I have maybe 20, 30 songs from iTMS, and I'm not altogether fond of it, for the simple reason that, impulse purchases aside, I prefer having the physical CD. I'll still buy from iTMS if there's a single or anything that I want off there, that's about it.
Why do you prefer the physical CD? Would you be happy if Apple sold you the file and sent you a pressed and decorated CD with lossless but FairPlay encumbered music on it?
The interesting question is, will anyone care enough about this to stop doing business with HP?
Busines harm, in this case is counter productive. The guilty have been embarrassed and might even be punished. No one wants to be the next Newsweek posterboy of corporate corruption and the behavior will be avoided. Anyone who tries a stunt like this gains little but puts themselves at the mercy of anyone who finds credible evidence. Corporate spying is not a core part of HP's business so crushing HP will only make their competitors fewer and stronger. Having one less place for employees to run just gives those competitors more power to abuse. It's better to punish the people responsible than it is to punish the company they abused.
The funniest thing about this article is how much effort the author has made to reach obvious conclusions but still won't benefit. Where effort should be placed is obvious from the household spending graph he cites. There we see that vehicle purchase is twice as important as gasoline and that household purchases (combine food, operations, shelter and apparel) are more important than transportation. While gasoline is the one commodity purchased more than any other on the chart, it should be obvious that savings in all of the hundreds of other commodities will outweigh gasoline savings. (not mentioned is that the best gasoline strategies are long term: living close to work, having a modest priced and fuel efficient vehicle, carpooling the kids etc.) The kicker is hinted at by his opening statements. He can't win unless he remembers the approximate price of all the hundreds of commodities he purchases. If you don't remember that bell peppers should not cost three dollars and purchase a jar of banana peppers instead, all your hard won savings go away quickly. A general perception of value a misleading. You have to have memory, imagination and flexibility to live well.
The term "free" is an intentional echo of cold war terminology and works for military types. Freedom is what they are all about and they are never supposed to obey an unlawful order. The American ideology of the Cold war carried over from the defeat of the German dictatorship and Japanese Empire but was firmly rooted in American history, writing and law. The core of that ideology is that free, moral people working in honest cooperation and competition are happier and more prosperous than people toiling under centralized dictatorships. Interesting expressions of these ideas can be found in the writing of Robert A. Heinlein, especially Starship Trooper, which is recommended reading in the US Marine Corps. Free software is an honest effort to make things work, guided by a free meritocracy. It works and has become best of class because people agree not to screw each other over, standards to modularize their work make it so things are interchangeable and the fittest work survives.
Officers with higher degrees will instantly appreciate the peer review nature of free software. People who have published scientific articles understand first hand the practical requirements of repeatability too. To them, if you can't repeat it yourself you have to take it on faith and no military person wants faith in anything but the almighty when they can have proof instead.
The non free people tried to call free software, "software communism" but failed and may have it thrown back in their face. Any military person will tell you that Communist contries are really nasty little fiefdoms, where who you know is more important than what you know and the top guy is in absolute lawless control of everything until murdered. This more resembles the distrustful, back stabbing and intentionally wasteful world of non free software in methodology and results.
Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as ``samizdat''. There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive.
As it stands, cameras are easy to forget about in day-to-day life, but hearing the voice of authority booming down from on high is sure to raise some alarm. Hopefully we will finally see some kind of backlash!
No, it would be better if your government were taking cameras down, not spending money on making them more effective. Once you have lost and the loudspeakers are up, you need to find a way to prove they are invasive and abused. Having a voice "on high" might help you in creating an incident if you are creative enough, but it will probably work against you.
The way forward is to expose the invasiveness and uselessness. Studies have already shown they don't fight crime. Print the results and tack them up at busy intersections. People live and die in front of government spies. You need to find ways of making very private events public. The victim has already lost their dignity and privacy, so you won't actually make it worse for them. Mostly, you need a whistle blower like the US has for wire taps. The extent to which the system is being used to monitor and harass political groups, students and other innocents should be published. You will have to infiltrate the system to see it, but it requires so many people that should be easy. Sooner or later, someone on the inside will turn against this monstrosity. Good luck.
So, how do you transfer to an OpenZaurus then? Please enlighten me, twitter. If it requires any special software, you automatically fail.
By Compact Flash or SD and any music player or program that can write to such.
You can transfer from iPod to computer using EphPod and GTKPod. You can plug your iPod into your PC without "self destructing", you either don't have iTunes installed so it won't do anything or you click the "Don't Replace" button when iTunes pops up. So long as you didn't buy your music from iTMS, you can move it around as much as you like.
That all sounds so easy.... for you. No, I don't believe you over what I read in Wikipedia and what people who own the device have told me.
Twitter, you've never used iTunes, you've never used an iPod and you are babbling on about something you only superficially know about from Wikipedia.
