Not as long as we still have allofmp3.com and similar.
The only difference between Kazaa and allofmp3.com is that with allofmp3 you are paying for the convenience of easier stealing. Don't think you're not stealing just because you're paying money.
As a consumer of iTunes music, I am seriously considering going back to CD's
Me too (tm). In fact, after being an early enthusiast and buying a good deal of music on the iTMS, I have now pretty much gone back to CDs (usually bought at concerts so the artist receives all the money). I only use iTMS for the occasional instant gratification.
An example of why: I have given some iTMS gift certificates to my 11-year-old nephew and now he has a bunch of songs on his computer. Recently he got a Sony PSP and asked me how to transfer some of his songs onto the PSP. I felt bad telling him that he couldn't transfer any of the songs he bought on-line.
This is the kind of restriction of Fair Use that scares me.
I'd say most musicians make their living from CD sales. I know many many artists, and CD sales are their primary income. These people don't have major label deals. They sell their CDs at concerts.
Often, an opening act will be paid something like $50, which doesn't go very far. They make their money by convincing listeners to pony up for the CD.
The hardware belongs to the Bells, they were the ones that invested the time, effort, and money into building the network.
Not really. The network was built while they were a monopoly with a guaranteed rate of return. They had absolutely zero risk. They were allowed to add a fixed profit on top of whatever they spent.
Besides, the agreement was that they would be allowed to sell Long Distance once they had opened their networks to competitors. Now that they have permission to sell LD in most states, they want to shut out the competition.
I finally convinced my mother to upgrade from AOL dialup to DSL (with package discounts, it's actually cheaper), and she says she doesn't notice a difference.
I guess if all you do is read email and hit Amazon once in a while, maybe it doesn't really matter.
> What are the implications of putting your bank account > number on a web-site as a means to collect payments?
It is very common in Japan for the bank account number to be listed in an advertisement. This is still the main way that people pay for mail order goods and invoiced services.
To get the money out, you need to have the passbook for the account and the hanko (seal), or an ATM card and PIN.
The original poster may have been joking, but leave it to the Japanese to come up with such a thing. Toto makes many fancy toilets, some with remote control. But for the do-it-yourselfer, they make a retrofit remote control add-on.
Reminds me of the early '90s in Japan when business cards started sporting barcodes, encoded with the phone and fax numbers printed on the card.
I could never quite grasp why anyone would want to use a scanner to scan the number, which would then output the touch-tones to the phone, instead of just punching eight buttons.
I admit I'm not totally immune to technology for technology's sake, but...what were these people thinking!
When I was taking programming classes in the mid '80s at UCLA, they had a rather clever cheating detection program. It didn't look at the source (Pascal or C) code, but rather at the produced assembler code to see if students were copying others' algorithms.
So you might obfuscate your copied code by moving it around, changing variable names, etc. but it would still catch you.
We have used Dialogic and NMS cards and have never been truly happy with those companies. They seem to promise the world and deliver buggy drivers and it can take months or years to get fixes out of them.
So we've now started using a totally open-source hardware platform, the Tormenta Card. Linux drivers are provided.
It costs us just a few hundred dollars for a card that handles a few T1 spans. These cards are kind of like Winmodems, in that they have very little intelligence on them, with all the work being done by the host. But we're running two Ts on a 1.3 GHz machine and we're testing a 4-span card too. One of the card's developers told us he expects to be able to run two or three of their 4-span PCI cards in a dial-processor 1.7 GHz machine.
Compared to the NMS cards we were buying at $10k a pop, this is downright cheap, and with full open-source we don't have to wait for Dialogic's developers in New Zealand to get around to our problem.
In Japan, Toshiba sells a PVR with a built-in DVD recorder, allowing for easy archiving. I wonder when we'll see that here (where here=anywhere but Japan).
Only if you're running 10 or 20 of them with compute-heavy users. Otherwise, the SPARC you've already got at home should be fine. We use the Sun Rays at work and they are completely quiet. I plan to add an Ethernet card to my home Ultra 5 and plug in a few Sun Rays ($300 each) around the house.
Currently I address the noise problem by using 10-meter keyboard and video cables and locking the computer in a spare room.
Not just those South of the Equator. Not all places in the Northern Hemisphere have the same sense of seasons as North America. For example, "Summer" in Thailand is roughly April and May, because that's when it's hottest there.
I saw a sign at Yosemite National Park (where 50% of visitors are foreigners) announcing that a particular trail is open "Memorial Day to Labor Day". How many foreigners would know what this means!
Most of the hardware manufacturers I've spoken to recently are finally (reluctantly?) acknowledging Linux's popularity and are planning Linux releases.
My sources at Dialogic say they'll probably have a Linux port of their drivers out sometime early next year, while the good folks at Aculab already have Linux drivers for some of their products and will release more Linux drivers in the coming months.
Aculab is also pretty good about releasing hardware specs if you're really interested in doing a port yourself. Dialogic has never quite understood that they could boost sales of their products by releasing enough information to allow outside parties to write more drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference between Kazaa and allofmp3.com is that with allofmp3 you are paying for the convenience of easier stealing. Don't think you're not stealing just because you're paying money.
Me too (tm). In fact, after being an early enthusiast and buying a good deal of music on the iTMS, I have now pretty much gone back to CDs (usually bought at concerts so the artist receives all the money). I only use iTMS for the occasional instant gratification.
An example of why: I have given some iTMS gift certificates to my 11-year-old nephew and now he has a bunch of songs on his computer. Recently he got a Sony PSP and asked me how to transfer some of his songs onto the PSP. I felt bad telling him that he couldn't transfer any of the songs he bought on-line.
