I was in middle school I think. my 486 with a (gasp!) on-chip floating point processor. I didn't have sound though so I missed out on all the nazi speak
You have to go for the Asus Deluxe line of cards(they make the same cards in multiple versions, Deluxe has a crappy TV tuner and digital VCR) or for an ATI All-in-Wonder line. The ATI has by far the best multimedia suite, it's tv-guide-like recording of shows and on-board mpeg-2 encoding kick-ass. the program is still a little slow and buggy, but incredible nonetheless.
honestly though, I say save 50-100$ on the video card, and buy the tv-card seperate. that way a) save money on the video card b)no need to keep buying the 50-100$ extra card every year, since the capture card will still work just as well.
As for Linux compatibility, I've heard mixed reports about all the Asus Deluxe and the ATI All In Wonders, so you'll have to search around online and take a guess.
that's a flat-out lie. I have a 1.0gigaherz processor and Geforce2 and still have to run DeusEx and Max Payne in 800x600, and Deus Ex is on the 10$ game rack at Wal-Mart. I don't know what the hell tough corner you're talking about, but if you want to keep playing Quake2 in 16-bit color so you can brag about your frame rates to your buddies, go right ahead.
I think my friends are valuable, and they make my life better.
Does that mean I should be paying ridiculous amounts of money for them?
What, you don't pay money for your friends? If your friends have no value to you, I guess that's understandable.
PS: this thought is copyrighted, by reading it you have agreed to pay for 20$ for it. By the terms of the EULA, you are also homosexual. Reading this agreement implied acceptance. If you did not agree you should not have read it.
Yes, Counter-strike is a first person shooter, not one of those big overhead games. But it has more strategy than most games, and I think this is why it's so popular. Find a good team on a public server, or find a good clan, and you'll see real strategy. working together to accomplish your goal. Working together with a team is a heck of a lot of fun.
We have had
1) Unreasonable laws that make every citizen a criminal
for quite some time. How many people in the US aren't violating some law? Probably none. there are so many laws, and so many are poorly and vaguely worded, and so many laws against "victimless" crimes, that just about everyone in America is a criminal. Fortunately, the police had no means to prove that we were breaking these BS laws. Until now:
2) Police can now search your house whenever they feel like it, without a warrant, and without even letting you know that your house was searched. So now police can search with wreckless abandon to find the people committing these victimless crimes in the privacy of their own home. Plus violate the privacy of the few people who AREN'T breaking any of the insane laws.
Another thing to worry about: What happens when a God-fearing second-amendment loving gun owner is in his home when the Secret Police try to come in to perform a search without a warrant? The Secret Police officer gets shot, his partner shoots the god-fearing US citizen, we now have two dead people and NO CRIME COMMITTED. What the fuck is up with this?
This isn't at all comparable to AOL with its Instant Messaging client. The WWW started as a standardized and open environment, which Microsoft is now trying to claim as its own. AOL, on the other hand, has always been a proprietary platform. Which is also somewhat necessary seeing as they're paying for the servers.
Also, AOL has always been a choice. I said "no" to that choice some time ago. On the other hand, Microsoft is doing everything they can to use their monopoly to force the average user to cough up money, and also to prevent the average user from making a decision to go to another platform. How long do you think it'll be before Microsoft starts using veto power over programs made for XP, to prevent anyone from competing on their operating system? Then how long before they have IE check SERVERS so that you can only view content running on Microsoft servers?
This is just the first step here...
The riovolt has upgradable codecs, and is (imo) the best cd-mp3 player out there even despite that fact. Go to rio, http://www.rio.com and send them some e-mail begging for an ogg upgrade. I have one of the first generation mp3-cd players, but as soon as the Riovolt supports ogg, I'm buying one, and re-ripping my cds into ogg.
One of the biggest reasons I don't use linux all that much is the quality of programs for doing my everyday things. High on that list is listening to mp3s/oggs. I tried both freeamp and xmms, and while I thought they were decent, both seemed to be trying their damndest to copy winamp, and failing. Both had many quirks that annoy the hell out of me. For instance on XMMS you have to hold down the mouse button to navigate the right-click and options menus. The add-files in xmms is extremely clunky too. I can't even read half the names of my songs because of it.
