You're making a judgement value on a piece of software you've admittedly never used, based on you having spoke with clueless people
Fuck you for calling my friends clueless. You really have no idea and the fact that they are annoyed is all that really matters.
The judgement I'm making is between a piece of free software that works as well and does more than a non free one that costs lots of money and significantly restricts the rights and ability of the end user. iTunes, for what it costs, should be held to a much higher standard of performance.
Poor Reasoning, PS3 could take off.
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember reading a recent comment on/. earlier about Sony's last-minute motion-senseing controller reeking of upper management mandating that said feature go into the product. I have a feeling that this same upper management is going to severely harm what was once a pretty sweet console.
You might think I'm clueless, but you should pay attention if you want to know how this is going to go.
I'm 40 years old and I've never owned a game console. Does that make me clueless? No, I've seen other consoles but I've been waiting for a networked enabled version that's really up to PC based gaming. Xbox was not it and the whole line will never will be more than a second rate PC.
We'll see if PS3 sucks or not. When it comes out, I'll walk down to a store and have a look. The descriptions so far look like a winner, no matter what crazy things we might imagine happen inside Sony's corporate headquarters. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what it's like to work inside a huge company that speaks a language I can't read or speak. My only doubts come from the fact that it will be non free, even though IBM's got all sorts of SDK for cell and it's going to run a Linux kernel. I can put up with a non free set top box if it works well enough. What really matters is what's delivered. At that point, I just might spend the few hundreds of bucks I have not wasted on Xbox and ultra expensive wintel video cards.
So far as you're aware, iTunes could be faultless, and you've just been hearing the complaints of clueless users who don't know the simplest of GUI control basics, or how to use the built-in Help subsystem.
No, I can tell when my physics and engineering graduate student peers are being morons, but thanks for asking. In any case, software for playing music should not require manual reading, it should just work. Amarok does, out of the box.
Amarok needs a hell of a lot of work. The only thing I managed to get it to do was freeze.
That's strange, the version available in Debian Etch has worked well for half a year or so.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
Users I've talked to complain that it's clumsy. For instance, you can't collapse the tree, there's no file system view, etc.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task.
I named my favorite programs for each task, you don't have to use all of them. Still, all of them come with most distributions, such as the excellent Mepis, which runs from CD and can walk you through a GUI install in 20 minutes or so. The braver could take the hour or two to install Debian proper and get those things they like best. Dependency resolution is only difficult when you use non free or legally suppressed software like DeCSS to watch DVDs.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
I'll bet there are more Amarok users than there are WMP users. WMP has that bad a reputation, and that's one of the big reasons Apple has thrived.
Still, you are right the lack of major computer vendor advocacy of free software and massive FUD makes it too much trouble for all but the most motivated of users. That's what makes iTunes the best easy choice. They just don't know what they are missing. We will see what kind of a deal they have actually gotten when the RIAA decides it's time to resell everything again and DRM takes it's bite. If the Purge deal is not a good enough demonstration of their intentions, I'm not sure what is.
The iPod is successful partly due to marketing, but also because it Just Works for the average user.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends).
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another.
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Someone just starting out would do well to use free software for their entertainment.
Rip with Konqueror's audiocd: function. With too lame, ogg is a concern only for those who care about freedom and saving 10-20% of storage space. Correct lables, flac, ogg and mp3 encoding has never been easier. ABCDE provides more robust ripping from the command line if you want that.
Record analog with Krec, Krecord, Audacity or Gramofile. Use Rockbox for your iPod or iRiver portable device.
Get your new music off the web. The Internet Archive has more than 30,000 concerts by artists that want you to share. Most players have built in stream sources.
Play and organize your music with Amarok. It's all the goodness of iTunes with none of the annoyances.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
I'd be willing to wager that something like Bittorrent, which seems to have a habit of choking/flooding a connection, would be prioritized flat at the bottom of the list unless otherwise paid for.
Want to tell me why they still allow Windoze to connect to networks? Spam / virus control is what your upload cap is all about.
"I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there's actual censorship... however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don't result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can't drop spam or stop... (hacker) attacks.
BBC:And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?
"It depends really on the nature of the whole thing... I'm against net censorship. However when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved... (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it's just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.
The rest is mostly Adam Livingstone's opinion. Included are the notion that bit torrent is mostly used by "pirates" as if only big media is capable of producing content worth sharing.
