The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
That might be because computer set up is not intuitive. Device drivers, naming conventions and file system arrangement follow few conventions and there are many correct combinations. Worse, the user is at their ISP or network administrator's mercy for almost all of the network set up.
What Debian's installer has always done is inform. The Debian install is one of the most informative of Linux installs outside of Gentoo. It tells you what it's doing, offers hints for common situations and tells you where you need information from someone else.
Ripping with iTunes does not add DRM to your music. Ripping with Windows Media Player can add DRM to your music, but it's a choice you are given very clearly when you first rip a CD with it.
As if anyone can rip their CDs and transfer the results any number of times to any device on either system. If that were true, the world would be a better place because DRM would not be DRM.
Not having either iTunes or WMP, I have to defer to what others report. For WMP and iTunes, I trust Cory Doctorow of the EFF and my own friends. For an updated look at where WMP has gone, I'll refer you to previous posts quoting the Washington Post review of ViiV and WMP, which show things have gotten worse instead of better in the last two years. Yes, my biggest fan is sure to know where that is, so I don't even have to look for it.
Doctrow has this to say:
I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought... If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music...
...
I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music.
He's being too nice to Apple about the rekeying and M$ about WMA formats. Friends have told me that Apple's restore is a royal pain that loses the metadata. If you've lost the metadata, you might as well re rip all of your CDs again. I know I don't want to go through that every three computers. The EULA is unilaterally changeable, so once they have you they can impose whatever they want. In the end they are going to impose what the RIAA wants, which is what M$ delivers today. Oh yeah, if the "choice" about adding DRM to your ripped CDs was so clear, how come so many people have gotten burnt that Doctrow can walk onto M$'s campus and wag his finger at them?
I'm going to skip the whole mess. WMA is not really better than MP3 and both loose out to ogg. Free software does everthing I want it to do with my music and comes without restrictions of anykind.
If they already own it on a CD, what is to stop them from inserting the disc into the computer and click "encode" or "import"? I thought a lot of media management programs offer easy CD importing, both Windows Media Player and iTunes offer this, I think WMP even does this automatically, I'm not sure.
DRM makes even that simple task painful, so the new pain of subscription music is extended to your old media. Both iTunes and WMP do what you say, but the lock you to a specific machine to one extent or another. WMA is famous for being impossible to transfer to another computer. iTunes is equally onerous when you run into their R - restrictions - of DRM. If you've been a good customer and have hundreds of CDs, you will resent having to encode them again. It gets worse when you want the freedom to put your music onto portable players. Like I said, all this has really stopped is honest users who want to do normal things with their music.
I've been happier encoding my CDs with ABCDE, and now Konqueror. They get the tags right and give you a choice of formats, FLAC, ogg or mp3. Needles to say, I can put my music onto as many machines as I want and the CD is now just a nice, last resort backup.
Such ease of enjoying music has some wrong headed people at music companies talking about killing CD as a format.
I work on a Lenovo and it really behaves as if it was made out of recycled parts.
Every Thinkpad I have owned, including the one I'm using right now, was recycled. I bought them used and only one was a lemon. Too bad you got one that does not work, but you might just check your software.
When I say that one was a lemon, I say that because it would not stay up for months at a time when I carried it around. Sitting on a desk, it works well enough.
The funny thing is that my rating of Green is heavily shifted by machine reliability. By my definition, every Dell is a lemon out of the box because it runs Windoze. Most users will throw it away in two years or so rather than get new software. At the same time, I've never thrown a laptop away. One of my favorites is a Thinkpad 600, made in 1998. It's battery sucks eggs but it works well enough for power management, the screen is bright and it's still adequate for daily use with Debian Sarge. While it's true that there will come a day when these laptops hit the trash, substantial environmental savings can be had if people would just use decent software and had more durable machines.
Everyone knows the DRM is nothing but an inconvenience to normal users suckered into repurchasing music they have owned for decades in format after format. It had zero impact on wholesale media rip off, where "pirates" duplicate the original distribution medium. It's had zero impact on file sharing. Sooner or later, legitimate users are going to get fed up with format changes and eternal copyright. DRM is the last gasp of industries that depended on expensive physical distribution and government broadcast franchises to survive. No one else wants it and it's going away. Until it does, I've given up on their content. Big media won't be seeing any of my money till they make life easier for me and their artists.