WINAMP being ported to Linux is a GOOD THING. It is definetly the best media player. Even if it wasn't, with 99% of windows people using Winamp, seeing the software they use ported to linux is a great way to convince them to get off Windows.
If anyone wants to stick to XMMS or Freeamp because of their religious open source ideals, regardless of player quality, go right ahead. I'll be using winamp as soon as it's out of beta for linux.
What do you mean by that? How could a digital music player work like Tivo? Your ripped cds don't have commercials, and don't need to be saved so you can listen to them later. What feature of tivo could be applied to music player like winamp to make the controls better?
I bought a Western Digital 80gig 7200rpm drive, and it started having problems the week I brought it home.
This was a major hassle for me, since I was building a new computer, and couldn't pinpoint the random problems on one part for some time. Add in to that some bad RAM(how much bad RAM does everyone end up with?), a video card getting fried in a storm, and an Asus Geforce2 Deluxe that SAYS it works under Windows2000, but the primary feature of the card(the digital VCR) doesn't, and the store refused to give me a refund.
Nothing funner than building a new computer, eh boys?
A nice family-run place nearby figured out the RAM and video card were bad for me. I returned the video card for a replacement and bought new RAM. Then the hard drive got RMA'd back to Western Digital with a replacement coming in a timely manner, with their nifty ability to get the new hard drive BEFORE sending back the old one(so I could copy my data over).
To get my comp working I also had to upgrade drivers, flash bioses, install AGP patches for the motherboard, and install several hundred megs of patches to Windows 2000, all of which caused various problems while I was trying to trouble-shoot which and whether my hardware was broken.
It should be easy to see if hardware is broken--everything else works, so the thing that doesn't is broken. right? Nowadays nothing works right, even when its working at its best. It's near impossible to tell if your hardware is bum, or if you just have some unlucky combination of hardware and software and need to wait patiently for a patch to come out and make things work correctly.
Computer parts are becoming incredibly unreliable. Putting together this latest 1ghz machine was more hell than every other machine i've built put together. What can we as consumers do to stop this? Why is there no pressure on companies to put out reliable products that work out of the box?
If I drove my car into McDonald's and the exit moved every time I drove towards it, it would be called Kidnapping, or something similar. But it's perfectly legal for some assholes to trap you on their web site? I hope the government takes this opportunity to give legally give us back control of our own computers.
Minidiscs are not cool. They are not versatile, and I wouldn't even consider them portable compared to what I use. I much prefer the option of having all of my music on my hard drive(80gigs of storage) with the ability to burn any 700mb of that to a CD-RW to be played in my portable-digital-music-player.
Right now I do this with MP3s. I have 7gigs of MY personal cds ripped to my home computer. I *never* have to dig through 100+ CDs to switch albums, and I can mix songs and albums in Winamp as quick as I can think of the the song I added to the playlist. Currently I also have my entire cd collection burned to cds in mp3 format. Down from 120-some cds to 11 cds. ALL of my 120+ albums of music, a mp3-cd player, AC adapter, car-adapters, and extra batteriess, all fit in one easily-portable cd carrier.
Minidisc makes a lot of this impossible.
" I know I can't transfer the files off the minidisc, but we're really not supposed to be doing that too much anyhow, right?:)"
The fuck with what we're "supposed" to be doing. I have fair use rights to do whatever I want with the things I buy. I'll never buy music I can't store on my hard drive and make unlimited copies of for my own un-corporate-regulated purpose. You may say that's irrelevent since you're putting music onto your minidisc off of rippable cds, but if minidisc caught on, you'd be buying albums on minidiscs, and BAM, suddenly you can't do a thing with it. (besides analog ripping, which is unsatisfactory)
CDs aren't just more useful, they're a hell of a lot cheaper to use for digital audio than Sony's proprietary minidisc BS.
"minidiscs cost about $2 each"
Why the hell would anyone pay 2$ for 300minutes of storage, when you can get CDs that hold more than twice that for 33 cents each and cheaper?
And then be forced to only use it with Sony's proprietary players, and barred from doing anything with that music that Sony doesn't want you to?