Saying Cohen is in favor of tiered internet is a stretch at best. Twice Cohen told the reporter he does not like "censorship" which could be defined as slowing others down at the expense of packets for those who pay the tolls. Moreover, it contradicts most of the kinds of things he's said in the past. Looking quickly at his blog, we find nothing quickly. Too bad. Looking at his wikipedia entry, we find:
Regardless, he is outspoken in his belief that the current media business was doomed to being outmoded despite the RIAA and MPAA's legal or technical tactics, such as digital rights management.... In late 2005 Cohen made a deal with the MPAA to remove all links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website. The deal was with the seven largest studios in America. The agreement means the site will comply with procedures outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Sounds to me like he wants nothing to do with the MPAA dummies and would not like the Cachelogic deal if all other P2P is shut down or even slowed. His concern is with stopping all the spam and DDoS flooding from Windoze computers not keeping you and me from trading free files. That's censorship.
They are talking about taking Carnivore out of the secret room. The "records" of everything you do will be available without warrent already. New laws will do away those pesky constitutional concerns. Sooner or later the collection machinery will be specified and owned by the feds, though still payed for by the ISP. The "evidence" will stand up better in court when someone decides to dissapear you with kiddie porn or some other disgraceful crime. The currently proposed system will eliminate the "stove pipes" in the current corporate owned spy network. You private papers and personal effects are owned more effectively than Eric Blair imagined they would be.
It would seem to me that philosophical works of philosophers such as Aristotle, Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and Tarski could play a central role in a Computer Science curriculum, as they form a mathematical basis of modern CS and Math.
Some philosophy teacher will surely turn this into a course. I imagine GT, where EVERYTHING is subjugated to engineering needs, could be one of the first if it's not already there. You could make it one of your required electives. Of course, a real philosophy person will rain on all our parades by telling us that this is already a class offering under a different name and those who change the name are pandering.
Now, who the hell are these people? Abandon all hope, ye who enter:
Aristotle did everything, so there's no end to it. Appropriate.
Leibniz
is most remembered for optimism, i.e., his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made." could not possibly have known about non free software and should be excluded for "being out of touch."
Frege " learned from Bertrand Russell that Russell's paradox could be derived from Basic Law V. Hence, the formal system of Grundgesetze was inconsistent." His underlying system was purchase at a greatly reduced rate after the second world war by one Wm. Gates Esq. and it has been practiced in both law and computer code from Redmond since. Abomination.
Russell "Russell is generally recognised as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, even of its several branches.... strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless and incoherent assertions in philosophy, and they sought clarity and precision in argument by the use of exact language and by breaking down philosophical propositions into their simplest components." This sounds great but it would probably degenerate into a flame war about proper indentation.
Tarski "proved that a sphere can be cut into a finite number of pieces, and then reassembled into a sphere of larger size, or alternatively it can be reassembled into two spheres whose sizes each equal that of the original one.... Banach and Tarski intended for this proof as evidence in favor of rejecting the axiom of choice" Thus he founded the modern business science of time management.
Lets not couch this in terms of some kind of cultural divide. These people are putting things in public that should be private and then surprised by their own ignorance.
Human nature has not been changed by blogging. Everyone has their moments and they are witnessed in public. If you work for a company long enough, people will get to know you and your faults. The difference between then and now is that now people don't have to go on word of mouth, they can see the pictures themselves.
Was the woman his grandmother? I wouldn't hire that dude at all.
If you are really that rash, I don't want to work for you. The problem with a non free economy is that I might not have a choice.
As large companies are increasingly favored, the assholes win. When society and government tolerate blatantly anti-competitive behavior, your ability to switch jobs or start your own business dissapears. The assholes in any company realize this and abuse their subordinates as they please. The subordinate has the unenviable choice of career change, poverty or sucking it up.
Our trade with non free powers like China has not made them more free, it has made us less free.
no direct monitoring or snooping will be done unless the school receives a report from a concerned parent, community member or other student
In your best Ministry for State Security accent, "There will be no invasion of privatzy ugnless we have information from zee reliable informant of missbehavior. You are free to file such reports yourself and shoult if you are zee good citizen."
How much are they going to spend reading blogs? There's no end to the amount of monitoring you can do. Look, you get the same thing at work , on the telephone, off your navistar, you cell phone, around your computer, or any newer monitor. I'm so glad my freedom loving country has pioneered all of these futuristic technologies.
