I have substantial credit card debt right now, but I think my use of those credit cards was justified -- I was unemployed for a lengthy period of time (more than 24 months) and had only owned my house for a year before the airline industry was hammered and I lost my job, so loans were not possible, cash was kept for paying the mortgage and other critical bills which required cash, and things such as food, car repairs, fixing up the house to sell, and moving across the country after I finally found work went on credit card.
Unemployed people have VERY limited financial options. I simply had no other way to pay for those things, and it is a good thing I had a lot of relatively empty cards that I could use when I was laid off.
If I hadn't done that, I would have had to declare bankruptcy. There's no doubt of that.
As it is, it will be a slow recovery, but I can recover my life in a controlled manner while still retaining some semblence of financial responsibility, and I can slowly convert the high-interest loans to other forms of debt which are more manageable. It's a wonder what a difference EMPLOYMENT makes...
I'm sympathetic to the trauma of losing one's job, but when you admit "we didn't ask for [Indian contractors], management imposed them on us" the finger must be pointed at your management
I completely agree. Nevertheless, such incidents can result in misdirected feelings towards other parties, and that persons in the former situation I described are a lot less likely to be annoyed at the idea of contractors than folks in the latter situation. I'm not saying it's justified, only possible.
I personally have no problems with outsourcing as long as it makes long-term sense for the business (and isn't just an easy way for upper management to line its pockets). Sadly, it often happens for the latter reason.
and it remains unfair for the GGP to hate an entire nation for the personal impact of staffing decisions made by employers.
Yes and no. When something becomes a trend, it becomse important to identify the root causes, and the main engine which is driving the current outsourcing trend (the difference in living costs between nations) is really a national issue at its root, not a business issue.
I suspect that 'management' are not the only people to blame.
I disagree. Management these days seems to be focused on short-term goals with little regard for long-term stability or organizational viability, and that attitude makes them more easily influenced by "fads" and other similar things which are presented as general solutions but which have often been proven to work only in certain fairly specific circumstances. This type of activity seems to hurt the business and lower-echelon employees while leaving the upper ranks (who made the decision) relatively unscathed. This makes me angry.
If management would have taken a long-term view of the business, many of the issues we've been seeing over the past half decade would not have been happening, and I wouldn't hold most CEOs and corporate board members in such contempt.
Perhaps the entire U.S. system is collapsing upon you: shareholders want better returns; politicians want to return to office and so are unsupportive of (supposedly free-loading) migrating workers that bolster the workforce and nation's GDP; managers are forced to find more-efficient ways to complete their projects which can't use the skilled H1B visa staff (because there aren't enough visas) so try to employ the same staff in another country, saving money on home-grown staff. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor. I'm sorry about that.
The problem is not the system per se, but rather the apparent lack of checks and balances when it comes to abuses and exploitations of the system. CEOs and others are able to squeeze obscene amounts of money out of their organizations while at the same time reducing payrolls to beat the next quarter's numbers on Wall Street.
Hmmm. Maybe that means the flaw *is* in the system.:-)
16 years ago I worked in a software development center along with several Indian contractors, and I found the experience to be generally positive, mainly because:
a) The contractors were working in the same physical office we were so communication with them was easy,
b) All of them had impressive skillsets and a considerable amount of specific application knowledge, and
c) The contractors actually solved a very real problem our organization had (not enough knowledgeable people).
All in all, those folks from India were a pleasure to work with. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Roughly seven years ago at another company we also had Indian contractors involved with our programming team, but there were some huge differences.
a) The contractors got a few months of training from us and then went back overseas, and they didn't have individual telephones, meaning communication was a huge problem (e-mail conversations with an 11-hour timezone difference can take many many days).
b) Two of the contractors were excellent technically, but the rest were obviously just out of school -- they had some basic mainframe technical background, but not much beyond that, only one had general experience related to our industry, and none of them knew anything about our specific application or environment. We had to train them.
c) They didn't solve a problem we had -- we didn't ask for them, management imposed them on us for reasons we're still not quite aware of -- and we ended up spending time training these guys (and their replacements when a few of the original folks were swapped out by the contracting agency w/o our blessing) that would have been much better spent doing the work ourselves.