This is the kind of restriction of Fair Use that scares me.
Often, an opening act will be paid something like $50, which doesn't go very far. They make their money by convincing listeners to pony up for the CD.
--
Jim Gottlieb
Not really. The network was built while they were a monopoly with a guaranteed rate of return. They had absolutely zero risk. They were allowed to add a fixed profit on top of whatever they spent.
Besides, the agreement was that they would be allowed to sell Long Distance once they had opened their networks to competitors. Now that they have permission to sell LD in most states, they want to shut out the competition.
---Jim Gottlieb
Remember there were some studios (including Disney) that originally refused to release any product on DVD.
That was a similarly short-sighted decision.
I finally convinced my mother to upgrade from AOL dialup to DSL (with package discounts, it's actually cheaper), and she says she doesn't notice a difference.
I guess if all you do is read email and hit Amazon once in a while, maybe it doesn't really matter.
We had a new employee recently, and she called me to complain that her browser (Safari) wasn't working properly.
I walked over to her office and she showed me the problem: when she opens a browser window, it doesn't display the MSN home page.
I set her default page to MSN as I wondered to myself how Microsoft could have brainwashed someone so completely.
They don't complain because they have a better deal than we (in the U.S.) do.
Gas (petrol) is heavily taxed and the money is used to provide excellent public transportation so most people don't even need to own a car.
Not owning a car leaves more money in your pocket than even the cheapest gasoline.
(I live in California when I'm not in Tokyo so I have to own a car, but I own a hybrid: the Toyota Prius. A great geek car.)
> number on a web-site as a means to collect payments?
It is very common in Japan for the bank account number to be listed in an advertisement. This is still the main way that people pay for mail order goods and invoiced services.
To get the money out, you need to have the passbook for the account and the hanko (seal), or an ATM card and PIN.
Sorry to disappoint Mr. Amos, but for at least the past twenty years, you have been able to make anonymous cash payments at any bank ATM in Japan.
You just key in the bank name and account number to transfer to, insert the cash, and it's on its way. The ATM will even make change for you.
We run our whole company (16 desktops) off of two $995 Sun Blade 100 boxes, accessed through Sun Rays, and I never hear users complaining about speed.
I'm sure CD Baby would be happy to carry Pearl Jam's music.
The original poster may have been joking, but leave it to the Japanese to come up with such a thing. Toto makes many fancy toilets, some with remote control. But for the do-it-yourselfer, they make a retrofit remote control add-on.
> It wasn't even fun for the novelty value.
Reminds me of the early '90s in Japan when business cards started sporting barcodes, encoded with the phone and fax numbers printed on the card.
I could never quite grasp why anyone would want to use a scanner to scan the number, which would then output the touch-tones to the phone, instead of just punching eight buttons.
I admit I'm not totally immune to technology for technology's sake, but...what were these people thinking!
When I was taking programming classes in the mid '80s at UCLA, they had a rather clever cheating detection program. It didn't look at the source (Pascal or C) code, but rather at the produced assembler code to see if students were copying others' algorithms.
So you might obfuscate your copied code by moving it around, changing variable names, etc. but it would still catch you.
We use accounting software from American Business Systems and have for many years. We're pretty happy with it, though it is all text based.
We used it first under Interactive, and now under Solaris, but it runs under Linux too, or any platform that Acucobol supports.
Dialogic cards are probably your best bet
We have used Dialogic and NMS cards and have never been truly happy with those companies. They seem to promise the world and deliver buggy drivers and it can take months or years to get fixes out of them.
So we've now started using a totally open-source hardware platform, the Tormenta Card. Linux drivers are provided.
It costs us just a few hundred dollars for a card that handles a few T1 spans. These cards are kind of like Winmodems, in that they have very little intelligence on them, with all the work being done by the host. But we're running two Ts on a 1.3 GHz machine and we're testing a 4-span card too. One of the card's developers told us he expects to be able to run two or three of their 4-span PCI cards in a dial-processor 1.7 GHz machine.
Compared to the NMS cards we were buying at $10k a pop, this is downright cheap, and with full open-source we don't have to wait for Dialogic's developers in New Zealand to get around to our problem.
In Japan, Toshiba sells a PVR with a built-in DVD recorder, allowing for easy archiving. I wonder when we'll see that here (where here=anywhere but Japan).
> you need an E250 to run it
Only if you're running 10 or 20 of them with compute-heavy users. Otherwise, the SPARC you've already got at home should be fine. We use the Sun Rays at work and they are completely quiet. I plan to add an Ethernet card to my home Ultra 5 and plug in a few Sun Rays ($300 each) around the house.
Currently I address the noise problem by using 10-meter keyboard and video cables and locking the computer in a spare room.
Not just those South of the Equator. Not all places in the Northern Hemisphere have the same sense of seasons as North America. For example, "Summer" in Thailand is roughly April and May, because that's when it's hottest there.
I saw a sign at Yosemite National Park (where 50% of visitors are foreigners) announcing that a particular trail is open "Memorial Day to Labor Day". How many foreigners would know what this means!
My sources at Dialogic say they'll probably have a Linux port of their drivers out sometime early next year, while the good folks at Aculab already have Linux drivers for some of their products and will release more Linux drivers in the coming months.
Aculab is also pretty good about releasing hardware specs if you're really interested in doing a port yourself. Dialogic has never quite understood that they could boost sales of their products by releasing enough information to allow outside parties to write more drivers.