The area off Cape Perpetua on the central Oregon coast is now a gigantic crab and fish graveyard. It was first discovered in 2002,
I have noticed something similar next to the local mall, a gigantic device graveyard called CompUSA. It's downright spooky. The floor is covered with devices, some of which are outright broken, but all of which are dying in a money starved environment. Some people have pointed to DRM, others to vague notions of Monopoly, but the "experts" in the press seem to be stumped. All but a few give these products a clean bill of health and "must have" status, but the devices die anyway. What can be causing this disaster? The only real thing in common is a proximity to Washington state. Is Washington cursed?
Nowadays, we need to support not only people at the office, but friends, family, friends of the family, family of the friends....
You are not supporting them, you are supporting M$. Why should you make it cheaper and easier for them to surrender their freedom? When you ask them why they use Windoze, they will tell you it's because Windoze is cheap and easy. It's neither. The solution is to quit supporting Microsoft.
The only help I'll give people is to migrate them to free software. I'm not going to waste my time keeping up with all the arcane Windoze patch, AV and firewall nonsense, much less waste all day applying it. The closest I'll come to supporting Windoze is to right size their NTFS partition and let grub point to it, and I'll only do that after the client has run M$'s pathetic defrag software all night to clean it up. If their computer is too far gone for that, they need to take it to a local computer store to have it wiped and reloaded. The free software part is easy, just boot off suitable live CD. A nice touch is to make a fat filesystem and move all of their work to it so they can manipulate it from either boot. People who migrate seldom look back and they require much less "support". Giving the user free software on a non free platform won't solve your support problem directly. Sooner or later, the system preferences will mysteriously revert to the M$ default and M$ style bit rot will take the whole computer down anyway.
My thumb drive is only useful for getting things off Windoze systems. A USB drive is handy for saving out files your friend wants to keep before you send the computer into the shop for a wipe and reload. Thumb drives are useful for getting small files you want from computers you are forced to use.
most people would like to be able to play DRMed music that they've bought
So tell me if (P)urge will play your old Napster music. No, oh well, my joke is funnier than DRM.
We'll see whether people want a Zaurus more than a "DRM suck hole filled with adverts"
Indeed we will, but I suspect it will do about as well as Dell's attempt at M$ Music
. No one will buy them because the terms suck. They will give them and music away but people will still think they suck and finally, M$ will give up and put it's effort back into their third rate OS. M$ entry to a market is usually the demise of the market.
Zaurus, and other PDAs, died because the companies got sued by the Wintel conglomerate members and because M$ made their OS difficult for anything but their own PDAs. In both PDAs and media there are enough anti-trust violations to make a whole new chapter in any MBA text. In the Music space, they are getting their asses sued off by the EU. As people embrace alternatives, the Wintel conglomerates lose their previous power and everyone wins.
How do you prevent making one large botnet powered by a bunch of third-world children turning hand cranks?
You can do that by using well know software that has yet to power bot nets.
Let's assume there is one nice security hole in these laptops... Is there an automatic update system? Is it centrally controlled like Windows Update or since there are supposed to be large numbers of segregated ad-hoc networks is the distribution of these updates going to be peer based?
It will be as easy to update these machines as it is to update any other free software. If it follows the same path every other hardware platform, there were be multiple distributions all well maintained and trustworthy.
Compare the record those distributions have to the dismal record Windoze has and call me in the morning. I've yet to hear of a Mac, Solaris, Linux or BSD botnet. It's not the users, it's not the update scheme, it's not the market share, it's the software. Windoze is brain dead and you have a lot of nerve to recommend it as a model for anything other than abject failure.
With the given specs, this laptop is attractive everywhere and that spells doom for M$. Cheaper than a PDA, with more features than most "low end" laptops. Computers like this are going to rock the commercial world. Who's going to buy a $2,500 tablet at that rate? How's Bill going to extort even a $40 license fee on top of a $140 platform? Software that grew up in the era of $2,000 enthusiast computers will die as computers are finally and undeniably turned into commodities.
After many years of excellent service, it's almost time to retire the BillGatesBorg icon for Microsoft stories. Esp. since he won't be with them any more, sorta. I vote for a chair icon. It can be a borg chair, I guess.