That experience was quite a bit less positive for what I hope are obvious reasons. It failed within two years.
It isn't always the fact that the folks "are from India" that is the source of the problem -- sometimes it has to do with their skillsets, or the way they are presented to the local employees, or perhaps the basic reasons for having them at a given company in the first place. Sometimes the anger or resentment you see on the part of local employees is very well-founded.
I'm not saying I want to trade.:-) Aside from my manager, though, the rest of my group is based in the UK, our main collaborative partner is located in Sydney, and most of the folks I seem to interact with on the phone or via e-mail are located in the computer center 25 miles south of here.
Thankfully my manager is a good guy, and I do run into a couple of interesting folks in this building now and then.
Please read the Audio Recording Recording Act of 1992, which adds specific exceptions to copyright law in the United States for things such as "fair use", at least in the case of analog media and certain types of digital media.
In the United States, I most emphatically *do* have those rights. Explicitly. The hold of the copyright cannot legally stop me from recording my LPs on cassette tape, for example. The AHRA gives me that specific right as a consumer. This is also true for my recording tapes to CD using my stereo CD recorder (which uses CD blanks that are explicitly intended for digital music and which have already had additional "royalties" levied on them), and an argument can be made that the ripping of CDs to MP3 files is also covered under the act.
Learn about your actual rights under US federal law before accusing others of making pretenses, please...
Right now, it's just me and my manager. I'm surrounded by nontechnical 50+ females all day who do user support for an application I know nothing about, so they have almost nothing in common with me.:-) Not that it's a bad thing, but it's different from what I've experienced in the past.
In a way, I'm kinda in the same position as the original poster.:-)
To address the original question, though: Do you have anything in common with the folks you work with? Are you into PCs, or tunes, or sports, or movies, or something that would open up some common ground?
How important are these cliques you're talking about in your workplace? In some offices, there are teams delineated by the work area in question, but "cliques" per se don't really exist outside of those teams.
I guess I've spent so much time working with technies in their 30's/40's/50's that I've never run into the issue of "cliques" before, so it's an interesting question for me, too.
Don't get me wrong, I like my job...I'm often passionate about my interest in what I do, that happens to also earn me a living...a good one. But, it is just a job. Where I do it, and who for really isn't the biggest deal in my life.
Some of us aren't like that. I chose to work for Northwest Airlines, for example, because I had a few years of previous exposure to the airline industry and I wanted to work as a programmer FOR A MAJOR AIRLINE. Period. And while I worked there, I wasn't just a programmer, applications, one each. I was an applications programmer in the heart of their flight operations group. If my code failed, the airline didn't fly. Literally. And it felt good to feel like the stuff I was doing was a critical part of the actual operation.
Northwest was a company I felt very strongly about. I loved working there, and I'm still proud to know that I have something like 100,000 lines of code still running in their WorldFlight production system and handling a large percentage of their ACARS and surface weather traffic, as well as doing various other things. But it hurt me quite a bit personally when I was laid off because I'd invested over a decade of time (between contractor time and employee time) in that system, and I was really proud to be part of that particular group.
It hurt to leave, but I'm glad I was there. I do like where I am now, and I'm proud of what I do, but it's not the same.
But, losing my job, doesn't really mean I lost something that defines me. I work ONLY to make money...to enable me to buy and do things that make me happy. If I won the lottery tomorrow, trust me..I'd never work again, I'd do nothing but stuff that was fun.
I want to create software that actually MEANS something. I like working on projects that will have a real impact on some aspect of the company, and I sometimes put a lot of time and emotional energy into the designs I create.