If you look at his, "stability monitor", you will see that the longest run between crashes and or software uninstalls was about five days. It's hard to read their crappy graph, so it might be six or seven. Other than those days, he had some kind of critical failure every day during those three weeks. In fact the last days looked worse than the rest. Looks like hell to me.
After the author managed to destroy two laptops with Vista and had one "sort of working" he had this to say:
Think of Vistas new features as similar to what you might find on a new model car shiny new mag wheels, a finely tuned suspension and a set of high-performance, all-season tires. It still looks like a car and youre still going to know where the pedals are and how to drive but you will find that youll be able to push it to a new set of higher limits.
You can say that about KDE with a straight face. I can say it about Gnome and Enlightenment too. Oh yeah, Mepis' GUI install won't wipe your XP or your files in the half hour it takes to get everything right.
Everything is in place for a GNU/Linux desktop revolution. M$ has shot itself in the head. They've gone six years without a new release, despite bragging that all sorts of fantastic features were just around the corner for years. As the corner finally becomes visible, as the worst OS experience ever, the only thing left of the promissed features is massive hardware requirements, DRM and media that won't work. To make matters worse, they think they have the world by the nuts and are tightening all their usual anti competitive nonsense. Being free has never been so easy. M$ has lost it.
I hereby invoke my Triple-S Rule which stats: Sharing Shit (they) Shouldn't. News flash: Break the law, and you might get caught.
Fuck you and your RIAA buddies. If you give me the choice between P2P retrieval of legitimate content and my RIAA music collection, I'll wipe my non free music in a heartbeat. It's crap like this that tightens my resolve to avoid non free music. I can get all I want from archive.org, magnatune.com, others like them, artist CDs bought at the club and etunes. You pigopolists and your old commercial shit are on the bottom of my list.
We can debate the morality of surrendering to government sponsored ownership of culture, but the practical path is to not help by sharing non free material. Government mandated broadcast monopolies and many other bogus laws lead directly to the creation of the big three music publishers. As the owners of the previous convenient means of sharing music, radio, the publishers have co-opted a large part of our culture. No one really won that one, least of all artists and those actually making the music. The best way to fight it is not to purchase or share RIAA shit.
Lack of hassle is another reason to delete it all. The accused should be presumed innocent, despite having their doors kicked in. As I pointed out, there's plenty of free content out there by people who want you to share. Much of it is easiest to get by bit torrent and other P2P services. If possesion of RIAA shit is the incriminating evidence, you might be better off without it. That way, I won't have some dickhead like you tut tuting in my face about how I'm getting what I deserved.
That's kind of what they want - RIAA only or nothing RIAA for you. They are forcing you to chose. If everyone gave them what they wanted, the world would be a better place.
The author's ideas are not very original and are mostly insulting. The very act of linking and pointing is creation of new content. Outlawing it on blogs is about as silly as forbiding people to quote the newspaper over breakfast.
Here's what they have to say for themselves:
Many people are obsessed not with how to best disperse information and participate in this sharing revolution, but with how much they can get away with legally and ethically. In a parallel to the famous John F. Kennedy quote, we need to stop asking what others can do for us, and ask what we can do for them. Rather than simply wondering what we can get away with or how we can get the most for the least amount of work, we need to figure out how we can best participate in this world-wide discussion. If the ethics of the blogging world are constantly abused to promote the gain of others, high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.
Wow, why don't you just come out and call every one a thief like the RIAA does?
These are the same attacks on fair use that Google is having to fight against to offer their excellent news aggregation service. Google was right and the above is wrong headed. No one is losing readers because of Google. The fact that the author could not come up with hard and fast rules proves that they are simply wrong. If you can't say this specific thing is wrong, you can't make a law about it.
WMP can store lyrics and even time them to the song if you're willing to sort that out. It downloads cover art automatically. Anything else, twitter?
Sure jb stalker, you can read the article:
It's too bad that Windows Media Player didn't locate cover-art images reliably -- most of my library was illustrated with generic blank-CD icons. For every obscure indie artist's cover art that the program found, it missed two or three releases from big-name acts. And this feature doesn't work at all if your music files (like many Internet downloads) haven't been tagged with the right artist and album data; Windows Media Player 11 is supposed to fill in such missing information automatically but often did not.
