I couldn't agree more. In fact, last time I was home I did split up his document, and that certainly helped. The problem is that I am five hours away, and my dad is the type that jumps in and reads the instructions afterward.
All things considered though, WordPerfect is holding up fairly well. I don't think I have the strength to teach Dad to use a DTP app, and WordPerfect has been pretty good at building a table of contents and an index. The entire document is something like 1.2G and with enough memory WordPerfect will open the entire expended document.
Not that I would trade it for Emacs and LaTeX though, plain text is a blessing on documents that big.
In 1990 I was in South America (Peru to be precise), and there was absolutely no way that I was going to be able to get an expensive NeXT station past customs. Those crooks would have stolen it for sure. Not to mention the fact that I was a senior in high school, and my parents weren't about to pay for a UNIX workstation.
Perhaps that is why I am so bitter about Mac OS X. I can't help but think that if Apple had gone into the software business instead of trying to sell hardware that I wouldn't have had to use Windows. I learned to program on the Apple IIc, and then migrated to the Macintosh, and if Apple would have opened up their hardware then DOS wouldn't have been more than a footnote and Windows would have never existed. However, because of Apple's high prices I was trapped in the DOS and Windows world until Linux came along. I originally started using Linux because I was a poor student who couldn't afford development tools (I wasn't a CS major), and so I used Linux despite the fact that it made for a very stark desktop.
Now I can afford a Mac, but I am still more than a little pissed, and besides Linux makes a pretty nice desktop now. Especially considering the fact that I don't much care for graphical file managers. The funny thing is that I just had my home computer stolen, and I have a fairly large check to replace my stolen hardware. I wonder if there are any places in town that sell Macs, I think I would like to take one for a spin.
Compaqs, especially older Compaqs, are the devil. Which is why I compared the Macs to a Dell. Believe it or not Dell computers are quite well laid out. The one I am using right now opens without any screws, and the push of a button folds the power supply out of the way of the motherboard. The drives, likewise, slide in and out with the push of a button or two. The motherboard isn't upgradeable, but then neither are the Macs.
Now, I am not saying that the system isn't worth the price. Heck, stripes has nearly convinced me that I need to purchase a Mac. My point was simply that Apple customers pay a premium for their commodity hardware.
Okay, I can understand that. I have started to play with digital photography and it would have been nice to simply go to the store and look for hardware with an Apple on it. As it stands my Epson printer and HP camera work perfectly with Linux, but I did have to do a little shopping around. And I totally agree about the laptop bit. Linux on laptops is a pain in the posterior. And don't even get me started on font issues. Honestly, before OpenOffice came out I didn't give a flying fig for fonts, but OpenOffice isn't even useable unless you get some fonts from somewhere, and installing the fonts and getting them to work took me an entire day (the first time).
Now that I see where you are coming from I would love to get my Mom a Mac. Unfortunately my father is working on a book (with lots of pictures and wacky layouts) and MS Word simply wouldn't hold up under the stress. Corel's WordPerfect seems to be doing all right for now. I told my father that if he has to call me again for help I am going to force him to switch to LaTeX. I don't suppose WordPerfect is available for Mac OS X? Don't tell me that the version of MS Word for Mac OS X is better than the Windows version either. For one thing, I don't believe it. For another he has nearly 800 pages in WordPerfect format and everytime he so much as adds a letter to one of the early pages it screws up the entire layout. I would rather die than help him switch to anything but LaTeX.
This article is about tips for UNIX users migrating to the Mac. Which basically means that we are already getting along just fine without MS Office or Photoshop. Now, if Apple would have come out with such a beast in 1995 when I switched my desktop over to Linux then there is no question that I would have been thrilled. However, Linux (and UNIX in generally) has finally gotten to the point where it isn't painful to use on the desktop. UNIXers that put up with UNIX desktops when Motif was the state of the art and the closest thing to an Office suite was Emacs are certainly not looking around to switch now.
And yes, I realize that that my Linux desktop still requires some workarounds. For example, my resume is in Word format (created in OpenOffice). I tested it in the Word that comes with Office 2000 and it looked fine. Migrating from my old WordPerfect resume took 15 minutes. I also realize that if I was ever to do pre-press work I would need a way to use Photoshop. Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
Now that's an argument that I can understand. And it makes perfect sense if I was buying a Mac for my mother. However, I am not buying a Mac for my mother, and I don't run Windows on my PC. This article was about UNIX users switching to the Mac, and I just don't see the draw. If I was a Windows user I imagine that I would be dying to pay extra for something that works, but I am not a Windows user.