Coding is a means to an end, certainly, but for me it's also an end in itself. The problem solving and design aspects are satisfying IN THEMSELVES for me, and I'm actually quite proud of some of the things that I've been able to accomplish so far in my short 18-year career as a programmer.
When I was at NWA, I would still be working there even if I had won the lottery. Why? Because that was a working and technical environment that I very much enjoyed being a part of, and solving problems in that context was a fun activity in its own right. I *WANTED* to go to work every day.
I guess that explains a lot of the posts I read here...I was actually shocked that so many people described the firing process so emotionally...and took it so personally. I didn't realize that the job people hold defines them so much. And I think that is sad.
I believe that programming is art at a certain level, and I believe there is nothing wrong with an artist feeling some form of emotion over the works he creates.
If you don't get the kind of satisfaction that I do after coming up with a particularly elegant fix for a problem or a particularly efficient design, then I feel sorry for you because I think you are missing out on one of the really neat things about being a programmer. Our profession is to weave webs of logic and structure out of nothing! I think the whole virtual world of computing is an amazing thing, even magical in a way.
A job should be nothing more than a means to supporting your lifestyle. Sure...hopefully you can enjoy your work, but, really...does it matter who you do it for? Your job should not be YOU.
I agree that your job should not be you, but I don't have a problem with people who are willing to put some of their heart and soul into their work. It's one of the things which differentiates good software from great software, I think. For some people, passion is important. I was just going through the motions here, I'd be ready to find a different career. Instead, I'm doing what I love: writing software. I hope I'm able to do it for another 18 years, and hopefully until I retire...
It makes a big difference to hear it in person, I think.
When I was laid off by Unisys back in 1992 after working for them for almost five years, it helped cushion the blow to see how hard my manager (who is the one who told me) was taking it all. He was told from above to let three of our four-person programming team go that same day - our side of the Airline Center ended up laying off 20% of the staff all told - and it really shook him up, even though we all knew for months that it was coming.
When I was laid off by Northwest Airlines in January 2002 after eight years, hearing the news from my director also helped, since he was obviously not happy that the layoff was occurring, and again that helped a little to cushion the blow (and I needed it that time, since that was a layoff I *didn't* see coming since I'd survived the mass layoffs after September 11th. We thought they were done).
An e-mail message telling you you've been let go is impersonal as hell. I'd really be angry about something like that. Hearing it in person shows a little bit of class on the part of the organization, at least IMO.
Instead, I have a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation which is used as a common fileserver for music as well as a backup server for Ghost and DriveImage images and compressed filesystems in other formats, and I have a 250GB Buffalo DriveStation (a fanless external USB drive) plugged into the LinkStation and dedicated as a backup device for the LinkStation.
That way, I can back up my various OS partitions via Ghost or DriveImage and store them on the LS, back up data files and directory trees as ZIP or.tgz files to the LS, and back the LS itself up to the DS every week or so (it takes me about 40 hours to do a LS->DS backup right now).
Even with my small LAN, DVDs would be too cumbersome.
While I agree with your statement, nowhere in my message did I state that I have a problem with copyright or with paying for music.
I said that I had a problem with DRM.
Whether it's free or not doesn't matter. I won't be a part of a music distribution method or music-bearing medium if I know beforehand that it uses DRM.
I think folks need here to learn how to read. I personally think music and movia pirates should be nailed to the wall. If you want to get tunes for free, there are zillions of ways to record things without having to resort to blatant copyright violation.
Don't be an ass. The AHRA of 1992 give you the right to convert your analog music between formats if you have the equipment to do so, and that analog media doesn't have active DRM on it (and neither does the hardware) to prevent you from doing so.
The digital music we're talking about in this thread, while free (gratis), will not allow you to perform the equivalent media transformation regardless of your ability to actually make it happen.
The issue involved here is twofold:
(1) Should the music industry have the right (beyond copyright) to dictate to me what I do with the content I purchase from them?
(2) Should the music industry have the right to use technology to remove my ability to perform a media conversion on that content even if I have the legal right to do so?