Sure, we all know that Bill is no longer calling the micro management shots - ha ha ha ha ha, want to buy a bridge? The whole hog co-option of a BSD or whatever else M$ will turn to will make the company less like Bill's Personal Borg Collective too. I propose we adopt a cute little butterfly or something to more accurately reflect Microsoft's intentions and influence.
I've read that the "shared" content will go away in a day or so. Chances are that they developed new and crappier formats that will degrade on copy before they go away and that you won't have a choice about what you can share or even keep without paying a subscription. This device is about as cool as every previous M$ media wreck.
I see a new business, though: Set up a wifi base with a fair amount of power. Send ads to everybody who passes with a Zune. Yeah, I can see it already.
And just think that they can (ab)use the unregulated 802.11 frequency space and be virtual jammers of everyone else's ad-hoc networking. I wonder if Vista will have network drivers for this broadcast, so that notebooks can be spammed too? Eh, we will see. My bet is the things will flop like every other M$ music service so far.
I'm neutral on the whole thing since I realized that iTunes is actually pretty good even without the iPod in the equation.
Amarok is generally better than iTunes, why not use that everywhere? The expandability is second only to Firefox but out of the box it has an excellent interface and a solid database. Songs can be quickly searched on any field and nested in more ways than most people want. There are iPod interface and mass storage device plugins to manage music on any portable device which create good playlists. What does iTunes have over that besides a fancy way to pay the RIAA?
with my laptop I could flood all the nearby Zunes with goatse images.
I doubt you will be able to send anything to them or that they will be able to send anything to anyone else. The last hype article noticed that content "shared" between devices would disappear in a day or two. Getting around that would be a DMCA violation, M$ would happily punish you for. You can bet this device will use a "new and improved" Windoze Media format that will take all sorts of time to figure out and ultimately not be worth the effort.
We'll see what this thing really does, but my bet is that it will be a big DRM suck hole filled with adverts and disappearing content. That's what M$ has tried to force through every one of it's previous music services. I predict a device with Windoze Mobile battery life and stability combined with suck deal of (P)Urge, the featureless facade of WiMP, and Windoze lack of security. It's hard to tell if the ultimate limiting factor will be DRM shortened battery life or uptime.
I'll stick to my four year old Zaurus with GPE that plays mp3, ogg, gstreamed movies and everything else supported by Xine in addition to a choice of window managers, web browsers and normal PDA software.
Zune might not display your images but is will blow goats.
10 years of announcing minor point Linux Kernel releases, and then Linux's 15th birthday doesn't even make it to the front page.
Ah, but each point revision of Linux does more than five years of waiting for the next Windoze version. A birthday next to that is not a really big deal. You should try it some time.
You know how I can tell you are not using free software? Because you misspelled announcing. Well, OK, you could be using dillo or similar on a pocket device but I don't think so. Have you tweaked your register today? How about a wipe and reload to get rid of all that malware? Reload Debian. Ha ha ha.
Using this software in any of these countries is your responsibility and in doing so you accept to pay any patent fees that may affect this software.
A "no responsibility" clause would be much better. The author does not have to force an agreement between me and some patent holding asshole in order to shirk "responsibility" for my use of the software. It has nothing to do with the author as things are now and is of no concern outside the US. It is a perversion of US law that distributors of software have to worry. The author should be free of care for how their software is used in some other country, just as much as you are free of censorship laws in other countries even though your writing is available there.
You might want something cheaper than 45/$65 when you need 30,0000 stored, but the principle is valid. I use regular manila folders with slits cut to receive the CD. If they already store paper with each customer's stuff, they already have the answer. All you need is an index to keep things organized.
will these type of people threaten a lawsuit against me... or just SMASH?!?
You might think the whole affair is funny, but the ability to use popular culture icons to make a point is what's being defended.
That depends on who you piss off and how many people notice. If both are true, you might get slapped, which makes this kind of harassment worse than it looks at first.
The regulation of broadcast has given tremendous power to those who control it. They have had the ability to mold and use popular culture for a long time. Your inability to use their images and sounds as shortcuts to make a point put you at a disadvantage when you want to argue a point with the public. Cable and the internet has diminished broadcast influence, but there's plenty of concentrated power left as this Barney case illustrates. Ultimately, free culture will level the playing field. An EFF victory here will make others easier.