That's true. A brief overview of how iPod works is enough for me to not want one. People I know have failed to push the right button at the right time and had to go through a "restore" process he described as a pain in the ass. I'm not giving my money to a company that makes things hard for me and I don't need to. The briefest of google searches pulls up all sorts of problems on iPod besides trying to make it work with free software.
SHUT THE FUCK UP. Let people who actually know what they are talking about participate in this discussion, you go and sit in the corner and talk to yourself.
No. The discussion I started here is about how people like you reject the iTunes music store. Why don't you tell me about how cool DRM'd music is and how long you have been looking forward to it? Tell me what a cool company Apple is and how all of their stuff does exactly what you want, without modification and how happy you are with your non free iPod. No? tell me about how easy it is to work with Apple and how supportive they have been of GTKpod and others.
when I use my iPod. It's all LAME-encoded MP3s ripped from CDs. What restrictions do you think I'm accepting, pray tell?
The restrictions ordinary users face are listed in the blockquote from wikipedia. If you have gotten around them, more power to you. The average user would give you a blank look about toolame, alternate clients, rockbox and all that. Most bought into iPod because it's "easy" and they would not have to fool with it. They would be limited to all of iTunes conditions. Others might be interested in what you have done, if you can have the same music at home, work and on your laptop and how your iPod manages when you plug it into them all without self destructing. I'm not interested because it's is too much trouble to put into a portable music player when there are others that behave out of the box. If you can't copy your music with all of it's tags and metadata intact as many times to as many devices as you like using whatever device you like to move and listen to the music, the result of your hard effort is not adequate for me.
Number two is obviously wrong, only DRM'd music stores are a failure and all of them have failed. MP3.com was a success, Amazon.com is a success and many other online music stores without DRM are a successful. DRM costs everyone but the RIAA money and it's not going to make it. Listeners and vendors alike loath it. Jupiter's little study has show that not even iPod users are not going for DRM.
That iPod users don't go for it is significant because iPod users have already accepted artificial restrictions in their music but even they refused to be locked in completely. iTunes is the easiest, most integrated, in your face DRM music store. It even seems to work, though it has been shown to suck 25% of your battery life. The restrictions are significant and include the following:
The user must still use iTunes or a compatible third-party software to load audio, videos, and photos in such a way that they are playable and viewable on the iPod. Simply copying files to the drive will not allow the iPod to properly access them.... iTunes cannot transfer songs or videos from device to computer, unless they were purchased from the iTunes Store and authorized for use on that computer. The media files are stored in a hidden folder together with a proprietary database on the iPod. While the hidden content can be accessed through the host operating system, practical recovery of the audio with correct file names, tag meta-data, and playlists requires the use of third-party software.
The practical upshot of that it's hard to share music with yourself, let alone others. There are limits on the number of times you can copy your music and how many devices you can have it on at once. iPod owners have put up with all of that but won't get suckered into iTunes music store.
It's the DRM and nothing but the DRM. They don't want to be locked in.
Why do I need to buy all those again, if I buy, I'll probably buy via iTunes, but I've got a large catalog already purchased. This isn't shunning.
Take it up with the BBC, or pay for the report and take it up with Jupiter, but they say that people who buy portable music players purchase more music than other people and they are purchasing it on CDs. They were clear about it, I'm sorry if my summary was not.
I imagine that people who own portable music players and reasonable jukebox software, such as iTunes or Amarok enjoy their music more than others and purchase more of it. You know, that whole Napster effect thing all over again. Music fans will buy music even if they can get it for "free" of some network. Of course, it's easy to buy more music than average if the average is zero.
Thinking of free music, I have to point again to the internet archive, where anyone wanting to build a great collection should start. Be sure to check out one of my favorites, the New Orleans Radiators and rock on.
A lot of people (and I don't want to be divisive, but honestly they were mostly Linux proponents, including Linus himself) spread FUD for years about BSD systems being "unsafe"--even after the UCB/USL lawsuit was settled. The fact is that there was no danger in using NetBSD in a product, and a number of companies did so.
You have to wonder if that would have been the case if there was not a much bigger boogie man for Ma Bell, M$ and other greed heads to worry about. If it were not for the success of the GPL, would BSD be left alone today? I think not.
Yes, and that goes a long way to foil the author's baseless elitism. A recurrent theme of the article is snobbery. MySpace looks bad because people are stupid and evil is their central message:
... a one-stop shopping mall for online predators.... In an era when the basic tenets of the Net are under attack by both Ma Bell and Uncle Sam, MySpace is a headache we don't need. But let's put all that aside for a moment. Graphically, many MySpace pages look like a teenager's bedroom after a tornado--a swirl of clashing backgrounds,... in a place where "U are soooooooo hot!!!" passes for wit, MySpace isn't doing much to elevate the level of social discourse.
Let's take out the cluebat.
The web is supposed to be two way, for everyone. MySpace is not a special gateway for predators anymore than google or your local city park.
My space, like PCWorld, looks like crap because the authors have been given crappy editing tools and greedy site owners.