I believe the answer to both questions should be a resounding **NO**.
To address your other issue: It's trivial to convert 8-track tape to other media. Cutting records can be done as well, and the equipment can be ontained, but I think I would seriously question your choice of target media.:-)
Let me start by saying I have no issue with the preceding comment,
Thank you for actually reading my comment instead of inserting various inane assumptions where they don't belong (as so many respondants before you seem to have done).:-)
however that same "demanding idealist" attitude is often echoed by those who are, quite simply, addicted to free content and use their perceived moralism as justification for continuing their actions.
Demanding? I simply want them to continue the status quo. Provide copyrighted music for a reasonable fee, and let folks like me (who have filled the music industry's coffers for decades) continue to purchase the music we like and play it in an unrestricted way.
DRM is the change being made. By them. My expectations are the same now as they were in the mid 1970's. I don't want change.
Trust me when I say I am no fan of the RIAA's tactics regarding their customers, but at some point they need to make money. If you're willing to buy a DRM-free CD that is rippable, burnable and whatnot and don't mind paying $9.99(on sale)-$13.99+ for a CD, then by all means go ahead.
It's fine by me. I've gravitated towards things like Time-Life or Rhino collections and such over the years, anyway, which provide a much better listenable-track-to-disc ratio than standard label CDs do.:-)
Nice straw man. Read my comment again. I said cost wasn't an issue. I'm perfectly willing to continue to pay for music in a format which does not restrict my ability to transfer between media for my own personal use.
And who says I violate agreements? I simply don't MAKE them. If I even have to deal with an agreement beyond basic copyright law, then I've not taken part in that technology or service to date.
It's quite possible for one to be adamant about freedom while still remaining ethical (and legal) in one's music and video media consumption. It's no different from those who choose to only use open source software.
I purchase non-DRMed music CDs. Period. Just like I've done for the past 20 years. To date, I've spent many thousands of US dollars on music in traditional CD format. If DRM continues, however, I will simply cease purchasing music except from legitimate sources of used non-DRM media.
But if it still limits my ability to listen, it isn't worth it (to me). Not even at zero cost.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Configuring a Linux kernel isn't all that difficult. It may require a little bit of knowledge, but so does working with Microsoft Word. Kernel configration does not require any "programming" expertise at all these days.
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Why are they using computers?
Because somebody, somewhere is getting a cut of the contract costs...
It depends on circumstances.
I have substantial credit card debt right now, but I think my use of those credit cards was justified -- I was unemployed for a lengthy period of time (more than 24 months) and had only owned my house for a year before the airline industry was hammered and I lost my job, so loans were not possible, cash was kept for paying the mortgage and other critical bills which required cash, and things such as food, car repairs, fixing up the house to sell, and moving across the country after I finally found work went on credit card.
Unemployed people have VERY limited financial options. I simply had no other way to pay for those things, and it is a good thing I had a lot of relatively empty cards that I could use when I was laid off.
If I hadn't done that, I would have had to declare bankruptcy. There's no doubt of that.
As it is, it will be a slow recovery, but I can recover my life in a controlled manner while still retaining some semblence of financial responsibility, and I can slowly convert the high-interest loans to other forms of debt which are more manageable. It's a wonder what a difference EMPLOYMENT makes...
In the business climate today, *nobody* who works for someone else is absolutely certain about their job status.
Heck, even folks who are self-employed could find themselves out of a job due to natural disters or to other circumstances outside their control.
I completely agree. Nevertheless, such incidents can result in misdirected feelings towards other parties, and that persons in the former situation I described are a lot less likely to be annoyed at the idea of contractors than folks in the latter situation. I'm not saying it's justified, only possible.
I personally have no problems with outsourcing as long as it makes long-term sense for the business (and isn't just an easy way for upper management to line its pockets). Sadly, it often happens for the latter reason.
Yes and no. When something becomes a trend, it becomse important to identify the root causes, and the main engine which is driving the current outsourcing trend (the difference in living costs between nations) is really a national issue at its root, not a business issue.
