Re:Given that live music is the best music...
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Instant Concert CDs?
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· Score: 1
I can only imagine that the RIAA would squash this one, since traditionally, there would be all sorts of copyright issues here.
The RIAA has nothing they can say about it unless the band was stupid enough to sign a contract that gives their record company rights to their live performances. Copyright on a performance belongs to the performer.
Royalties go to the Label,
The label is Clear Channel, since they are the ones financing the recording (and perhaps the performance). Royalties to a label are a matter of contract, though, they don't have a right to them.
Producer,
The Producer in this case is a representative of Clear Channel, whoever is supervising the recording and copying. Again, though, this is a matter of contract.
Studio,
There is no studio, since it is a live performance. The venue is being paid in the same way that they always do. Additionally, I have never heard of a studio getting royalties. Studios get rented by the hour.
Artists,
The artists have to agree or the whole thing is illegal, since the artist owns the copyright on the performance. Obviously, they're going to get a cut of performance recordings being sold at the performance, just like they get a cut of all the other merchandise being sold at the performance. (That's how musicians actually make money, BTW. Record sale proceeds go towards paying back the advance the record company gave them to make the record. Royalties to the artist are so low that a record generally has to go at least Gold before the artist actually sees any money.)
RIAA,
Again, the RIAA and its members are not involved in the production of the performance, so they have no rights to it. That you are required to attend the concert to get it is totally irrelevant. Clear Channel and the artist have every right to sell the recording at Tower if they want to, and they won't owe the RIAA jack.
and who knows who else. Beyond that, a lot of the great artists play cover songs and unreleased material, which they'd have to cover royalties or permissions for that.
This is always the case anyway. A performer always owes royalties to the creator of the work they perform whether it's recorded or not (asuming it hasn't passed into the public domain). It's hardly limited to great artists, they're just the ones most likely to get caught if they ignore the law.
I used to work at a small engineering firm. We had a design staff of maybe 5 people (it fluctuated with work load) all running SolidWorks on Windows 98. We were having wierd issues, though. SolidWorks was really unstable, and occasionally some of our CAD files were getting corrupted. Finally, one of our assembly files got corrupted, and we called them up and complained. Their answer was that we needed to upgrade to Win2k and NTFS, so thats what we did. Yeah, it was expensive and time consuming, but that assembly file had about 50 parts in it, with 1-2 hours of design time per part (our burden rate was somewhere around $50/hour). Upgrading was cheap in comparison to losing another one of those. It was probably cheap compared to the lost productivity time from having to restart SolidWorks every hour or so.
There is the arguement, of course, that we shouldn't have had to pay for the design flaws of Windows or SolidWorks, but it's philosophical at best.
I could leave work and get there at midnight. I could not however, get back to work by 7:30 the next morning. I could probably get about halfway before I fell asleep and wound up in a ditch alongside I-77.
Take the 15th off. What's more important to you: A girl you care for enough to suffer the pains of a long distance relationship, or a job that makes you work Saturdays? You have 8 days to find someone to cover your shift. Get to work, man!
And there would be no "getting laid" involved anyways. We go straight for the _really_ good stuff. Godiva chocolate cheesecake ice cream. I'm not kidding. (:
If you think any food, and I don't care what it is or who makes it, is better than sex, you're doing it wrong. Plain and simple.
Don't get me wron, if you've decided to have a non-sexual relationship I totally respect that. I've even done it myself. But if you honestly believe that ice cream is better than sex, I pity you, and strongly suggest you flip through a book on Tantra some time. Even a magazine article or a web page would help. Sex is the ultimate intimacy, and as close to the divinity as you will ever get. Nothing should be better than that.
A lot of us shop online because the stuff we want simply isn't available in our immediate area. The nearest Target is 30 minutes away, and it's a small one with a crappy selection. The nearest WalMart is an hour away, as is Best Buy, Toys'R'Us, and just about every other big store. The big name stores in my town are JCPenney, KMart, Staples, and as of a month ago, Big5. Of those, Staples is the only one that carries anything I'm interested in, and their prices suck ass. The small local guys have big signs that say "we'll meet or beat Staples prices", but I'm afraid that doesn't mean much. I'm not paying $30 for an RTL8139 reference board when I can get one for $3 online, I don't care if D-Link stamped their name on it.
There are a whole lot of people living in basically the same situation, and we aren't going to give up our online shopping any time soon. We are the online customers of stores like Target and Best Buy, and that's why they can say that online shopping isn't going to be hurt.
It may be no problem for you to drop by WalMart and pick up what you want, but for me it's an All Day Outing which can only be attempted on Sunday, since that's the only day my wife and I both have off.