Sounds like I'm better off with Amarok, which did not cost me anything to begin with.
But as a busy guy with three small children, searching out the good stuff via those other means just isn't worth the time and attention involved... [WiMP/Purge solves the] pain in the butt to get a full album, well encoded, with correct metadata..... The scarcity isn't music. It's the music I want, in high enough quality that it doesn't bug me, with the right metadata, with a pricing model that doesn't penalize me for experimentation.
But the reviewer dissagrees:
It's too bad that Windows Media Player didn't locate cover-art images reliably -- most of my library was illustrated with generic blank-CD icons. For every obscure indie artist's cover art that the program found, it missed two or three releases from big-name acts. And this feature doesn't work at all if your music files (like many Internet downloads) haven't been tagged with the right artist and album data; Windows Media Player 11 is supposed to fill in such missing information automatically but often did not.
Missing big name acts is pathetic when you are the music company and the free alternatives can do as well. Amarok with musicbrainz, Amazon search and easy tagging worked better than the above when I moved my vinyl. It did not always work, but the cover manager, which is easy to find, lets you put in your own images so everything missing is a quick Google image search away. Once again, the music community outdoes the pigopolists.
$15/month isn't even 10% of our monthly entertainment budget around here, but it's sure more than 10% for my entertainment value right now. 10 years ago, I had a $200/month used CD habit.
Well, if you've got money to burn and don't mind your collection dissapearing when WiMP 12 rolls around, WiMP 11 might just work for you. I trust neither Microsoft nor the RIAA to keep the deal, even if it is as wonderful as you say it is. WiMP 11 is screwing over Napster and MSN, so that's going to be gone soon. What happens to your music collection then? Will M$ come to your rescue and buy them out or will it all just fade away? How long will Purge work for you? Considering the abominable state of commercial radio, I'm never going to put my music world into the RIAA's hands again.
With URGE, I pay my flat fee, and can try ANYTHING - it isn't $9.99 ever time I want to give an album a spin to see whether or not I like it beyond 30 second previews. I can play it on any of three different PCs, and can even transfer songs to my Treo to listen to on the plane, or stream them live to my Xbox 360 for an entertainment experience. And if I like something, I can just buy it just like iTunes and burn it to CD or whatever.
As for pricing, $15/month for as much new stuff as I want to listen to? I've already got 20 new albums in rotation, stuff I likely wouldn't have bought before but found via the recommendation system, and really enjoy... Ast $15/month, the amount I would have paid buying that music would have covered the fee for years.
Wow, for fifteen bucks a month plus the cost of all the newest M$ toys and software, I can stream my music to my TV where my $40/month cable subscription already pipes 30 channels of endless hours of music I already don't listen to? Fantastic! Besides that music source I don't listen to, there's plenty of online music streams these days. You know, like the internet archive and their 34,000 live concerts? Don't forget the creative commons people, who also want to promote worth while music. Why would I want to rent a source of music from the usual RIAA pigs again?
What was it that WiMP has that Amarok was lacking? Wait a minute, WiMP does not do lyrics, cover art or even wikipedia lookups?
Sarcasm off. The RIAA and Microsoft are both based on a scarcity that does not exist. The music publishers are damaged and people have routed around them. Microsoft too has been routed around. There are plenty of alternatives to both. Restricting your users while other do not is fatal. Your supposed world of plenty looks awfully limited.
Even with MTV and Microsoft pushing it together, I think that the fact that you can't burn the music is going to turn away most of their potential customers.
Uhhh, how about the big stab in the rear end this is to Napster, the other "also rans" and their customers? If you have a subscription to one of these other services, you might wish you could have burned those songs because M$ is (from the article),
doing something drastic: It's throwing its own MSN Music store under the bus and launching a new music program that spotlights another company's service.
So Napster is going out of business and everyone gets to download all of their rent-a-music again? Loser. How long till those five gigs of Napster tunes quit playing on your snazzy M$ player? Hey, if you pay extra, the new service will let you walk around with your music on ONE device. Now that's the kind of stability and service we have all come to expect from the M$ Monopoly. Total loser. Given that, who the hell is going to buy into the next loser service?