Blaming the users is stupid. Other sites look better because users have been given better tools. Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and others all look good and work well. Do those sites raise the "level of discourse"? Yes, better than this flamebait article from PCWorld.
The ability to rotate pages, and a status bar at the bottom saying "Page X of Y",
For version 0.5.1 (might be old by now) of kpdf, the thumbnails in the side pane do page numbering as you want. I'm not sure about the rotation because I have not needed to do that in years, but that would be a useful feature. It's on the wish list and you can fall back to Kghostview if you run into something that really needs rotating. It should show up under View->View Mode of Konqueror as an option when you look at pdf files.
Kpdf also has browser like navigation buttons that are very helpful in large documents. For an example of aids to navigation and not needing to rotate see the very useful Idaho National Laboratory Ge(Li) Gamma Sectrum Catalog (warning, this is an 89MB file). This document makes me think rotate has been done automatically, which would explain my never needing to do it. For an example of text searching where you thought there was not text because the file is obviously an image of an ancient, manually typed manuscript, see here. Those features, combined with Konqueror's ability to split tabs, have made it so I have not printed someone else's pdf in two years.
Evince and gPDF, since these lack support for a lot of the additional features of PDF am i any safer?
From the Fine Article:
the target's browser is automatically launched and loads the embedded link.
"At this point, it is obvious that any malicious code [can] be launched," Kierznowski said.
That looks like a lot of auto magic nonsense that most free software would not do. The only thing that's obvious to me is that any malicious w32 code is going to bounce off my browser. My pdf reader, kpdf, did not take the first step of automatically launching a browser and my browser would not take any of the dozens of brain dead and spam friendly automatic steps that makes IE a dissaster. A computer that's not internet safe but is connected to a network is always at risk.
Note that it's not a "lack of features" that makes kpdf work right. Kpdf has links that work when you press them, table of content browsing, keyword searches, text and image cut and paste, and prints flawless copy. Those are the features you want in a pdf viewer. Automatically popping up a browser is a feature you don't want.
a page mentioning that Canada will enforce foreign lawsuits. This is, of course, Canada rather than the UK, but they have a similar legal tradition. Could this backfire?
When Air Strip One finally merges back into the Atlantic supercontinent some 200,000,000 years from now, UK law may more closely reflect Canadian laws.
They'll market it through back-channels -- you'll see lots of "sign up for XXX and get a FREE Microsoft Zune!" and Zunes given away as prizes in contests. I'm sure that Microsoft has figured out how long they can lose money on Zunes before they have to pull the plug.
Even that's not enough to save M$'s media grab. This one will go the way of their college music force fee services and Dell's music player, September 22, 2005 - August 24, 2006, RIP. The give away was there but the deal still sucked. If it requires use of WMP, it's not going to work because WMP does not work. Yes, people still remember the WMA fiasco where WMP refused to play their music collections after the all to frequent system wipe and reload. People continue to overwhelmingly reject teathered music in favor of the same thing without DRM from CDs. Zune is more of the same and worse bad deal. People are not going to buy them no matter how many M$ gives away.
If Microsoft were to allow wireless sharing without DRM, then it would be used for open-piracy of songs, this is quite clear.
By that reasoning, any non DRM publication would be used for "open-piracy". The whole point of electronic copy is that it's costless and perfect. If non DRM'd copy is outlawed, every general purpose computing device would be outlawed. I can do the same things on my laptop, with my CDs etc, etc.
This story should be pulled immediately! Slashdot does not tolerate cheap shots towards Microsoft
Don't worry, swarms of paid M$ PR drones will quickly make light of DRM and other serious flaws in this M$ product. People will be so busy laughing at their +5 funny wit, they will never notice that the Zune sucks. Sales will be off chart, like Xbox, because M$'s marketing genious never fails it just gets pushed into a "ten year time frame" of money loss. Go team!
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to.mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
I imagine it was preemptive astroturf on M$'s part but don't think it's not a big deal. The transcoding nonsense fooled me by repetition and disinterest on my part. M$'s main competitive weapon is to say everyone else has their problems and none of their strengths, which usually reduce to their desktop monopoly.
Did I say disinterest? Yes I did. For the same reasons I have no interest in Zune, I also have no interest in iPod. Apple's DRM method for your non DRM'd music is to erase everything from the device if you plug it into another computer (that's news I got from an actual owner I trust to get things right). As a person who has more than one computer and I don't want to have to jump through hoops to share with myself and my friends. I don't want to have to install a non free client to load music to my music player. I don't want to have to beg that non free client to copy my music to my other computers. Finally, I don't want a player that erases everything when I try to copy files that are under free licenses. The Radiators of New Orleans encourage people to record and share their songs. Because of this, I have almost two gigs of their awesome music. The music players I actually own don't self destruct when I plug them into a friend's computer. It's a shame because I admire and envy Apple's mechanical design.
Zune, I'm sure, will have all of those problems and more.