At stake is your ability to use your culture for your own ends. That ability is only in doubt because copyright law is out of control.
Windoze Media is a loser. Hell, they gave those things and the music away and people did not use them. A friend of mine got one from his apartment complex as a spiff for not moving. The DRM'd music the RIAA tried to push on campuses was a flop even when they gave it away. LSU never got suckered with that one so my buddy never bothered. He used WMP, as much as it sucks, to load it up and enjoyed it the player. Would he have spent $200 for it? Never. When he gets a new computer and WMP no longer works with his little device, the device is going in the trash. Music is about fun. Cool is easy. DRM is not fun and little devices that don't work everywhere are not easy. If Michael Dell can't push it, no one can.
As someone else pointed out, easy is when the device shows up as a mass storage device and plays whatever format you have without transcoding.
A key (either cut or blank) for the proper keyway must be possessed or obtained
in order to create a bump key to open a lock. This becomes the most critical
issue in success or failure of bumping.
You would think that a bent piece of music wire would do the trick. All the key provides is a series of ramps and torque. A zigzag can provide both, though a second wire might be better for torque. So much for that obstacle.
This is an issue for post office boxes, safe deposit boxes and that kind of thing. Stealthy entry to homes is much easier through the windows with a rag to muffle the noise.
As such, firefox is dedicated to being a browser where the web is a primary focus, whereas konqueror is more like a swiss army knife where the web is an included convenience.
So, what's the mysterious "less compatible" component? Every now and then I'll find some page that won't work. Once in a blue moon, a right click Firefox open will do better, so I keep it around. The problem is mostly with non free junk like Macromedia Flash and IE specific navigation.
I use Konqueror as my primary browser because it's file handling is so excellent. The web looks like an extension of my computer and I like it that way. It renders standard compatible web pages without a problem and it's split tab capability (think the old Windoze 3.1 file manager) makes it an excellent research tool. Integration of tools like kpdf and kget make a seemless browsing experience that is top notch. Next to that, Firefox feels cramped.
But, hey, I could be missing something. What is it?
Slashdot Mirror
The questions are the same and the layout is practically the same. The X-based installer is just as (but no more) intuitive than the curses installer.
That might be because computer set up is not intuitive. Device drivers, naming conventions and file system arrangement follow few conventions and there are many correct combinations. Worse, the user is at their ISP or network administrator's mercy for almost all of the network set up.
What Debian's installer has always done is inform. The Debian install is one of the most informative of Linux installs outside of Gentoo. It tells you what it's doing, offers hints for common situations and tells you where you need information from someone else.
My biggest fan writes:
Ripping with iTunes does not add DRM to your music. Ripping with Windows Media Player can add DRM to your music, but it's a choice you are given very clearly when you first rip a CD with it.
As if anyone can rip their CDs and transfer the results any number of times to any device on either system. If that were true, the world would be a better place because DRM would not be DRM.
Not having either iTunes or WMP, I have to defer to what others report. For WMP and iTunes, I trust Cory Doctorow of the EFF and my own friends. For an updated look at where WMP has gone, I'll refer you to previous posts quoting the Washington Post review of ViiV and WMP, which show things have gotten worse instead of better in the last two years. Yes, my biggest fan is sure to know where that is, so I don't even have to look for it.
Doctrow has this to say:
I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought ... If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine. As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music ...
...
I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music.
He's being too nice to Apple about the rekeying and M$ about WMA formats. Friends have told me that Apple's restore is a royal pain that loses the metadata. If you've lost the metadata, you might as well re rip all of your CDs again. I know I don't want to go through that every three computers. The EULA is unilaterally changeable, so once they have you they can impose whatever they want. In the end they are going to impose what the RIAA wants, which is what M$ delivers today. Oh yeah, if the "choice" about adding DRM to your ripped CDs was so clear, how come so many people have gotten burnt that Doctrow can walk onto M$'s campus and wag his finger at them?
I'm going to skip the whole mess. WMA is not really better than MP3 and both loose out to ogg. Free software does everthing I want it to do with my music and comes without restrictions of anykind.