Pigopolists, screw them all. Get a Tekstor (does ogg and mp3), any cheap-o music player from Walmart or a used Iriver and Rockbox. Get Amarok. Keep all your old music from CD and get your new music from archive.org and magnitune.com. Never worry about DRM again. The only people between you and your music should be one or two crazies in the mosh pit.
The interesting issue here is whether this need for broadening the offer would be the case also for other leading companies subject to similar 'bundled-with' competition.
It's a good thing to quote that "bundled-with" because the term is misleading. No one cares if M$ or anyone else gives away a text editor. What matters is if they make it so no other text editor will work. The Netscape complaint was that M$ strong armed vendors to gain a desktop software monopoly and then abused that monopoly in all sorts of ways to make it a huge pain in the neck to run Netscape on the desktop so that they could steal Netscapes' server market. The tactics included constantly changing the user's defaults back to IE and a combined smear and code breakage like they did with DRDOS.
It's all very nasty and they keep doing it, over and over. They have done it with Office Software to Lotus and Word Perfect, they have done it with backup software, browsers and just about anything you can think of. The people who want to own the worlds computers want to own every piece of it. The developers ran off a long time ago except for a few large companies and even they are looking for a way out. The current fights are over media and, yes, antivirus.
The most obvious result of all of these fights is a decidedly second rate user experience. So many second rate programs have been kludged together, they hardly work. All the hooks and barbs M$ made for others, they have to deal with themselves. Add a bit of DRM and remove the last of the companies trying to patch up your system and you get Vista, the five year development flop. It's kind of like watching an oil filled megatanker fall into the moon.
Information about the DRDOS example can be found here:
let's see where the wiki comes into its own. Try editing the Main page, save the changes, and then click on the History tab. You'll see that MediaWiki tracks who made all changes and when. You can compare the differences between different versions. In one fell swoop you've got yourself a document management system as well as a potential in-house knowledge base.
Let me put that into perspective. One of the main features selling M$ Word is easy to use versioning. So, imagine people at your place of work using a Wiki instead of emailing each other 20MB binary files and overwrite each others changes all day long. Give them a decent browser with spell checking and this is a much better way to share work. Oh yeah, it's also free.
What's important here is that the GPL was recognized as legal and beneficial. The judge ruled the GPL:
encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck you for calling my friends clueless. You really have no idea and the fact that they are annoyed is all that really matters.
The judgement I'm making is between a piece of free software that works as well and does more than a non free one that costs lots of money and significantly restricts the rights and ability of the end user. iTunes, for what it costs, should be held to a much higher standard of performance.
You might think I'm clueless, but you should pay attention if you want to know how this is going to go.
I'm 40 years old and I've never owned a game console. Does that make me clueless? No, I've seen other consoles but I've been waiting for a networked enabled version that's really up to PC based gaming. Xbox was not it and the whole line will never will be more than a second rate PC.
We'll see if PS3 sucks or not. When it comes out, I'll walk down to a store and have a look. The descriptions so far look like a winner, no matter what crazy things we might imagine happen inside Sony's corporate headquarters. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what it's like to work inside a huge company that speaks a language I can't read or speak. My only doubts come from the fact that it will be non free, even though IBM's got all sorts of SDK for cell and it's going to run a Linux kernel. I can put up with a non free set top box if it works well enough. What really matters is what's delivered. At that point, I just might spend the few hundreds of bucks I have not wasted on Xbox and ultra expensive wintel video cards.
No, I can tell when my physics and engineering graduate student peers are being morons, but thanks for asking. In any case, software for playing music should not require manual reading, it should just work. Amarok does, out of the box.
That's strange, the version available in Debian Etch has worked well for half a year or so.
I must be misunderstanding you... it is possible and very easy to sort by Artist or Album. What do you mean?
Users I've talked to complain that it's clumsy. For instance, you can't collapse the tree, there's no file system view, etc.
Yeah, or they could use one program to do all of that and not waste time mucking about with the command line, updating dependencies (depending on what distro you're using) and generally jumping through a number of annoying hoops just to perform one simple task.
I named my favorite programs for each task, you don't have to use all of them. Still, all of them come with most distributions, such as the excellent Mepis, which runs from CD and can walk you through a GUI install in 20 minutes or so. The braver could take the hour or two to install Debian proper and get those things they like best. Dependency resolution is only difficult when you use non free or legally suppressed software like DeCSS to watch DVDs.