People, eventually, will end up with music devices that are easy. They will transfer files by standard protocols and will play any of the formats supported by giants like Xine - no problem video and music streaming and playback. Anything less than that is too much trouble in the long run.
At the end of the day, these movie/song clips are just basically adverts. Its the ultimate form of Viral Advertising and the studios should be encouraging it, not trying to control it. If they want to make money then this sort of stuff is gold for them, it doesn't cost them anything at all and its not hard to start something.
For a normal publisher, that would be true. A normal publisher finds and promotes excellent works in a free market. Big media is the exact opposite of all that. They are based on exclusion and it has nothing to do with artistic merit. YouTube is just another attempt a free entertainment market, a competitor to be owned and destroyed.
The two big music companies make money by controlling your taste in music. They grew up with physical median and are still geared to the "big hit" marketing model. They don't want anyone else exposing you to something they are not promoting because that will take money away from their promoted act. Their whole business model is based on owning the broadcast spectrum and excluding everything but their sad top 40 songs a week. They have bought an extensive set of laws to extend this model into the future
YouTube is going to meet the same fate as Napster and MTV before it. They own your culture because they own all recorded media by purchase and intimidation. Witness the problems Jib Jab had over a parody of a song that was actually in public domain. It's a chicken and egg problem big media thinks they can win. At a nominal rate of $40,000 per sample, big media can decide who gets to use anything from the recorded past in our common memory. When a YouTuber puts a Led Zeppelin guitar riff into a home video, big media can screw YouTube. They did it to MTV, which no longer plays music and they did it to Napster, which is now a failing M$ music service.
This is viral ownership. Because big media owns a tiny portion of the work placed on YouTube, they think they can take it all. In cases like MP3.com, the courts agreed with big media. I hope that the courts look at this one and finally realize that it's bad for culture to be owned like that. If big media is allowed to steal every new business this way, they will continue to own and limit what we are all exposed to. That's exactly the opposite of what copyright is all about.
You just need to be asked to run small company with all bureaucracy done on paper with typewriter. Absolutely w/o computers. You would understand why the boom happened really: computer market stabilized, became commodity and business at large went from paper-based work flow to computer-based one. In fact, computers now allow small companies to increase business volumes: only because bureaucracy is magnitude cheaper now.
Are you trying to tell me that the average M$ shop is paperless? Hold on a second.... OK, now I'm back from laughing and crying. Large companies have some rudiments of paper replacement. Small companies have simply been throwing their records away or still have paper files. The M$ monopoly has cost us all lots and lots of money.
At fortune 500 companies, pdf and tiff may indeed have replaced paper records, but M$ had nothing to do with it and the actual work is still done one paper. If the company is highly regulated, like a nuclear power plant, they might have called in IBM to make a document serving and saving system and that has marginally decreased total costs. IT costs, as a portion of the total budget did not change at all! Employees loath and distrust their M$ workstations to the point that they carry their actual work on floppies or USB fobs. The M$ "file servers" are even worse about keeping data. All of the work in progress is printed out and done with pen and paper. The results are laboriously typeset with M$ Word. This is not the office of the future.
Small businesses have it even worse. In one way they have an advantage, a lack of legacy systems to draw them down. The problem is that they do not trust the local IT people they can afford to move them into the future with free Unix derivatives. They could do it all with free software but M$ spends billions of dollars a year in FUD to keep them from doing that.
I'm old enough to have seen it all happen and am bitterly disappointed by the slow pace of change. Family members helped computerize medical records at a large regional hospital back in the 70s. They hooked up a terminal in his house back in the day Ma Bell rented people their phones. My first "real" computer was an IBM clone. I hooked a typewriter to it and used it to print my papers, mail and CAD in the 80s. That is the model still used by most companies. 25 years later all correspondence, records keeping, even scratch work, should be electronic but it's not.
The overriding problems for large and small businesses using M$ are poor GUI and poor reliability issues. A lack of virtual desktops forces printing of all real work in progress. If you can't spread it out on your computer, you have to spread it out on your desk. M$'s notorious lack of stability and "complex" file formats rules out their use for real records keeping. Even if the business is bright enough to waste money on Acrobat distiller, so that formatting issues go away, the underlying OS and file system lacks reliability. As noted, only large companies have spent the big bucks on document archive systems people believe in. I've written elsewhere about the way the combination of poor GUI and reliability ruins place keeping and wastes employee time on reboots every day. All of these issues are solved in free software.
The cost of all of this intentional waste may indeed produce hundreds of thousands of jobs. How else would Bill Gates have all his billions? The problem is that every penny spent is waste and we would all be better off if those people were making things that people want and need instead of endlessly running circles around broken equipment which has failed to deliver on it's promise for decades.
A binary search would be better. Split the search space (the set of startup programs) in half. Enable or disable one half. If the problem appears, adjust your search space to that half.