Once upon a time there were quite a few application categories that didn't have a decent Linux equivalent. Those days are over, but the Mac faithful are having a hard time believing it.
Give me my undeniably ugly but very functional Linux box any day of the week.
Oh please. The least expensive Mac that I can buy is the iMac at $799, for $699 I can get a brand new Dell with a 1.8 Ghz processor (Mac has 600Mhz) and 256M of Ram (Mac has 128M). Dell will even throw in Corel's PerfectOffice.
The hardware in the two boxes will be very comparable, with the edge probably going to Dell. After all, Apple uses commodity hard drives, video cards, sound cards, and memory just like Dell does. And if you are talking about the Power Macs, then for far less than Apple wants you can get a far superior Intel system (SCSI drives, for example).
Mac addicts can just drop the story about superior Mac hardware. At this point it is nothing but myth. Just compare prices for a bit.
You can put the genie back in the bottle if the amount of affected Americans is small enough. Most Americans are still connect to the Internet with a modem, and a good percentage of these Internet users connect via AOL. In other words, the average American has a radically different idea as to what constitutes an acceptable Internet connection than you do.
What's more, most folks are happy enough with what they have. Even those folks that have broadband aren't really complaining about the bandwidth caps, except for the very heaviest of users.
Basically the bandwidth providers have you over a barrel. If you are like me, you probably only have one alternative for broadband. I am convinced that I couldn't get DSL from Qwest if I lived in their NOC. Which means that my only real alternative is cable (from one provider). I looked at their TOS, and decided that my modem connection wasn't so bad. The small ISP I use is making noise about wireless, and so maybe I will take a look at that, but it will probably be considerably more expensive.
Clearly there were some bad business plans during the "boom," but what really killed these companies was not bad business plans per se, but management that focused solely on increasing the stock price of the company.
In short, there was less money to be made in building a solid business than there was in erecting the shell of a business and spending money keeping it afloat until after an IPO. The original investors could then sell their shares at vastly inflated prices and abandon ship. The people building these shell companies could easily quadruple their money. Building an actual profitable company is much harder, and the proceeds are generally far smaller.
On another note. I think that you will find that Free Software service companies (like RedHat) are the wave of the future. The reason for this is simple, they are targetting a business sector that has an absolutely astounding profit margin. Microsoft currently has a profit margin of over 30%. There is still plenty of money to be made undercutting Microsoft's prices. You might not put a $5000 stereo in your fiat, but ask WalMart which stereos make the most money and they will tell you that they make far more money selling $100 stereos than all of the $5000 stereo vendors put together.
Have you ever actually seen a gun? They are quite easy to use. You can sum up an entire gun safety course with one line:
Don't point guns at people.
There is no question that guns are dangerous, but they are really only accidentally dangerous in the hands of small children and people under the influence of alcohol (or some other drug). Your neighbor is not going to "forget" how to use his gun and shoot you.
Actually Internet Explorer is descended from Mosaic. They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free. This destroyed both the value of the Mosaic source code (who else was going to license the rights if they could get the IE derivative for free), and it also helped destroy Netscape. Since many of the early Netscape employees had contributed to Mosaic I imagine that they were pretty ticked off to see that happen. If Mosaic had been licensed under the GPL, then the browser wars would almost certainly have turned out differently. For one thing, I would probably be browsing the web with a descedent of Mosaic instead of a Mozilla descendent (Galeon).
Mosaic is not a very good example of the benefits of a BSD-style license. TCP/IP is a much better example.
Three chapters might be enough for Orson Scott Card, who already has a fairly large following, but it certainly isn't enough for authors that are less well known. Besides, why be stingy? If you aren't going to put the whole book up on the Internet what does it hurt to put nearly all of the book on the Internet? You still have to buy the book to find out how it ends, and no one is likely to read 80% of a book and then not finish it.
The folks at Baen aren't stupid. Most sci-fi/fantasy novels nowadays are actually part of a series, and Baen isn't giving away any series in its entirety. I have bought several books from them from authors I had never heard of because I liked the books I was able to read for free.
I actually prefer reading on my Visor, and I refuse to buy encrypted ebooks, and that means that baen.com and fictionwise.com are getting the lion's share of my book dollars.