I disagree. Management these days seems to be focused on short-term goals with little regard for long-term stability or organizational viability, and that attitude makes them more easily influenced by "fads" and other similar things which are presented as general solutions but which have often been proven to work only in certain fairly specific circumstances. This type of activity seems to hurt the business and lower-echelon employees while leaving the upper ranks (who made the decision) relatively unscathed. This makes me angry.
If management would have taken a long-term view of the business, many of the issues we've been seeing over the past half decade would not have been happening, and I wouldn't hold most CEOs and corporate board members in such contempt.
The problem is not the system per se, but rather the apparent lack of checks and balances when it comes to abuses and exploitations of the system. CEOs and others are able to squeeze obscene amounts of money out of their organizations while at the same time reducing payrolls to beat the next quarter's numbers on Wall Street.
Hmmm. Maybe that means the flaw *is* in the system. :-)
The USPTO seems to think that if a patent application involves technology, it must be completely new.
16 years ago I worked in a software development center along with several Indian contractors, and I found the experience to be generally positive, mainly because:
a) The contractors were working in the same physical office we were so communication with them was easy,
b) All of them had impressive skillsets and a considerable amount of specific application knowledge, and
c) The contractors actually solved a very real problem our organization had (not enough knowledgeable people).
All in all, those folks from India were a pleasure to work with. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
Roughly seven years ago at another company we also had Indian contractors involved with our programming team, but there were some huge differences.
a) The contractors got a few months of training from us and then went back overseas, and they didn't have individual telephones, meaning communication was a huge problem (e-mail conversations with an 11-hour timezone difference can take many many days).
b) Two of the contractors were excellent technically, but the rest were obviously just out of school -- they had some basic mainframe technical background, but not much beyond that, only one had general experience related to our industry, and none of them knew anything about our specific application or environment. We had to train them.
c) They didn't solve a problem we had -- we didn't ask for them, management imposed them on us for reasons we're still not quite aware of -- and we ended up spending time training these guys (and their replacements when a few of the original folks were swapped out by the contracting agency w/o our blessing) that would have been much better spent doing the work ourselves.
That experience was quite a bit less positive for what I hope are obvious reasons. It failed within two years.
It isn't always the fact that the folks "are from India" that is the source of the problem -- sometimes it has to do with their skillsets, or the way they are presented to the local employees, or perhaps the basic reasons for having them at a given company in the first place. Sometimes the anger or resentment you see on the part of local employees is very well-founded.
Wow. In some companies, if folks had to wait for "management approval" for every IT action, then nothing would ever get done.
I'm not saying I want to trade. :-) Aside from my manager, though, the rest of my group is based in the UK, our main collaborative partner is located in Sydney, and most of the folks I seem to interact with on the phone or via e-mail are located in the computer center 25 miles south of here.
Thankfully my manager is a good guy, and I do run into a couple of interesting folks in this building now and then.
They've had competition of a serious nature for several years now at least. That (by itself) doesn't seem to justify the layoffs.
Please read the Audio Recording Recording Act of 1992, which adds specific exceptions to copyright law in the United States for things such as "fair use", at least in the case of analog media and certain types of digital media.
In the United States, I most emphatically *do* have those rights. Explicitly. The hold of the copyright cannot legally stop me from recording my LPs on cassette tape, for example. The AHRA gives me that specific right as a consumer. This is also true for my recording tapes to CD using my stereo CD recorder (which uses CD blanks that are explicitly intended for digital music and which have already had additional "royalties" levied on them), and an argument can be made that the ripping of CDs to MP3 files is also covered under the act.
Learn about your actual rights under US federal law before accusing others of making pretenses, please...
Right now, it's just me and my manager. I'm surrounded by nontechnical 50+ females all day who do user support for an application I know nothing about, so they have almost nothing in common with me. :-) Not that it's a bad thing, but it's different from what I've experienced in the past.
