Play.com's 65p comes to 93c today, which is close enough to 99c. 7digital seems to be charging 79p. Seems about the same.
I used to like eMusic.com before they put me through a bunch of stupid annoyance over the way they handle billing. I assume they're still a pretty good deal since I left them.
There's increasingly many options, thanks to companies like eMusic and, yes, Apple, who managed to pry open the DRM gates. My point wasn't that Amazon isn't an option, but rather than it's not actually better than iTunes... I was responding to all the posts that implied that iTunes was still exclusively DRM-protected content like it had to be when they made their original deals with the labels.
Out of curiosity, how are you posting to slashdot?
By whistling pure 300 baud tones directly into a plain old telephone and handling the TCP-IP protocol and checksums in my superior cerebral cortex, just like anyone else.
Any connection to slashdot involves transferring many files, all in formats repeatedly shown to be exploitable in the past, in virtually any application you could be using.
Oh, that's right. Since you can't guarantee you can't catch a cold it's OK to run barefoot through the hot word in a plague hospital and snog all the ebola patients. I'll keep on washing my hands after using the restroom, if that's OK with you.
Um.. don't you need iTunes to download iTunes Plus tracks?
OK, here's the scenario:
1. Someone figures out that if you put "#!No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." followed by 447 nulls and "1060 West Addison Street - Chicago" into a.amz file and pass it to the Amazon downloader it opens up a gateway to hell in your hard disk. Anyone can put up a ".amz" file for downloading anywhere and the helper application will run it as soon as you follow the link. You lose.
2. Someone figures that if you put "#!No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." followed by 447 nulls and "1060 West Addison Street - Chicago" into an mp3 file and pass it to iTunes it opens up a gateway to hell in your hard disk. Anyone can put up an mp3 file for downloading and as soon as you follow the link... it gets saved to your hard drive. OK, they make it an "itms:" link... but that only fetches files from Apple's servers, so they can't feed it to iTunes that way...
It's cheap, DRM-less, and easy. And it doesn't install a helper application into your browser, just waiting for someone to figure out how to slide an exploit into a ".amz" file.
For Safari under Leopard, to remove that erroneous tagging of ".amz" as "safe" (there's no such thing as a "safe" file), remove the entry from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist .
What do you have to say about Apple's warm and fuzzy user-friendly DRM now?
I say "I just upgraded three tracks from Joe Hisaishi's soundtrack to "Kikujiro" to iTunes Plus", what do you expect me to say? I should refuse to take advantage of the fact that Apple finally got the labels to agree to let them finish removing the cold and prickly DRM from the trackes they're licensing?
And whoever modded you "funny" must be similarly out of touch.
I didn't say he took code, I said he built on the work of others, and I CERTAINLY have no objection to him doing so... we both clearly agree that everything we do is built on the work of others, so I'm a little confused as to the source of your obvious anger over such a quotidian truism.
As for zealots, I think anyone comparing the tone of your comment to mine will have no difficulty deciding which of us suffers from that complaint.:)
Anyone can take that code, ignore the communal effort which went into producing it, close source the code and their own additions and benefit off the backs of the work of others.
You mean like the way Linus Torvalds did when he used the work that everyone from Thompson and Ritchie to Allman and McKusick had done in designing the system he cloned?
I'm not criticizing Linus, writing open source code to open systems APIs is a Good Thing. My point is that EVERYTHING we do is done on the back of others.
And if this is another step in Microsoft's slow and reluctant journey from proprietary APIs back to open ones, that's good too.
... If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"
If you write Win32 open source, consider writing your code to an open API instead of a proprietary one instead. Open systems are at least as important as open source.
I suppose you're talking about the pot Dubya smoked in his younger and wilder days before he became a Born Again Fundie. While I don't smoke, myself, I don't think we can really blame marijuana for what he's done as president.
I'm free to run any software on this here FreeBSD box I want.
Some of it I have to log in as root, or su to root, to run. Because that's something I do rarely, applications don't routinely make calls to APIs that are restricted to root very often.
On Windows, these calls have never been restricted, so applications have been free to call them, since they were introduced (some as far back as Windows 1.0). There's never been any reason for applications to avoid using them. So thousands of applications, including applications written by Microsoft, make these calls routinely. So instead of having "su" something you do once a week, at most, UAC is something that comes up many times a day.
Um, I was criticizing Microsoft (and Apple) for the lack of security in Windows (and Mac) APIs back in '89 or '91 or whenever they were introducing Win32s (and System 7). And I'm not any kind of super genius, so if I could see the problems they were letting themselves in for why couldn't they?