I see no reason why you couldn't be at her door by midnight on Valentine's day. With that kind of distance between you, just getting there is enough to get you laid.
I actually have in my closet an add-on 3.5" floppy controller for an AppleII in its origional box.
The really funny thing about that is that it was given to me by a friend about a year ago who actually thought it might be useful to me...
Re:Broadband overestimation
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Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
Well then why did AOL, MSN, and Earthlink all report lose of subscribers due to an uptake of broadband?
Because they are idiots.
None of the people I know that ditched those services did so to get broadband, they did it because they could get the same internet with better customer support for 1/2 to 1/3 as much (and in the case of Earthlink, without all the double billing).
I think your assessment of the Sims is right on, though. That was certainly my question, although admitedly it followed 'What does The Sims offer me at all?'
Maybe I should use a different distro, but installation would be improved if it were "click this icon, pick a directory, come back later."
That's exactly what I've been doing in SuSE. I browse to the RPM in Konqueror, click on it, and click on the "Install using YaST" button that pops up, and come back later. There's no picking a directory, since that's usually defined in the RPM and you're better off not messing with it.
I don't think this is a SuSE exclusive feature, though, I'm pretty sure it's part of Konqueror customized to run YaST instead of whatever other package manager your distro uses. If Mandrake has KDE (I've never used it, so I don't know) you might want to check out this feature.
The thing that makes installation so easy in SuSE is that SuSE Pro is currently 7 CDs. That's an assload of packages. The down side is they don't do.isos. You can do an ftp install, or you can buy it. I actually recommend buying it for a newbie. The SuSE Pro 8.1 Upgrade is about $50, and it comes with the SuSE administration manual (whatever they're calling it now, used to be "The Handbook"), which is hands down the most useful Linux book I own.
I've had very few occasions to want something not included, and those were things like newly released drivers, and my strange and perhaps unhealthy desire to have the absolute bleeding edge, compiled from cvs mplayer with all the quasi-legal codecs.
When you spend $99 on Windows XP, Windows XP is all you get.
When you spend $129 on SuSE with Crossover Office you get, in addition to the obvious, 5GB of software bundled for free, and some of the best software manuals ever written.
With the former, if you want to actually do something with your computer, you need to spend more money. With the later, everything is included, freely available to install whenever you should get the urge to do so.
More hardware support! I have a Radeon 7500 AIW and gettin VIVO to work was evil and a half. Output to TV was worse, (framebuffer crashes and the like).
This is ATIs fault, not Linuxs. NVidia cards work well in Linux because NVidia supports them on Linux. ATI seems to be only starting to get the idea that driver support is half of their product, but they don't seem to be interested in supporting older cards, even only slightly older like the 7500. If you want better support, you need to let ATI know that, and if they aren't going to support you, then you should take your business elsewhere.
Real One is slow and buggy (but better than nothing and now it has fullscreen support)
Real One is proprietary, and it's just as slow and buggy on Windows. This is not a Linux problem. However, there are Real Player codecs available for mplayer.
Xine needs to be more user friendly (to be a desktop candidate) and mplayer needs a good, consistant frontend (at least it is stable and fast as hell though).
I know nothing about Xine, but as for mplayer frontends, have you taken a good look at the state of media players on Windows lately? Only the really crappy players have a single consistent interface. If consistency is what you're looking for, pick one frontend and stick with it.
Video Editing needs to exist. Cinelerra is ok for now (I never got kino to work), but it is slow, unstable, and lacks many features (like chroma keying for green-screen effects). I did manage to create a video project though to completion on my box, but it was not easy.
Broadcast2000? I haven't used it yet, so maybe there's something there that I don't know, but that seems to be the thing for video editing whenever I look into it.
What does Linux have that makes it a Windows competitor? One word, KDE. Konq is an awesome web browser and file manager (kills anything the explorer can do) Kicker is way more useful than the XP task bar, and themeing is easy. I would give Bill Gate's left arm for these featurs to be ported to Windows.
I totally agree with you regarding KDEs feature set. Unfortunately, it competes with Windows in one other way; instability. That's been my experience anyway. I love the KDE apps though, and I use Konqueror all the time. I just do it in WindowMaker.
IMHO the thing that Linux needs is a Desktop UnitedLinux. Basically, several distros using the same filestructure, etc, to make it easy on hardware and software vendors. It has to suck for a vendor to have to produce different packages for every distro.
