Alternative to Blu-Ray - DVD (which has laughable DRM)
It's DRM none the less, and it is (if I'm not mistaken) a felony to circumvent that DRM in the US. Also, how many VHS tapes are available for rent or sale at your local video store? Watch as studios slowly squeeze out the DVD and force those pesky "consumers" to "upgrade" to Blue-Ray.
Alternative to iTunes - DRM-free MP3 download(amazon, etc), CDs that are not protected(harder to tell)
Sure, if you live in the US. Amazon does not sell MP3 downloads to foreign countries. I've read about other services, but none that I have seen offer either the convenience, price and selection of iTunes. If anyone can recommend an alternative that doesn't require me to pay a monthly fee (I prefer ala carte, thank you) and offers a decent selection outside of the US, I'd love to hear about it.
You are correct about CDs, and I encourage people to continue to buy them for the superior (to iTunes, anyway) audio quality and for the peace of mind that you can rip 'em, put them in a plastic storage bin in the basement and they will likely still be available to be re-ripped if necessary in the future. Until, that is, drives that are able to play CDs become as scarce as drives that can read 5-1/4 floppies.
(btw, I still have my old Akai turntable and every vinyl album I ever bought, but most suffered irreparable damage at the hands of a dumb-ass teenager who didn't appreciate how precious his music collection would be to him in his old age).
What, without record companies to help us along we'd have to sift through every dross song released to find something good? Lots of new bands are being "discovered" by record companies now because of online communities that supported them, and found them, previous to their "discovery".
Exactly. I don't have time to listen to literally everything anyone anywhere decides to makes a permanent record of. Having someone make recommendations (which is all a record company signing a band amounts to) is a necessity. It doesn't have to be a "record company" doing it, there a plenty of opportunities for others to do it and benefit from it.
It may be an online community, who would benefit by encouraging others to support artists they like. It could be performed by an independantly run, commercial free online radio station, who may benefit by soliciting donations from people who value what they are doing (that's where I "discovered" The Artic Monkeys, The Shins, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Iron and Wine, among others).
I can also scout local talent myself by getting out and seeing live music at venues who give unsigned bands stage time. It's very satisfying to share a new band with friends, and again, I benefit if the band continues to make more music thanks in part to support they received from music fans.
My point was not that the current setup is either ideal or necessary. I was disagreeing with the grandparent's assertion that "there is simply no way for the music industry to harness the internet to their continued existence." Maybe the current "music industry" can't make it in the modern world. But that does not mean there won't be an industry around artists. We will always need managers, promoters, producers, A&R of some sort, roadies, caterers, truck drivers, security, concession, merchandising, carpenters, guitar teachers, engineers, and older brothers who to turn young ears on to great music.
Plenty will do this for not much money - money most 1/2 way decent bands can get doing gigs
Money isn't the only way an entity can benefit from turning others on to a great new band. In the case of the "online community" model, music fans benefit if their "discoveries" are able to continue making music, thanks to the support they receive from the community. Or you may draw visitors to your site by playing a great selection of little-known artists and use that as an opportunity to showcase your writing, or your own music. Just because someone isn't drawing a paycheque it doesn't mean they are not benefitting.
Much of I'm talking about only works ideally
It's the existence of the Internet and the availability of cheap, powerful computers that make this "ideal" scenario possible.
Thanks for that. I feel the same way about being referred to as a "consumer."
By the way, here is the link to Courtney's rant on the music biz. I don't agree with everything she says, either, but I appreciate the effort she put in to imagining a system that would be fair to artists and patrons alike.
there is simply no way for the music industry to harness the internet to their continued existence. the internet, the substance of it, is simply anathema to what they do: charge a fee for music distribution. the internet is simply replacing them. effortless free distribution has no economics too it. there's no money to be made
But distribution isn't all the "music industry" does. From my perspective, that's a relatively small piece of the puzzle.
Someone still needs to scout talent; just because you can pound out off-key versions of your classic rock favorites, that doesn't necessarily mean anyone else wants to listen to it. Someone needs to work with artists, to help them develop and hone their craft. Someone has to put up the money needed to record CDs and produce videos, and put the artist together with the right producer, the right engineers.
A&R people take the 40 or 50 half-finished songs the band has been working on and help them select the one's they believe people are more likely to pay to listen to. Others promote the band, pay off radio stations to play them, do advance work in cities the band will be performing to create a buzz and drum up ticket sales.