:-)
In a way, I'm kinda in the same position as the original poster.
To address the original question, though: Do you have anything in common with the folks you work with? Are you into PCs, or tunes, or sports, or movies, or something that would open up some common ground?
How important are these cliques you're talking about in your workplace? In some offices, there are teams delineated by the work area in question, but "cliques" per se don't really exist outside of those teams.
I guess I've spent so much time working with technies in their 30's/40's/50's that I've never run into the issue of "cliques" before, so it's an interesting question for me, too.
Some of us aren't like that. I chose to work for Northwest Airlines, for example, because I had a few years of previous exposure to the airline industry and I wanted to work as a programmer FOR A MAJOR AIRLINE. Period. And while I worked there, I wasn't just a programmer, applications, one each. I was an applications programmer in the heart of their flight operations group. If my code failed, the airline didn't fly. Literally. And it felt good to feel like the stuff I was doing was a critical part of the actual operation.
Northwest was a company I felt very strongly about. I loved working there, and I'm still proud to know that I have something like 100,000 lines of code still running in their WorldFlight production system and handling a large percentage of their ACARS and surface weather traffic, as well as doing various other things. But it hurt me quite a bit personally when I was laid off because I'd invested over a decade of time (between contractor time and employee time) in that system, and I was really proud to be part of that particular group.
It hurt to leave, but I'm glad I was there. I do like where I am now, and I'm proud of what I do, but it's not the same.
I want to create software that actually MEANS something. I like working on projects that will have a real impact on some aspect of the company, and I sometimes put a lot of time and emotional energy into the designs I create.
Coding is a means to an end, certainly, but for me it's also an end in itself. The problem solving and design aspects are satisfying IN THEMSELVES for me, and I'm actually quite proud of some of the things that I've been able to accomplish so far in my short 18-year career as a programmer.
When I was at NWA, I would still be working there even if I had won the lottery. Why? Because that was a working and technical environment that I very much enjoyed being a part of, and solving problems in that context was a fun activity in its own right. I *WANTED* to go to work every day.
I believe that programming is art at a certain level, and I believe there is nothing wrong with an artist feeling some form of emotion over the works he creates.
If you don't get the kind of satisfaction that I do after coming up with a particularly elegant fix for a problem or a particularly efficient design, then I feel sorry for you because I think you are missing out on one of the really neat things about being a programmer. Our profession is to weave webs of logic and structure out of nothing! I think the whole virtual world of computing is an amazing thing, even magical in a way.
I agree that your job should not be you, but I don't have a problem with people who are willing to put some of their heart and soul into their work. It's one of the things which differentiates good software from great software, I think. For some people, passion is important. I was just going through the motions here, I'd be ready to find a different career. Instead, I'm doing what I love: writing software. I hope I'm able to do it for another 18 years, and hopefully until I retire...It makes a big difference to hear it in person, I think.
When I was laid off by Unisys back in 1992 after working for them for almost five years, it helped cushion the blow to see how hard my manager (who is the one who told me) was taking it all. He was told from above to let three of our four-person programming team go that same day - our side of the Airline Center ended up laying off 20% of the staff all told - and it really shook him up, even though we all knew for months that it was coming.
When I was laid off by Northwest Airlines in January 2002 after eight years, hearing the news from my director also helped, since he was obviously not happy that the layoff was occurring, and again that helped a little to cushion the blow (and I needed it that time, since that was a layoff I *didn't* see coming since I'd survived the mass layoffs after September 11th. We thought they were done).
An e-mail message telling you you've been let go is impersonal as hell. I'd really be angry about something like that. Hearing it in person shows a little bit of class on the part of the organization, at least IMO.
Instead, I have a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation which is used as a common fileserver for music as well as a backup server for Ghost and DriveImage images and compressed filesystems in other formats, and I have a 250GB Buffalo DriveStation (a fanless external USB drive) plugged into the LinkStation and dedicated as a backup device for the LinkStation.