Start with zero, all of them turned off. If this does not work, and it won't, you better wipe and reload. Boot off a liveCD, backup data files and start the reinstall.
Slashdot Mirror
I have maybe 20, 30 songs from iTMS, and I'm not altogether fond of it, for the simple reason that, impulse purchases aside, I prefer having the physical CD. I'll still buy from iTMS if there's a single or anything that I want off there, that's about it.
Why do you prefer the physical CD? Would you be happy if Apple sold you the file and sent you a pressed and decorated CD with lossless but FairPlay encumbered music on it?
The interesting question is, will anyone care enough about this to stop doing business with HP?
Busines harm, in this case is counter productive. The guilty have been embarrassed and might even be punished. No one wants to be the next Newsweek posterboy of corporate corruption and the behavior will be avoided. Anyone who tries a stunt like this gains little but puts themselves at the mercy of anyone who finds credible evidence. Corporate spying is not a core part of HP's business so crushing HP will only make their competitors fewer and stronger. Having one less place for employees to run just gives those competitors more power to abuse. It's better to punish the people responsible than it is to punish the company they abused.
The funniest thing about this article is how much effort the author has made to reach obvious conclusions but still won't benefit. Where effort should be placed is obvious from the household spending graph he cites. There we see that vehicle purchase is twice as important as gasoline and that household purchases (combine food, operations, shelter and apparel) are more important than transportation. While gasoline is the one commodity purchased more than any other on the chart, it should be obvious that savings in all of the hundreds of other commodities will outweigh gasoline savings. (not mentioned is that the best gasoline strategies are long term: living close to work, having a modest priced and fuel efficient vehicle, carpooling the kids etc.) The kicker is hinted at by his opening statements. He can't win unless he remembers the approximate price of all the hundreds of commodities he purchases. If you don't remember that bell peppers should not cost three dollars and purchase a jar of banana peppers instead, all your hard won savings go away quickly. A general perception of value a misleading. You have to have memory, imagination and flexibility to live well.
My current cooling system blows by comparison!
Current eh? How about plasma? My Jackob's Ladder spark gap chimney effect is a real blast, though it's not quiet or very good at cooling.
The term "free" is an intentional echo of cold war terminology and works for military types. Freedom is what they are all about and they are never supposed to obey an unlawful order. The American ideology of the Cold war carried over from the defeat of the German dictatorship and Japanese Empire but was firmly rooted in American history, writing and law. The core of that ideology is that free, moral people working in honest cooperation and competition are happier and more prosperous than people toiling under centralized dictatorships. Interesting expressions of these ideas can be found in the writing of Robert A. Heinlein, especially Starship Trooper, which is recommended reading in the US Marine Corps. Free software is an honest effort to make things work, guided by a free meritocracy. It works and has become best of class because people agree not to screw each other over, standards to modularize their work make it so things are interchangeable and the fittest work survives.
Officers with higher degrees will instantly appreciate the peer review nature of free software. People who have published scientific articles understand first hand the practical requirements of repeatability too. To them, if you can't repeat it yourself you have to take it on faith and no military person wants faith in anything but the almighty when they can have proof instead.
The non free people tried to call free software, "software communism" but failed and may have it thrown back in their face. Any military person will tell you that Communist contries are really nasty little fiefdoms, where who you know is more important than what you know and the top guy is in absolute lawless control of everything until murdered. This more resembles the distrustful, back stabbing and intentionally wasteful world of non free software in methodology and results.
I'll quote the gnu.org sites, see what you think:
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as ``samizdat''. There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive.
As it stands, cameras are easy to forget about in day-to-day life, but hearing the voice of authority booming down from on high is sure to raise some alarm. Hopefully we will finally see some kind of backlash!
No, it would be better if your government were taking cameras down, not spending money on making them more effective. Once you have lost and the loudspeakers are up, you need to find a way to prove they are invasive and abused. Having a voice "on high" might help you in creating an incident if you are creative enough, but it will probably work against you.
The way forward is to expose the invasiveness and uselessness. Studies have already shown they don't fight crime. Print the results and tack them up at busy intersections. People live and die in front of government spies. You need to find ways of making very private events public. The victim has already lost their dignity and privacy, so you won't actually make it worse for them. Mostly, you need a whistle blower like the US has for wire taps. The extent to which the system is being used to monitor and harass political groups, students and other innocents should be published. You will have to infiltrate the system to see it, but it requires so many people that should be easy. Sooner or later, someone on the inside will turn against this monstrosity. Good luck.
So, how do you transfer to an OpenZaurus then? Please enlighten me, twitter. If it requires any special software, you automatically fail.
By Compact Flash or SD and any music player or program that can write to such.
You can transfer from iPod to computer using EphPod and GTKPod. You can plug your iPod into your PC without "self destructing", you either don't have iTunes installed so it won't do anything or you click the "Don't Replace" button when iTunes pops up. So long as you didn't buy your music from iTMS, you can move it around as much as you like.
