Genetic engineering also generally does nothing to address real nutrition, and especially not taste. Tomatoes have been engineered to be hard plastic, more suitable for shipping, and have even had flounder genes spliced in to make them frost-resistant. But as _food_, they're worthless; the taste and texture are so bad that I consider them inedible. The smell of tomato plants and fruits is one of my favorites, and to have it reduced to that...
The best thing to do is to buy fresh produce from your local stand/farmer's market/whatever, and use it in the next few days before it goes bad. I'll taking a few small grocery trips per week over plastic food any day.
You almost have to kill someone to get a network adaptor for the Dreamcast. I'm not even sure they're being manufactured anymore (I wouldn't think so), but there are a few on eBay; the cheapest one is $60.
Besides, as other posters have mentioned, a Dreamcast doesn't exactly look inconspicuous to me, especially if some person I don't recognise is carrying one around in my building.
It basically states that even with UCITA, software is still allowed to be sold "as is" (without a warranty). The GPL is an example of this type of software license.
Places like Bertucci's always advertise the fact that they cook their pizza in a brick oven. Well, you can too.
You can either get a pizza stone ($30-$40) from a food store, or you can go down to your local tile mart and get some unglazed quarry tile. I wound up with 4 8" square pieces, and they were so surprised that I wanted so few that they just gave them to me.
Basically, you put the tile on the bottom of your oven and crank the heat up as high as it will go for 30 minutes. You also need a metal pizza peel (giant spatula) to get it in and out of the oven, which can be bought online (I was lucky enough to find a restaurant supply place a few miles away) for cheap (less than $10, probably).
This reduces cooking time to about 5 minutes, and it really does taste better. I got this from the cooking show Good Eats (Alton Brown's book was reviewed here recently). You can find transcripts and recipes from every show here:
http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com
He also has an interview and all sorts of facts.
Oh, and as far as regular pizza toppings (the recipe in the parent post sounds very good, and I'll have to try it), I like roasted garlic cloves (20 minutes at 300 degrees F), sun dried tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers. Pineapples go well with the hot peppers (it works for stir fry!), but are a bit heavy unless you're making deep dish pizza.
The documentation clearly states when there are differences in behaviour between different versions of PHP. It also states "This function was added in version x.x.x" I've always found it to be very helpful and straightforward, and I've never been confused about versions (important, because I use Debian unstable at home, and stable in the server room).
I did a review of it for NewsForge a while ago. It's not quite there, but it's certainly headed in the right direction. I have to deal with the horror that is Quark every week at the college paper, and I'd love for it to have some real competition.
(an employee of Quark actually stated in a support forum that "Quark is not designed to work across a network." (i.e., edit files which reside on a file server). Well, super! What decade was this, again?)
Pardon me, but I happen to work at a place (freshmeat.net) that lists several thousand applications for *nix systems, most of which are under the GPL. I also happen to think that at least a few dozen of them are very good indeed.
What exactly is it that you want to do on a Linux desktop that you can't find a Free application to do it? Aside from attempting to turn your computer into a game machine (and even then, several titles are commercially available, and if your shady person has pirated the Windows copy, they can generally download the Linux executable and have it work).
Another person made a good point in that people might not be aware of Linux applications, because there are no shiny boxes and Wal-Mart advertisements for Pan. But people found out about Napster somehow.
The entire University of Maryland system (which includes my school, UMBC) has a deal with Microsoft. Part of the fees every student must pay go to Microsoft, and as a result, people can get copies of XP or Office for around $10. If they see Red Hat Linux in the school bookstore for $80, I don't think they're going to want it.
Sure, OpenOffice is great, but how am I supposed to recommend it over MS Office for $10? Obviously, I'm annoyed that I have to give money to a convicted monopolist every year; when the deal was in the works, I did a point/counterpoint with the head of technology at UMBC in the school newspaper. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been put online.
On the other hand, I was using IE on a Mac the other day and tried to open up a tab...oh, wait:) So I think Mozilla can still be recommended on quite a few points.
Is that really what you want? If you're burning a CD, and you somehow hit the CD button by accident (let's say you have the DVD drive right above the CD-RW like I do, and you're trying to take out the DVD you left in there), do you really want the drive to immediately stop burning the CD and spit it out?