Right now I'm just waiting for.ogg to hit 1.0 so I can re-rip my cds, get a Riovolt(once they have an ogg codec), and never use propriatary media formats ever again.
It's probably realplayer. I keep Mozilla open all the time, and am always surfing with 6+ windows open at a time. no problems here. but I also use basically no plugins, no flash, no realplayer, etc. If I want to watch streaming video I keep it in a seperate program, so it doesn't crash my browsers when those buggy things go down.
I have always preferred ICQ's "numbered users" scheme over AIM and e-mail having names. With ICQ you can always change your handle without getting and telling everyone a new number/name to reach you at. I've had so many e-mail address in the past 6 years--probably 3 or 4 per year, because I'm always changing ISPs. What I wouldn't give to have had a universal number this whole time, which I could forward to my mailbox at my current ISP.
The one thing, and people have mentioned this higher up, is preventing spam. My suggestion would be to require you to "authorize" other users to contact you. Once we all have PDAs this might be practical. You could also have a "request" sort of thing, like ICQ has...but then you would likely get inundated with "Request for authorization from: teensex00124134 free teen sex at www.teensex.com" sort of authorization messages. maybe if the requests would only show the number&name of the person/organization, rather than a spammable text message...
Sorry man, but they even had the freakin' Asbury Park Press in the convenience store in Clerks. That's just a couple miles from where my parents grew up in NEW JERSEY.
While I suppose they could have brought a stack of newspapers to MN to film it, they could have just as easily brought license plates from MN to NJ. I'm inclined to trust the director...
I know I keep my room as dark as possible (glare sucks on monitor screen, especially for extremely dark games like Quake), many of my friends listen to repetitive techno, and pill-popping is pretty popular (say that 5 times fast)...
Follow this link to Rio's web page and e-mail them requesting support for Ogg Vorbis. Personally this is the only thing holding me back from buying a compressed-audio cd player. The first one that comes out supporting.ogg will have me reripping all of my CDs into the supreme.ogg format and purchasing their player, regardless of cost.
Rio,
I'm interested in buying a cd-mp3 player. I think this would be a GREAT way to backup all my cds, as well as make them easier(and funner!) to listen to. I could fit my 100cds on around 10 cds. That's awesome.
There is only one thing holding me back.
MP3 is an aged format, and also requires that related software pay royalties to Frauenhoffer for the mp3 patents. Same with "mp3pro" or whatever their next mp3 is.
Ogg Vorbis is a free codec which isn't blocked by any patents whatsoever. It also sounds better than mp3, AND takes up less space. I will be ripping all of my cds into.ogg format as soon as their encoder reaches 1.0 (which will be soon).
I noticed that the Roivolt has upgradable codecs.
If an upgrade is released for the Roivolt to play Ogg Vorbis, the Roivolt will win the hearts of audiophiles and geeks all over.
Thanks!:)
we've all spent money that goes to Frauenhoffer for their mp3 patent. AND we've all suffered the software quality problems from encoders not being freely available because of the patent issue.
With.ogg anyone can work on it any which way. No more getting sued by The Man.
Any half-decent cd-ripper will let you tell it what encoder to use. CDEX is my personal favorite, and has a very simple drop down box to choose between LAME, Blade, OGG, and many others. then all you do is rip, and it puts it in whatever format you told it to.
He should go free because reverse engineering is necessary for the advancement of society and technology, especially in a country such as the United States of America where copyrights and patents have become so odious that they serve to promote only suing rather than actually improving products.
Why improve your product if you can just sue everyone who competes?
MORE IMPORTANTLY it is important for us as consumers to retain the rights to the information we create and purchase. It is unreasonable to prevent(via DMCA) the ability of consumers to backup their files, convert purchased media to improved and more versatile formats(eg: cd-audio to mp3), and to create their own media and media players without paying exorbinant licensing fees(DVD encryption) or being restricted from playing media with they legitimately purchased(DVD regions).
This is getting disgusting. Free Sklyarov and keep America in the hands of the CITIZENS not the CORPORATIONS!