.tgz files to the LS, and back the LS itself up to the DS every week or so (it takes me about 40 hours to do a LS->DS backup right now).
That way, I can back up my various OS partitions via Ghost or DriveImage and store them on the LS, back up data files and directory trees as ZIP or
Even with my small LAN, DVDs would be too cumbersome.
An ASCII text file or man page will stick with a program as long as it's distributed.
A wiki will only last as long as its hosting service.
I prefer the former.
Try pricing high-end IBM or Unisys servers. You'll still get to spend 6-7 digits for the hardware, and then there's the software licensing fees. :-)
While I agree with your statement, nowhere in my message did I state that I have a problem with copyright or with paying for music.
I said that I had a problem with DRM.
Whether it's free or not doesn't matter. I won't be a part of a music distribution method or music-bearing medium if I know beforehand that it uses DRM.
I think folks need here to learn how to read. I personally think music and movia pirates should be nailed to the wall. If you want to get tunes for free, there are zillions of ways to record things without having to resort to blatant copyright violation.
Don't be an ass. The AHRA of 1992 give you the right to convert your analog music between formats if you have the equipment to do so, and that analog media doesn't have active DRM on it (and neither does the hardware) to prevent you from doing so.
:-)
The digital music we're talking about in this thread, while free (gratis), will not allow you to perform the equivalent media transformation regardless of your ability to actually make it happen.
The issue involved here is twofold:
(1) Should the music industry have the right (beyond copyright) to dictate to me what I do with the content I purchase from them?
(2) Should the music industry have the right to use technology to remove my ability to perform a media conversion on that content even if I have the legal right to do so?
I believe the answer to both questions should be a resounding **NO**.
To address your other issue: It's trivial to convert 8-track tape to other media. Cutting records can be done as well, and the equipment can be ontained, but I think I would seriously question your choice of target media.
Thank you for actually reading my comment instead of inserting various inane assumptions where they don't belong (as so many respondants before you seem to have done). :-)
Demanding? I simply want them to continue the status quo. Provide copyrighted music for a reasonable fee, and let folks like me (who have filled the music industry's coffers for decades) continue to purchase the music we like and play it in an unrestricted way.
DRM is the change being made. By them. My expectations are the same now as they were in the mid 1970's. I don't want change.
It's fine by me. I've gravitated towards things like Time-Life or Rhino collections and such over the years, anyway, which provide a much better listenable-track-to-disc ratio than standard label CDs do. :-)
That is not what I said. Money for me is a nonissue. Music which has DRM is music I will not partake of, be it high cost, low cost, or no cost.
Period.
They can take their sugar-sweetened attempt to further insert DRM into the market, and they can shove it.
Nice straw man. Read my comment again. I said cost wasn't an issue. I'm perfectly willing to continue to pay for music in a format which does not restrict my ability to transfer between media for my own personal use. And who says I violate agreements? I simply don't MAKE them. If I even have to deal with an agreement beyond basic copyright law, then I've not taken part in that technology or service to date. It's quite possible for one to be adamant about freedom while still remaining ethical (and legal) in one's music and video media consumption. It's no different from those who choose to only use open source software. I purchase non-DRMed music CDs. Period. Just like I've done for the past 20 years. To date, I've spent many thousands of US dollars on music in traditional CD format. If DRM continues, however, I will simply cease purchasing music except from legitimate sources of used non-DRM media.
But if it still limits my ability to listen, it isn't worth it (to me). Not even at zero cost.
Configuring a Linux kernel isn't all that difficult. It may require a little bit of knowledge, but so does working with Microsoft Word. Kernel configration does not require any "programming" expertise at all these days.
Next thing you know they'll be colorizing old black-and-white movies!
Oh, wait...
Cost isn't the main issue I have with digital music. Freedom is the main issue.
I want to be able to play the music that I purchase on whatever device I choose. Period.
If I can't do that, then I won't participate in the service.