How is efm's stability? I'm itching to try it based on your description, but I'm a bit wary about any software (and particularly file managers) with version number 0.0.0. Then again, Enlightenment is still at version 0.16.4 and I use it all the time without problems, so it could easily be that the e people are very conservative in their version assignments. How would you rate efm on stability?
I tried going with Flashcom (which re-sells Covad's service) before BellAtlantic offered their Infospeed service. The problem was that Covad sub-contracted through BellAtlantic to do the initial line work, and BellAtlantic was once again the weak link in the chain. BellAtlantic made some sort of attempt at installing the necessary line related materials, but then they told me that the installation could not be completed as-is (I forget what reasons they gave) and they proceeded to conveniently push back the date of when they could make the "necessary" adjustments until after the date when BellAtlantic's own Infospeed DSL service became available in my area. Well, when Infospeed became available I figured I might as well cut out two layers of sub-contracting by going straight to BellAtlantic and I cancelled my order with Flashcom. Little did I know that I would have such an enormous amount of problems with their service. My service has gone out for an extended period of time at least 3 or 4 times now, they charged me 6 times for my >$100 DSL modem, I have spent literally days (perhaps weeks) on hold all totalled up, and my service has been down for the past week despite my daily calls to tech support. I don't think any of the problems were line problems, so when I move in September I'm definitely going with Covad or Shorenet (or RCN if they have cabel modems in Boston now).
I'm unfamiliar with AirTouch so I can't comment on it's suckiness, but it's hard to imagine anything sucking more than BellAtlantic. I have noticed the customer service on BellAtlantic's Infospeed DSL service actually improve since the merger, but there wasn't really any other direction for it to go. I no longer have to look forward to a 4 hours on hold each day waiting for their tech support (they actually pick up quickly now) like I did for the first _two_ _months_ after installation when my connection was unusable, but then again my service went down again a week ago and they have yet to fix it so it would seem that only their customer service has improved and not their actual technical competency. Fortunately, I haven't had any serious problems with my BellAtlantic Mobile / Verizone Wireless service - based on Hemos' comment it sounds like their wireless support isn't any better than their DSL support.
Are you able to sign up for an US based service like DirectTV? If you can sign up for such a service and select a local line up for the service that is equivalent to one available in the US, then I don't see why the TiVo service wouldn't work for you. The catch is that you may end up having to pay long distance charges if your TiVo's nightly calls can't be made locally, but this would be moot if they were to come out with an ethernet model that you could hook into your LAN (which is when I'll trade in my current TiVo).
Warning: getting a TiVo will fix one of your probs
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I'd love to if I had the cash and watched that much TV...
Having a TiVo has definitely cured me of not watching much TV. I rarely watched TV before I got one, and now I watch something practically every day because it's just so convenient. I try to exercise while I watch, though, so that it doesn't feel like a total waste of time (getting me into the habit of exercising was certainly not one of the side effects I expected).
TiVo unfortunately won't help with cash problems, though. It would have made them worse if you picked up some TiVo stock awhile back like I did. Apart from that, expect to see the price of TiVo units fall a lot this year as hard drives become cheaper and as Sony comes out with their 60(?) hour version which should push down the other price points.
MOST groups on mp3.com aren't very good. There are many good groups on mp3.com, but the time it takes to sort through the absolute crap almost makes it feel worthless.
It may seem like it takes awhile, but I think that it's actually much faster than the alternatives. Before I got into MP3.com finding new music consisted of two options for me. The first was listening to the radio. Considering that radio stations invariably play the same stuff over and over and over again, I found maybe one or two new songs a week that I liked this way. The other method of finding new music that I used was going to the CD store and buying a bunch of CDs from artists that I read about or heard about and I thought I might like. This was slightly more productive than listening to the radio as it might turn up 6 or 7 songs I liked (with a typical purchase of 5 cds), but it was far more expensive.