Take SuSE for example. If you want to install something that's included in the distro, but not installed by default, just open the Control Center (cryptically named I know, but I think most people can figure it out), browse to Install Software (still with me here?), and then browse or search for the package you want. Suse is a huge distro, so that should cover 99% of it. In the odd case that you have some otherwise acquired software (like my motherboard drivers, for example), just browse to the rpm in Konqueror, click on it, then click on the "Install using YaST" button that magically appears.
I know that's difficult to follow, but you seem like a reasonable intelligent person. I'm sure you can figure it out.
All the Id stuff is available for linux, as are UT and UT2003, Tribes2 and (according to rumor) Americas Army. These all run natively, not on Wine. With Wine, of course, you get a lot of other stuff. Halflife and Counter-strike have been running fine on Wine for years now (notice that's Wine, which is free, not WineX, which costs money). I pretty much only play fps, but I can't think of an important one that isn't covered above.
I agree that Linux isn't totally caught up as far as games go, but it's catching up fast.
Honestly though, now that Lindows has backed out of its outrageous claims, can you name a single Linux distro that can't run something it claims it can?
YaST is just as graphical, more centralised, and simpler to use.
Convenient, standardised help system with excellent searching and troubleshooting options
Again, SuSE takes the crown here.
In built support, from time of consumer device launch, for peripherals and card types (PCMCIA, USB etc. - Linux got late to market here).
When I was a network admin I found that SuSE, since 7.1, has had far superior built in hardware support than Windows 2000 (I have little experience with XP, so I can't comment there). In fact, the only hardware we had that wasn't supported under Linux was our plotter, which also wasn't supported under Win2k. Linux may have been late to market, but it's caught up quick.
Advanced tools are hidden from basic users.
I can only assume you're talking about Windows here, which hides advanced tools even from advanced users (I'm personally quite fond of the "where did they put network settings in this version" shuffle, but then I get paid by the hour). Again: YaST. It's easy to find, easy to use.
System files are protected from inadvertent change.
Remember the plotter I mentioned above? The solution given to me by the vendor was to replace the Win2k parallel port driver with the WinNT one (which they assured me they had done, and it would work fine). Of course, being Admin wasn't good enough to do that, I also had to have another machine hooked up to the one I was trying to change running a kernel debugger over hyperterminal. And no, I'm not kidding.
Linux files are protected, that's why they're owned by root. Root access should give me ultimate power over the machine. Period, the end. The computer should never assume that it knows better than I do; it's wrong far too often.
Incidentally, if you want more protection than is offered by just having all your system files owned by root, chown them to a different (unused) user. Root can still change them, but will be prompted if they are sure. That should be enough, ultimately the ability to change things should never be taken away from the superuser.
System rescue tools provided on disk (while Linux may die less frequently, when it does there's NO WAY for Joe User to recover).
I'm not sure where you get this idea. I've found backup to be just as accesible in Linux as it is in Windows. Perhaps you should try a modern distro?
No confusing messages on startup.
I'm not sure how this is an advantage. Is it really better to have your system hang at a splash screen with absolutely no clue as to what might be causing the problem? And on the rare occasions Windows does give you a boot error message, it's far more cryptic than anything Linux gives you. (Hint: the Linux boot messages aren't particularly confusing, they just go by to fast to make any sense of them. Rumor has it they can be turned off, though I've never had the urge to try).
When it comes down to it, Windows has very few advantages, and those it has are either of dubious value (MS Office) or rapidly disappearing (games and hardware support).
Yeah, if you subscribe to AOL, Earthlink, or MSN you can get DSL or cable for only a little more, and you might even be saving money if you have a second line for internet use.
That's not why any of the people I know are leaving those ISPs, though. In my experience it's a combination of high prices, questionable billing practices, and poor customer support. Earthlink seems to be especially bad. I knew a lot of people that signed up with jps when it was $99 per year. jps got bought by MediaOne(?IIRC) and the rates went up to something like $12 a month. There was a little grumbling, but nobody did anything about it. Phone support was much less useful, and all the useful online support information became much more difficult to find. Then they got bought up by Earthlink, rates shot up to the $20 range, and everybody started getting bills for months they had already paid for, and getting cut off for not paying. Phone support got downright hostile, and useful online information completely disappeared.
A lot of people paid what they had to and jumped ship as soon as they found a $10 per month ISP. A few lucky ones like my dad, who saves paperwork like it's a freakin religion, where able to browbeat Earthlink with threats of lawsuit (Earthlink graciously gave him "for free" 6 months of service he had already paid for).
Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to go with a different ISP...
I can totally see how a mobile phone could be mistaken for a good natured fat guy who likes to beat up romans and eat wild boar.
