'PlaysForSure' is now abandonware, and as such, the usual websites will pick up on it and abandonware enthusiasts will start 'PlaysForSure' hardware, software, and media files back and forth.
That's the only sense I can make of this. It's cool, in the same way that using an ancient Cassiopeia PDA with the first version of WindowsCE on it is cool. Sorta. I guess.
Yes, but any iPod enthusiast will tell you that it's a very gentle DRM. You can burn it to a CD, then rip the CD to a.wav file, and play the.wav file back through an old 8-bit sound blaster card on a Windows 3.1 system to the line input on a cassette deck. Then play the cassette back into your Mac II's sound input to record an.aiff file and from there encode it to MP3. Alternatively, if your SparcStation 10 is one of the rare ones with the sound options, you can record to.au instead.
At least when you by an Apple DRM'd file you know it will still work on your older players.
Also, you know that for the indefinite future, you'll be running MacOS or 'doze on at least one machine, with iTunes, in order to transfer said DRM'd file.
Maybe the solution is telling a lot of Americans that they can expect to earn approx. the same amount as workers in China for equivalent work. That would level out the labor market and take away the advantage from building stuff all the way around the world, then using 'greenhouse depleting' methods to ship it here. Perhaps it's just another instance of greedy lazy Americans.
Oops, but that would 'split' the coalition of Union Bosses and Environmentalists who rally under the 'progressive' banner.
I'll have to say that it's ultimately "not our fault."
Your version of history has some merit, but it's not the complete story. Streetcar lines were unpopular once a certain percentage of the traffic was automobile traffic. They were always in the fricking way. Static 'rail' lines have that problem in mixed traffic. And people like their freedom to come and go with cars.
For a long time I was an inner-city enthusiast and happy to not own a car and get around on public transit. Now, I'm sorta burned out on living all bunched in a crowded space. I like walking out to my small orchard of apple trees. I didn't 'sell out' to get my present circumstances, mind you. I just moved outta the city to an area of the country where the money from my two-bedroom attached townhouse (a fourplex) bought me a 100+ year old country house and 5 acres.
The countries where Americans would visit to see how well Mass Transit works are highly populated crowded places.
Questions like 'what is better for humanity' are complex ethical issues. What is 'freedom'? Is 'freedom' a social setting where one is 'freed' from having to make choices, i.e. where you can't even paint your house the color you like (townhouses)? There is a balance to arrive at.
The point I started out trying to take a stab at in the above and drifted from is that we can't blame a 'conspiracy' of corporations for the reduction in mass transit in the US. People didn't like it, it went away.
Blame the jackasses who would rather destroy the world in order to protect their profits and business model... blame them, attack them with pies in the face, attack them with sticks and stones! I'd love to see a greener and less-corrupt US of A.
That doesn't sound like productive behavior at all. You're gonna throw pie in the face of some marketing dudes at GM from 1950?
If your company is doing dishonest things, legal or not, and you have geeks working for you, you are at risk.
That's a fairly old-school attitude. However, software has been pretty commodified recently, to the point where an elite of 'geeks' isn't as important as once was the case. I've known 'cop an attitude' geeks and backroom technical people since back when I worked at a shop that still used PDP-8's for part of the system.
There comes a point, and we're close to it, when said 'craftsman' type technical people aren't needed. Certainly not for routine things like IT. Said folks need to keep that in mind before copping a superior attitude.
I hadn't heard of the 'totally superior.7z format' before this thread, but I suspect it's like all the other 'totally superior formats' of the past that break the common defacto standard that.zip and gzip have become. As such, it's kinda like fretting about a program using 24K instead of 18K on a machine with 768M of ram. People get ridiculed for that a lot, ya know.
Been here too long to have much time for hotdog compression formats that 'are totally superior' thankyouverymuch.
As long as everybody is willing to accept how the media may/will play this harassment and imposed life-in-hell, I guess it's okay. I have a strong suspicion that a concerted program to harass and attack the MediaDefender folks would not draw more people to the side of the Torrent community. Out in the mainstream world, the MD folks can easily be depicted as the victims if and when the harassment starts. Remember, that kind of media campaign is these folks' bread and butter.
Well, in this instance there was no terrorist a-bomb to prevent, so you're just trying to cloud the issue.
I think it could be said that there are very few, limited instances where it would not be wrong. This is a controversial issue where there is no clear-cut black/white divide, so it's clearly wrong.