These are all services music fans value and as such would be willing to pay for. Traditionally, these services have largely been financed through the sale of plastic discs, and that may no longer be possible - at least on the scale the industry is used to. That's why the need for a new business model.
But it is no more correct to say you can not make money off music in the Internet age than it is to say you can not make money off software in the age of FOSS.
The idiots driving the google camera car should have known better.
Perhaps they got to the end of that gravel road and used the driveway to turn around. If the camera is operating all the time, as the summary suggests, it would have been snapping away for the five or ten seconds it would have taken to do this.
If the majority of your users are taking advantage of all the groupware features offered by Exchange/Outlook, and you can not find a satisfactory substitute, go right ahead an continue using it. If the changes in interface and file format are not posing problems, go on down the upgrade path into Vista and Office 2007.
I suspect a lot of businesses are very much like mine, where the majority of users are using their email client as, well, an email client. If that's the case, at least some of the users may be just fine with Evolution, or Thunderbird or any number of other choices out there. Every day more FOSS projects come on line offering features and functionality that previously didn't exist outside of proprietary software. Eventually one may come along that addresses the needs of your users. As these projects continue to mature, we all accrue the wealth that FOSS represents. Some of us will be able to take advantage of it more than others, but we will all benefit (just as we all benefit from FOSS when we use the Internet. It doesn't matter that I'm using IE on an XP box, that web page I'm viewing might come from an Apache server running Free BSD).
You still need a copy of Windows on the VM and Vista isn't particularly pleasant in that type of environment.
Did my XP licenses all just disappear in a puff of smoke? That's one of the advantages to have at least a few beige boxes running off-the-shelf XP Pro. If the hardware dies, you can install the OS in a VM and still get use out of it.
As far as I know Office 2007 runs just fine in XP. If it doesn't, run Office 2003. Or OpenOffice.org. Or run Office 2007 on a Vista box if you just have to.
But don't tell me it's Office 2007 and VS 2008 or nothing. For most users that's not the case. If you need it, spend the money on it and be happy.
you trailed off before you came up with a suitable alternative to VisualStudio
What about Photoshop?
If you're a developer and you need a full-blown IDE you may need to run VisualStudio and XP or Vista on the machine you use for development. Same if you're a graphics artist. You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
But that's not most people. Most people's needs are actually better met with FOSS projects if they are mature enough (just like proprietary software) and have a healthy community of users and developers supporting them.
If you are a pro, or a serious amateur, it may be worth your the investment to buy Photoshop, even if you have to purchase a machine dedicated to the task of using it. But if you have a cubicle farm full of people using email, a word processor and an accounting package and maybe sharing printers and doing some simple file sharing, you can do that all very efficiently with Linux. Spend the money on the departments that may need an expensive piece of proprietary software - and the hardware required to run it. But don't assume it is the only solution, or even the best solution, especially for departments (and users) with more modest needs.
If using your software on Linux means you need to run Windows in a VM, then that isn't dropping the Microsoft OS altogether, is it?
Well he was answering the question "How do I run Office 2007 and VS 2008 under Linux?" Your issue is with the question, not the fact that he answered it. If the questioner had asked "what can I use for an Office app in Linux" and the responder said run Office 2007 in Citrix, you would have had a point. But he didn't.
Until you can come up with a solution other than "Stop using proprietary software" or "VM Windows", it isn't going to work out.
How about we're going to run an Exchange server on 2003 but our clients will run Evolution in KDE, or something like that? Does it have to be all or nothing? Oth, what's wrong with having "stop using proprietary software" as a "big picture" goal, that everyone works towards. Just like asking everyone to be frugal and reuse things as much as possible to cut down on overhead, you could also give people incentives to bring in free and open source alternatives to proprietary software you are using, especially if the vendor you are currently using charges fees at every opportunity and does its best to lock you in and prevent you from using it in concert with software from other vendors.
This is what I'm doing at my work. I may never get us completely rid of Windows and other "squeeze-every-last-penny-out-of-you-we-can" type software, but every time I manage slip in a FOSS solution (using Drupal in a LAMP box to create a resource center on the company intranet for example) it's a win for the company, and an overall step in the right direction.
We also had strap on skate wheels that were also metal.