</sarcasm>
When will the insanity end? Mobilix, despite being in a totally different market, gets the shaft, but Lindows, which was intentionally named in order to draw in Windows customers, is OK?
Regardless of your experiences, consistency is what McDonalds sells, That's what franchises is all about, and have always been about since the first franchise (Motel 6) got started. Your statement only strengthens my later point: that buying habits are rarely based on reality.
Personally, I think you should pay more attention to what's going on in the real world. You and the poster I was resonding to both suffer from the naive belief that "what's good for GM is good for America". Let me clue you in: GM doesn't give a rats ass about you, and would happily poison your grandmother if they thought it would make them a buck.
And for the record, I hate Starbucks for the same reason I hate WalMart and Microsoft. It has nothing to do with how big they are, but rather what actions they took to get there. None of those companies compete by offering a superior product. Instead, they compete by buying up the leases on their competitors buildings a rising the rent until they can no longer afford to remain in business, or by charging less than it costs to produce a product in order to undercut the competition, or by using their sheer bulk or monopoly position in order to bully their their competitors suppliers and customers to not do business with them.
I have no problem with companies like IBM, Apple, and Sun, who (despite some of their pasts) maintain their market positions based on the actual quality of their product.
When a band signs a contract they are generally given an advance in the neighborhood of $250,000. That money is to pay for producing the record and it goes to the engineers, the producers, the artist who designs the covers, etc. In the end there's maybe $50,000 left for the band to live on. Yes, $50k for the whole band to live on for the year or so it often takes from the start of recording to the time the album goes on sale.
Note that it is an advance, not a grant. The band has to pay all that money back before they get any for themselves, and that takes a long time on the 1-2% that the band is making on album sales.
The recording effectively costs the record company NOTHING. Then, packaging, shipping, and promotions cost the same for a CD as they do for a cassette, although the manufacturing of a CD is orders of magnitude cheaper, and yet the CD costs twice as much.
I think it's important to note, here, that a FEDERAL JUDGE, who has spent a great deal more time examining the economics of the music business, has convicted several members of the RIAA of Price Fixing, and has determined that you and I should be paying no more than about $13 for a CD from a big name artist. Think about it.
It is the selling of a consistently good product at all stores, day in and day, that appeals to wide audience is what sells.
No, it is the selling of a consistent product at all stores, day in day [out], that doesn't disgust a wide audience that sells.
McDonalds does not make good hamburgers, but that doesn't seem to have hurt them at all. Why? Because I can walk into any McDonalds anywhere in the world and point at the picture of the Big Mac behind the cashier and get exactly the same crappy hamburger with exactly the same special sauce. I know exactly what I'm going to get, and people are willing to pay for that, generally regardless of actual quality.
What needs to happen is you anti-free market and anti-capitalism wanna be do-gooders need to do is go back to econ 101 and learn that a product sells when people desire it or need it, people know about it and can buy it.
I hope you'll take your blinders off when you decide to grow up. In the modern market economy peoples buying decisions rarely have anything to do with either need or quality of the product. The idealistic supply/demand model only works in commodity markets.
Nobody buys Kraft cheese or Wonderbread because they're superior products. They buy them because that's the bland, tasteless, lowest common denominator product from a brand name they recognize.
It might come as a big shock, but any Starbucks, anywhere in the world, is better than 95% of the non-chain Coffee Houses.
I don't know where you've been buying your coffee, but I think it's clear to most of the people reading this thread that you need to get out more.
Starbucks makes stuff that isn't bad, but I can get equivalent or better, with faster more personal service, at the same price, at any of my local non-chain coffee houses.
What is even more amazing is that I saw this last night on the evening news (local NBC affiliate). As if that isn't strange enough, it was part of the sports segment!
mplayer. In case you have any other questions regarding recording or viewing video using open source software, from or to any format, the answer to those questions is also mplayer.
This is a completely stupid conversation. Linux is more commercialized because it's more popular. I would guess that it might be because the Linux community is less exclusive and elitist. I might also guess that the GPL encourages participation in the Linux community, whereas the BSD license encourages commercial entities to steal the code without giving anything back. The BSD license provides no incentive for a commercial interest to actually participate in the developement of BSD, as both Apple and Microsoft have clearly shown.
I've already shown why commercialism isn't a problem for Linux, so I don't understand why I'm still being asked about it.
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I can only imagine that the RIAA would squash this one, since traditionally, there would be all sorts of copyright issues here.
The RIAA has nothing they can say about it unless the band was stupid enough to sign a contract that gives their record company rights to their live performances. Copyright on a performance belongs to the performer.
Royalties go to the Label,
The label is Clear Channel, since they are the ones financing the recording (and perhaps the performance). Royalties to a label are a matter of contract, though, they don't have a right to them.