From reading other comments in this thread, it sounds like someone was autoforwarding email threads to his/her gmail account. It shouldn't be too hard for them to figure out who was forwarding 700MB of traffic to a gmail account.
What do you want it to support? It plays MP3s (many of which I ripped when I had a Linux desktop)
Obviously, people want to be able to sync it without having to own a Mac or 'doze box. You know, people who don't say 'had a Linux desktop' in past tense.
It's rare to find people who simply don't give a shit and do their own thing regardless of society.
If you load up the Internet Wayback machine, you can load Slashdot pages from a few years back and see plenty of them.
There didn't used to be an apple.slashdot.org domain, for instance....
I shopped all over at Frys Electronics, where there are MP3 players stuck all over the store in different categories. Finally I found, over in the area with the cheap CD players (in consumer electronics audio, hundreds of feet away from the shiny Apple hucksterstand) and what-not, an RCA branded 1GB MP3 player that you can plug SD cards into to expand it, for $20. I've been quite happy with it. If I want to carry a library of music, I just need one of those little wallets to fill with cheap SD cards. It uses a standard (horrors!!!) USB connector. It uses one single AAA battery, which is enough power to run it for a week of intermittant use. etc. etc.
The 'touch' is the only thing Apple has produced in a long time that piques my interest whatsoever in any way. But then it has the negative feature of docking on iTunes to deal with....
Also, it's not always a bad thing to be in a niche market, as long as the niche is big enough and margins are good.
It sucks if you're someone who bought said Macintosh, and there's one short aisle of software for sale for your Mac in the BIG stores that have multiple aisles of 'doze software, and NO software whatsoever for your Mac at any other store that sells software.
It doesn't matter that much for me and other geeks who load and build from tarballs, but it does to the general public.
A number of years back I stood in line to pay at a CompUSA. A woman was trying to console her crying little boy, who was pointing at boxed game software around him in the store. His mom could only say 'no, that won't run on a Mac.' Apple- making small children cry. It isn't as big a problem now, of course, because you can boot outta the Mac system if you want. It's funny that there are people who use that as justification for saying the Mac is superior, though.
It's not always just function, form is immensely important to many people, and Apple excels in that area.
You see, comments like yours are meaningless to a lot of us. What do you mean by 'form'?? It just doesn't grok. Your sentence parses like market-speak from some slick ad writer.
Plus there's just the fact that a brand name can propel/hinder a product with certain people:
Linux is a kernel. To say that it 'supports an architecture' and simply mean that the kernel has been ported is a half-statement. There are many OSes based on the Linux kernel, and virtually none of them support more than a few architectures.
I agree that NetBSD's portability ceased being amazing a long time ago. Now it's just plain fact. It's nothing that surprises anybody.
But when the other guy gets the source code from my site, and it only has the GPL on it,
Right there is the problem. You can't distribute it with only the GPL terms. You have to continue to distribute it dual licensed. You can GPL-only license your contribution to it if you like.
but it doesn't do nearly as many things nearly as well as for instance Linux or FreeBSD.
Actually, since it runs on so many different architectures, it does a TREMENDOUS number of things infinitely better than Linux or FreeBSD. Although I suppose you could sit down and port a particular snapshot of a specific Linux 'distro' to whatever arch you wanted, given a huge amount of time...
the pre-compiled package collection hardly existed for other platforms than i386,
The source tree exists, though. And when I've mirrored the entire pkgsrc's distfile directory of source tarballs, I can build the binaries for anything without needing anything else. Further, there are well-tested capabilities to cross-compile what you want. You don't have to build the binaries for your ancient Macintosh SE/30 on the SE/30 (which would take weeks) you can build them on your Quad Sparc64 box. Mechanisms exist to automatically build the whole pkgsrc tree (ever supported package) for a given architecture with a few commands.
Some of the above features have to qualify as coolness. Because this is a nerd website, not a site where the 'coolest' people are the ones who can flash the most plastic.
Slashdot Mirror
'PlaysForSure' is now abandonware, and as such, the usual websites will pick up on it and abandonware enthusiasts will start 'PlaysForSure' hardware, software, and media files back and forth.
That's the only sense I can make of this. It's cool, in the same way that using an ancient Cassiopeia PDA with the first version of WindowsCE on it is cool. Sorta. I guess.