I propose that using MP3.com is far more efficeint than either using the radio or buying CDs of potentially likeable material. In my first 3 days of using MP3.com this year I discovered nearly 3 hours of music that I really liked. That is much more than I could ever hope to find using the radio and much quicker than wading through a huge pile of CDs. One of the beauties about finding music on MP3.com is that if you don't like something you can skip it and move on to something else, unlike the radio and somewhat unlike purchased CDs where I usually feel compelled to listen to what I've paid for even if I don't like it. I guess having DSL helps a lot with the skipping - it's much harder to skip around when you're connecting via modem. I used to feel the same way as you about MP3.com before I got my DSL.
This one's kind of lame - it just wraps www.slashdot.org in its own frameset so that it can show an ad at the bottom. Whois says it's owned by IDIRECTIONS.COM. Anyway, if you feel like giving them a free ad banner hit see http://www.salshdot.org/.
I run kmfms.com and I've been trough two merchant providers so far. IBill was the first and the worst. I was aghast to encounter some of the bugs in their system that they left unchecked. A particularly nasty bug (no pun inteded) was that my customers would have pornographic items appear in their shopping carts, and that is certainly not what I'm selling. The first time it happened I thought some script kiddie was messing with the system so I yelled at him and yelled at IBill for letting him put things in his cart which I don't sell (IBill would have actually billed him for this too if I hadn't caught it). I reported the bug to IBill and they said they would get right on it, but of course it remained unfixed weeks later (and perhaps still). I felt really bad later when I found out it was totally IBill's fault. I was testing some changes to my website and for the heck of it I tried submitting an order. Lo and behold, what did appear? Pornographic items in my cart! Well, after unsuccessfully trying to deal with IBill's unresponsive support, I dropped them and moved on. For those of you wondering why porn would randomly appear in the shopping carts, I read somewhere that the vast majority of IBill's merchants sell adult products. My guess at what was happening was that their code was so poorly written that different users' sessions got mixed together (perhaps they were generating non-unique cookies for user ids).
Shortly after IBill I switched to Cardservice. I was a lot more impressed with the flexibility of their system right off the bat, and I would still say that is one of their best qualities. The problem that I had with them was that the person who set up my account, Michael Wentzell, did so improperly such that all of my transactions were creditted to a different user's account (funny thing, though, they had no problem deducting the montly fee from the account that was supposed to have been creditted). After a month of not recieving any credits (it was supposed to take around 48 hours after a sale, but I wasn't sure of this) I called Michael Wentzell up to see what was going on. He said that he was sorry about the problem, that he had found it, and it would be fixed within a week. Well, it wasn't fixed. I called him back about two weeks later and he told me the same thing. This game of me calling him and him telling me it was fixed now went on for several months until I got sick of it and went over his head to Cardservice's corporate headquarters. It was an absolute nightmare trying to get them to fix this as they refused to take responsibility for the problem or even help me figure out what the problem was. I kept getting bounced between Cardservice and Authorize.net (Cardservice resells Authorize.net's services) because nobody at either place actually wanted to help me, it seemed. Well, I finally got ahold of somebody at Cardservice who said they could fix the problem and she yelled at me for not reporting the problem right away (apparently, in her mind I was responsible for their salesman's lack of action)! Anyway, that finally got straightened out and I was too sick of dealing with people like this to try switching again. Their service works OK now that it works (it's down sometimes), and at least porn doesn't magically appear in my customers' carts. I don't know what their other salespeople are like, so maybe Michael Wentzell is an anomoly.
Hmmm... I can't help but think that this could end up being a good thing in the long run. If an unfavorable ruling is issued against 2600 they should have a much easier time getting it overturned if they can show that the judge had a conflict of interest and did not step down. This is sort of what Microsoft did long before the current antitrust case when they were sued for bundling IE and Windows. The judge in that case had appointed a special master (Lawrence Lessig) to provide an analysis of the situation. Microsoft argued that the special master was biased based on an email that was inifinitely less convincing than the evidence agains Kaplan, but the judge refused to appoint a different master (largely because Microsoft had been seriously pissing the judge off throughout the trial). Well, Microsoft very quickly got the original ruling thrown out on appeal by pointing out the judge's refusal to appoint an "unbiased" master and they still to this day point to the appelate court's overturning of the decision as the government giving them the stamp of approval for integrating Windows and IE. I can't say that I agree with their reasoning, but if the same thing plays out in the DeCSS case then 2600 is sitting pretty. 2600 should take a lesson from one of the areas in which Microsoft actually performs superbly (i.e., litigation) and fight the current battle so that it looks as absolutely biased as possible in order to expidite the appeals process. Then again, this will only work if the appellate court is unbiased and that may be hoping for too much.