Yes, strcpy and strcat and sprintf have inherent security holes, but YOU can't write a program using strcpy or strcat and have that lead to the user seeing a "please run me as root" dialog which, of course, they approve because they get "please run me as root" dialogs ALL THE TIME.
The requirement that applications run as root to do things like open low IP ports in UNIX is a security flaw, yes. It's a design flaw in the Berkeley socket API and has led to many programs running setuid root, instead of running setgid or requiring that users be in a particular group, that shouldn't be.
Sudo is also not part of the standard UNIX toolset, either... it STILL doesn't ship as a standard part of many traditional UNIX systems, and it isn't actually required for the use of ANY UNIX system. You could eliminate sudo and just perform privileged actions logged in as root on a separate virtual console and most users would never notice.
Yes, even on Mac OS X, Apple could remove their hack around sudo (which I don't approve of) and force users to use Fast User Switching back to a real Administrator account, and most users wouldn't notice.
Also, sudo isn't built in at a low level so that every application that wants to do something that requires privileges automatically gets a dialog popped up on its behalf, teaching users that these kinds of security dialogs are a normal part of their day, and so making it easier for malware authors to social-engineer their way in. It's not as bad as the way applications that use the Microsoft HTML control are willing to grant full local user access to untrusted websites and email attachments if the user can be tricked into clicking "OK" at the wrong time, but it's still a daft idea.
Now if Microsoft were to say "applications that have UAC pop up will be completely broken in Windows 8, unless the user installs them in a legacy VM, because we're going to replace UAC with something that requires more explicit user interaction", so they were using UAC to force application writers (including Microsoft) to quit using raw system management APIs directly from applications... but they don't.
A bunch of obsessives with nothing else to do have sunk to the digital equivalent of rooting through someone's trash, and found out that Apple may, possibly, be considering an idea that's been implemented a thousand different ways since the sixities or earlier, and has universally failed because it is a bad idea because nobody wants to worry about how they look on the phone.
And yet this bad idea (and I agree it's a bad idea) is so important to them that they dropped the separate iSight product and replaced it with a camera in every new Mac that is basically useless for any purpose OTHER than video calls through iChat.
This is a bad idea that has its memetic claws deep in Apple's psyche.
god forbid we deride anything the almighty Apple might do.
Oh, I'll deride it alright, what I won't do is discount it. I've been burned too many times underestimating Apple's pigheadedness.
Since everything in the OS is exposed via the Win32 API... you can't even see the NT kernel API unless you're someone like Softway Systems... the difference is academic. So is "it's a system level change", when it's a system level change that thousands of applications (for many of which the source is no longer available) depend on.
"There are APIs in Windows that applications have been written to use, that should not be exposed to untrusted applications. These APIs can not be blocked without breaking too many legacy applications, so UAC makes the user responsible for deciding when they should be allowed." Better?
The fact that these APIs were made available for general use was a security flaw, but one that didn't much matter when there was no security. Now they make security impossible.
This is the same logic as the stupid security dialogs in IE and other applications that use the Microsoft HTML control. It's not "security", it's "we're afraid to make the OS/libraries/COM objects/APIs secure, so we're putting it on you, the user".
UAC is a hack to deal with the problem that the Win32 API is full of inherent security holes that would require changing lots third-party software to fix. So they put a prompt up if a program is about to use one of the features that contain or implement part of one of these security holes.
The only real way to fix it is to implement a designed-for-security API and designate Win32 and everything based on it "legacy", only run in a sandbox.
Which is what Windows 7 was rumored to be, a couple years ago.
The ancestors of the ibexes had to learn the behaviors that let them survive in the wild in the first place.
That's a small problem, compared with the problem of genetic defects. This is now a species represented by a single gene set. Even if they manage to do a little genetic engineering to produce male and female ibexes, that's nowhere near enough to produce a viable species.
"New option: disable ribbon. When this is selected programs that use the "Ribbon" API (including Microsoft Office and Internet explorer) revert to the well tested, well understood, easily navigable and discoverable menus"
Not that I will, but DAMN I hate and despise that ribbon.
Slashdot Mirror
Play.com's 65p comes to 93c today, which is close enough to 99c. 7digital seems to be charging 79p. Seems about the same.
I used to like eMusic.com before they put me through a bunch of stupid annoyance over the way they handle billing. I assume they're still a pretty good deal since I left them.
There's increasingly many options, thanks to companies like eMusic and, yes, Apple, who managed to pry open the DRM gates. My point wasn't that Amazon isn't an option, but rather than it's not actually better than iTunes... I was responding to all the posts that implied that iTunes was still exclusively DRM-protected content like it had to be when they made their original deals with the labels.