That all sounds so easy.... for you. No, I don't believe you over what I read in Wikipedia and what people who own the device have told me.
Twitter, you've never used iTunes, you've never used an iPod and you are babbling on about something you only superficially know about from Wikipedia.
That's true. A brief overview of how iPod works is enough for me to not want one. People I know have failed to push the right button at the right time and had to go through a "restore" process he described as a pain in the ass. I'm not giving my money to a company that makes things hard for me and I don't need to. The briefest of google searches pulls up all sorts of problems on iPod besides trying to make it work with free software.
SHUT THE FUCK UP. Let people who actually know what they are talking about participate in this discussion, you go and sit in the corner and talk to yourself.
No. The discussion I started here is about how people like you reject the iTunes music store. Why don't you tell me about how cool DRM'd music is and how long you have been looking forward to it? Tell me what a cool company Apple is and how all of their stuff does exactly what you want, without modification and how happy you are with your non free iPod. No? tell me about how easy it is to work with Apple and how supportive they have been of GTKpod and others.
when I use my iPod. It's all LAME-encoded MP3s ripped from CDs. What restrictions do you think I'm accepting, pray tell?
The restrictions ordinary users face are listed in the blockquote from wikipedia. If you have gotten around them, more power to you. The average user would give you a blank look about toolame, alternate clients, rockbox and all that. Most bought into iPod because it's "easy" and they would not have to fool with it. They would be limited to all of iTunes conditions. Others might be interested in what you have done, if you can have the same music at home, work and on your laptop and how your iPod manages when you plug it into them all without self destructing. I'm not interested because it's is too much trouble to put into a portable music player when there are others that behave out of the box. If you can't copy your music with all of it's tags and metadata intact as many times to as many devices as you like using whatever device you like to move and listen to the music, the result of your hard effort is not adequate for me.
Number two is obviously wrong, only DRM'd music stores are a failure and all of them have failed. MP3.com was a success, Amazon.com is a success and many other online music stores without DRM are a successful. DRM costs everyone but the RIAA money and it's not going to make it. Listeners and vendors alike loath it. Jupiter's little study has show that not even iPod users are not going for DRM.
That iPod users don't go for it is significant because iPod users have already accepted artificial restrictions in their music but even they refused to be locked in completely. iTunes is the easiest, most integrated, in your face DRM music store. It even seems to work, though it has been shown to suck 25% of your battery life. The restrictions are significant and include the following:
The practical upshot of that it's hard to share music with yourself, let alone others. There are limits on the number of times you can copy your music and how many devices you can have it on at once. iPod owners have put up with all of that but won't get suckered into iTunes music store.
It's the DRM and nothing but the DRM. They don't want to be locked in.
Why do I need to buy all those again, if I buy, I'll probably buy via iTunes, but I've got a large catalog already purchased. This isn't shunning.
Take it up with the BBC, or pay for the report and take it up with Jupiter, but they say that people who buy portable music players purchase more music than other people and they are purchasing it on CDs. They were clear about it, I'm sorry if my summary was not.
I imagine that people who own portable music players and reasonable jukebox software, such as iTunes or Amarok enjoy their music more than others and purchase more of it. You know, that whole Napster effect thing all over again. Music fans will buy music even if they can get it for "free" of some network. Of course, it's easy to buy more music than average if the average is zero.
Thinking of free music, I have to point again to the internet archive, where anyone wanting to build a great collection should start. Be sure to check out one of my favorites, the New Orleans Radiators and rock on.
A lot of people (and I don't want to be divisive, but honestly they were mostly Linux proponents, including Linus himself) spread FUD for years about BSD systems being "unsafe"--even after the UCB/USL lawsuit was settled. The fact is that there was no danger in using NetBSD in a product, and a number of companies did so.
You have to wonder if that would have been the case if there was not a much bigger boogie man for Ma Bell, M$ and other greed heads to worry about. If it were not for the success of the GPL, would BSD be left alone today? I think not.
User Rob Levin.
As the cars get bigger, bike riding is scarier but remains my only convenient daily exercise.
The best part is PCWorld's site sucks.
Yes, and that goes a long way to foil the author's baseless elitism. A recurrent theme of the article is snobbery. MySpace looks bad because people are stupid and evil is their central message:
Let's take out the cluebat.
Blaming the users is stupid. Other sites look better because users have been given better tools. Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and others all look good and work well. Do those sites raise the "level of discourse"? Yes, better than this flamebait article from PCWorld.
For version 0.5.1 (might be old by now) of kpdf, the thumbnails in the side pane do page numbering as you want. I'm not sure about the rotation because I have not needed to do that in years, but that would be a useful feature. It's on the wish list and you can fall back to Kghostview if you run into something that really needs rotating. It should show up under View->View Mode of Konqueror as an option when you look at pdf files.