Now I know I'm losing touch with the normal world - the first thing I thought of when you suggested "clients suing websites" was adding a "Sue" button to Mozilla which would send a summons to the owner of the current website when pressed. Then I realized you probably didn't mean HTTP clients. Oh well, at least I didn't think of something totally bizarre like adding a "Shop" button.
I've never used Napster before so maybe I'm missing something, but what's to stop somebody who wants to post a decoy MP3 from hacking their client so that it doesn't report the actual md5sum of the file, but rather the md5sum that other users are expecting? For md5summing to be effective you would need some way of verifying that each client can be trusted. I suppose that once you download a particular file your own client could issue a warning if its sum didn't match up with what it was supposed to be, but then you've wasted the download time already so that's not a huge help.
To clarify my previous post, I was not saying that it is actually illegal to rip a CD for your personal use, just that the RIAA claims it is. I was trying to point out how unreasonable the RIAA has been and how their statements on what is legal are not very credible.
However, duplicating or ripping a CD is perfectly legal. Translating a work, or making archival copies, has never been a violation of copyright.
Not according to the RIAA. I had a link to the page on their website where they explicitly stated this, but they have apparently moved the page and I don't feel like looking for the new location right now. They explicitly stated that ripping a CD that you have paid for is illegal, even if you only use the resulting mp3s for your own personal use. The page was at http://www.riaa.com/tech/tech_ht.htm . Perhaps they took it down because they realized how absolutely psycho this made them look, or maybe they just moved the page and haven't realized that they are pure evil yet.
Well, without an LCD screen to display the text, support for playlists (or ID3 tags) would be pretty much worthless. Wait for the next generation, I suppose.
It's not the lack of support for playlists that bugs me so much as the fact that I can't have any files on the CD other than MP3s. I'm not expecting the MPTrip to be able to utilize these other files, but I would like to have the option of having them available in the event that I have access to a computer. Playlists are just one type of file that I could think of which would be useful to keep on my mp3 cds. I might also want to store videos for a particular band if I were making an mp3 cd compilation of all their albums I own. Or I might want to keep a copy of xmms on the CD so that I wouldn't need to go through the process of downloading it if I ran across a computer that didn't have it. The MPTrip should ideally just ignore files that it doesn't recognize (including playlists for the time being) so that these things would be possible.
According to this page the MPTrip barfs on any files that aren't MP3s. That means you can't have m3u playlists on the disc. I was all ready to buy one of these things until I read this the other week, but then I concluded it would be too much of a hassle when I read this. I probably would have even bought the thing had it been built to just skip non-MP3 files (lack of playlists isn't a huge deal to me), but it dies when it encounters one. I think it would just be inconvenient to have to burn two seperate MP3 cds every time I make one - one for my MPTrip and one for computers I encounter or future mp3 cd players that aren't differently enabled. Arghh... maybe I'll break down and buy one anyway - I just want one so bad.
If it's just some audio that they encode and stick on the back or front of the MP3, how are you going to know which frames contain the ad audio and which contain the audio you want to hear?
Who say's they have to stick it before or after the music? What if they stick it at the beginning or end of the music itself? DJs on the radio will generally talk over the first N seconds of a song until the vocals kick in (or the last N seconds after the vocals have ended), so what's to stop the ad from being played over top of the music in the same way? I must say, I think I would find this easier on the ears than listening to the ads first as I think I could tune out the ads in my head if there were background music to listen to. Nevertheless, I think I'll be sticking with MP3.com for the forseeable future as no audible ads are even better still.