There's a _reason_ the system won't give you back the CD "right now" sometimes. It's because it still needs it. You can handle waiting a few seconds for the program to finish reading data so that it doesn't block, explode, or fail at whatever it was trying to finish (which will probably lead to you being more upset than it not giving you back the CD the instant you want it).
What sort of CDs do people use on a Linux system these days anyway, other than audio CDs (which don't need to be mounted)? And thankfully, some people are starting to get the idea that floppies are annoying and bad. True, they're now transferring files by emailing them to themselves via Hotmail...
Non-profit radio stations (such as college radio) pay a set fee to ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC every year for the right to broadcast works by their artists. AFAIK, BMI is the only one which requires you to submit log sheets (randomly selected 3 days' worth, once a year).
Almost all college radio stations submit at least their weekly top 30 songs to the College Music Journal, because if you're not listed in there, labels and distributors (for very small labels) are far less likely to send you music (and posters, and Weezer pocket protectors, and...).
The parent post is correct: it's mainly the logging requirements that will be the issue. Crap like requiring a "unique identifier" and the listener's time zone means that you can't have a directory like shoutcast where people just click on the streams and listen; you've got to get them to fill out forms at your site EVERY TIME. This is terrible, and wrong; even if we're going with the "pay per listener per song" crud, as long as I dutifully keep track of the time period each listener tuned in, I shouldn't have to say anything else. That's a strain on the listener and the station, and an invasion of the listener's privacy.
I plan on writing (Free) software to do whatever it takes to stay around (see my.sig!), but I sure hope it gets easier than what the RIAA has proposed.
> I don't know how good he actually is since there > hasn't been a new 2.4 kernel released in almost 5 > months now.
Well, why do kernel releases have to happen so often? What functionality are you missing that is going to be added to a release of a stable (2.4) kernel? Are you having stability problems? Or are you just in a hurry to reboot your computer?
This is supposed to be a stable kernel. Each and every change, as he said, needs to be carefully examined, and tested as much as possible. This is a professional attitude which is missing in a lot of development these days (both commercial and Free).
Really, the only gaming I do with my Debian system, aside from xscorch, is running emulators for the NES, SNES, and (sometimes) Genesis. I don't feel bad about this because either my brother or I owned all of the "good" games for these systems at some point, and I'm pretty sure we gave them away.
(This was not very difficult for the Genesis; the good games consisted of Shining Force, Shining Force II, and Landstalker.)
Maybe you owned some of these games, or maybe you have a black thieving heart and don't care:) It's not like anyone is going to make money selling The Guardian Legend anymore, and that was (IMHO) one of the best games for the NES. And no one ever sold Seiken Densetsu 3 in this country (the game that went in between Secret of Mana and Legend of Mana). Some fans hacked the ROM and translated it, though. Very good game!
Then too, we have a PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn downstairs. It's not like my Linux desktop is my gaming machine; I've always preferred console games, and unless Square and Working designs start making games for Linux, probably always will.
I guess you didn't bother to check and see what protocols Gaim actually supports, preferring instead to make an inference based on the name of the program. For the record, it supports MSN, Yahoo, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, Jabber, and ICQ.
Everybuddy (www.everybuddy.org) is another multi-protocol chat client available for Linux. It can actually receive files from AIM users, which Gaim can't, though I don't really worry about that too much. And I never worry about being able to send files using my IM client; that's what Web server software does.
You've just hit upon a recent pet peeve of mine. Why is it that people think they can apply their graphic design skills (in designing layout for newspapers, yearbooks, etc.) to the Web unchanged?
If I had a job playing a standup bass, I certainly wouldn't practice for it with a fretted electric bass. I guess what's needed is a good bash over the head with "Designing Web Usability." Unfortunately, that's not always an option.
This situation really isn't very much different from the software development world, though. Bad software is produced largely because of people (bosses, designers, and even the coders) wanting some flashy feature without really having a need for it, and bad Web pages often come about in the same way.
Re:More to do with admin set up.
on
Klez: a closer look
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· Score: 5, Informative
Not all of the complaints about Outlook are "bs". Certainly, a lot of people seem to like the interface. This is one point that has probably kept it on users' desktops.
However, it will randomly refuse to work with perfectly functional IMAP servers. Some people have had it delete everything in their inbox. And many aspects of its design make it an easy target for virus writers. Up until recently, even if you knew what you were doing and wanted to, you couldn't prevent Outlook from displaying HTML (and everything associated with it, such as Javascript and Web bugs). It's gotten a bit more difficult to have it automatically execute attachments, but apparently not difficult enough. (In all fairness, it should be pointed out that a large section of the population would simply execute those attachments themselves anyway).