DRM makes even that simple task painful, so the new pain of subscription music is extended to your old media. Both iTunes and WMP do what you say, but the lock you to a specific machine to one extent or another. WMA is famous for being impossible to transfer to another computer. iTunes is equally onerous when you run into their R - restrictions - of DRM. If you've been a good customer and have hundreds of CDs, you will resent having to encode them again. It gets worse when you want the freedom to put your music onto portable players. Like I said, all this has really stopped is honest users who want to do normal things with their music.
I've been happier encoding my CDs with ABCDE, and now Konqueror. They get the tags right and give you a choice of formats, FLAC, ogg or mp3. Needles to say, I can put my music onto as many machines as I want and the CD is now just a nice, last resort backup.
Such ease of enjoying music has some wrong headed people at music companies talking about killing CD as a format.
I work on a Lenovo and it really behaves as if it was made out of recycled parts.
Every Thinkpad I have owned, including the one I'm using right now, was recycled. I bought them used and only one was a lemon. Too bad you got one that does not work, but you might just check your software.
When I say that one was a lemon, I say that because it would not stay up for months at a time when I carried it around. Sitting on a desk, it works well enough.
The funny thing is that my rating of Green is heavily shifted by machine reliability. By my definition, every Dell is a lemon out of the box because it runs Windoze. Most users will throw it away in two years or so rather than get new software. At the same time, I've never thrown a laptop away. One of my favorites is a Thinkpad 600, made in 1998. It's battery sucks eggs but it works well enough for power management, the screen is bright and it's still adequate for daily use with Debian Sarge. While it's true that there will come a day when these laptops hit the trash, substantial environmental savings can be had if people would just use decent software and had more durable machines.
Everyone knows the DRM is nothing but an inconvenience to normal users suckered into repurchasing music they have owned for decades in format after format. It had zero impact on wholesale media rip off, where "pirates" duplicate the original distribution medium. It's had zero impact on file sharing. Sooner or later, legitimate users are going to get fed up with format changes and eternal copyright. DRM is the last gasp of industries that depended on expensive physical distribution and government broadcast franchises to survive. No one else wants it and it's going away. Until it does, I've given up on their content. Big media won't be seeing any of my money till they make life easier for me and their artists.
Don't project your problems onto other people. The only thing I wonder is why people like you waste all day harassing Slashdotters.
The area off Cape Perpetua on the central Oregon coast is now a gigantic crab and fish graveyard. It was first discovered in 2002,
I have noticed something similar next to the local mall, a gigantic device graveyard called CompUSA. It's downright spooky. The floor is covered with devices, some of which are outright broken, but all of which are dying in a money starved environment. Some people have pointed to DRM, others to vague notions of Monopoly, but the "experts" in the press seem to be stumped. All but a few give these products a clean bill of health and "must have" status, but the devices die anyway. What can be causing this disaster? The only real thing in common is a proximity to Washington state. Is Washington cursed?
Nowadays, we need to support not only people at the office, but friends, family, friends of the family, family of the friends....
You are not supporting them, you are supporting M$. Why should you make it cheaper and easier for them to surrender their freedom? When you ask them why they use Windoze, they will tell you it's because Windoze is cheap and easy. It's neither. The solution is to quit supporting Microsoft.
The only help I'll give people is to migrate them to free software. I'm not going to waste my time keeping up with all the arcane Windoze patch, AV and firewall nonsense, much less waste all day applying it. The closest I'll come to supporting Windoze is to right size their NTFS partition and let grub point to it, and I'll only do that after the client has run M$'s pathetic defrag software all night to clean it up. If their computer is too far gone for that, they need to take it to a local computer store to have it wiped and reloaded. The free software part is easy, just boot off suitable live CD. A nice touch is to make a fat filesystem and move all of their work to it so they can manipulate it from either boot. People who migrate seldom look back and they require much less "support". Giving the user free software on a non free platform won't solve your support problem directly. Sooner or later, the system preferences will mysteriously revert to the M$ default and M$ style bit rot will take the whole computer down anyway.
My thumb drive is only useful for getting things off Windoze systems. A USB drive is handy for saving out files your friend wants to keep before you send the computer into the shop for a wipe and reload. Thumb drives are useful for getting small files you want from computers you are forced to use.
most people would like to be able to play DRMed music that they've bought
So tell me if (P)urge will play your old Napster music. No, oh well, my joke is funnier than DRM.