MP3.com's payback for playback model seems to be working well for some artists. MP3.com pays artists based on how often their songs are played. They're basically splitting the ad revenue with the artists which is good for consumers since they're not stuck with paying for something before they know what they're getting. Anyway, some artists have been making several thousand dollars a month off of this which sounds like a much better deal than the traditional music industry as Courtney Love describes it. This payback for playback money is also in addition to other revenue the artist receives from the site such as CD sales (artists get 50% of CD sales through MP3.com, which again is unheard of in the traditional industry).
The way I see this (hopefully) heading is that it will provide artists with the means to financially bootstrap their careers. An artist that posts one or two well received songs written in his or her spare time would receive money which could be used to fund development of much more extensive work. Then if their more extensive work is well received, the artist is in an infinitely better postion than they would have been with a major label (financially, contractually, and artistically). If their work isn't well received, at least they won't be bankrupt as Ms Love described it. So, in all scenerios I think MP3.com's payback for playback system is something which artists should be heavily preferring over traditional labels as the market for internet distributed music continues to grow.
From the users' perspective, the mp3s are free (legally), and you can't get much more favorable than that. So, I think the revenue model definitely works from the user's end - it's just a matter of time for it to be thoroughly tested on the artists' side. I personally prefer hunting around mp3.com for a few hours to find an hour worth of music that I like for free over going to the CD store and buying half a dozen $15 CDs in hopes that they would each have more than one song that I like (which is what I used to do all the time - the RIAA has already lost itself one frequent customer). (Just so I don't seem totally cheap, I've also bought CDs of MP3.com artists which had a large number of songs that I liked because I like supporting them with more than just airplay royalties.)
The main thing i'd like to see done with the TIVO is to add an ethernet card to the thing to make it a node on my home network.... Does anyone know if TIVO has any of the above in the works?
I have been told that they are considering the edition of ethernet support. Please contact them and let them know you are interested in this. I really want this feature too so we need let them know how many of us there are. I plan on upgrading my current 14 hour machine (which I love) whenever they add ethernet support, HDTV support, or support for user expandable storage.
They actually lose money on the hardware
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Even if your Linux box could record the shows, you would still need the programming service to let your computer know what was on. I don't see Tivo offering just the service without the hardware. I believe that they do make a profit off of the hardware, and more importantly, it's much easier to support a standard console then some geek's home brew box running a dev kernel.
TiVo the company provides the services and software to run the TiVo boxes, but they do not build the hardware. They parnter with existing manufacturers to provide the hardware, currently Phillips and Sony and soon AOL, and they in fact subsidize the hardware manufacturing by paying their partners for each TiVo box built. (I own a little TiVo stock if you're wondering how I know this.) So based on their current business model it would seem that they would want to encourage homebrew machines (although your point about supporting systems where they don't have absolute control over the software is something they would need to deal with).
According to ON24's 1pm (EDT) report, the judge overseeing the Napster trial has issued a preliminary injunction to shut down the Napster service.
You're jumping to an incorrect conclusion
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First off, to the other posters who have responded so far, I don't think FreeUser was referring to MP3.com's my.mp3.com service, but rather to the unsigned artists that post music to mp3.com.
What they are saying, basically, is that the mp3's are gratis, but not libre: they want traffic to their web page, so they don't want you sharing music the artists have authorized you to download for free, and presumably therefor to share with your friends.
It is invalid to assume that by posting music to MP3.com the artists have authorized you to redistribute their music, even to your friends. The artists have placed their music on MP3.com with the assurance that only individuals will be authorized to use it for personal use. If they want to grant users broader redistribution rights they are perfectly able to do so because they fully retain the copyright on the music that they post. So while finding music on MP3.com does not by default make it legal to share that music with your friends, the artists are not forced to make sharing illegal as they are with traditional record labels - the artists retain the copyright and can authorize sharing if they so desire (witness the Kosmic Free Music Foundation. I urge you to rethink your condemnation of MP3.com because even though they do not force their artists to authorize sharing, they do not prohibit it.