No, the main obstacle is that all of the free software you've listed is about a billion times less convenient than iTunes or even Windows Media Player, especially to anyone without extensive knowledge of computers.
I'll bet there are more Amarok users than there are WMP users. WMP has that bad a reputation, and that's one of the big reasons Apple has thrived.
Still, you are right the lack of major computer vendor advocacy of free software and massive FUD makes it too much trouble for all but the most motivated of users. That's what makes iTunes the best easy choice. They just don't know what they are missing. We will see what kind of a deal they have actually gotten when the RIAA decides it's time to resell everything again and DRM takes it's bite. If the Purge deal is not a good enough demonstration of their intentions, I'm not sure what is.
No I have not used iTunes. My information comes from an annoyed user who wanted to collapse the tree. Other users have told me about other problems.
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends).
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another.
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Someone just starting out would do well to use free software for their entertainment.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
Want to tell me why they still allow Windoze to connect to networks? Spam / virus control is what your upload cap is all about.
"I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there's actual censorship... however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don't result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can't drop spam or stop... (hacker) attacks.
BBC:And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?
"It depends really on the nature of the whole thing... I'm against net censorship. However when you're talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved... (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it's just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.
The rest is mostly Adam Livingstone's opinion. Included are the notion that bit torrent is mostly used by "pirates" as if only big media is capable of producing content worth sharing.
Saying Cohen is in favor of tiered internet is a stretch at best. Twice Cohen told the reporter he does not like "censorship" which could be defined as slowing others down at the expense of packets for those who pay the tolls. Moreover, it contradicts most of the kinds of things he's said in the past. Looking quickly at his blog, we find nothing quickly. Too bad. Looking at his wikipedia entry, we find:
Regardless, he is outspoken in his belief that the current media business was doomed to being outmoded despite the RIAA and MPAA's legal or technical tactics, such as digital rights management. ... In late 2005 Cohen made a deal with the MPAA to remove all links to illegal content on the official BitTorrent website. The deal was with the seven largest studios in America. The agreement means the site will comply with procedures outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Sounds to me like he wants nothing to do with the MPAA dummies and would not like the Cachelogic deal if all other P2P is shut down or even slowed. His concern is with stopping all the spam and DDoS flooding from Windoze computers not keeping you and me from trading free files. That's censorship.
Some philosophy teacher will surely turn this into a course. I imagine GT, where EVERYTHING is subjugated to engineering needs, could be one of the first if it's not already there. You could make it one of your required electives. Of course, a real philosophy person will rain on all our parades by telling us that this is already a class offering under a different name and those who change the name are pandering.
Now, who the hell are these people? Abandon all hope, ye who enter:
Please, God, make it stop.
Human nature has not been changed by blogging. Everyone has their moments and they are witnessed in public. If you work for a company long enough, people will get to know you and your faults. The difference between then and now is that now people don't have to go on word of mouth, they can see the pictures themselves.
It has nothing to do with job performance.
If you are really that rash, I don't want to work for you. The problem with a non free economy is that I might not have a choice.
As large companies are increasingly favored, the assholes win. When society and government tolerate blatantly anti-competitive behavior, your ability to switch jobs or start your own business dissapears. The assholes in any company realize this and abuse their subordinates as they please. The subordinate has the unenviable choice of career change, poverty or sucking it up.
Our trade with non free powers like China has not made them more free, it has made us less free.
In your best Ministry for State Security accent, "There will be no invasion of privatzy ugnless we have information from zee reliable informant of missbehavior. You are free to file such reports yourself and shoult if you are zee good citizen."
How much are they going to spend reading blogs? There's no end to the amount of monitoring you can do. Look, you get the same thing at work , on the telephone, off your navistar, you cell phone, around your computer, or any newer monitor. I'm so glad my freedom loving country has pioneered all of these futuristic technologies.
Think of Vistas new features as similar to what you might find on a new model car shiny new mag wheels, a finely tuned suspension and a set of high-performance, all-season tires. It still looks like a car and youre still going to know where the pedals are and how to drive but you will find that youll be able to push it to a new set of higher limits.
You can say that about KDE with a straight face. I can say it about Gnome and Enlightenment too. Oh yeah, Mepis' GUI install won't wipe your XP or your files in the half hour it takes to get everything right.