We'll see whether people want a Zaurus more than a "DRM suck hole filled with adverts"
Indeed we will, but I suspect it will do about as well as Dell's attempt at M$ Music
. No one will buy them because the terms suck. They will give them and music away but people will still think they suck and finally, M$ will give up and put it's effort back into their third rate OS. M$ entry to a market is usually the demise of the market.Zaurus, and other PDAs, died because the companies got sued by the Wintel conglomerate members and because M$ made their OS difficult for anything but their own PDAs. In both PDAs and media there are enough anti-trust violations to make a whole new chapter in any MBA text. In the Music space, they are getting their asses sued off by the EU. As people embrace alternatives, the Wintel conglomerates lose their previous power and everyone wins.
How do you prevent making one large botnet powered by a bunch of third-world children turning hand cranks?
You can do that by using well know software that has yet to power bot nets.
Let's assume there is one nice security hole in these laptops... Is there an automatic update system? Is it centrally controlled like Windows Update or since there are supposed to be large numbers of segregated ad-hoc networks is the distribution of these updates going to be peer based?
It will be as easy to update these machines as it is to update any other free software. If it follows the same path every other hardware platform, there were be multiple distributions all well maintained and trustworthy.
Compare the record those distributions have to the dismal record Windoze has and call me in the morning. I've yet to hear of a Mac, Solaris, Linux or BSD botnet. It's not the users, it's not the update scheme, it's not the market share, it's the software. Windoze is brain dead and you have a lot of nerve to recommend it as a model for anything other than abject failure.
With the given specs, this laptop is attractive everywhere and that spells doom for M$. Cheaper than a PDA, with more features than most "low end" laptops. Computers like this are going to rock the commercial world. Who's going to buy a $2,500 tablet at that rate? How's Bill going to extort even a $40 license fee on top of a $140 platform? Software that grew up in the era of $2,000 enthusiast computers will die as computers are finally and undeniably turned into commodities.
After many years of excellent service, it's almost time to retire the BillGatesBorg icon for Microsoft stories. Esp. since he won't be with them any more, sorta. I vote for a chair icon. It can be a borg chair, I guess.
Sure, we all know that Bill is no longer calling the micro management shots - ha ha ha ha ha, want to buy a bridge? The whole hog co-option of a BSD or whatever else M$ will turn to will make the company less like Bill's Personal Borg Collective too. I propose we adopt a cute little butterfly or something to more accurately reflect Microsoft's intentions and influence.
And just think that they can (ab)use the unregulated 802.11 frequency space and be virtual jammers of everyone else's ad-hoc networking. I wonder if Vista will have network drivers for this broadcast, so that notebooks can be spammed too? Eh, we will see. My bet is the things will flop like every other M$ music service so far.
I'm neutral on the whole thing since I realized that iTunes is actually pretty good even without the iPod in the equation.
Amarok is generally better than iTunes, why not use that everywhere? The expandability is second only to Firefox but out of the box it has an excellent interface and a solid database. Songs can be quickly searched on any field and nested in more ways than most people want. There are iPod interface and mass storage device plugins to manage music on any portable device which create good playlists. What does iTunes have over that besides a fancy way to pay the RIAA?
with my laptop I could flood all the nearby Zunes with goatse images.
I doubt you will be able to send anything to them or that they will be able to send anything to anyone else. The last hype article noticed that content "shared" between devices would disappear in a day or two. Getting around that would be a DMCA violation, M$ would happily punish you for. You can bet this device will use a "new and improved" Windoze Media format that will take all sorts of time to figure out and ultimately not be worth the effort.
We'll see what this thing really does, but my bet is that it will be a big DRM suck hole filled with adverts and disappearing content. That's what M$ has tried to force through every one of it's previous music services. I predict a device with Windoze Mobile battery life and stability combined with suck deal of (P)Urge, the featureless facade of WiMP, and Windoze lack of security. It's hard to tell if the ultimate limiting factor will be DRM shortened battery life or uptime.
I'll stick to my four year old Zaurus with GPE that plays mp3, ogg, gstreamed movies and everything else supported by Xine in addition to a choice of window managers, web browsers and normal PDA software.