Producer,
The Producer in this case is a representative of Clear Channel, whoever is supervising the recording and copying. Again, though, this is a matter of contract.
Studio,
There is no studio, since it is a live performance. The venue is being paid in the same way that they always do. Additionally, I have never heard of a studio getting royalties. Studios get rented by the hour.
Artists,
The artists have to agree or the whole thing is illegal, since the artist owns the copyright on the performance. Obviously, they're going to get a cut of performance recordings being sold at the performance, just like they get a cut of all the other merchandise being sold at the performance. (That's how musicians actually make money, BTW. Record sale proceeds go towards paying back the advance the record company gave them to make the record. Royalties to the artist are so low that a record generally has to go at least Gold before the artist actually sees any money.)
RIAA,
Again, the RIAA and its members are not involved in the production of the performance, so they have no rights to it. That you are required to attend the concert to get it is totally irrelevant. Clear Channel and the artist have every right to sell the recording at Tower if they want to, and they won't owe the RIAA jack.
and who knows who else. Beyond that, a lot of the great artists play cover songs and unreleased material, which they'd have to cover royalties or permissions for that.
This is always the case anyway. A performer always owes royalties to the creator of the work they perform whether it's recorded or not (asuming it hasn't passed into the public domain). It's hardly limited to great artists, they're just the ones most likely to get caught if they ignore the law.
Sometimes upgrades are justified.
I used to work at a small engineering firm. We had a design staff of maybe 5 people (it fluctuated with work load) all running SolidWorks on Windows 98. We were having wierd issues, though. SolidWorks was really unstable, and occasionally some of our CAD files were getting corrupted. Finally, one of our assembly files got corrupted, and we called them up and complained. Their answer was that we needed to upgrade to Win2k and NTFS, so thats what we did. Yeah, it was expensive and time consuming, but that assembly file had about 50 parts in it, with 1-2 hours of design time per part (our burden rate was somewhere around $50/hour). Upgrading was cheap in comparison to losing another one of those. It was probably cheap compared to the lost productivity time from having to restart SolidWorks every hour or so.
There is the arguement, of course, that we shouldn't have had to pay for the design flaws of Windows or SolidWorks, but it's philosophical at best.
Why is sex good? Just a bunch of chemicals released into your brain.
There is more to sex than orgasms. Shocking, I know, but true.
I could leave work and get there at midnight. I could not however, get back to work by 7:30 the next morning. I could probably get about halfway before I fell asleep and wound up in a ditch alongside I-77.
Take the 15th off. What's more important to you: A girl you care for enough to suffer the pains of a long distance relationship, or a job that makes you work Saturdays? You have 8 days to find someone to cover your shift. Get to work, man!
And there would be no "getting laid" involved anyways. We go straight for the _really_ good stuff. Godiva chocolate cheesecake ice cream. I'm not kidding. (:
If you think any food, and I don't care what it is or who makes it, is better than sex, you're doing it wrong. Plain and simple.
Don't get me wron, if you've decided to have a non-sexual relationship I totally respect that. I've even done it myself. But if you honestly believe that ice cream is better than sex, I pity you, and strongly suggest you flip through a book on Tantra some time. Even a magazine article or a web page would help. Sex is the ultimate intimacy, and as close to the divinity as you will ever get. Nothing should be better than that.
A lot of us shop online because the stuff we want simply isn't available in our immediate area. The nearest Target is 30 minutes away, and it's a small one with a crappy selection. The nearest WalMart is an hour away, as is Best Buy, Toys'R'Us, and just about every other big store. The big name stores in my town are JCPenney, KMart, Staples, and as of a month ago, Big5. Of those, Staples is the only one that carries anything I'm interested in, and their prices suck ass. The small local guys have big signs that say "we'll meet or beat Staples prices", but I'm afraid that doesn't mean much. I'm not paying $30 for an RTL8139 reference board when I can get one for $3 online, I don't care if D-Link stamped their name on it.
There are a whole lot of people living in basically the same situation, and we aren't going to give up our online shopping any time soon. We are the online customers of stores like Target and Best Buy, and that's why they can say that online shopping isn't going to be hurt.
It may be no problem for you to drop by WalMart and pick up what you want, but for me it's an All Day Outing which can only be attempted on Sunday, since that's the only day my wife and I both have off.
Only 8 hours?
I see no reason why you couldn't be at her door by midnight on Valentine's day. With that kind of distance between you, just getting there is enough to get you laid.
I actually have in my closet an add-on 3.5" floppy controller for an AppleII in its origional box.