Out of curiosity, how are you posting to slashdot?
By whistling pure 300 baud tones directly into a plain old telephone and handling the TCP-IP protocol and checksums in my superior cerebral cortex, just like anyone else.
Any connection to slashdot involves transferring many files, all in formats repeatedly shown to be exploitable in the past, in virtually any application you could be using.
Oh, that's right. Since you can't guarantee you can't catch a cold it's OK to run barefoot through the hot word in a plague hospital and snog all the ebola patients. I'll keep on washing my hands after using the restroom, if that's OK with you.
Um .. don't you need iTunes to download iTunes Plus tracks?
OK, here's the scenario:
1. Someone figures out that if you put "#!No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." followed by 447 nulls and "1060 West Addison Street - Chicago" into a .amz file and pass it to the Amazon downloader it opens up a gateway to hell in your hard disk. Anyone can put up a ".amz" file for downloading anywhere and the helper application will run it as soon as you follow the link. You lose.
2. Someone figures that if you put "#!No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." followed by 447 nulls and "1060 West Addison Street - Chicago" into an mp3 file and pass it to iTunes it opens up a gateway to hell in your hard disk. Anyone can put up an mp3 file for downloading and as soon as you follow the link... it gets saved to your hard drive. OK, they make it an "itms:" link... but that only fetches files from Apple's servers, so they can't feed it to iTunes that way...
It's cheap, DRM-less, and easy. And it doesn't install a helper application into your browser, just waiting for someone to figure out how to slide an exploit into a ".amz" file.
For Safari under Leopard, to remove that erroneous tagging of ".amz" as "safe" (there's no such thing as a "safe" file), remove the entry from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist .
What do you have to say about Apple's warm and fuzzy user-friendly DRM now?
I say "I just upgraded three tracks from Joe Hisaishi's soundtrack to "Kikujiro" to iTunes Plus", what do you expect me to say? I should refuse to take advantage of the fact that Apple finally got the labels to agree to let them finish removing the cold and prickly DRM from the trackes they're licensing?
And whoever modded you "funny" must be similarly out of touch.
I didn't say he took code, I said he built on the work of others, and I CERTAINLY have no objection to him doing so... we both clearly agree that everything we do is built on the work of others, so I'm a little confused as to the source of your obvious anger over such a quotidian truism.
As for zealots, I think anyone comparing the tone of your comment to mine will have no difficulty deciding which of us suffers from that complaint. :)
Anyone can take that code, ignore the communal effort which went into producing it, close source the code and their own additions and benefit off the backs of the work of others.
You mean like the way Linus Torvalds did when he used the work that everyone from Thompson and Ritchie to Allman and McKusick had done in designing the system he cloned?
I'm not criticizing Linus, writing open source code to open systems APIs is a Good Thing. My point is that EVERYTHING we do is done on the back of others.
And if this is another step in Microsoft's slow and reluctant journey from proprietary APIs back to open ones, that's good too.
That's enough to power *20* deLoreans!
... If you write Win32 open source or shareware, please open yourself to the wider market!"
If you write Win32 open source, consider writing your code to an open API instead of a proprietary one instead. Open systems are at least as important as open source.
I suppose you're talking about the pot Dubya smoked in his younger and wilder days before he became a Born Again Fundie. While I don't smoke, myself, I don't think we can really blame marijuana for what he's done as president.
I was right with you up until you started talking about .NET.
No, please, just no.
I'm free to run any software on this here FreeBSD box I want.
Some of it I have to log in as root, or su to root, to run. Because that's something I do rarely, applications don't routinely make calls to APIs that are restricted to root very often.
On Windows, these calls have never been restricted, so applications have been free to call them, since they were introduced (some as far back as Windows 1.0). There's never been any reason for applications to avoid using them. So thousands of applications, including applications written by Microsoft, make these calls routinely. So instead of having "su" something you do once a week, at most, UAC is something that comes up many times a day.
Um, I was criticizing Microsoft (and Apple) for the lack of security in Windows (and Mac) APIs back in '89 or '91 or whenever they were introducing Win32s (and System 7). And I'm not any kind of super genius, so if I could see the problems they were letting themselves in for why couldn't they?
At least Apple has finally scotched Classic.
Yes, strcpy and strcat and sprintf have inherent security holes, but YOU can't write a program using strcpy or strcat and have that lead to the user seeing a "please run me as root" dialog which, of course, they approve because they get "please run me as root" dialogs ALL THE TIME.