It's easy to say that you're safe at work. You're sitting behind various filters set up by competant administrators. But many people at home don't have that option. If an ISP started filtering out attachments by file type, many would doubtless scream bloody murder. Home users are the main problem here (not that it's necessarily their fault). In an unprotected environment, Outlook still makes it too easy for virus writers, and while I would love to be in a world where everyone was shielded by competent admins (hello big job market for me!), we currently aren't.
I'm sure that there will be plenty of poorly designed Web sites that only allow proper functionality with IE. For that matter, there will be poorly designed Web sites that are not really helpful at all to the person who wants to buy something, due to their (lack of) organization and structure. I deal with these sites in the same way: I buy from someone else.
I can't remember having run into an IE-only problem on a commerce site; the second type of problem is much more common. I've been able to use my bank's Web interface with Mozilla for months (and before then, I only had to use NS4, not IE).
That said, I was pleased to read about the push by the people in Netscape/Mozilla to get Web designers to create compliant sites. Sure, I'm never going to visit most of the sites on the Web, and if I have a problem with one, there will likely be an alternate. But it's nice that one browser maker is pushing for people to have as much choice as possible (it's likely that their efforts will also help users of Konqueror and Opera).
The Godfather part II is the only sequel to ever win a...whichever award it is they give out to movies. Can you tell I haven't been into mainstream movies for a while?:)
I agree that talking about uptime in the context of desktop computers is silly, and good arguments have been made about the concept of "uptime" versus "availability" for servers.
However, with the power saving features of modern computers, it's not really necessary to turn them off at the end of the day (unless they're misconfigured). Even without power saving features, the real power drains have always been CRTs, not the computers themselves.
Also, some people's computers do more than just act as their desktop. What if one of my roommates wants to listen to some of my music while I'm asleep? Or one of my friends wants something from my Web server?
Sorry, but I really do like the interface of Enlightenment much better than that of Win2k. Even if Windows were equal to Linux in stability, I still wouldn't want it. Others have brought up viruses, and I'll add to that a distrust of Microsoft ("What are you doing, Dave?").
The things that were problems a few years ago (watching movies, listening to music, having a really good Web browser, reading Office documents) are gone now. I never really played PC games; we've got a PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn downstairs, and if I get bored of those, I can fire up an emulator. So Windows doesn't really have any benefits for me.
If you like your Mac because of usability, but you don't like the fact that it crashes, why don't you just get a new Mac with OS X? Sure, it will cost a bit more than a PC, but you'll get to keep it longer, and you can ease yourself into the world of the command line while still being able to fall back to a friendly Apple GUI world. Plus, with XonX, you can run many of those Free *nix applications.
Personally, Debian is the right choice for my desktop, but I'm a sysadmin; the right choice for your desktop might be different.
You can get a frog to allow itself to be boiled to death in the same manner. If you place it in a pot of boiling water, it will try to escape. However, if you place it in a pot of cool or warm water and gradually increase the temperature, it will sit there until it has been cooked.
I don't see why it would only work in Windows. If it's just more hardware on the motherboard, a company selling a piece of closed source software could certainly make calls to said hardware. They might need to distribute a binary kernel module (or partially open, like nVidia) and require you to run it. Some people might not like this idea, but these people probably wouldn't want to run closed source programs either.
They don't have a true monopoly at the moment. Not every label is an RIAA member, and there is a pretty low barrier to entry. People who have gotten sick of $20 CDs have some choices:
1. Whine about $20 CDs. 2. Download MP3s made from $20 CDs instead. 3. Both 1 and 2 4. Discover labels that charge half that for CDs which aren't one or two "hits" with a bunch of filler.
If anyone would care to reply with their musical preferences, I'll even recommend some artists (as best I can for some genres).
Gorillaz, "G-sides" Badly Drawn Boy, "About A Boy" Ed Harcourt (well, more mainstream in the UK than the US)
All of these are good CDs, and the Badly Drawn Boy album is really excellent all the way through (and as a soundtrack to a Hugh Grant movie, about as mainstream as you can get). Let's not forget the gems that bands like Radiohead and Tool release on a regular basis.
Since you didn't specify what sort of music you think is "GOOD", I can't really give you a better list.