Everything is in place for a GNU/Linux desktop revolution. M$ has shot itself in the head. They've gone six years without a new release, despite bragging that all sorts of fantastic features were just around the corner for years. As the corner finally becomes visible, as the worst OS experience ever, the only thing left of the promissed features is massive hardware requirements, DRM and media that won't work. To make matters worse, they think they have the world by the nuts and are tightening all their usual anti competitive nonsense. Being free has never been so easy. M$ has lost it.
Fuck you and your RIAA buddies. If you give me the choice between P2P retrieval of legitimate content and my RIAA music collection, I'll wipe my non free music in a heartbeat. It's crap like this that tightens my resolve to avoid non free music. I can get all I want from archive.org, magnatune.com, others like them, artist CDs bought at the club and etunes. You pigopolists and your old commercial shit are on the bottom of my list.
We can debate the morality of surrendering to government sponsored ownership of culture, but the practical path is to not help by sharing non free material. Government mandated broadcast monopolies and many other bogus laws lead directly to the creation of the big three music publishers. As the owners of the previous convenient means of sharing music, radio, the publishers have co-opted a large part of our culture. No one really won that one, least of all artists and those actually making the music. The best way to fight it is not to purchase or share RIAA shit.
Lack of hassle is another reason to delete it all. The accused should be presumed innocent, despite having their doors kicked in. As I pointed out, there's plenty of free content out there by people who want you to share. Much of it is easiest to get by bit torrent and other P2P services. If possesion of RIAA shit is the incriminating evidence, you might be better off without it. That way, I won't have some dickhead like you tut tuting in my face about how I'm getting what I deserved.
That's kind of what they want - RIAA only or nothing RIAA for you. They are forcing you to chose. If everyone gave them what they wanted, the world would be a better place.
Here's what they have to say for themselves: Many people are obsessed not with how to best disperse information and participate in this sharing revolution, but with how much they can get away with legally and ethically. In a parallel to the famous John F. Kennedy quote, we need to stop asking what others can do for us, and ask what we can do for them. Rather than simply wondering what we can get away with or how we can get the most for the least amount of work, we need to figure out how we can best participate in this world-wide discussion. If the ethics of the blogging world are constantly abused to promote the gain of others, high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.
Wow, why don't you just come out and call every one a thief like the RIAA does?
These are the same attacks on fair use that Google is having to fight against to offer their excellent news aggregation service. Google was right and the above is wrong headed. No one is losing readers because of Google. The fact that the author could not come up with hard and fast rules proves that they are simply wrong. If you can't say this specific thing is wrong, you can't make a law about it.
Sure jb stalker, you can read the article:
It's too bad that Windows Media Player didn't locate cover-art images reliably -- most of my library was illustrated with generic blank-CD icons. For every obscure indie artist's cover art that the program found, it missed two or three releases from big-name acts. And this feature doesn't work at all if your music files (like many Internet downloads) haven't been tagged with the right artist and album data; Windows Media Player 11 is supposed to fill in such missing information automatically but often did not.
Sounds like I'm better off with Amarok, which did not cost me anything to begin with.
BTW, saying WiMP does not make you a big man.
Yes, but eating too much does.
It's too bad that Windows Media Player didn't locate cover-art images reliably -- most of my library was illustrated with generic blank-CD icons. For every obscure indie artist's cover art that the program found, it missed two or three releases from big-name acts. And this feature doesn't work at all if your music files (like many Internet downloads) haven't been tagged with the right artist and album data; Windows Media Player 11 is supposed to fill in such missing information automatically but often did not.
Missing big name acts is pathetic when you are the music company and the free alternatives can do as well. Amarok with musicbrainz, Amazon search and easy tagging worked better than the above when I moved my vinyl. It did not always work, but the cover manager, which is easy to find, lets you put in your own images so everything missing is a quick Google image search away. Once again, the music community outdoes the pigopolists.
$15/month isn't even 10% of our monthly entertainment budget around here, but it's sure more than 10% for my entertainment value right now. 10 years ago, I had a $200/month used CD habit.
Well, if you've got money to burn and don't mind your collection dissapearing when WiMP 12 rolls around, WiMP 11 might just work for you. I trust neither Microsoft nor the RIAA to keep the deal, even if it is as wonderful as you say it is. WiMP 11 is screwing over Napster and MSN, so that's going to be gone soon. What happens to your music collection then? Will M$ come to your rescue and buy them out or will it all just fade away? How long will Purge work for you? Considering the abominable state of commercial radio, I'm never going to put my music world into the RIAA's hands again.