I remember those, you wore them over your sneakers, and tightened the metal clamps around your feet with a key. The vibration of metal on pavement would cause numbing foot paralysis within minutes.
And do you think it would ever occur to our parents to put a helmet or shin pads on us? Apparently we were expendable back then.
I do something along similar lines. I listen to Internet radio. I support a station i like every month, save streams in mp3 files so I can listen to them on my portable player and in the car, and only buy the music I really like. I still buy a lot of music, and a lot of bands owe their sales to me to a station run by a guy and his wife. I don't get to pick the tunes, as I imagine you get to with Rhapsody, but then I've got my own music collection to do that with if I feel like it.
Interesting. Did you find all this out through your own experimentation, or am I just the last person on slashdot to notice?
You would think - given this distinction between users who are not logged in and those who choose to post anonymously - you would be able to apply different modifiers between the two. I've only noticed this fairly recently. Has it always been this way?
Hey if any editors are reading this, this is an example of something I've noticed over the past couple weeks. This Anonymous Coward post started at -1. This one, from the same discussion, started at 0. Both received positive moderation. So some AC posts are starting at -1, while most are starting at 0. I've checked my prefs and don't see anything that would account for this.
Sorry if this is something well known and I'm just clueless.
This was the premise of Blade Runner. That's why they developed the Voight-Kampff machine to be able to single out replicants.
Voight-Kampff was used to determine whether the subject was able to empathize with others. Interesting that the replicants were the ones who actually exhibited the quality (Leon and Rachael keeping photos of their "families", Batty breaking Deckard's fingers for killing Pris, even Deckard lying to Rachael that he was only joking about her being a replicant) while the humans in the movie seemed to lack it. Then again, I guess that was the whole point.
t interests me how the Geek lusts to rip off Steamboat Willie. While the real artist moves on and produces a Ratatouille.
You speak for yourself.
This geeks produces his own precious creations, while at the same time wanting a more balanced agreement between those who contribute to art through its production and those who contribute to it through its appreciation. I'm not sure, but I suspect it's really those who simply seek to make a profit off of it that are the threat to the process.
FOSS advocates are human, and it's human nature to paint your opponent as absolutely evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's a mistake, and a sign of immaturity, but it's human.
For sure. When I told my brother-in-law I'm in to Linux, he said "isn't that like communism?" I'm sure we all know where he got that idea. Small minded people (and I'm talking about Balmer, not my brother-in-law) who are more worried about attacking the other side than doing a better job themselves will usually render themselves irrelevant, given enough time. The morons who prejudge you because you worked for Microsoft are no different than the morons who think FOSS is equivalent to communism.
Slashdot Mirror
It's DRM none the less, and it is (if I'm not mistaken) a felony to circumvent that DRM in the US. Also, how many VHS tapes are available for rent or sale at your local video store? Watch as studios slowly squeeze out the DVD and force those pesky "consumers" to "upgrade" to Blue-Ray.
Sure, if you live in the US. Amazon does not sell MP3 downloads to foreign countries. I've read about other services, but none that I have seen offer either the convenience, price and selection of iTunes. If anyone can recommend an alternative that doesn't require me to pay a monthly fee (I prefer ala carte, thank you) and offers a decent selection outside of the US, I'd love to hear about it.
You are correct about CDs, and I encourage people to continue to buy them for the superior (to iTunes, anyway) audio quality and for the peace of mind that you can rip 'em, put them in a plastic storage bin in the basement and they will likely still be available to be re-ripped if necessary in the future. Until, that is, drives that are able to play CDs become as scarce as drives that can read 5-1/4 floppies.
(btw, I still have my old Akai turntable and every vinyl album I ever bought, but most suffered irreparable damage at the hands of a dumb-ass teenager who didn't appreciate how precious his music collection would be to him in his old age).
Exactly. I don't have time to listen to literally everything anyone anywhere decides to makes a permanent record of. Having someone make recommendations (which is all a record company signing a band amounts to) is a necessity. It doesn't have to be a "record company" doing it, there a plenty of opportunities for others to do it and benefit from it.
It may be an online community, who would benefit by encouraging others to support artists they like. It could be performed by an independantly run, commercial free online radio station, who may benefit by soliciting donations from people who value what they are doing (that's where I "discovered" The Artic Monkeys, The Shins, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Iron and Wine, among others).