Battlefield Earth is probably the first time in its life that the Cult of $cientology has engaged in truthful advertising
On that note, the commercials for this movie are hilarious. Have you seen the ones where at the end they proudly echo some reviewer who said that "John Travolta is the new face of evil?" The first time I saw that I thought "New? I thought he's been the mouthpiece of Scientology for years." If anything good has come from this movie it is that quote.
Here's the CNet article on the subject. All I have to say is Wooohooo! I love BeamIt (as well as many of MP3.com's other services) and will be glad to get it back. I also love the fact that their stock has practically doubled in the last few days.
Re:Click-wrap license agreement problem - solved
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Copyrant
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I plead insanity.
Hmmmm... professing a desire to install Windows would probably help back up your insanity plea. I see some potential here.
I understand that if all of the authors of KDE agree to a license which allows it to be linked to QT then KDE itself can be distributed with Debian, but wouldn't QT also need to be distributed for KDE to work at all? And according to the link at the top of this article the current QT release does not meet Debian's open source guidelines (it's the future version that will), so how can QT be distributed? Maybe the links provided in this article are out of date and KDE2 will use the open source QT2 - if so, somebody please clarify this. Otherwise, I don't see how changing the KDE license will made a working version distributable as it looks like the current QT can't be distributed with Debian. (This is not flamebait, I am genuinely curious as to what I missed.)
Slashdot Mirror
How is efm's stability? I'm itching to try it based on your description, but I'm a bit wary about any software (and particularly file managers) with version number 0.0.0. Then again, Enlightenment is still at version 0.16.4 and I use it all the time without problems, so it could easily be that the e people are very conservative in their version assignments. How would you rate efm on stability?
I tried going with Flashcom (which re-sells Covad's service) before BellAtlantic offered their Infospeed service. The problem was that Covad sub-contracted through BellAtlantic to do the initial line work, and BellAtlantic was once again the weak link in the chain. BellAtlantic made some sort of attempt at installing the necessary line related materials, but then they told me that the installation could not be completed as-is (I forget what reasons they gave) and they proceeded to conveniently push back the date of when they could make the "necessary" adjustments until after the date when BellAtlantic's own Infospeed DSL service became available in my area. Well, when Infospeed became available I figured I might as well cut out two layers of sub-contracting by going straight to BellAtlantic and I cancelled my order with Flashcom. Little did I know that I would have such an enormous amount of problems with their service. My service has gone out for an extended period of time at least 3 or 4 times now, they charged me 6 times for my >$100 DSL modem, I have spent literally days (perhaps weeks) on hold all totalled up, and my service has been down for the past week despite my daily calls to tech support. I don't think any of the problems were line problems, so when I move in September I'm definitely going with Covad or Shorenet (or RCN if they have cabel modems in Boston now).
I'm unfamiliar with AirTouch so I can't comment on it's suckiness, but it's hard to imagine anything sucking more than BellAtlantic. I have noticed the customer service on BellAtlantic's Infospeed DSL service actually improve since the merger, but there wasn't really any other direction for it to go. I no longer have to look forward to a 4 hours on hold each day waiting for their tech support (they actually pick up quickly now) like I did for the first _two_ _months_ after installation when my connection was unusable, but then again my service went down again a week ago and they have yet to fix it so it would seem that only their customer service has improved and not their actual technical competency. Fortunately, I haven't had any serious problems with my BellAtlantic Mobile / Verizone Wireless service - based on Hemos' comment it sounds like their wireless support isn't any better than their DSL support.
Are you able to sign up for an US based service like DirectTV? If you can sign up for such a service and select a local line up for the service that is equivalent to one available in the US, then I don't see why the TiVo service wouldn't work for you. The catch is that you may end up having to pay long distance charges if your TiVo's nightly calls can't be made locally, but this would be moot if they were to come out with an ethernet model that you could hook into your LAN (which is when I'll trade in my current TiVo).
Having a TiVo has definitely cured me of not watching much TV. I rarely watched TV before I got one, and now I watch something practically every day because it's just so convenient. I try to exercise while I watch, though, so that it doesn't feel like a total waste of time (getting me into the habit of exercising was certainly not one of the side effects I expected).