The really funny thing about that is that it was given to me by a friend about a year ago who actually thought it might be useful to me...
Well then why did AOL, MSN, and Earthlink all report lose of subscribers due to an uptake of broadband?
Because they are idiots.
None of the people I know that ditched those services did so to get broadband, they did it because they could get the same internet with better customer support for 1/2 to 1/3 as much (and in the case of Earthlink, without all the double billing).
I think your assessment of the Sims is right on, though. That was certainly my question, although admitedly it followed 'What does The Sims offer me at all?'
Maybe I should use a different distro, but installation would be improved if it were "click this icon, pick a directory, come back later."
.isos. You can do an ftp install, or you can buy it. I actually recommend buying it for a newbie. The SuSE Pro 8.1 Upgrade is about $50, and it comes with the SuSE administration manual (whatever they're calling it now, used to be "The Handbook"), which is hands down the most useful Linux book I own.
That's exactly what I've been doing in SuSE. I browse to the RPM in Konqueror, click on it, and click on the "Install using YaST" button that pops up, and come back later. There's no picking a directory, since that's usually defined in the RPM and you're better off not messing with it.
I don't think this is a SuSE exclusive feature, though, I'm pretty sure it's part of Konqueror customized to run YaST instead of whatever other package manager your distro uses. If Mandrake has KDE (I've never used it, so I don't know) you might want to check out this feature.
The thing that makes installation so easy in SuSE is that SuSE Pro is currently 7 CDs. That's an assload of packages. The down side is they don't do
I've had very few occasions to want something not included, and those were things like newly released drivers, and my strange and perhaps unhealthy desire to have the absolute bleeding edge, compiled from cvs mplayer with all the quasi-legal codecs.
When you spend $99 on Windows XP, Windows XP is all you get.
When you spend $129 on SuSE with Crossover Office you get, in addition to the obvious, 5GB of software bundled for free, and some of the best software manuals ever written.
With the former, if you want to actually do something with your computer, you need to spend more money. With the later, everything is included, freely available to install whenever you should get the urge to do so.
More hardware support! I have a Radeon 7500 AIW and gettin VIVO to work was evil and a half. Output to TV was worse, (framebuffer crashes and the like).
This is ATIs fault, not Linuxs. NVidia cards work well in Linux because NVidia supports them on Linux. ATI seems to be only starting to get the idea that driver support is half of their product, but they don't seem to be interested in supporting older cards, even only slightly older like the 7500. If you want better support, you need to let ATI know that, and if they aren't going to support you, then you should take your business elsewhere.
Real One is slow and buggy (but better than nothing and now it has fullscreen support)
Real One is proprietary, and it's just as slow and buggy on Windows. This is not a Linux problem. However, there are Real Player codecs available for mplayer.
Xine needs to be more user friendly (to be a desktop candidate) and mplayer needs a good, consistant frontend (at least it is stable and fast as hell though).
I know nothing about Xine, but as for mplayer frontends, have you taken a good look at the state of media players on Windows lately? Only the really crappy players have a single consistent interface. If consistency is what you're looking for, pick one frontend and stick with it.
Video Editing needs to exist. Cinelerra is ok for now (I never got kino to work), but it is slow, unstable, and lacks many features (like chroma keying for green-screen effects). I did manage to create a video project though to completion on my box, but it was not easy.
Broadcast2000? I haven't used it yet, so maybe there's something there that I don't know, but that seems to be the thing for video editing whenever I look into it.
What does Linux have that makes it a Windows competitor? One word, KDE. Konq is an awesome web browser and file manager (kills anything the explorer can do) Kicker is way more useful than the XP task bar, and themeing is easy. I would give Bill Gate's left arm for these featurs to be ported to Windows.
I totally agree with you regarding KDEs feature set. Unfortunately, it competes with Windows in one other way; instability. That's been my experience anyway. I love the KDE apps though, and I use Konqueror all the time. I just do it in WindowMaker.
IMHO the thing that Linux needs is a Desktop UnitedLinux. Basically, several distros using the same filestructure, etc, to make it easy on hardware and software vendors. It has to suck for a vendor to have to produce different packages for every distro.
Try a modern distro, and I don't mean Slackware.
Take SuSE for example. If you want to install something that's included in the distro, but not installed by default, just open the Control Center (cryptically named I know, but I think most people can figure it out), browse to Install Software (still with me here?), and then browse or search for the package you want. Suse is a huge distro, so that should cover 99% of it. In the odd case that you have some otherwise acquired software (like my motherboard drivers, for example), just browse to the rpm in Konqueror, click on it, then click on the "Install using YaST" button that magically appears.
