John said:
Richard, this isn't really strange at all when you consider that (at
least in the U.S.) most of the articles you read in the press, or see
and hear in media come from one huge monopolistic press agency - the
"Associated Press".
"IMO" AP is totally in bed with the government. I.e. the government
doesn't need to control the press since they both kiss each other's asses.
You getting them mixed up with UPI? UP is owned by Rev. Moon, as is the
Washington Post. When I worked in radio, UP was considered the better
(less biased) of the two major services. I was given, however, some
pretty nasty rip-and-read features -- outrageous yellow journalism --
that I outright refused to read over the air; these pieces violated UP's
handbook which cautioned against linking hotbutten words together, as in
"leftist student agitators." And AP was considered to be _worse._ Of
course, this was a long time ago. In the meantime, Reuters came to the
US -- I've always preferred the coverage of our country by people based
elsewhere, so I've viewed the arrival of Reuters as a good thing.
Unfortunately, the CBC had their budgets cut so drastically that they
don't seem to be able to do stories from here any more.
Free press, free speech, freedom of association, etc. all of these no
longer really exist in many ways. However, our (U.S.) government strives
in a half-assed way to maintain the illusion that this isn't the case.
You might notice that you rarely hear references to the United States as
being a "free country" anymore.
No; there's this Kahuna who says, "They hate our freedom."
As for simply viewing and hearing the RealMedia streams, Real
Alternative works on my system to view or listen to BBC streaming media.
However, the following questions:
1. where does Real Alternative originate
2. if it's on the level, why doesn't Real go after the person who is
responsible for it
still haven't been answered to my satisfaction.
Oh, wow, we've been over this so many times, John. I've got the dry
heaves. I think someone established a while back that the Real
Alternative file set did, in fact, contain some sort of spyware. I'll
say, though, that I haven't caught the bastard phoning the mother ship.
And I believe that Sygate would ring my chimes if this occurred. Sad to
say, we should all be on the lookout for a replacement for Sygate now
that it's gone to the enemy's camp. One little nasty about Sygate we've
not discussed is that you can hit the brick wall of the 20-rule limit. I
just maxed this out last week, so even before I heard about the Sygate
acquisition, I was thinking about replacing it. You see, my ISP
transmits to me from their "latency tester," and Sygate blocks this, not
having a rule to permit it. And I can't create the rule to allow it
because that would be rule #21 (gotcha).
As for saving streaming RealMedia to one's hard drive, a cursory
research on the internet has shown me that this is usually not going to
be possible for two reasons:
1. Real has incorporated proprietary coding in their media format that
blocks players which do things which Real doesn't want them to do, like
recording streaming media for instance.
2. Real agressively pursues legal action against companies who put out
software for downloading streaming media.
This isn't to say that all RealMedia can't be saved to hard drive, but
companies who want to block this from happening can easily do so.
Actually, there are ways around this. I'll explain. At some point within
your system, Real converts to a straight audio signal -- I'm talking
about analog now. You see, this is the only way to get the music from
your computer into your speakers, headphones, what have you. Now (heh
heh) all one needs is to capture this ordinary _audio_ signal, and stash
it any which way you want (.wav, .mp3, OGG, you name it). I haven't
bothered because it's not often that I'll actually want to save what I
download. Now, I download the Real audio directly to cassette tape or
directly into my teentsy MP3 player. In the last case, the player
converts line-level audio directly to MP3 format. And it's just great
for speech.
Real sound is compromised (as is MP3). Like MP3, the degree of
compression is set by the party who encodes the signal. Therefore, some
of the audio can be horrendous, and some is pretty decent. You want bad?
Try downloading something from KPFK (the sound is at the edge of
screeching). You want better: try the BBC or "On The Media," from WNYC
(a wonderful, enjoyable show, by the way).
I've seen mentioned here recently a couple or so programs that can
capture real streams to digital form, and I have a hunch that this is
the way that they do it -- grab it from analog audio. Hell: why not. My
experience with the two methods that I use indicate that going digital
within the computer itself would be as good.
How's that?
Richard