I would only purchase a distribution for the work environment. In which case I would probably buy 2 or 3 copies(~150$) for the server(s), and then replicate freely across hundreds of corporate users. Think of paying Windows licensing per workstation vs using Linux? even if you pay for the distro, you're saving a SH**LOAD of money(and/or legal expenses getting sued by MS for pirating).
As far as home users, my friends and I have all paid for one or two distribution copies. At 30-50$ we'll say we spend 100$ total on linux. Ever.
Meanwhile with Microsoft, we all have probably twice as many licenses as we do computers, seeing how they come with everything but Color TVs. So while I'm using Windows on a single PC at home, I've paid Microsoft upwards of 500$ for that single license.
That's not even mentioning the support fees. I have tried many times to get tech support from Microsoft, and its fscking impossible! And if you do get through? They charge you for it. Nevermind that I just spend >100$ on a crappy OS, but now I get to spend money just to get it working. According to this presentation I ran into today, this guy at a corporation was spending thousands of dollars in tech support to Microsoft, trying to get them to fix the instability of THEIR OWN PRODUCT! Is that f*cked up or what?
http://citv.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.html
Between friends, Linux User Groups(LUGs), and your own bandwidth, Linux is free. Tech support? More for free online(and more helpful users) than you can find for Microsoft Windows.
So your answer? We spend less on Linux. *FAR* less.
OK, so Here's the situation:
The music companies are introducing errors into their music intentionally, to be jackasses.
The point, is to prevent people from listening to the music they buy.
If anyone makes software which averts this, they will be summarily raped under the DMCA.
SO, does this mean that the error correction on cd-audio players is now a "circumvention device"?
Any music player which avoids the intentionally introduced errors(through error-correction) is liable under the DMCA?
Of course, you can bet that The Monopoly will selectively apply the law only where they feel like it. I'd say at least 50% of US laws would die a screaming death if they were actually enforced consistently.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in middle school I think. my 486 with a (gasp!) on-chip floating point processor. I didn't have sound though so I missed out on all the nazi speak
You have to go for the Asus Deluxe line of cards(they make the same cards in multiple versions, Deluxe has a crappy TV tuner and digital VCR) or for an ATI All-in-Wonder line. The ATI has by far the best multimedia suite, it's tv-guide-like recording of shows and on-board mpeg-2 encoding kick-ass. the program is still a little slow and buggy, but incredible nonetheless.
honestly though, I say save 50-100$ on the video card, and buy the tv-card seperate. that way a) save money on the video card b)no need to keep buying the 50-100$ extra card every year, since the capture card will still work just as well.
As for Linux compatibility, I've heard mixed reports about all the Asus Deluxe and the ATI All In Wonders, so you'll have to search around online and take a guess.
that's a flat-out lie. I have a 1.0gigaherz processor and Geforce2 and still have to run DeusEx and Max Payne in 800x600, and Deus Ex is on the 10$ game rack at Wal-Mart. I don't know what the hell tough corner you're talking about, but if you want to keep playing Quake2 in 16-bit color so you can brag about your frame rates to your buddies, go right ahead.
I think my friends are valuable, and they make my life better.
Does that mean I should be paying ridiculous amounts of money for them?
What, you don't pay money for your friends? If your friends have no value to you, I guess that's understandable.
PS: this thought is copyrighted, by reading it you have agreed to pay for 20$ for it. By the terms of the EULA, you are also homosexual. Reading this agreement implied acceptance. If you did not agree you should not have read it.
Yes, Counter-strike is a first person shooter, not one of those big overhead games. But it has more strategy than most games, and I think this is why it's so popular. Find a good team on a public server, or find a good clan, and you'll see real strategy. working together to accomplish your goal. Working together with a team is a heck of a lot of fun.
We have had
1) Unreasonable laws that make every citizen a criminal
for quite some time. How many people in the US aren't violating some law? Probably none. there are so many laws, and so many are poorly and vaguely worded, and so many laws against "victimless" crimes, that just about everyone in America is a criminal. Fortunately, the police had no means to prove that we were breaking these BS laws. Until now:
2) Police can now search your house whenever they feel like it, without a warrant, and without even letting you know that your house was searched. So now police can search with wreckless abandon to find the people committing these victimless crimes in the privacy of their own home. Plus violate the privacy of the few people who AREN'T breaking any of the insane laws.
