Slashdot Mirror

Gaston is a veritable Da Vinci of comic books! He has covered every field -- chemistry, mechanical engineering, electronics, computers, biology, music theory, rocket science. He's european and not a superhero, so I guess that's why you never heard of him

Examples:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3195/2998324088_9106a0bd77_o.jpg
http://briconique.free.fr/images/GastonLagaffe.gif
http://www.sceneario.com/Planche_bd_8065_GASTON.jpg
http://multimedia.fnac.com/multimedia/images_produits/zoom_planche_bd/8/6/9/9782800126968_1.jpg
http://www.dupuis.com/Couvertures/G/9782800145853-G.JPG

When I lived in Spain, the local FNAC was a great place to browse, but a lousy place to buy. Their CDs are ridiculously expensively priced compared to other options. I'll pick a general classical CD that, as far as I know, is still always full-price, the DG disc with Anne-Sophie Mutter as the soloist on the Berg violin concerto. FNAC has it for a steep 23 euro. Meanwhile, Amazon has it for US$16. Even though I've settled in Europe for good, I've grown accustomed to ordering from Amazon, having everything shipped to a relative in the US, and getting my stuff every few months when someone flies over. But if I didn't have that option, like most European music lovers, you better believe that I'd be downloading nonstop. Retailers like FLAC should realize that outright gouging of your customers doesn't spur business.

Well, they are not the only ones. FNAC in france ( http://www.fnac.com/ ) already offers a pretty large catalog of unprotected MP3 music downloads, in addition to its standard DRM enabled WMA files. It seems that DRM is dying a painfull and slow death (not that any of this is relevant after DRM got cracked)...

I don't know about the US, but in Europe you can get a boxed set pretty much anywhere. Don't know if it's the fat binary version but if not it should soon be...

FYI that online store I linked to is roughly a French equivalent of the Virgin stores. They're mostly in Europe though.

Actually when I went to the local software shop (Fnac) a few years ago and bought a boxed copy of Myth2 for Linux (ok, only time I ever saw a Linux game in that shop), it installed just by running a script. Pretty much like any Windows thingy would. And it worked too.

When you buy user oriented software for Linux (StarOffice, one of the few games, etc.), you'll find that it comes with a proper installer. Of course not many Linux users get commercial software.

Despite the few (mostly successful, really) attempts at creating drool proof installers, most software writers prefer to leave their software as a source tarball with a configure script, knowing that the whole thing can be further packaged for pretty much anything from Gentoo to Linspire. Nowadays on a x86 machine, it's gotten fairly rare that a plain ./configure && make && make install desn't "just work" either.

Of course I know it's not much comfort to a lot of people who just won't use the keyboard to enter commands. Whether they ought to learn the CLI or not is purely a philosophical debate since they just won't. The actual debate is "ought developpers spend more time working on the installation friendliness of their software?". So far this has been settled with "it's the distribution maintainer's job". And indeed software that cannot be found through either the official or the alternate repositories for your distro of choice is either very cutting edge (so it will presumably be included later) or so marginal (or redundant) that the maintainers don't believe it's worth the effort.

So as a conclusion, installing software in Linux *is* using your distribution's package manager (which hopefully comes with an interface new users can understand). Installing source is starting to deal with something else. While it's not programming as such, it does require understanding what a few tools such as autoconf and make are and what they do. It can be a fun project for those who like to poke around but it's not for the casual user. After all, would they even consider installing from source in Windows? I think the MS compiler can be downloaded for free nowadays...

On the Windows side, the fact that the system is the same everywhere does make the situation a bit easier as well... The Linux situation is just the price to pay for its versatility. I don't think it's actually a problem for most people.

Uh ? I just played the french version of Another Code...
http://www.fnac.com/Shelf/article.asp?PRID=1667427 &OrderInSession=1&Mn=1&Mu=-13&SID=4096aae6-2360-f6 3e-c43f-2781203ad2cf&TTL=110720051259&Origin=FnacA ff&Ra=-4&To=0&Nu=1&UID=0bae7c93a-4e77-cdcd-1a27-c9 a9926f5669&Fr=0

That's the 40GB version. The 15 GB is Euro 350 at FNAC.

Yes, the US enjoys very low prices. Partly because of the huge unified market, partly because of low taxes (but then, I understand you have to pay for medical insurance, and even for decent schools).

That's the 40GB version. The 15 GB is Euro 350 at FNAC.

Yes, the US enjoys very low prices. Partly because of the huge unified market, partly because of low taxes (but then, I understand you have to pay for medical insurance, and even for decent schools).

RFID tags are much smaller. You'll find some pictures here:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52343, 00.html

By contrast, the comics "industry" in the US is mainly a commercial enterprise primarily targetted at teenagers. The whole thing revolves around a few "brand" heros that are assigned to nameless artists. The stories and themes are the application of simple recipes. This kind of thing insults the intelligence of anyone above 16.

Americans pretty much invented the modern form of comics, but since the mid sixties, the really interesting stuff is all produced in France, Belgium, and Italy with rare exceptions.

Have a look at the FNAC wweb site if you don't believe me.

• HMV Canada - their selection of music beats Amazon.com hands down. Doing a search reveals that they sell "Funker Vogt"
• Amazon Germany - great source for music tailored to the german market. The only catch is that you need to understand German (quite normal really ;)
• Amazon UK - great source for music tailored to the german market.
• HMV UK
• HMV Germany
• FNAC - online version of the French media store

BTW If you want to know what is hot in th UK, then BBC1 Radio 1 is a good site, and IMO is info-marketing ratio is 9:1, which is nice to see.

Are you suggesting that cnet.com, slashdot, and I invented this whole story to entertain the /. community during the summer? :)

Of course there is the possibility that I made something wrong. However, my previous experience at copying audio CDs, the time I spent trying to copy that particular CD, and the results I got that match the effects of macrovision listed in the cnet article make me strongly believe that the cd is copy protected and that I did nothing wrong.

And for those who asked, the disc in question is called Harmony Voix, it's a compilation of classical music distributed by Virgin France. Definetely not a top selling record, but probably a good one to test the reaction of the public.