Kpdf also has browser like navigation buttons that are very helpful in large documents. For an example of aids to navigation and not needing to rotate see the very useful Idaho National Laboratory Ge(Li) Gamma Sectrum Catalog (warning, this is an 89MB file). This document makes me think rotate has been done automatically, which would explain my never needing to do it. For an example of text searching where you thought there was not text because the file is obviously an image of an ancient, manually typed manuscript, see here. Those features, combined with Konqueror's ability to split tabs, have made it so I have not printed someone else's pdf in two years.
KDE just keep rocking.
Evince and gPDF, since these lack support for a lot of the additional features of PDF am i any safer?
From the Fine Article:
the target's browser is automatically launched and loads the embedded link. "At this point, it is obvious that any malicious code [can] be launched," Kierznowski said.
That looks like a lot of auto magic nonsense that most free software would not do. The only thing that's obvious to me is that any malicious w32 code is going to bounce off my browser. My pdf reader, kpdf, did not take the first step of automatically launching a browser and my browser would not take any of the dozens of brain dead and spam friendly automatic steps that makes IE a dissaster. A computer that's not internet safe but is connected to a network is always at risk.
Note that it's not a "lack of features" that makes kpdf work right. Kpdf has links that work when you press them, table of content browsing, keyword searches, text and image cut and paste, and prints flawless copy. Those are the features you want in a pdf viewer. Automatically popping up a browser is a feature you don't want.
a page mentioning that Canada will enforce foreign lawsuits. This is, of course, Canada rather than the UK, but they have a similar legal tradition. Could this backfire?
When Air Strip One finally merges back into the Atlantic supercontinent some 200,000,000 years from now, UK law may more closely reflect Canadian laws.
They'll market it through back-channels -- you'll see lots of "sign up for XXX and get a FREE Microsoft Zune!" and Zunes given away as prizes in contests. I'm sure that Microsoft has figured out how long they can lose money on Zunes before they have to pull the plug.
Even that's not enough to save M$'s media grab. This one will go the way of their college music force fee services and Dell's music player, September 22, 2005 - August 24, 2006, RIP. The give away was there but the deal still sucked. If it requires use of WMP, it's not going to work because WMP does not work. Yes, people still remember the WMA fiasco where WMP refused to play their music collections after the all to frequent system wipe and reload. People continue to overwhelmingly reject teathered music in favor of the same thing without DRM from CDs. Zune is more of the same and worse bad deal. People are not going to buy them no matter how many M$ gives away.
If Microsoft were to allow wireless sharing without DRM, then it would be used for open-piracy of songs, this is quite clear.
By that reasoning, any non DRM publication would be used for "open-piracy". The whole point of electronic copy is that it's costless and perfect. If non DRM'd copy is outlawed, every general purpose computing device would be outlawed. I can do the same things on my laptop, with my CDs etc, etc.
This story should be pulled immediately! Slashdot does not tolerate cheap shots towards Microsoft
Don't worry, swarms of paid M$ PR drones will quickly make light of DRM and other serious flaws in this M$ product. People will be so busy laughing at their +5 funny wit, they will never notice that the Zune sucks. Sales will be off chart, like Xbox, because M$'s marketing genious never fails it just gets pushed into a "ten year time frame" of money loss. Go team!
Why is it, that on blogs, in comments, and many other places, I see this exact bahvior ascribed to Apple (adds DRM to .mp3s, has "proprietary format" conversion) when they've never done any such thing - and when Microsoft does it, it's no big deal?
I imagine it was preemptive astroturf on M$'s part but don't think it's not a big deal. The transcoding nonsense fooled me by repetition and disinterest on my part. M$'s main competitive weapon is to say everyone else has their problems and none of their strengths, which usually reduce to their desktop monopoly.
Did I say disinterest? Yes I did. For the same reasons I have no interest in Zune, I also have no interest in iPod. Apple's DRM method for your non DRM'd music is to erase everything from the device if you plug it into another computer (that's news I got from an actual owner I trust to get things right). As a person who has more than one computer and I don't want to have to jump through hoops to share with myself and my friends. I don't want to have to install a non free client to load music to my music player. I don't want to have to beg that non free client to copy my music to my other computers. Finally, I don't want a player that erases everything when I try to copy files that are under free licenses. The Radiators of New Orleans encourage people to record and share their songs. Because of this, I have almost two gigs of their awesome music. The music players I actually own don't self destruct when I plug them into a friend's computer. It's a shame because I admire and envy Apple's mechanical design.
Zune, I'm sure, will have all of those problems and more.
People, eventually, will end up with music devices that are easy. They will transfer files by standard protocols and will play any of the formats supported by giants like Xine - no problem video and music streaming and playback. Anything less than that is too much trouble in the long run.
Users will get over the cool factor quickly
What cool factor?
At the end of the day, these movie/song clips are just basically adverts. Its the ultimate form of Viral Advertising and the studios should be encouraging it, not trying to control it. If they want to make money then this sort of stuff is gold for them, it doesn't cost them anything at all and its not hard to start something.