Actually, for the amount of money that this patent is likely to be worth I imagine that you could get a very competent team of lawyers willing to work for a piece of the pie. That's how people get millions of dollars for pouring hot coffee in their laps. If the pie is big enough there are plenty of excellent lawyers that will.
I don't care who writes the code as long as its made available. Nor am I concerned that a "closed" version of Linux written by the Chinese is going to out innovate the Free Software version that we have all know and love. The fact of the matter is that China is years behind the United States and the rest of the free world. I have no doubt that amont their population they have people that could make serious contributions to Free Software, but I don't believe that they currently have the education or the hardware to outpace the everyone else on the planet.
The fact of the matter is that the Chinese are desperate for the technology found in Free Software because they are hoping to use it to jump start their own technology base. However, there is very little difference between the China of today and the China that saw itself fall years behind the state of the art in computing. Mixing in the source code to Emacs is not likely to change their environment to such an extent that they dominate the rest of the world.
And even if the Chinese did dominate, it wouldn't be very much different than the situation that we have in Free Software today. No matter what Free Software you use there is a good chance that you won't approve of the politics of one of the hackers that donates code. I might not agree with communism, but I have no problem using their software as long as it comes with source code.
The Justice Department has almost nothing to do with this switch. This switch is fueled by simple economics. Gateway knows that on the low end the computer buyers are motivated by one thing and one thing only, price. Dell and HP have been offering Corel's PerfectOffice for some time. Gateway probably thought that they could use the fact that they were the largest PC OEM still bundling MS Office with their low end PCs to their advantage. Apparently the couldn't.
This doesn't mean that the computer industry is pushing towards more diversity. Instead it simply means that PC hardware and software is becoming a commodity market. Instead of features driving purchasing decisions price is becoming the primary factor in purchasing decisions. So we will see more diversity in the short run as buyers shift from the popular but expensive MS Office towards its less expensive competitors.
From what I have seen of Microsoft's PR mania I would actually be surprised if they could find someone in Western Washington that wasn't a Microsoft PR person.
I suppose it is somewhat comical that anyone would consider partnering with Microsoft in this day and age. Even the devil has a better reputation of living up to his end of the bargain.
Blaming the Pope for the population growth in South America seems somewhat silly. Especially since the population growth in Islamic countries is just as bad or worse. I suppose that the Pope is to blame for this as well?
The fact of the matter is that people in developing nations have large families for mostly the same reasons that first world folk invest in 401Ks. In the third world your children are your retirement plan. When people in Peru get old they expect their children to take care of their financial needs. People without children are screwed. They end up working until they can't anymore, at which point they die. Anyone that has ever actually lived in South America (as I have) could tell you that.
As for the future of ebooks, I am living it right now. I bought an inexpensive Visor Handsprint for $80, and a compact flash plugin to go with it. Now I can carry an amazing number of books around in my pocket, and the backlight guarantees that I can read them even in the dark. The resolution on my Visor is more than adequate, even in direct sunlight, and the batteries last over a week on average on a single charge (rechargable batteries sold separately).
John Hopkins might not go for it, but the Samaritan General Hospital in Moses Lake, WA would love it to pieces. After all, the doc will still have a medical degree from an accredited school.
Re:Never let the facts get in the way of a diatrib
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
You can do what you want, I plan on living less expensively and saving.
Even if the dock workers win this particular round chances are good that they are going to lose in the long run. There are plenty of people that are willing to do their work at lower prices (especially in California with their large immigrant population). A quick look at the ILWU's website shows that shipping companies are already shifty work away from the longshoremen. It's only a matter of time.
Programming is something that is even easier to shift overseas. Programming unions would simply guarantee that software development shifted overseas.
The rest of y'all must have more money than I do. The first few seconds of a song are not worth the $18 that purchasing the album would cost me. Besides, I would bet software could wash the voiceover right out anyhow.
That's what this whole MP3 craze has proven, most of the people who are interested in listening to music aren't one bit interested in quality, but they are instead motivated by price. They want the music they like for less money.
You are just bitter, but not as bitter as the RIAA is going to be once a Linux adaptor for this digital signal is available.
You almost have to feel sorry for the recording industry. They are increasingly between a rock and a hard place since the radio business was deregulated. Now the RIAA is going to be stuck paying your local station to broadcast CD quality music. How long before there is a Tivo for radio?