I was taking a class where we were shown Visio, but I used Dia instead for my final project report. Not that this should influence your decision, but I did get an A in the class:)
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Genetic engineering also generally does nothing to address real nutrition, and especially not taste. Tomatoes have been engineered to be hard plastic, more suitable for shipping, and have even had flounder genes spliced in to make them frost-resistant. But as _food_, they're worthless; the taste and texture are so bad that I consider them inedible. The smell of tomato plants and fruits is one of my favorites, and to have it reduced to that...
The best thing to do is to buy fresh produce from your local stand/farmer's market/whatever, and use it in the next few days before it goes bad. I'll taking a few small grocery trips per week over plastic food any day.
"availability of an Ethernet adaptor"?
You almost have to kill someone to get a network adaptor for the Dreamcast. I'm not even sure they're being manufactured anymore (I wouldn't think so), but there are a few on eBay; the cheapest one is $60.
Besides, as other posters have mentioned, a Dreamcast doesn't exactly look inconspicuous to me, especially if some person I don't recognise is carrying one around in my building.
It basically states that even with UCITA, software is still allowed to be sold "as is" (without a warranty). The GPL is an example of this type of software license.
Places like Bertucci's always advertise the fact that they cook their pizza in a brick oven. Well, you can too.
You can either get a pizza stone ($30-$40) from a food store, or you can go down to your local tile mart and get some unglazed quarry tile. I wound up with 4 8" square pieces, and they were so surprised that I wanted so few that they just gave them to me.
Basically, you put the tile on the bottom of your oven and crank the heat up as high as it will go for 30 minutes. You also need a metal pizza peel (giant spatula) to get it in and out of the oven, which can be bought online (I was lucky enough to find a restaurant supply place a few miles away) for cheap (less than $10, probably).
This reduces cooking time to about 5 minutes, and it really does taste better. I got this from the cooking show Good Eats (Alton Brown's book was reviewed here recently). You can find transcripts and recipes from every show here:
http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com
He also has an interview and all sorts of facts.
Oh, and as far as regular pizza toppings (the recipe in the parent post sounds very good, and I'll have to try it), I like roasted garlic cloves (20 minutes at 300 degrees F), sun dried tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers. Pineapples go well with the hot peppers (it works for stir fry!), but are a bit heavy unless you're making deep dish pizza.
The documentation clearly states when there are differences in behaviour between different versions of PHP. It also states "This function was added in version x.x.x" I've always found it to be very helpful and straightforward, and I've never been confused about versions (important, because I use Debian unstable at home, and stable in the server room).
For desktop publishing, take a look at this:
http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/
I did a review of it for NewsForge a while ago. It's not quite there, but it's certainly headed in the right direction. I have to deal with the horror that is Quark every week at the college paper, and I'd love for it to have some real competition.
(an employee of Quark actually stated in a support forum that "Quark is not designed to work across a network." (i.e., edit files which reside on a file server). Well, super! What decade was this, again?)
> Linux just doesn't have any good, free software
Pardon me, but I happen to work at a place (freshmeat.net) that lists several thousand applications for *nix systems, most of which are under the GPL. I also happen to think that at least a few dozen of them are very good indeed.
What exactly is it that you want to do on a Linux desktop that you can't find a Free application to do it? Aside from attempting to turn your computer into a game machine (and even then, several titles are commercially available, and if your shady person has pirated the Windows copy, they can generally download the Linux executable and have it work).
Another person made a good point in that people might not be aware of Linux applications, because there are no shiny boxes and Wal-Mart advertisements for Pan. But people found out about Napster somehow.
The entire University of Maryland system (which includes my school, UMBC) has a deal with Microsoft. Part of the fees every student must pay go to Microsoft, and as a result, people can get copies of XP or Office for around $10. If they see Red Hat Linux in the school bookstore for $80, I don't think they're going to want it.
Sure, OpenOffice is great, but how am I supposed to recommend it over MS Office for $10? Obviously, I'm annoyed that I have to give money to a convicted monopolist every year; when the deal was in the works, I did a point/counterpoint with the head of technology at UMBC in the school newspaper. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been put online.
On the other hand, I was using IE on a Mac the other day and tried to open up a tab...oh, wait
Is that really what you want? If you're burning a CD, and you somehow hit the CD button by accident (let's say you have the DVD drive right above the CD-RW like I do, and you're trying to take out the DVD you left in there), do you really want the drive to immediately stop burning the CD and spit it out?