TiVo unfortunately won't help with cash problems, though. It would have made them worse if you picked up some TiVo stock awhile back like I did. Apart from that, expect to see the price of TiVo units fall a lot this year as hard drives become cheaper and as Sony comes out with their 60(?) hour version which should push down the other price points.
It may seem like it takes awhile, but I think that it's actually much faster than the alternatives. Before I got into MP3.com finding new music consisted of two options for me. The first was listening to the radio. Considering that radio stations invariably play the same stuff over and over and over again, I found maybe one or two new songs a week that I liked this way. The other method of finding new music that I used was going to the CD store and buying a bunch of CDs from artists that I read about or heard about and I thought I might like. This was slightly more productive than listening to the radio as it might turn up 6 or 7 songs I liked (with a typical purchase of 5 cds), but it was far more expensive.
I propose that using MP3.com is far more efficeint than either using the radio or buying CDs of potentially likeable material. In my first 3 days of using MP3.com this year I discovered nearly 3 hours of music that I really liked. That is much more than I could ever hope to find using the radio and much quicker than wading through a huge pile of CDs. One of the beauties about finding music on MP3.com is that if you don't like something you can skip it and move on to something else, unlike the radio and somewhat unlike purchased CDs where I usually feel compelled to listen to what I've paid for even if I don't like it. I guess having DSL helps a lot with the skipping - it's much harder to skip around when you're connecting via modem. I used to feel the same way as you about MP3.com before I got my DSL.
This one's kind of lame - it just wraps www.slashdot.org in its own frameset so that it can show an ad at the bottom. Whois says it's owned by IDIRECTIONS.COM. Anyway, if you feel like giving them a free ad banner hit see http://www.salshdot.org/.
Shortly after IBill I switched to Cardservice. I was a lot more impressed with the flexibility of their system right off the bat, and I would still say that is one of their best qualities. The problem that I had with them was that the person who set up my account, Michael Wentzell, did so improperly such that all of my transactions were creditted to a different user's account (funny thing, though, they had no problem deducting the montly fee from the account that was supposed to have been creditted). After a month of not recieving any credits (it was supposed to take around 48 hours after a sale, but I wasn't sure of this) I called Michael Wentzell up to see what was going on. He said that he was sorry about the problem, that he had found it, and it would be fixed within a week. Well, it wasn't fixed. I called him back about two weeks later and he told me the same thing. This game of me calling him and him telling me it was fixed now went on for several months until I got sick of it and went over his head to Cardservice's corporate headquarters. It was an absolute nightmare trying to get them to fix this as they refused to take responsibility for the problem or even help me figure out what the problem was. I kept getting bounced between Cardservice and Authorize.net (Cardservice resells Authorize.net's services) because nobody at either place actually wanted to help me, it seemed. Well, I finally got ahold of somebody at Cardservice who said they could fix the problem and she yelled at me for not reporting the problem right away (apparently, in her mind I was responsible for their salesman's lack of action)! Anyway, that finally got straightened out and I was too sick of dealing with people like this to try switching again. Their service works OK now that it works (it's down sometimes), and at least porn doesn't magically appear in my customers' carts. I don't know what their other salespeople are like, so maybe Michael Wentzell is an anomoly.
Hmmm... I can't help but think that this could end up being a good thing in the long run. If an unfavorable ruling is issued against 2600 they should have a much easier time getting it overturned if they can show that the judge had a conflict of interest and did not step down. This is sort of what Microsoft did long before the current antitrust case when they were sued for bundling IE and Windows. The judge in that case had appointed a special master (Lawrence Lessig) to provide an analysis of the situation. Microsoft argued that the special master was biased based on an email that was inifinitely less convincing than the evidence agains Kaplan, but the judge refused to appoint a different master (largely because Microsoft had been seriously pissing the judge off throughout the trial). Well, Microsoft very quickly got the original ruling thrown out on appeal by pointing out the judge's refusal to appoint an "unbiased" master and they still to this day point to the appelate court's overturning of the decision as the government giving them the stamp of approval for integrating Windows and IE. I can't say that I agree with their reasoning, but if the same thing plays out in the DeCSS case then 2600 is sitting pretty. 2600 should take a lesson from one of the areas in which Microsoft actually performs superbly (i.e., litigation) and fight the current battle so that it looks as absolutely biased as possible in order to expidite the appeals process. Then again, this will only work if the appellate court is unbiased and that may be hoping for too much.