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't agree more. In fact, last time I was home I did split up his document, and that certainly helped. The problem is that I am five hours away, and my dad is the type that jumps in and reads the instructions afterward.
All things considered though, WordPerfect is holding up fairly well. I don't think I have the strength to teach Dad to use a DTP app, and WordPerfect has been pretty good at building a table of contents and an index. The entire document is something like 1.2G and with enough memory WordPerfect will open the entire expended document.
Not that I would trade it for Emacs and LaTeX though, plain text is a blessing on documents that big.
In 1990 I was in South America (Peru to be precise), and there was absolutely no way that I was going to be able to get an expensive NeXT station past customs. Those crooks would have stolen it for sure. Not to mention the fact that I was a senior in high school, and my parents weren't about to pay for a UNIX workstation.
Perhaps that is why I am so bitter about Mac OS X. I can't help but think that if Apple had gone into the software business instead of trying to sell hardware that I wouldn't have had to use Windows. I learned to program on the Apple IIc, and then migrated to the Macintosh, and if Apple would have opened up their hardware then DOS wouldn't have been more than a footnote and Windows would have never existed. However, because of Apple's high prices I was trapped in the DOS and Windows world until Linux came along. I originally started using Linux because I was a poor student who couldn't afford development tools (I wasn't a CS major), and so I used Linux despite the fact that it made for a very stark desktop.
Now I can afford a Mac, but I am still more than a little pissed, and besides Linux makes a pretty nice desktop now. Especially considering the fact that I don't much care for graphical file managers. The funny thing is that I just had my home computer stolen, and I have a fairly large check to replace my stolen hardware. I wonder if there are any places in town that sell Macs, I think I would like to take one for a spin.
Compaqs, especially older Compaqs, are the devil. Which is why I compared the Macs to a Dell. Believe it or not Dell computers are quite well laid out. The one I am using right now opens without any screws, and the push of a button folds the power supply out of the way of the motherboard. The drives, likewise, slide in and out with the push of a button or two. The motherboard isn't upgradeable, but then neither are the Macs.
Now, I am not saying that the system isn't worth the price. Heck, stripes has nearly convinced me that I need to purchase a Mac. My point was simply that Apple customers pay a premium for their commodity hardware.
Okay, I can understand that. I have started to play with digital photography and it would have been nice to simply go to the store and look for hardware with an Apple on it. As it stands my Epson printer and HP camera work perfectly with Linux, but I did have to do a little shopping around. And I totally agree about the laptop bit. Linux on laptops is a pain in the posterior. And don't even get me started on font issues. Honestly, before OpenOffice came out I didn't give a flying fig for fonts, but OpenOffice isn't even useable unless you get some fonts from somewhere, and installing the fonts and getting them to work took me an entire day (the first time).
Now that I see where you are coming from I would love to get my Mom a Mac. Unfortunately my father is working on a book (with lots of pictures and wacky layouts) and MS Word simply wouldn't hold up under the stress. Corel's WordPerfect seems to be doing all right for now. I told my father that if he has to call me again for help I am going to force him to switch to LaTeX. I don't suppose WordPerfect is available for Mac OS X? Don't tell me that the version of MS Word for Mac OS X is better than the Windows version either. For one thing, I don't believe it. For another he has nearly 800 pages in WordPerfect format and everytime he so much as adds a letter to one of the early pages it screws up the entire layout. I would rather die than help him switch to anything but LaTeX.
This article is about tips for UNIX users migrating to the Mac. Which basically means that we are already getting along just fine without MS Office or Photoshop. Now, if Apple would have come out with such a beast in 1995 when I switched my desktop over to Linux then there is no question that I would have been thrilled. However, Linux (and UNIX in generally) has finally gotten to the point where it isn't painful to use on the desktop. UNIXers that put up with UNIX desktops when Motif was the state of the art and the closest thing to an Office suite was Emacs are certainly not looking around to switch now.
And yes, I realize that that my Linux desktop still requires some workarounds. For example, my resume is in Word format (created in OpenOffice). I tested it in the Word that comes with Office 2000 and it looked fine. Migrating from my old WordPerfect resume took 15 minutes. I also realize that if I was ever to do pre-press work I would need a way to use Photoshop. Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
Now that's an argument that I can understand. And it makes perfect sense if I was buying a Mac for my mother. However, I am not buying a Mac for my mother, and I don't run Windows on my PC. This article was about UNIX users switching to the Mac, and I just don't see the draw. If I was a Windows user I imagine that I would be dying to pay extra for something that works, but I am not a Windows user.