The requirement that applications run as root to do things like open low IP ports in UNIX is a security flaw, yes. It's a design flaw in the Berkeley socket API and has led to many programs running setuid root, instead of running setgid or requiring that users be in a particular group, that shouldn't be.
Sudo is also not part of the standard UNIX toolset, either... it STILL doesn't ship as a standard part of many traditional UNIX systems, and it isn't actually required for the use of ANY UNIX system. You could eliminate sudo and just perform privileged actions logged in as root on a separate virtual console and most users would never notice.
Yes, even on Mac OS X, Apple could remove their hack around sudo (which I don't approve of) and force users to use Fast User Switching back to a real Administrator account, and most users wouldn't notice.
Also, sudo isn't built in at a low level so that every application that wants to do something that requires privileges automatically gets a dialog popped up on its behalf, teaching users that these kinds of security dialogs are a normal part of their day, and so making it easier for malware authors to social-engineer their way in. It's not as bad as the way applications that use the Microsoft HTML control are willing to grant full local user access to untrusted websites and email attachments if the user can be tricked into clicking "OK" at the wrong time, but it's still a daft idea.
Now if Microsoft were to say "applications that have UAC pop up will be completely broken in Windows 8, unless the user installs them in a legacy VM, because we're going to replace UAC with something that requires more explicit user interaction", so they were using UAC to force application writers (including Microsoft) to quit using raw system management APIs directly from applications... but they don't.
A bunch of obsessives with nothing else to do have sunk to the digital equivalent of rooting through someone's trash, and found out that Apple may, possibly, be considering an idea that's been implemented a thousand different ways since the sixities or earlier, and has universally failed because it is a bad idea because nobody wants to worry about how they look on the phone.
And yet this bad idea (and I agree it's a bad idea) is so important to them that they dropped the separate iSight product and replaced it with a camera in every new Mac that is basically useless for any purpose OTHER than video calls through iChat.
This is a bad idea that has its memetic claws deep in Apple's psyche.
god forbid we deride anything the almighty Apple might do.
Oh, I'll deride it alright, what I won't do is discount it. I've been burned too many times underestimating Apple's pigheadedness.
Since everything in the OS is exposed via the Win32 API... you can't even see the NT kernel API unless you're someone like Softway Systems... the difference is academic. So is "it's a system level change", when it's a system level change that thousands of applications (for many of which the source is no longer available) depend on.
"There are APIs in Windows that applications have been written to use, that should not be exposed to untrusted applications. These APIs can not be blocked without breaking too many legacy applications, so UAC makes the user responsible for deciding when they should be allowed." Better?
The fact that these APIs were made available for general use was a security flaw, but one that didn't much matter when there was no security. Now they make security impossible.
This is the same logic as the stupid security dialogs in IE and other applications that use the Microsoft HTML control. It's not "security", it's "we're afraid to make the OS/libraries/COM objects/APIs secure, so we're putting it on you, the user".
UAC is a hack to deal with the problem that the Win32 API is full of inherent security holes that would require changing lots third-party software to fix. So they put a prompt up if a program is about to use one of the features that contain or implement part of one of these security holes.
The only real way to fix it is to implement a designed-for-security API and designate Win32 and everything based on it "legacy", only run in a sandbox.
Which is what Windows 7 was rumored to be, a couple years ago.
The ancestors of the ibexes had to learn the behaviors that let them survive in the wild in the first place.
That's a small problem, compared with the problem of genetic defects. This is now a species represented by a single gene set. Even if they manage to do a little genetic engineering to produce male and female ibexes, that's nowhere near enough to produce a viable species.
With the X.Org Poulsbo driver not being actively maintained, it doesn't even build with the latest Linux packages.
Is this because of changes in the kernel API, or instability at a higher level?
American revolution - not resources (at least not entirely, Britain probably did want access to North American resources)
It was totally about resources - the American colonies taking control of the sugar/rum/slave trade triangle from Britain.
And don't forget Bush's little oil war.
Here's what I want to see:
"New option: disable ribbon. When this is selected programs that use the "Ribbon" API (including Microsoft Office and Internet explorer) revert to the well tested, well understood, easily navigable and discoverable menus"
Not that I will, but DAMN I hate and despise that ribbon.
This is how the outer layers of a Matrioshka Brain would work, perhaps?
Yeh, the money should go to bbc.co.uk :)
I'd rather my living room didn't look like it had the same lighting as a Dollar Store.
But how can you judge how your beloved trinkets are going to look in your house if the lighting doesn't match the store you bought them from?