There's a _reason_ the system won't give you back the CD "right now" sometimes. It's because it still needs it. You can handle waiting a few seconds for the program to finish reading data so that it doesn't block, explode, or fail at whatever it was trying to finish (which will probably lead to you being more upset than it not giving you back the CD the instant you want it).
What sort of CDs do people use on a Linux system these days anyway, other than audio CDs (which don't need to be mounted)? And thankfully, some people are starting to get the idea that floppies are annoying and bad. True, they're now transferring files by emailing them to themselves via Hotmail...
Non-profit radio stations (such as college radio) pay a set fee to ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC every year for the right to broadcast works by their artists. AFAIK, BMI is the only one which requires you to submit log sheets (randomly selected 3 days' worth, once a year).
Almost all college radio stations submit at least their weekly top 30 songs to the College Music Journal, because if you're not listed in there, labels and distributors (for very small labels) are far less likely to send you music (and posters, and Weezer pocket protectors, and...).
The parent post is correct: it's mainly the logging requirements that will be the issue. Crap like requiring a "unique identifier" and the listener's time zone means that you can't have a directory like shoutcast where people just click on the streams and listen; you've got to get them to fill out forms at your site EVERY TIME. This is terrible, and wrong; even if we're going with the "pay per listener per song" crud, as long as I dutifully keep track of the time period each listener tuned in, I shouldn't have to say anything else. That's a strain on the listener and the station, and an invasion of the listener's privacy.
I plan on writing (Free) software to do whatever it takes to stay around (see my
> I don't know how good he actually is since there
> hasn't been a new 2.4 kernel released in almost 5
> months now.
Well, why do kernel releases have to happen so often? What functionality are you missing that is going to be added to a release of a stable (2.4) kernel? Are you having stability problems? Or are you just in a hurry to reboot your computer?
This is supposed to be a stable kernel. Each and every change, as he said, needs to be carefully examined, and tested as much as possible. This is a professional attitude which is missing in a lot of development these days (both commercial and Free).
Then again, I run Debian
Really, the only gaming I do with my Debian system, aside from xscorch, is running emulators for the NES, SNES, and (sometimes) Genesis. I don't feel bad about this because either my brother or I owned all of the "good" games for these systems at some point, and I'm pretty sure we gave them away.
(This was not very difficult for the Genesis; the good games consisted of Shining Force, Shining Force II, and Landstalker.)
Maybe you owned some of these games, or maybe you have a black thieving heart and don't care
Then too, we have a PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn downstairs. It's not like my Linux desktop is my gaming machine; I've always preferred console games, and unless Square and Working designs start making games for Linux, probably always will.
But do get them xscorch...
I guess you didn't bother to check and see what protocols Gaim actually supports, preferring instead to make an inference based on the name of the program. For the record, it supports MSN, Yahoo, IRC, Gadu-Gadu, Napster, Zephyr, Jabber, and ICQ.
Everybuddy (www.everybuddy.org) is another multi-protocol chat client available for Linux. It can actually receive files from AIM users, which Gaim can't, though I don't really worry about that too much. And I never worry about being able to send files using my IM client; that's what Web server software does.
You've just hit upon a recent pet peeve of mine. Why is it that people think they can apply their graphic design skills (in designing layout for newspapers, yearbooks, etc.) to the Web unchanged?
If I had a job playing a standup bass, I certainly wouldn't practice for it with a fretted electric bass. I guess what's needed is a good bash over the head with "Designing Web Usability." Unfortunately, that's not always an option.
This situation really isn't very much different from the software development world, though. Bad software is produced largely because of people (bosses, designers, and even the coders) wanting some flashy feature without really having a need for it, and bad Web pages often come about in the same way.
Not all of the complaints about Outlook are "bs". Certainly, a lot of people seem to like the interface. This is one point that has probably kept it on users' desktops.
However, it will randomly refuse to work with perfectly functional IMAP servers. Some people have had it delete everything in their inbox. And many aspects of its design make it an easy target for virus writers. Up until recently, even if you knew what you were doing and wanted to, you couldn't prevent Outlook from displaying HTML (and everything associated with it, such as Javascript and Web bugs). It's gotten a bit more difficult to have it automatically execute attachments, but apparently not difficult enough. (In all fairness, it should be pointed out that a large section of the population would simply execute those attachments themselves anyway).