Once upon a time there were quite a few application categories that didn't have a decent Linux equivalent. Those days are over, but the Mac faithful are having a hard time believing it.
Give me my undeniably ugly but very functional Linux box any day of the week.
Oh please. The least expensive Mac that I can buy is the iMac at $799, for $699 I can get a brand new Dell with a 1.8 Ghz processor (Mac has 600Mhz) and 256M of Ram (Mac has 128M). Dell will even throw in Corel's PerfectOffice.
The hardware in the two boxes will be very comparable, with the edge probably going to Dell. After all, Apple uses commodity hard drives, video cards, sound cards, and memory just like Dell does. And if you are talking about the Power Macs, then for far less than Apple wants you can get a far superior Intel system (SCSI drives, for example).
Mac addicts can just drop the story about superior Mac hardware. At this point it is nothing but myth. Just compare prices for a bit.
You can put the genie back in the bottle if the amount of affected Americans is small enough. Most Americans are still connect to the Internet with a modem, and a good percentage of these Internet users connect via AOL. In other words, the average American has a radically different idea as to what constitutes an acceptable Internet connection than you do.
What's more, most folks are happy enough with what they have. Even those folks that have broadband aren't really complaining about the bandwidth caps, except for the very heaviest of users.
Basically the bandwidth providers have you over a barrel. If you are like me, you probably only have one alternative for broadband. I am convinced that I couldn't get DSL from Qwest if I lived in their NOC. Which means that my only real alternative is cable (from one provider). I looked at their TOS, and decided that my modem connection wasn't so bad. The small ISP I use is making noise about wireless, and so maybe I will take a look at that, but it will probably be considerably more expensive.
Clearly there were some bad business plans during the "boom," but what really killed these companies was not bad business plans per se, but management that focused solely on increasing the stock price of the company.
In short, there was less money to be made in building a solid business than there was in erecting the shell of a business and spending money keeping it afloat until after an IPO. The original investors could then sell their shares at vastly inflated prices and abandon ship. The people building these shell companies could easily quadruple their money. Building an actual profitable company is much harder, and the proceeds are generally far smaller.
On another note. I think that you will find that Free Software service companies (like RedHat) are the wave of the future. The reason for this is simple, they are targetting a business sector that has an absolutely astounding profit margin. Microsoft currently has a profit margin of over 30%. There is still plenty of money to be made undercutting Microsoft's prices. You might not put a $5000 stereo in your fiat, but ask WalMart which stereos make the most money and they will tell you that they make far more money selling $100 stereos than all of the $5000 stereo vendors put together.
Have you ever actually seen a gun? They are quite easy to use. You can sum up an entire gun safety course with one line:
There is no question that guns are dangerous, but they are really only accidentally dangerous in the hands of small children and people under the influence of alcohol (or some other drug). Your neighbor is not going to "forget" how to use his gun and shoot you.
Actually Internet Explorer is descended from Mosaic. They purchased the rights to use the Mosaic code and then gave IE away for free. This destroyed both the value of the Mosaic source code (who else was going to license the rights if they could get the IE derivative for free), and it also helped destroy Netscape. Since many of the early Netscape employees had contributed to Mosaic I imagine that they were pretty ticked off to see that happen. If Mosaic had been licensed under the GPL, then the browser wars would almost certainly have turned out differently. For one thing, I would probably be browsing the web with a descedent of Mosaic instead of a Mozilla descendent (Galeon).
Mosaic is not a very good example of the benefits of a BSD-style license. TCP/IP is a much better example.
Three chapters might be enough for Orson Scott Card, who already has a fairly large following, but it certainly isn't enough for authors that are less well known. Besides, why be stingy? If you aren't going to put the whole book up on the Internet what does it hurt to put nearly all of the book on the Internet? You still have to buy the book to find out how it ends, and no one is likely to read 80% of a book and then not finish it.
The folks at Baen aren't stupid. Most sci-fi/fantasy novels nowadays are actually part of a series, and Baen isn't giving away any series in its entirety. I have bought several books from them from authors I had never heard of because I liked the books I was able to read for free.
I actually prefer reading on my Visor, and I refuse to buy encrypted ebooks, and that means that baen.com and fictionwise.com are getting the lion's share of my book dollars.