Yes, but any iPod enthusiast will tell you that it's a very gentle DRM. You can burn it to a CD, then rip the CD to a .wav file, and play the .wav file back through an old 8-bit sound blaster card on a Windows 3.1 system to the line input on a cassette deck. Then play the cassette back into your Mac II's sound input to record an .aiff file and from there encode it to MP3. Alternatively, if your SparcStation 10 is one of the rare ones with the sound options, you can record to .au instead.
At least when you by an Apple DRM'd file you know it will still work on your older players.
Also, you know that for the indefinite future, you'll be running MacOS or 'doze on at least one machine, with iTunes, in order to transfer said DRM'd file.
'Anybody who upgrades every year or two' is a little sliver of the market.
Incidentally it's a fairly wasteful sliver of the market.
Don't look back. All the marketing bullshit is up front, in your face.
Citation, please.
Maybe the solution is telling a lot of Americans that they can expect to earn approx. the same amount as workers in China for equivalent work. That would level out the labor market and take away the advantage from building stuff all the way around the world, then using 'greenhouse depleting' methods to ship it here. Perhaps it's just another instance of greedy lazy Americans.
Oops, but that would 'split' the coalition of Union Bosses and Environmentalists who rally under the 'progressive' banner.
Your version of history has some merit, but it's not the complete story. Streetcar lines were unpopular once a certain percentage of the traffic was automobile traffic. They were always in the fricking way. Static 'rail' lines have that problem in mixed traffic. And people like their freedom to come and go with cars.
For a long time I was an inner-city enthusiast and happy to not own a car and get around on public transit. Now, I'm sorta burned out on living all bunched in a crowded space. I like walking out to my small orchard of apple trees. I didn't 'sell out' to get my present circumstances, mind you. I just moved outta the city to an area of the country where the money from my two-bedroom attached townhouse (a fourplex) bought me a 100+ year old country house and 5 acres.
The countries where Americans would visit to see how well Mass Transit works are highly populated crowded places.
Questions like 'what is better for humanity' are complex ethical issues. What is 'freedom'? Is 'freedom' a social setting where one is 'freed' from having to make choices, i.e. where you can't even paint your house the color you like (townhouses)? There is a balance to arrive at.
The point I started out trying to take a stab at in the above and drifted from is that we can't blame a 'conspiracy' of corporations for the reduction in mass transit in the US. People didn't like it, it went away.
That doesn't sound like productive behavior at all. You're gonna throw pie in the face of some marketing dudes at GM from 1950?
If your company is doing dishonest things, legal or not, and you have geeks working for you, you are at risk.
That's a fairly old-school attitude. However, software has been pretty commodified recently, to the point where an elite of 'geeks' isn't as important as once was the case. I've known 'cop an attitude' geeks and backroom technical people since back when I worked at a shop that still used PDP-8's for part of the system.
There comes a point, and we're close to it, when said 'craftsman' type technical people aren't needed. Certainly not for routine things like IT. Said folks need to keep that in mind before copping a superior attitude.
I hadn't heard of the 'totally superior .7z format' before this thread, but I suspect it's like all the other 'totally superior formats' of the past that break the common defacto standard that .zip and gzip have become. As such, it's kinda like fretting about a program using 24K instead of 18K on a machine with 768M of ram. People get ridiculed for that a lot, ya know.
Been here too long to have much time for hotdog compression formats that 'are totally superior' thankyouverymuch.
As long as everybody is willing to accept how the media may/will play this harassment and imposed life-in-hell, I guess it's okay. I have a strong suspicion that a concerted program to harass and attack the MediaDefender folks would not draw more people to the side of the Torrent community. Out in the mainstream world, the MD folks can easily be depicted as the victims if and when the harassment starts. Remember, that kind of media campaign is these folks' bread and butter.
Well, in this instance there was no terrorist a-bomb to prevent, so you're just trying to cloud the issue.
I think it could be said that there are very few, limited instances where it would not be wrong. This is a controversial issue where there is no clear-cut black/white divide, so it's clearly wrong.
From reading other comments in this thread, it sounds like someone was autoforwarding email threads to his/her gmail account. It shouldn't be too hard for them to figure out who was forwarding 700MB of traffic to a gmail account.
What do you want it to support? It plays MP3s (many of which I ripped when I had a Linux desktop)
Obviously, people want to be able to sync it without having to own a Mac or 'doze box. You know, people who don't say 'had a Linux desktop' in past tense.