I can also scout local talent myself by getting out and seeing live music at venues who give unsigned bands stage time. It's very satisfying to share a new band with friends, and again, I benefit if the band continues to make more music thanks in part to support they received from music fans.
My point was not that the current setup is either ideal or necessary. I was disagreeing with the grandparent's assertion that "there is simply no way for the music industry to harness the internet to their continued existence." Maybe the current "music industry" can't make it in the modern world. But that does not mean there won't be an industry around artists. We will always need managers, promoters, producers, A&R of some sort, roadies, caterers, truck drivers, security, concession, merchandising, carpenters, guitar teachers, engineers, and older brothers who to turn young ears on to great music.
Money isn't the only way an entity can benefit from turning others on to a great new band. In the case of the "online community" model, music fans benefit if their "discoveries" are able to continue making music, thanks to the support they receive from the community. Or you may draw visitors to your site by playing a great selection of little-known artists and use that as an opportunity to showcase your writing, or your own music. Just because someone isn't drawing a paycheque it doesn't mean they are not benefitting.
It's the existence of the Internet and the availability of cheap, powerful computers that make this "ideal" scenario possible.
Thanks for that. I feel the same way about being referred to as a "consumer."
By the way, here is the link to Courtney's rant on the music biz. I don't agree with everything she says, either, but I appreciate the effort she put in to imagining a system that would be fair to artists and patrons alike.
But distribution isn't all the "music industry" does. From my perspective, that's a relatively small piece of the puzzle.
Someone still needs to scout talent; just because you can pound out off-key versions of your classic rock favorites, that doesn't necessarily mean anyone else wants to listen to it. Someone needs to work with artists, to help them develop and hone their craft. Someone has to put up the money needed to record CDs and produce videos, and put the artist together with the right producer, the right engineers.
A&R people take the 40 or 50 half-finished songs the band has been working on and help them select the one's they believe people are more likely to pay to listen to. Others promote the band, pay off radio stations to play them, do advance work in cities the band will be performing to create a buzz and drum up ticket sales.
These are all services music fans value and as such would be willing to pay for. Traditionally, these services have largely been financed through the sale of plastic discs, and that may no longer be possible - at least on the scale the industry is used to. That's why the need for a new business model.
But it is no more correct to say you can not make money off music in the Internet age than it is to say you can not make money off software in the age of FOSS.
You'd better get some pants first
Perhaps they got to the end of that gravel road and used the driveway to turn around. If the camera is operating all the time, as the summary suggests, it would have been snapping away for the five or ten seconds it would have taken to do this.
There's a "topic" in this thread?
Sorry, that was a little curt.
If the majority of your users are taking advantage of all the groupware features offered by Exchange/Outlook, and you can not find a satisfactory substitute, go right ahead an continue using it. If the changes in interface and file format are not posing problems, go on down the upgrade path into Vista and Office 2007.
I suspect a lot of businesses are very much like mine, where the majority of users are using their email client as, well, an email client. If that's the case, at least some of the users may be just fine with Evolution, or Thunderbird or any number of other choices out there. Every day more FOSS projects come on line offering features and functionality that previously didn't exist outside of proprietary software. Eventually one may come along that addresses the needs of your users. As these projects continue to mature, we all accrue the wealth that FOSS represents. Some of us will be able to take advantage of it more than others, but we will all benefit (just as we all benefit from FOSS when we use the Internet. It doesn't matter that I'm using IE on an XP box, that web page I'm viewing might come from an Apache server running Free BSD).
Yup, they used to say that.
That one's starting to sound a little hackneyed, too.
Did my XP licenses all just disappear in a puff of smoke? That's one of the advantages to have at least a few beige boxes running off-the-shelf XP Pro. If the hardware dies, you can install the OS in a VM and still get use out of it.
As far as I know Office 2007 runs just fine in XP. If it doesn't, run Office 2003. Or OpenOffice.org. Or run Office 2007 on a Vista box if you just have to.
But don't tell me it's Office 2007 and VS 2008 or nothing. For most users that's not the case. If you need it, spend the money on it and be happy.
If you're a developer and you need a full-blown IDE you may need to run VisualStudio and XP or Vista on the machine you use for development. Same if you're a graphics artist. You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
But that's not most people. Most people's needs are actually better met with FOSS projects if they are mature enough (just like proprietary software) and have a healthy community of users and developers supporting them.