Now I know I'm losing touch with the normal world - the first thing I thought of when you suggested "clients suing websites" was adding a "Sue" button to Mozilla which would send a summons to the owner of the current website when pressed. Then I realized you probably didn't mean HTTP clients. Oh well, at least I didn't think of something totally bizarre like adding a "Shop" button.
I've never used Napster before so maybe I'm missing something, but what's to stop somebody who wants to post a decoy MP3 from hacking their client so that it doesn't report the actual md5sum of the file, but rather the md5sum that other users are expecting? For md5summing to be effective you would need some way of verifying that each client can be trusted. I suppose that once you download a particular file your own client could issue a warning if its sum didn't match up with what it was supposed to be, but then you've wasted the download time already so that's not a huge help.
To clarify my previous post, I was not saying that it is actually illegal to rip a CD for your personal use, just that the RIAA claims it is. I was trying to point out how unreasonable the RIAA has been and how their statements on what is legal are not very credible.
Not according to the RIAA. I had a link to the page on their website where they explicitly stated this, but they have apparently moved the page and I don't feel like looking for the new location right now. They explicitly stated that ripping a CD that you have paid for is illegal, even if you only use the resulting mp3s for your own personal use. The page was at http://www.riaa.com/tech/tech_ht.htm . Perhaps they took it down because they realized how absolutely psycho this made them look, or maybe they just moved the page and haven't realized that they are pure evil yet.
It's not the lack of support for playlists that bugs me so much as the fact that I can't have any files on the CD other than MP3s. I'm not expecting the MPTrip to be able to utilize these other files, but I would like to have the option of having them available in the event that I have access to a computer. Playlists are just one type of file that I could think of which would be useful to keep on my mp3 cds. I might also want to store videos for a particular band if I were making an mp3 cd compilation of all their albums I own. Or I might want to keep a copy of xmms on the CD so that I wouldn't need to go through the process of downloading it if I ran across a computer that didn't have it. The MPTrip should ideally just ignore files that it doesn't recognize (including playlists for the time being) so that these things would be possible.
According to this page the MPTrip barfs on any files that aren't MP3s. That means you can't have m3u playlists on the disc. I was all ready to buy one of these things until I read this the other week, but then I concluded it would be too much of a hassle when I read this. I probably would have even bought the thing had it been built to just skip non-MP3 files (lack of playlists isn't a huge deal to me), but it dies when it encounters one. I think it would just be inconvenient to have to burn two seperate MP3 cds every time I make one - one for my MPTrip and one for computers I encounter or future mp3 cd players that aren't differently enabled. Arghh... maybe I'll break down and buy one anyway - I just want one so bad.
Who say's they have to stick it before or after the music? What if they stick it at the beginning or end of the music itself? DJs on the radio will generally talk over the first N seconds of a song until the vocals kick in (or the last N seconds after the vocals have ended), so what's to stop the ad from being played over top of the music in the same way? I must say, I think I would find this easier on the ears than listening to the ads first as I think I could tune out the ads in my head if there were background music to listen to. Nevertheless, I think I'll be sticking with MP3.com for the forseeable future as no audible ads are even better still.
MP3.com's payback for playback model seems to be working well for some artists. MP3.com pays artists based on how often their songs are played. They're basically splitting the ad revenue with the artists which is good for consumers since they're not stuck with paying for something before they know what they're getting. Anyway, some artists have been making several thousand dollars a month off of this which sounds like a much better deal than the traditional music industry as Courtney Love describes it. This payback for playback money is also in addition to other revenue the artist receives from the site such as CD sales (artists get 50% of CD sales through MP3.com, which again is unheard of in the traditional industry).