I know that's difficult to follow, but you seem like a reasonable intelligent person. I'm sure you can figure it out.
I think that's what he meant. It should be noted, though, that Beowulf died. And I don't mean in the "everybody dies eventually" kind of way...
So, perhaps that isn't the heroic image we're looking for here.
Which games?
All the Id stuff is available for linux, as are UT and UT2003, Tribes2 and (according to rumor) Americas Army. These all run natively, not on Wine. With Wine, of course, you get a lot of other stuff. Halflife and Counter-strike have been running fine on Wine for years now (notice that's Wine, which is free, not WineX, which costs money). I pretty much only play fps, but I can't think of an important one that isn't covered above.
I agree that Linux isn't totally caught up as far as games go, but it's catching up fast.
Honestly though, now that Lindows has backed out of its outrageous claims, can you name a single Linux distro that can't run something it claims it can?
Simpler setup with very few questions.
SuSE beats every version of Windows on this count.
Smaller more focused set of default applications
Again, SuSE wins, with the added advantage that the default includes an actual, useful office suite.
Simpler, centralised, graphical configuration tools
YaST is just as graphical, more centralised, and simpler to use.
Convenient, standardised help system with excellent searching and troubleshooting options
Again, SuSE takes the crown here.
In built support, from time of consumer device launch, for peripherals and card types (PCMCIA, USB etc. - Linux got late to market here).
When I was a network admin I found that SuSE, since 7.1, has had far superior built in hardware support than Windows 2000 (I have little experience with XP, so I can't comment there). In fact, the only hardware we had that wasn't supported under Linux was our plotter, which also wasn't supported under Win2k. Linux may have been late to market, but it's caught up quick.
Advanced tools are hidden from basic users.
I can only assume you're talking about Windows here, which hides advanced tools even from advanced users (I'm personally quite fond of the "where did they put network settings in this version" shuffle, but then I get paid by the hour). Again: YaST. It's easy to find, easy to use.
System files are protected from inadvertent change.
Remember the plotter I mentioned above? The solution given to me by the vendor was to replace the Win2k parallel port driver with the WinNT one (which they assured me they had done, and it would work fine). Of course, being Admin wasn't good enough to do that, I also had to have another machine hooked up to the one I was trying to change running a kernel debugger over hyperterminal. And no, I'm not kidding.
Linux files are protected, that's why they're owned by root. Root access should give me ultimate power over the machine. Period, the end. The computer should never assume that it knows better than I do; it's wrong far too often.
Incidentally, if you want more protection than is offered by just having all your system files owned by root, chown them to a different (unused) user. Root can still change them, but will be prompted if they are sure. That should be enough, ultimately the ability to change things should never be taken away from the superuser.
System rescue tools provided on disk (while Linux may die less frequently, when it does there's NO WAY for Joe User to recover).
I'm not sure where you get this idea. I've found backup to be just as accesible in Linux as it is in Windows. Perhaps you should try a modern distro?
No confusing messages on startup.
I'm not sure how this is an advantage. Is it really better to have your system hang at a splash screen with absolutely no clue as to what might be causing the problem? And on the rare occasions Windows does give you a boot error message, it's far more cryptic than anything Linux gives you. (Hint: the Linux boot messages aren't particularly confusing, they just go by to fast to make any sense of them. Rumor has it they can be turned off, though I've never had the urge to try).
When it comes down to it, Windows has very few advantages, and those it has are either of dubious value (MS Office) or rapidly disappearing (games and hardware support).
Yeah, if you subscribe to AOL, Earthlink, or MSN you can get DSL or cable for only a little more, and you might even be saving money if you have a second line for internet use.
That's not why any of the people I know are leaving those ISPs, though. In my experience it's a combination of high prices, questionable billing practices, and poor customer support. Earthlink seems to be especially bad. I knew a lot of people that signed up with jps when it was $99 per year. jps got bought by MediaOne(?IIRC) and the rates went up to something like $12 a month. There was a little grumbling, but nobody did anything about it. Phone support was much less useful, and all the useful online support information became much more difficult to find. Then they got bought up by Earthlink, rates shot up to the $20 range, and everybody started getting bills for months they had already paid for, and getting cut off for not paying. Phone support got downright hostile, and useful online information completely disappeared.
A lot of people paid what they had to and jumped ship as soon as they found a $10 per month ISP. A few lucky ones like my dad, who saves paperwork like it's a freakin religion, where able to browbeat Earthlink with threats of lawsuit (Earthlink graciously gave him "for free" 6 months of service he had already paid for).
Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would choose to go with a different ISP...