It's easy to say that you're safe at work. You're sitting behind various filters set up by competant administrators. But many people at home don't have that option. If an ISP started filtering out attachments by file type, many would doubtless scream bloody murder. Home users are the main problem here (not that it's necessarily their fault). In an unprotected environment, Outlook still makes it too easy for virus writers, and while I would love to be in a world where everyone was shielded by competent admins (hello big job market for me!), we currently aren't.
I'm sure that there will be plenty of poorly designed Web sites that only allow proper functionality with IE. For that matter, there will be poorly designed Web sites that are not really helpful at all to the person who wants to buy something, due to their (lack of) organization and structure. I deal with these sites in the same way: I buy from someone else.
I can't remember having run into an IE-only problem on a commerce site; the second type of problem is much more common. I've been able to use my bank's Web interface with Mozilla for months (and before then, I only had to use NS4, not IE).
That said, I was pleased to read about the push by the people in Netscape/Mozilla to get Web designers to create compliant sites. Sure, I'm never going to visit most of the sites on the Web, and if I have a problem with one, there will likely be an alternate. But it's nice that one browser maker is pushing for people to have as much choice as possible (it's likely that their efforts will also help users of Konqueror and Opera).
The Godfather part II is the only sequel to ever win a...whichever award it is they give out to movies. Can you tell I haven't been into mainstream movies for a while?
I agree that talking about uptime in the context of desktop computers is silly, and good arguments have been made about the concept of "uptime" versus "availability" for servers.
However, with the power saving features of modern computers, it's not really necessary to turn them off at the end of the day (unless they're misconfigured). Even without power saving features, the real power drains have always been CRTs, not the computers themselves.
Also, some people's computers do more than just act as their desktop. What if one of my roommates wants to listen to some of my music while I'm asleep? Or one of my friends wants something from my Web server?
Sorry, but I really do like the interface of Enlightenment much better than that of Win2k. Even if Windows were equal to Linux in stability, I still wouldn't want it. Others have brought up viruses, and I'll add to that a distrust of Microsoft ("What are you doing, Dave?").
The things that were problems a few years ago (watching movies, listening to music, having a really good Web browser, reading Office documents) are gone now. I never really played PC games; we've got a PS2, Dreamcast, and Saturn downstairs, and if I get bored of those, I can fire up an emulator. So Windows doesn't really have any benefits for me.
If you like your Mac because of usability, but you don't like the fact that it crashes, why don't you just get a new Mac with OS X? Sure, it will cost a bit more than a PC, but you'll get to keep it longer, and you can ease yourself into the world of the command line while still being able to fall back to a friendly Apple GUI world. Plus, with XonX, you can run many of those Free *nix applications.
Personally, Debian is the right choice for my desktop, but I'm a sysadmin; the right choice for your desktop might be different.
You can get a frog to allow itself to be boiled to death in the same manner. If you place it in a pot of boiling water, it will try to escape. However, if you place it in a pot of cool or warm water and gradually increase the temperature, it will sit there until it has been cooked.
I don't see why it would only work in Windows. If it's just more hardware on the motherboard, a company selling a piece of closed source software could certainly make calls to said hardware. They might need to distribute a binary kernel module (or partially open, like nVidia) and require you to run it. Some people might not like this idea, but these people probably wouldn't want to run closed source programs either.
They don't have a true monopoly at the moment. Not every label is an RIAA member, and there is a pretty low barrier to entry. People who have gotten sick of $20 CDs have some choices:
1. Whine about $20 CDs.
2. Download MP3s made from $20 CDs instead.
3. Both 1 and 2
4. Discover labels that charge half that for CDs which aren't one or two "hits" with a bunch of filler.
If anyone would care to reply with their musical preferences, I'll even recommend some artists (as best I can for some genres).
First of all: why mainstream? But if you must:
Gorillaz, "G-sides"
Badly Drawn Boy, "About A Boy"
Ed Harcourt (well, more mainstream in the UK than the US)
All of these are good CDs, and the Badly Drawn Boy album is really excellent all the way through (and as a soundtrack to a Hugh Grant movie, about as mainstream as you can get). Let's not forget the gems that bands like Radiohead and Tool release on a regular basis.
Since you didn't specify what sort of music you think is "GOOD", I can't really give you a better list.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/dia/
I was taking a class where we were shown Visio, but I used Dia instead for my final project report. Not that this should influence your decision, but I did get an A in the class