Another thing to worry about: What happens when a God-fearing second-amendment loving gun owner is in his home when the Secret Police try to come in to perform a search without a warrant? The Secret Police officer gets shot, his partner shoots the god-fearing US citizen, we now have two dead people and NO CRIME COMMITTED. What the fuck is up with this?
Does IE really identify itself as Mozilla? I don't understand why it would do that
This isn't at all comparable to AOL with its Instant Messaging client. The WWW started as a standardized and open environment, which Microsoft is now trying to claim as its own. AOL, on the other hand, has always been a proprietary platform. Which is also somewhat necessary seeing as they're paying for the servers.
Also, AOL has always been a choice. I said "no" to that choice some time ago. On the other hand, Microsoft is doing everything they can to use their monopoly to force the average user to cough up money, and also to prevent the average user from making a decision to go to another platform. How long do you think it'll be before Microsoft starts using veto power over programs made for XP, to prevent anyone from competing on their operating system? Then how long before they have IE check SERVERS so that you can only view content running on Microsoft servers?
This is just the first step here...
The riovolt has upgradable codecs, and is (imo) the best cd-mp3 player out there even despite that fact. Go to rio, http://www.rio.com and send them some e-mail begging for an ogg upgrade. I have one of the first generation mp3-cd players, but as soon as the Riovolt supports ogg, I'm buying one, and re-ripping my cds into ogg.
One of the biggest reasons I don't use linux all that much is the quality of programs for doing my everyday things. High on that list is listening to mp3s/oggs. I tried both freeamp and xmms, and while I thought they were decent, both seemed to be trying their damndest to copy winamp, and failing. Both had many quirks that annoy the hell out of me. For instance on XMMS you have to hold down the mouse button to navigate the right-click and options menus. The add-files in xmms is extremely clunky too. I can't even read half the names of my songs because of it.
WINAMP being ported to Linux is a GOOD THING. It is definetly the best media player. Even if it wasn't, with 99% of windows people using Winamp, seeing the software they use ported to linux is a great way to convince them to get off Windows.
If anyone wants to stick to XMMS or Freeamp because of their religious open source ideals, regardless of player quality, go right ahead. I'll be using winamp as soon as it's out of beta for linux.
What do you mean by that? How could a digital music player work like Tivo? Your ripped cds don't have commercials, and don't need to be saved so you can listen to them later. What feature of tivo could be applied to music player like winamp to make the controls better?
I bought a Western Digital 80gig 7200rpm drive, and it started having problems the week I brought it home.
This was a major hassle for me, since I was building a new computer, and couldn't pinpoint the random problems on one part for some time. Add in to that some bad RAM(how much bad RAM does everyone end up with?), a video card getting fried in a storm, and an Asus Geforce2 Deluxe that SAYS it works under Windows2000, but the primary feature of the card(the digital VCR) doesn't, and the store refused to give me a refund.
Nothing funner than building a new computer, eh boys?
A nice family-run place nearby figured out the RAM and video card were bad for me. I returned the video card for a replacement and bought new RAM. Then the hard drive got RMA'd back to Western Digital with a replacement coming in a timely manner, with their nifty ability to get the new hard drive BEFORE sending back the old one(so I could copy my data over).
To get my comp working I also had to upgrade drivers, flash bioses, install AGP patches for the motherboard, and install several hundred megs of patches to Windows 2000, all of which caused various problems while I was trying to trouble-shoot which and whether my hardware was broken.
It should be easy to see if hardware is broken--everything else works, so the thing that doesn't is broken. right? Nowadays nothing works right, even when its working at its best. It's near impossible to tell if your hardware is bum, or if you just have some unlucky combination of hardware and software and need to wait patiently for a patch to come out and make things work correctly.
Computer parts are becoming incredibly unreliable. Putting together this latest 1ghz machine was more hell than every other machine i've built put together. What can we as consumers do to stop this? Why is there no pressure on companies to put out reliable products that work out of the box?