For a normal publisher, that would be true. A normal publisher finds and promotes excellent works in a free market. Big media is the exact opposite of all that. They are based on exclusion and it has nothing to do with artistic merit. YouTube is just another attempt a free entertainment market, a competitor to be owned and destroyed.
The two big music companies make money by controlling your taste in music. They grew up with physical median and are still geared to the "big hit" marketing model. They don't want anyone else exposing you to something they are not promoting because that will take money away from their promoted act. Their whole business model is based on owning the broadcast spectrum and excluding everything but their sad top 40 songs a week. They have bought an extensive set of laws to extend this model into the future
YouTube is going to meet the same fate as Napster and MTV before it. They own your culture because they own all recorded media by purchase and intimidation. Witness the problems Jib Jab had over a parody of a song that was actually in public domain. It's a chicken and egg problem big media thinks they can win. At a nominal rate of $40,000 per sample, big media can decide who gets to use anything from the recorded past in our common memory. When a YouTuber puts a Led Zeppelin guitar riff into a home video, big media can screw YouTube. They did it to MTV, which no longer plays music and they did it to Napster, which is now a failing M$ music service.
This is viral ownership. Because big media owns a tiny portion of the work placed on YouTube, they think they can take it all. In cases like MP3.com, the courts agreed with big media. I hope that the courts look at this one and finally realize that it's bad for culture to be owned like that. If big media is allowed to steal every new business this way, they will continue to own and limit what we are all exposed to. That's exactly the opposite of what copyright is all about.
You just need to be asked to run small company with all bureaucracy done on paper with typewriter. Absolutely w/o computers. You would understand why the boom happened really: computer market stabilized, became commodity and business at large went from paper-based work flow to computer-based one. In fact, computers now allow small companies to increase business volumes: only because bureaucracy is magnitude cheaper now.
Are you trying to tell me that the average M$ shop is paperless? Hold on a second. ... OK, now I'm back from laughing and crying. Large companies have some rudiments of paper replacement. Small companies have simply been throwing their records away or still have paper files. The M$ monopoly has cost us all lots and lots of money.
At fortune 500 companies, pdf and tiff may indeed have replaced paper records, but M$ had nothing to do with it and the actual work is still done one paper. If the company is highly regulated, like a nuclear power plant, they might have called in IBM to make a document serving and saving system and that has marginally decreased total costs. IT costs, as a portion of the total budget did not change at all! Employees loath and distrust their M$ workstations to the point that they carry their actual work on floppies or USB fobs. The M$ "file servers" are even worse about keeping data. All of the work in progress is printed out and done with pen and paper. The results are laboriously typeset with M$ Word. This is not the office of the future.
Small businesses have it even worse. In one way they have an advantage, a lack of legacy systems to draw them down. The problem is that they do not trust the local IT people they can afford to move them into the future with free Unix derivatives. They could do it all with free software but M$ spends billions of dollars a year in FUD to keep them from doing that.
I'm old enough to have seen it all happen and am bitterly disappointed by the slow pace of change. Family members helped computerize medical records at a large regional hospital back in the 70s. They hooked up a terminal in his house back in the day Ma Bell rented people their phones. My first "real" computer was an IBM clone. I hooked a typewriter to it and used it to print my papers, mail and CAD in the 80s. That is the model still used by most companies. 25 years later all correspondence, records keeping, even scratch work, should be electronic but it's not.
The overriding problems for large and small businesses using M$ are poor GUI and poor reliability issues. A lack of virtual desktops forces printing of all real work in progress. If you can't spread it out on your computer, you have to spread it out on your desk. M$'s notorious lack of stability and "complex" file formats rules out their use for real records keeping. Even if the business is bright enough to waste money on Acrobat distiller, so that formatting issues go away, the underlying OS and file system lacks reliability. As noted, only large companies have spent the big bucks on document archive systems people believe in. I've written elsewhere about the way the combination of poor GUI and reliability ruins place keeping and wastes employee time on reboots every day. All of these issues are solved in free software.
The cost of all of this intentional waste may indeed produce hundreds of thousands of jobs. How else would Bill Gates have all his billions? The problem is that every penny spent is waste and we would all be better off if those people were making things that people want and need instead of endlessly running circles around broken equipment which has failed to deliver on it's promise for decades.
A binary search would be better. Split the search space (the set of startup programs) in half. Enable or disable one half. If the problem appears, adjust your search space to that half.
Start with zero, all of them turned off. If this does not work, and it won't, you better wipe and reload. Boot off a liveCD, backup data files and start the reinstall.
Windoze never gets better, so you are better off with an ,alternative that installs in 20 minutes, does everthing you want and then keeps doing it. I once swore that I'd never suffer through a windoze install again, the reboots, the driver hunt, the software hunt, the endless screens of "I agree master" and now, I'm told, multiple reboots over "security updates". I've only had to break that vow once but never for my own computers.