Zune might not display your images but is will blow goats.
10 years of announcing minor point Linux Kernel releases, and then Linux's 15th birthday doesn't even make it to the front page.
Ah, but each point revision of Linux does more than five years of waiting for the next Windoze version. A birthday next to that is not a really big deal. You should try it some time.
You know how I can tell you are not using free software? Because you misspelled announcing. Well, OK, you could be using dillo or similar on a pocket device but I don't think so. Have you tweaked your register today? How about a wipe and reload to get rid of all that malware? Reload Debian. Ha ha ha.
Using this software in any of these countries is your responsibility and in doing so you accept to pay any patent fees that may affect this software.
A "no responsibility" clause would be much better. The author does not have to force an agreement between me and some patent holding asshole in order to shirk "responsibility" for my use of the software. It has nothing to do with the author as things are now and is of no concern outside the US. It is a perversion of US law that distributors of software have to worry. The author should be free of care for how their software is used in some other country, just as much as you are free of censorship laws in other countries even though your writing is available there.
will these type of people threaten a lawsuit against me ... or just SMASH?!?
You might think the whole affair is funny, but the ability to use popular culture icons to make a point is what's being defended.
That depends on who you piss off and how many people notice. If both are true, you might get slapped, which makes this kind of harassment worse than it looks at first.
The regulation of broadcast has given tremendous power to those who control it. They have had the ability to mold and use popular culture for a long time. Your inability to use their images and sounds as shortcuts to make a point put you at a disadvantage when you want to argue a point with the public. Cable and the internet has diminished broadcast influence, but there's plenty of concentrated power left as this Barney case illustrates. Ultimately, free culture will level the playing field. An EFF victory here will make others easier.
At stake is your ability to use your culture for your own ends. That ability is only in doubt because copyright law is out of control.
Windoze Media is a loser. Hell, they gave those things and the music away and people did not use them. A friend of mine got one from his apartment complex as a spiff for not moving. The DRM'd music the RIAA tried to push on campuses was a flop even when they gave it away. LSU never got suckered with that one so my buddy never bothered. He used WMP, as much as it sucks, to load it up and enjoyed it the player. Would he have spent $200 for it? Never. When he gets a new computer and WMP no longer works with his little device, the device is going in the trash. Music is about fun. Cool is easy. DRM is not fun and little devices that don't work everywhere are not easy. If Michael Dell can't push it, no one can.
As someone else pointed out, easy is when the device shows up as a mass storage device and plays whatever format you have without transcoding.
Use IE? Fuck no. Firefox for me, ta. ... IE is a POS
Would you move to Vista if all it had was the POS? If not, how can you argue that M$ is not forced to embrace and use FF?
A key (either cut or blank) for the proper keyway must be possessed or obtained in order to create a bump key to open a lock. This becomes the most critical issue in success or failure of bumping.
You would think that a bent piece of music wire would do the trick. All the key provides is a series of ramps and torque. A zigzag can provide both, though a second wire might be better for torque. So much for that obstacle.
This is an issue for post office boxes, safe deposit boxes and that kind of thing. Stealthy entry to homes is much easier through the windows with a rag to muffle the noise.
My biggest fan tells me:
Microsoft doesn't have to "embrace Firefox". They could easily just improve IE, which they seem to be at least making an effort at doing with IE7.
jb, I hope you use IE7 on Vista and sleep on this. The rest of us will go on living in comfort.
As such, firefox is dedicated to being a browser where the web is a primary focus, whereas konqueror is more like a swiss army knife where the web is an included convenience.
So, what's the mysterious "less compatible" component? Every now and then I'll find some page that won't work. Once in a blue moon, a right click Firefox open will do better, so I keep it around. The problem is mostly with non free junk like Macromedia Flash and IE specific navigation.
I use Konqueror as my primary browser because it's file handling is so excellent. The web looks like an extension of my computer and I like it that way. It renders standard compatible web pages without a problem and it's split tab capability (think the old Windoze 3.1 file manager) makes it an excellent research tool. Integration of tools like kpdf and kget make a seemless browsing experience that is top notch. Next to that, Firefox feels cramped.
But, hey, I could be missing something. What is it?
I'll take that as a "no" response. You obviously think that free software is a superior alternative. Thanks!