If I drove my car into McDonald's and the exit moved every time I drove towards it, it would be called Kidnapping, or something similar. But it's perfectly legal for some assholes to trap you on their web site? I hope the government takes this opportunity to give legally give us back control of our own computers.
Minidiscs are not cool. They are not versatile, and I wouldn't even consider them portable compared to what I use. I much prefer the option of having all of my music on my hard drive(80gigs of storage) with the ability to burn any 700mb of that to a CD-RW to be played in my portable-digital-music-player.
:)"
.ogg to hit 1.0 so I can re-rip my cds, get a Riovolt(once they have an ogg codec), and never use propriatary media formats ever again.
Right now I do this with MP3s. I have 7gigs of MY personal cds ripped to my home computer. I *never* have to dig through 100+ CDs to switch albums, and I can mix songs and albums in Winamp as quick as I can think of the the song I added to the playlist. Currently I also have my entire cd collection burned to cds in mp3 format. Down from 120-some cds to 11 cds. ALL of my 120+ albums of music, a mp3-cd player, AC adapter, car-adapters, and extra batteriess, all fit in one easily-portable cd carrier.
Minidisc makes a lot of this impossible.
" I know I can't transfer the files off the minidisc, but we're really not supposed to be doing that too much anyhow, right?
The fuck with what we're "supposed" to be doing. I have fair use rights to do whatever I want with the things I buy. I'll never buy music I can't store on my hard drive and make unlimited copies of for my own un-corporate-regulated purpose. You may say that's irrelevent since you're putting music onto your minidisc off of rippable cds, but if minidisc caught on, you'd be buying albums on minidiscs, and BAM, suddenly you can't do a thing with it. (besides analog ripping, which is unsatisfactory)
CDs aren't just more useful, they're a hell of a lot cheaper to use for digital audio than Sony's proprietary minidisc BS.
"minidiscs cost about $2 each"
Why the hell would anyone pay 2$ for 300minutes of storage, when you can get CDs that hold more than twice that for 33 cents each and cheaper?
And then be forced to only use it with Sony's proprietary players, and barred from doing anything with that music that Sony doesn't want you to?
Right now I'm just waiting for
It's probably realplayer. I keep Mozilla open all the time, and am always surfing with 6+ windows open at a time. no problems here. but I also use basically no plugins, no flash, no realplayer, etc. If I want to watch streaming video I keep it in a seperate program, so it doesn't crash my browsers when those buggy things go down.
I have always preferred ICQ's "numbered users" scheme over AIM and e-mail having names. With ICQ you can always change your handle without getting and telling everyone a new number/name to reach you at. I've had so many e-mail address in the past 6 years--probably 3 or 4 per year, because I'm always changing ISPs. What I wouldn't give to have had a universal number this whole time, which I could forward to my mailbox at my current ISP.
The one thing, and people have mentioned this higher up, is preventing spam. My suggestion would be to require you to "authorize" other users to contact you. Once we all have PDAs this might be practical. You could also have a "request" sort of thing, like ICQ has...but then you would likely get inundated with "Request for authorization from: teensex00124134 free teen sex at www.teensex.com" sort of authorization messages. maybe if the requests would only show the number&name of the person/organization, rather than a spammable text message...
Sorry man, but they even had the freakin' Asbury Park Press in the convenience store in Clerks. That's just a couple miles from where my parents grew up in NEW JERSEY.
While I suppose they could have brought a stack of newspapers to MN to film it, they could have just as easily brought license plates from MN to NJ. I'm inclined to trust the director...
my thoughts exactly!
I know I keep my room as dark as possible (glare sucks on monitor screen, especially for extremely dark games like Quake), many of my friends listen to repetitive techno, and pill-popping is pretty popular (say that 5 times fast)...
Follow this link to Rio's web page and e-mail them requesting support for Ogg Vorbis. Personally this is the only thing holding me back from buying a compressed-audio cd player. The first one that comes out supporting .ogg will have me reripping all of my CDs into the supreme .ogg format and purchasing their player, regardless of cost.
u bmenu=cs&item=cs_email-form&detail=other .ogg files. Below is the text that I sent to them.
With portable support for .ogg, I think it has a great chance of overtaking mp3.