The way I see this (hopefully) heading is that it will provide artists with the means to financially bootstrap their careers. An artist that posts one or two well received songs written in his or her spare time would receive money which could be used to fund development of much more extensive work. Then if their more extensive work is well received, the artist is in an infinitely better postion than they would have been with a major label (financially, contractually, and artistically). If their work isn't well received, at least they won't be bankrupt as Ms Love described it. So, in all scenerios I think MP3.com's payback for playback system is something which artists should be heavily preferring over traditional labels as the market for internet distributed music continues to grow.
From the users' perspective, the mp3s are free (legally), and you can't get much more favorable than that. So, I think the revenue model definitely works from the user's end - it's just a matter of time for it to be thoroughly tested on the artists' side. I personally prefer hunting around mp3.com for a few hours to find an hour worth of music that I like for free over going to the CD store and buying half a dozen $15 CDs in hopes that they would each have more than one song that I like (which is what I used to do all the time - the RIAA has already lost itself one frequent customer). (Just so I don't seem totally cheap, I've also bought CDs of MP3.com artists which had a large number of songs that I liked because I like supporting them with more than just airplay royalties.)
I have been told that they are considering the edition of ethernet support. Please contact them and let them know you are interested in this. I really want this feature too so we need let them know how many of us there are. I plan on upgrading my current 14 hour machine (which I love) whenever they add ethernet support, HDTV support, or support for user expandable storage.
TiVo the company provides the services and software to run the TiVo boxes, but they do not build the hardware. They parnter with existing manufacturers to provide the hardware, currently Phillips and Sony and soon AOL, and they in fact subsidize the hardware manufacturing by paying their partners for each TiVo box built. (I own a little TiVo stock if you're wondering how I know this.) So based on their current business model it would seem that they would want to encourage homebrew machines (although your point about supporting systems where they don't have absolute control over the software is something they would need to deal with).
According to ON24's 1pm (EDT) report, the judge overseeing the Napster trial has issued a preliminary injunction to shut down the Napster service.
What they are saying, basically, is that the mp3's are gratis, but not libre: they want traffic to their web page, so they don't want you sharing music the artists have authorized you to download for free, and presumably therefor to share with your friends.
It is invalid to assume that by posting music to MP3.com the artists have authorized you to redistribute their music, even to your friends. The artists have placed their music on MP3.com with the assurance that only individuals will be authorized to use it for personal use. If they want to grant users broader redistribution rights they are perfectly able to do so because they fully retain the copyright on the music that they post. So while finding music on MP3.com does not by default make it legal to share that music with your friends, the artists are not forced to make sharing illegal as they are with traditional record labels - the artists retain the copyright and can authorize sharing if they so desire (witness the Kosmic Free Music Foundation. I urge you to rethink your condemnation of MP3.com because even though they do not force their artists to authorize sharing, they do not prohibit it.
On that note, the commercials for this movie are hilarious. Have you seen the ones where at the end they proudly echo some reviewer who said that "John Travolta is the new face of evil?" The first time I saw that I thought "New? I thought he's been the mouthpiece of Scientology for years." If anything good has come from this movie it is that quote.
Here's the CNet article on the subject. All I have to say is Wooohooo! I love BeamIt (as well as many of MP3.com's other services) and will be glad to get it back. I also love the fact that their stock has practically doubled in the last few days.
Hmmmm... professing a desire to install Windows would probably help back up your insanity plea. I see some potential here.
I understand that if all of the authors of KDE agree to a license which allows it to be linked to QT then KDE itself can be distributed with Debian, but wouldn't QT also need to be distributed for KDE to work at all? And according to the link at the top of this article the current QT release does not meet Debian's open source guidelines (it's the future version that will), so how can QT be distributed? Maybe the links provided in this article are out of date and KDE2 will use the open source QT2 - if so, somebody please clarify this. Otherwise, I don't see how changing the KDE license will made a working version distributable as it looks like the current QT can't be distributed with Debian. (This is not flamebait, I am genuinely curious as to what I missed.)