If you are a pro, or a serious amateur, it may be worth your the investment to buy Photoshop, even if you have to purchase a machine dedicated to the task of using it. But if you have a cubicle farm full of people using email, a word processor and an accounting package and maybe sharing printers and doing some simple file sharing, you can do that all very efficiently with Linux. Spend the money on the departments that may need an expensive piece of proprietary software - and the hardware required to run it. But don't assume it is the only solution, or even the best solution, especially for departments (and users) with more modest needs.
Well he was answering the question "How do I run Office 2007 and VS 2008 under Linux?" Your issue is with the question, not the fact that he answered it. If the questioner had asked "what can I use for an Office app in Linux" and the responder said run Office 2007 in Citrix, you would have had a point. But he didn't.
How about we're going to run an Exchange server on 2003 but our clients will run Evolution in KDE, or something like that? Does it have to be all or nothing? Oth, what's wrong with having "stop using proprietary software" as a "big picture" goal, that everyone works towards. Just like asking everyone to be frugal and reuse things as much as possible to cut down on overhead, you could also give people incentives to bring in free and open source alternatives to proprietary software you are using, especially if the vendor you are currently using charges fees at every opportunity and does its best to lock you in and prevent you from using it in concert with software from other vendors.
This is what I'm doing at my work. I may never get us completely rid of Windows and other "squeeze-every-last-penny-out-of-you-we-can" type software, but every time I manage slip in a FOSS solution (using Drupal in a LAMP box to create a resource center on the company intranet for example) it's a win for the company, and an overall step in the right direction.
I remember those, you wore them over your sneakers, and tightened the metal clamps around your feet with a key. The vibration of metal on pavement would cause numbing foot paralysis within minutes.
And do you think it would ever occur to our parents to put a helmet or shin pads on us? Apparently we were expendable back then.
Oh well,
I do something along similar lines. I listen to Internet radio. I support a station i like every month, save streams in mp3 files so I can listen to them on my portable player and in the car, and only buy the music I really like. I still buy a lot of music, and a lot of bands owe their sales to me to a station run by a guy and his wife. I don't get to pick the tunes, as I imagine you get to with Rhapsody, but then I've got my own music collection to do that with if I feel like it.
They're also less likely to call IT with problems like "I'm trying to make an Internet on my desktop but I can't get the file to program."
Interesting. Did you find all this out through your own experimentation, or am I just the last person on slashdot to notice?
You would think - given this distinction between users who are not logged in and those who choose to post anonymously - you would be able to apply different modifiers between the two. I've only noticed this fairly recently. Has it always been this way?
I thought Tyler was just the product of the imagination of an autistic boy from Boston.
Hey if any editors are reading this, this is an example of something I've noticed over the past couple weeks. This Anonymous Coward post started at -1. This one, from the same discussion, started at 0. Both received positive moderation. So some AC posts are starting at -1, while most are starting at 0. I've checked my prefs and don't see anything that would account for this.
Sorry if this is something well known and I'm just clueless.
How would you ensure no one country becomes sufficiently powerful to be able to dominate all competitors combined, as happens in the corporate world?
I know. It's almost like there is more than one person posting on the bbs.
Voight-Kampff was used to determine whether the subject was able to empathize with others. Interesting that the replicants were the ones who actually exhibited the quality (Leon and Rachael keeping photos of their "families", Batty breaking Deckard's fingers for killing Pris, even Deckard lying to Rachael that he was only joking about her being a replicant) while the humans in the movie seemed to lack it. Then again, I guess that was the whole point.
Where the hell was this plant being built? That worker should have been wearing fall protection.
You speak for yourself.
This geeks produces his own precious creations, while at the same time wanting a more balanced agreement between those who contribute to art through its production and those who contribute to it through its appreciation. I'm not sure, but I suspect it's really those who simply seek to make a profit off of it that are the threat to the process.
So, what part of the United States do you live in?
For sure. When I told my brother-in-law I'm in to Linux, he said "isn't that like communism?" I'm sure we all know where he got that idea. Small minded people (and I'm talking about Balmer, not my brother-in-law) who are more worried about attacking the other side than doing a better job themselves will usually render themselves irrelevant, given enough time. The morons who prejudge you because you worked for Microsoft are no different than the morons who think FOSS is equivalent to communism.
And I don't care about the opinions of morons.