.ogg format as soon as their encoder reaches 1.0 (which will be soon).
I noticed that the Roivolt has upgradable codecs.
If an upgrade is released for the Roivolt to play Ogg Vorbis, the Roivolt will win the hearts of audiophiles and geeks all over. :)
http://www.riohome.com/default.asp?menu=support&s
That is a link to e-mail Rio requesting that they release an upgrade to their Roivolt to playback
Rio,
I'm interested in buying a cd-mp3 player. I think this would be a GREAT way to backup all my cds, as well as make them easier(and funner!) to listen to. I could fit my 100cds on around 10 cds. That's awesome.
There is only one thing holding me back. MP3 is an aged format, and also requires that related software pay royalties to Frauenhoffer for the mp3 patents. Same with "mp3pro" or whatever their next mp3 is.
Ogg Vorbis is a free codec which isn't blocked by any patents whatsoever. It also sounds better than mp3, AND takes up less space. I will be ripping all of my cds into
Thanks!
we've all spent money that goes to Frauenhoffer for their mp3 patent. AND we've all suffered the software quality problems from encoders not being freely available because of the patent issue. .ogg anyone can work on it any which way. No more getting sued by The Man.
With
Any half-decent cd-ripper will let you tell it what encoder to use. CDEX is my personal favorite, and has a very simple drop down box to choose between LAME, Blade, OGG, and many others. then all you do is rip, and it puts it in whatever format you told it to.
He should go free because reverse engineering is necessary for the advancement of society and technology, especially in a country such as the United States of America where copyrights and patents have become so odious that they serve to promote only suing rather than actually improving products.
Why improve your product if you can just sue everyone who competes?
MORE IMPORTANTLY it is important for us as consumers to retain the rights to the information we create and purchase. It is unreasonable to prevent(via DMCA) the ability of consumers to backup their files, convert purchased media to improved and more versatile formats(eg: cd-audio to mp3), and to create their own media and media players without paying exorbinant licensing fees(DVD encryption) or being restricted from playing media with they legitimately purchased(DVD regions).
This is getting disgusting. Free Sklyarov and keep America in the hands of the CITIZENS not the CORPORATIONS!
I would only purchase a distribution for the work environment. In which case I would probably buy 2 or 3 copies(~150$) for the server(s), and then replicate freely across hundreds of corporate users. Think of paying Windows licensing per workstation vs using Linux? even if you pay for the distro, you're saving a SH**LOAD of money(and/or legal expenses getting sued by MS for pirating).
l
As far as home users, my friends and I have all paid for one or two distribution copies. At 30-50$ we'll say we spend 100$ total on linux. Ever.
Meanwhile with Microsoft, we all have probably twice as many licenses as we do computers, seeing how they come with everything but Color TVs. So while I'm using Windows on a single PC at home, I've paid Microsoft upwards of 500$ for that single license.
That's not even mentioning the support fees. I have tried many times to get tech support from Microsoft, and its fscking impossible! And if you do get through? They charge you for it. Nevermind that I just spend >100$ on a crappy OS, but now I get to spend money just to get it working. According to this presentation I ran into today, this guy at a corporation was spending thousands of dollars in tech support to Microsoft, trying to get them to fix the instability of THEIR OWN PRODUCT! Is that f*cked up or what?
http://citv.unl.edu/linux/LinuxPresentation.htm
Between friends, Linux User Groups(LUGs), and your own bandwidth, Linux is free. Tech support? More for free online(and more helpful users) than you can find for Microsoft Windows.
So your answer? We spend less on Linux. *FAR* less.
OK, so Here's the situation:
The music companies are introducing errors into their music intentionally, to be jackasses.
The point, is to prevent people from listening to the music they buy.
If anyone makes software which averts this, they will be summarily raped under the DMCA.
SO, does this mean that the error correction on cd-audio players is now a "circumvention device"?
Any music player which avoids the intentionally introduced errors(through error-correction) is liable under the DMCA?
Of course, you can bet that The Monopoly will selectively apply the law only where they feel like it. I'd say at least 50% of US laws would die a screaming death if they were actually enforced consistently.