M3U playlists certainly work on my Rockbox. I assumed M3U was a defacto standard way of storing playlists.
It is. But this whole discussion is about an Apple product, you see.
About 3/4 of the excuses people were making a week ago for the iPod ("you're not tied to using iTunes") just evaporated.
Sometimes brands become so hyped and trendy that it becomes a nerd stigma to have one.
Fuck it. There are plans to make an MP3 player with a PIC controller.... It's only unfortunate that you need a propritary DSP chip to do the decoding.
It's rare to find people who simply don't give a shit and do their own thing regardless of society.
If you load up the Internet Wayback machine, you can load Slashdot pages from a few years back and see plenty of them.
There didn't used to be an apple.slashdot.org domain, for instance....
I shopped all over at Frys Electronics, where there are MP3 players stuck all over the store in different categories. Finally I found, over in the area with the cheap CD players (in consumer electronics audio, hundreds of feet away from the shiny Apple hucksterstand) and what-not, an RCA branded 1GB MP3 player that you can plug SD cards into to expand it, for $20. I've been quite happy with it. If I want to carry a library of music, I just need one of those little wallets to fill with cheap SD cards. It uses a standard (horrors!!!) USB connector. It uses one single AAA battery, which is enough power to run it for a week of intermittant use. etc. etc.
And it's easily the best-looking music player around. No herd mentality needed to see that one, either.
I guess that matters if you're deaf and only buying the thing for it's 'looks' or if you're a 'fash poseur.
..and gained about a hundred in the time it took you to post this.
There's a sucker born every minute.
The 'touch' is the only thing Apple has produced in a long time that piques my interest whatsoever in any way. But then it has the negative feature of docking on iTunes to deal with....
Also, it's not always a bad thing to be in a niche market, as long as the niche is big enough and margins are good.
It sucks if you're someone who bought said Macintosh, and there's one short aisle of software for sale for your Mac in the BIG stores that have multiple aisles of 'doze software, and NO software whatsoever for your Mac at any other store that sells software.
It doesn't matter that much for me and other geeks who load and build from tarballs, but it does to the general public.
A number of years back I stood in line to pay at a CompUSA. A woman was trying to console her crying little boy, who was pointing at boxed game software around him in the store. His mom could only say 'no, that won't run on a Mac.' Apple- making small children cry. It isn't as big a problem now, of course, because you can boot outta the Mac system if you want. It's funny that there are people who use that as justification for saying the Mac is superior, though.
It's not always just function, form is immensely important to many people, and Apple excels in that area.
You see, comments like yours are meaningless to a lot of us. What do you mean by 'form'?? It just doesn't grok. Your sentence parses like market-speak from some slick ad writer.
Plus there's just the fact that a brand name can propel/hinder a product with certain people:
Okay, then.
That's cool and all, but that's just a warez binary. A collector wants to see original disks and the printed manual.
Linux is a kernel. To say that it 'supports an architecture' and simply mean that the kernel has been ported is a half-statement. There are many OSes based on the Linux kernel, and virtually none of them support more than a few architectures.
I agree that NetBSD's portability ceased being amazing a long time ago. Now it's just plain fact. It's nothing that surprises anybody.
But when the other guy gets the source code from my site, and it only has the GPL on it,
Right there is the problem. You can't distribute it with only the GPL terms. You have to continue to distribute it dual licensed. You can GPL-only license your contribution to it if you like.
but it doesn't do nearly as many things nearly as well as for instance Linux or FreeBSD.
Actually, since it runs on so many different architectures, it does a TREMENDOUS number of things infinitely better than Linux or FreeBSD. Although I suppose you could sit down and port a particular snapshot of a specific Linux 'distro' to whatever arch you wanted, given a huge amount of time...
the pre-compiled package collection hardly existed for other platforms than i386,
The source tree exists, though. And when I've mirrored the entire pkgsrc's distfile directory of source tarballs, I can build the binaries for anything without needing anything else. Further, there are well-tested capabilities to cross-compile what you want. You don't have to build the binaries for your ancient Macintosh SE/30 on the SE/30 (which would take weeks) you can build them on your Quad Sparc64 box. Mechanisms exist to automatically build the whole pkgsrc tree (ever supported package) for a given architecture with a few commands.
Some of the above features have to qualify as coolness. Because this is a nerd website, not a site where the 'coolest' people are the ones who can flash the most plastic.