I can totally see how a mobile phone could be mistaken for a good natured fat guy who likes to beat up romans and eat wild boar.
</sarcasm>
When will the insanity end? Mobilix, despite being in a totally different market, gets the shaft, but Lindows, which was intentionally named in order to draw in Windows customers, is OK?
Regardless of your experiences, consistency is what McDonalds sells, That's what franchises is all about, and have always been about since the first franchise (Motel 6) got started. Your statement only strengthens my later point: that buying habits are rarely based on reality.
Personally, I think you should pay more attention to what's going on in the real world. You and the poster I was resonding to both suffer from the naive belief that "what's good for GM is good for America". Let me clue you in: GM doesn't give a rats ass about you, and would happily poison your grandmother if they thought it would make them a buck.
And for the record, I hate Starbucks for the same reason I hate WalMart and Microsoft. It has nothing to do with how big they are, but rather what actions they took to get there. None of those companies compete by offering a superior product. Instead, they compete by buying up the leases on their competitors buildings a rising the rent until they can no longer afford to remain in business, or by charging less than it costs to produce a product in order to undercut the competition, or by using their sheer bulk or monopoly position in order to bully their their competitors suppliers and customers to not do business with them.
I have no problem with companies like IBM, Apple, and Sun, who (despite some of their pasts) maintain their market positions based on the actual quality of their product.
When a band signs a contract they are generally given an advance in the neighborhood of $250,000. That money is to pay for producing the record and it goes to the engineers, the producers, the artist who designs the covers, etc. In the end there's maybe $50,000 left for the band to live on. Yes, $50k for the whole band to live on for the year or so it often takes from the start of recording to the time the album goes on sale.
Note that it is an advance, not a grant. The band has to pay all that money back before they get any for themselves, and that takes a long time on the 1-2% that the band is making on album sales.
The recording effectively costs the record company NOTHING. Then, packaging, shipping, and promotions cost the same for a CD as they do for a cassette, although the manufacturing of a CD is orders of magnitude cheaper, and yet the CD costs twice as much.
I think it's important to note, here, that a FEDERAL JUDGE, who has spent a great deal more time examining the economics of the music business, has convicted several members of the RIAA of Price Fixing, and has determined that you and I should be paying no more than about $13 for a CD from a big name artist. Think about it.
It is the selling of a consistently good product at all stores, day in and day, that appeals to wide audience is what sells.
No, it is the selling of a consistent product at all stores, day in day [out], that doesn't disgust a wide audience that sells.
McDonalds does not make good hamburgers, but that doesn't seem to have hurt them at all. Why? Because I can walk into any McDonalds anywhere in the world and point at the picture of the Big Mac behind the cashier and get exactly the same crappy hamburger with exactly the same special sauce. I know exactly what I'm going to get, and people are willing to pay for that, generally regardless of actual quality.
What needs to happen is you anti-free market and anti-capitalism wanna be do-gooders need to do is go back to econ 101 and learn that a product sells when people desire it or need it, people know about it and can buy it.
I hope you'll take your blinders off when you decide to grow up. In the modern market economy peoples buying decisions rarely have anything to do with either need or quality of the product. The idealistic supply/demand model only works in commodity markets.
Nobody buys Kraft cheese or Wonderbread because they're superior products. They buy them because that's the bland, tasteless, lowest common denominator product from a brand name they recognize.
It might come as a big shock, but any Starbucks, anywhere in the world, is better than 95% of the non-chain Coffee Houses.
I don't know where you've been buying your coffee, but I think it's clear to most of the people reading this thread that you need to get out more.
Starbucks makes stuff that isn't bad, but I can get equivalent or better, with faster more personal service, at the same price, at any of my local non-chain coffee houses.
What is even more amazing is that I saw this last night on the evening news (local NBC affiliate). As if that isn't strange enough, it was part of the sports segment!
mplayer. In case you have any other questions regarding recording or viewing video using open source software, from or to any format, the answer to those questions is also mplayer.
The vast majority of camcorders currently on the market have only 60 minute capacity per tape.
I never said his reason for switching was the licensing, I said that the licensing made his reason for switching stupid.
This is a completely stupid conversation. Linux is more commercialized because it's more popular. I would guess that it might be because the Linux community is less exclusive and elitist. I might also guess that the GPL encourages participation in the Linux community, whereas the BSD license encourages commercial entities to steal the code without giving anything back. The BSD license provides no incentive for a commercial interest to actually participate in the developement of BSD, as both Apple and Microsoft have clearly shown.
I've already shown why commercialism isn't a problem for Linux, so I don't understand why I'm still being asked about it.