As for pricing, $15/month for as much new stuff as I want to listen to? I've already got 20 new albums in rotation, stuff I likely wouldn't have bought before but found via the recommendation system, and really enjoy ... Ast $15/month, the amount I would have paid buying that music would have covered the fee for years.
Wow, for fifteen bucks a month plus the cost of all the newest M$ toys and software, I can stream my music to my TV where my $40/month cable subscription already pipes 30 channels of endless hours of music I already don't listen to? Fantastic! Besides that music source I don't listen to, there's plenty of online music streams these days. You know, like the internet archive and their 34,000 live concerts? Don't forget the creative commons people, who also want to promote worth while music. Why would I want to rent a source of music from the usual RIAA pigs again?
What was it that WiMP has that Amarok was lacking? Wait a minute, WiMP does not do lyrics, cover art or even wikipedia lookups?
Sarcasm off. The RIAA and Microsoft are both based on a scarcity that does not exist. The music publishers are damaged and people have routed around them. Microsoft too has been routed around. There are plenty of alternatives to both. Restricting your users while other do not is fatal. Your supposed world of plenty looks awfully limited.
Who says you have to stop paying your bills to have that happen?
Uhhh, how about the big stab in the rear end this is to Napster, the other "also rans" and their customers? If you have a subscription to one of these other services, you might wish you could have burned those songs because M$ is (from the article),
doing something drastic: It's throwing its own MSN Music store under the bus and launching a new music program that spotlights another company's service.
So Napster is going out of business and everyone gets to download all of their rent-a-music again? Loser. How long till those five gigs of Napster tunes quit playing on your snazzy M$ player? Hey, if you pay extra, the new service will let you walk around with your music on ONE device. Now that's the kind of stability and service we have all come to expect from the M$ Monopoly. Total loser. Given that, who the hell is going to buy into the next loser service?
Pigopolists, screw them all. Get a Tekstor (does ogg and mp3), any cheap-o music player from Walmart or a used Iriver and Rockbox. Get Amarok. Keep all your old music from CD and get your new music from archive.org and magnitune.com. Never worry about DRM again. The only people between you and your music should be one or two crazies in the mosh pit.
It's a good thing to quote that "bundled-with" because the term is misleading. No one cares if M$ or anyone else gives away a text editor. What matters is if they make it so no other text editor will work. The Netscape complaint was that M$ strong armed vendors to gain a desktop software monopoly and then abused that monopoly in all sorts of ways to make it a huge pain in the neck to run Netscape on the desktop so that they could steal Netscapes' server market. The tactics included constantly changing the user's defaults back to IE and a combined smear and code breakage like they did with DRDOS.
It's all very nasty and they keep doing it, over and over. They have done it with Office Software to Lotus and Word Perfect, they have done it with backup software, browsers and just about anything you can think of. The people who want to own the worlds computers want to own every piece of it. The developers ran off a long time ago except for a few large companies and even they are looking for a way out. The current fights are over media and, yes, antivirus.
The most obvious result of all of these fights is a decidedly second rate user experience. So many second rate programs have been kludged together, they hardly work. All the hooks and barbs M$ made for others, they have to deal with themselves. Add a bit of DRM and remove the last of the companies trying to patch up your system and you get Vista, the five year development flop. It's kind of like watching an oil filled megatanker fall into the moon.
Information about the DRDOS example can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050313031916/www.ki ckassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.htm
Windoze performance information can be found anywhere Windoze is run. Just wait for them to curse.
From the article:
let's see where the wiki comes into its own. Try editing the Main page, save the changes, and then click on the History tab. You'll see that MediaWiki tracks who made all changes and when. You can compare the differences between different versions. In one fell swoop you've got yourself a document management system as well as a potential in-house knowledge base.
Let me put that into perspective. One of the main features selling M$ Word is easy to use versioning. So, imagine people at your place of work using a Wiki instead of emailing each other 20MB binary files and overwrite each others changes all day long. Give them a decent browser with spell checking and this is a much better way to share work. Oh yeah, it's also free.
What's important here is that the GPL was recognized as legal and beneficial. The judge ruled the GPL:
encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.