortunately, this is a bit difficult to explain, but fortunately, this "problem", for most people is quite rare.

Finally, whilst unlikely, you may have set a preference to disallow metadata writing. To check this, go to file, open location, about:config, songbird.metadata.enableWriting should be true.

Hopefully this helps. Let me know if it doesn't.

Actually, I think things would be a lot easier, if there was a counter on the front page to the time for an expected release, that hyperlinks to a release history. Something similar to: https://fedoraproject.org/static/imag...

It doesn't need to be exact (it can say "approximately 4 weeks remaining for Korn (Kanye cancelled)". But if releases like 1.3 are knocked off the roadmap, it can hyperlink to an explanation why.

This would be the most transparent way of doing it I'd say, and users would know when a new release should be expected approximately instantly

Actually, the site is incorrect (at least in Aus). Here in Australia, whilst the phones have no means of being tracked, if they are ever returned to Apple for service or battery replacement, Apple has a database to identify them (and has for ages).

Although, many employees may be unaware that the database exists. – Andrew Luecke, on November 14, 2009 08:18