Actually, for the amount of money that this patent is likely to be worth I imagine that you could get a very competent team of lawyers willing to work for a piece of the pie. That's how people get millions of dollars for pouring hot coffee in their laps. If the pie is big enough there are plenty of excellent lawyers that will.
I don't care who writes the code as long as its made available. Nor am I concerned that a "closed" version of Linux written by the Chinese is going to out innovate the Free Software version that we have all know and love. The fact of the matter is that China is years behind the United States and the rest of the free world. I have no doubt that amont their population they have people that could make serious contributions to Free Software, but I don't believe that they currently have the education or the hardware to outpace the everyone else on the planet.
The fact of the matter is that the Chinese are desperate for the technology found in Free Software because they are hoping to use it to jump start their own technology base. However, there is very little difference between the China of today and the China that saw itself fall years behind the state of the art in computing. Mixing in the source code to Emacs is not likely to change their environment to such an extent that they dominate the rest of the world.
And even if the Chinese did dominate, it wouldn't be very much different than the situation that we have in Free Software today. No matter what Free Software you use there is a good chance that you won't approve of the politics of one of the hackers that donates code. I might not agree with communism, but I have no problem using their software as long as it comes with source code.
So does this mean I shouldn't get a Panavision camera? I am confused.
The Justice Department has almost nothing to do with this switch. This switch is fueled by simple economics. Gateway knows that on the low end the computer buyers are motivated by one thing and one thing only, price. Dell and HP have been offering Corel's PerfectOffice for some time. Gateway probably thought that they could use the fact that they were the largest PC OEM still bundling MS Office with their low end PCs to their advantage. Apparently the couldn't.
This doesn't mean that the computer industry is pushing towards more diversity. Instead it simply means that PC hardware and software is becoming a commodity market. Instead of features driving purchasing decisions price is becoming the primary factor in purchasing decisions. So we will see more diversity in the short run as buyers shift from the popular but expensive MS Office towards its less expensive competitors.
From what I have seen of Microsoft's PR mania I would actually be surprised if they could find someone in Western Washington that wasn't a Microsoft PR person.
I suppose it is somewhat comical that anyone would consider partnering with Microsoft in this day and age. Even the devil has a better reputation of living up to his end of the bargain.
Didn't Nvidia have to write off a bunch of hardware that became obsolete when Microsoft changed the XBox?
Blaming the Pope for the population growth in South America seems somewhat silly. Especially since the population growth in Islamic countries is just as bad or worse. I suppose that the Pope is to blame for this as well?
The fact of the matter is that people in developing nations have large families for mostly the same reasons that first world folk invest in 401Ks. In the third world your children are your retirement plan. When people in Peru get old they expect their children to take care of their financial needs. People without children are screwed. They end up working until they can't anymore, at which point they die. Anyone that has ever actually lived in South America (as I have) could tell you that.
As for the future of ebooks, I am living it right now. I bought an inexpensive Visor Handsprint for $80, and a compact flash plugin to go with it. Now I can carry an amazing number of books around in my pocket, and the backlight guarantees that I can read them even in the dark. The resolution on my Visor is more than adequate, even in direct sunlight, and the batteries last over a week on average on a single charge (rechargable batteries sold separately).
Two words: lower cost.
John Hopkins might not go for it, but the Samaritan General Hospital in Moses Lake, WA would love it to pieces. After all, the doc will still have a medical degree from an accredited school.
You can do what you want, I plan on living less expensively and saving.
Even if the dock workers win this particular round chances are good that they are going to lose in the long run. There are plenty of people that are willing to do their work at lower prices (especially in California with their large immigrant population). A quick look at the ILWU's website shows that shipping companies are already shifty work away from the longshoremen. It's only a matter of time.
Programming is something that is even easier to shift overseas. Programming unions would simply guarantee that software development shifted overseas.
The rest of y'all must have more money than I do. The first few seconds of a song are not worth the $18 that purchasing the album would cost me. Besides, I would bet software could wash the voiceover right out anyhow.
That's what this whole MP3 craze has proven, most of the people who are interested in listening to music aren't one bit interested in quality, but they are instead motivated by price. They want the music they like for less money.
You are just bitter, but not as bitter as the RIAA is going to be once a Linux adaptor for this digital signal is available.
You almost have to feel sorry for the recording industry. They are increasingly between a rock and a hard place since the radio business was deregulated. Now the RIAA is going to be stuck paying your local station to broadcast CD quality music. How long before there is a Tivo for radio?