As a Canadian waiting for a decent music service i'm sorry to see all the limitations outlined in the review..
It's interesting that while all the RIAA riff-raff has been going on, emblazoned throughout the media - no one has even questioned the fact that Microsoft has managed to somehow collude with all the recording companies to ensure that all the songs on any of these online services are in WMA/DRM wrapped audio format. Pretty unfortunate for all of us Linux and non-Microsoft OS users. These music services will be a success, and quietly behind the scenes I believe the happiest company involved will be Microsoft - now knowing they have yet one more thing to keep you locked to their platform. This note of course doesn't even touch on all the problems with the limitations imposed by the DRM being used for the songs off Puretracks. But anyway, enough said for now...
It's interesting that at first glance this levy seems like a somewhat viable solution to all that the RIAA is jibber jabbering about. However one problem, as others have mentioned, relates to the fact that you can end up paying a levy on blank cd-r's that you use for file storage/back-up purposes of just standard (non audio) data on your own computers. This for one is a serious problem with the levy. But even beyond this, one must consider the fact that the levy is setup to be paid back to the record companies in proportion to the amount of music they sell, which obviously favours only the very largest of record labels. So now the little independent record company or artist is forced to pay a levy on the blank CD's they are using to make their own music back to the very companies they are competing with!
While I am Canadian, and applaud our government for not allowing the silliness going on in the United States with the RIAA to happen up here in Canada (at least yet), I still believe our system is not without flaws as can be seen by the above situation.
Some non-technical reading and other suggestions
on
Getting Started In Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In addition to books on how to get Linux up and running your first time, you might also want to consider letting the viewers know about such great works of art as:
Eric Raymond's - The Cathedral and The Bazaar (ISBN:1565927249)..A great book that describes some of the details behind how open source has come to be, and the processes that go on in the background that make open source software advancement possible in a seemingly chaotic environment...Extremely well written, and very motivational to getting involved in the Open source community!
Rebel Code: Linux and The Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody (ISBN: 0738203335) - An amazing history of the Linux and Open source, from the days of RMS building the GNU tools, right up to the now infamous IBM investment into Linux and Open source. This book filled in many of my gaps in knowledge of where some of the projects I use everyday came from...A truly great account of the Linux and Open source history.
Couple other simple things you could show: - I can't imagine a more meaningful display of the benefit to Opensource software then finding a bug in a piece of open source software, submitting the bug and receiving a response from one of the main coders within 3 minutes to say that the problem has been addressed..Then conversely going into Windows getting IEXPLORE has crashed and you have the option to click OK or Cancel and thats about it...:) - Mozilla Pop-up blocker! What a great piece of software that Mozilla is...! - Mozilla Tabbed browsing! Another amazing, yet simple in concept feature, implemented in a piece of open source software... - Any time the above two things are shown to non-Linux and non-Mozilla users they never cease to be impressed..it's a simple thing, but a very nice thing.
- Finally, for those users who still need their MS Office applications and/or Quicken...Throw on a copy of Codeweavers Crossover office. A great application built on Wine that helps thousands of people every day keep from having to reboot their computers!
Just a few random thoughts of mine....Good luck with the show, it's always a good show whenever I get a chance to watch it!
Recently I have investigated this very issue with regards to automated web application testing. One of the most important things that came up in this venture was the requirement for managing service levels of a web application. To solve this problem a solution that could automatically perform web transactions and baseline the performance of the responses over time was necessary. During this time we looked at numerous web application testing tools, but none fully provided the flexibility and functionality that we needed. Mercury's software was close but still often failed creating a test case for complex web apps - beyond this the GUI and reporting interface was severely lacking. Anyway to make a long story short we've begun developing an application using many common Perl modules that allows to obtain accurate web transaction times and integrate those values into a network performance reporting tool. The abilities provided by Perl and the associated modules provided an amazing framework for obtaining the service level statistics we required.
Bank of Nova Scotia provides two methods to connect to on-line banking. The first is a proprietary authorization software client, and the second is a simplified pure web-interface that in fact does work with Netscape in Linux. I e-mailed Bank of Nova scotia around two months ago with a complaint that they were eliminating a portion of their customer base by not supporting all OS's with their software (as well as their stupid software requirement meant that too use web banking on any other machine required the installation of that software...). Anyway shortly thereafter they put up the following site which, as you can see, no longer requires that software. The software was only necessary way back when browsers did not come with 128 bit encryption. Scotiabank wished to provide 128 bit encryption and thus created that piece of software to circumvent the absence of the encryption in the browsers of the time.
Correction, Bank of Nova Scotia uses a proprietary authorization client AS WELL as a simplified interface that in fact does work with Netscape in Linux. I e-mailed Bank of Nova scotia around a two months ago with a complaint that they were eliminating a portion of their customer base by not supporting all OS's with their software. Anyway shortly thereafter they put up the following site which, as you can see, no longer requires that software. The software was only necessary way back when browsers did not come with 128 bit encryption. Scotiabank wished to provide 128 bit encryption and thus created that piece of software to circumvent the absence of the encryption in the browsers of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Canadian waiting for a decent music service i'm sorry to see all the limitations outlined in the review..
It's interesting that while all the RIAA riff-raff has been going on, emblazoned throughout the media - no one has even questioned the fact that Microsoft has managed to somehow collude with all the recording companies to ensure that all the songs on any of these online services are in WMA/DRM wrapped audio format. Pretty unfortunate for all of us Linux and non-Microsoft OS users. These music services will be a success, and quietly behind the scenes I believe the happiest company involved will be Microsoft - now knowing they have yet one more thing to keep you locked to their platform. This note of course doesn't even touch on all the problems with the limitations imposed by the DRM being used for the songs off Puretracks. But anyway, enough said for now...
Jeff
It's interesting that at first glance this levy seems like a somewhat viable solution to all that the RIAA is jibber jabbering about. However one problem, as others have mentioned, relates to the fact that you can end up paying a levy on blank cd-r's that you use for file storage/back-up purposes of just standard (non audio) data on your own computers. This for one is a serious problem with the levy. But even beyond this, one must consider the fact that the levy is setup to be paid back to the record companies in proportion to the amount of music they sell, which obviously favours only the very largest of record labels. So now the little independent record company or artist is forced to pay a levy on the blank CD's they are using to make their own music back to the very companies they are competing with!
While I am Canadian, and applaud our government for not allowing the silliness going on in the United States with the RIAA to happen up here in Canada (at least yet), I still believe our system is not without flaws as can be seen by the above situation.
In addition to books on how to get Linux up and running your first time, you might also want to consider letting the viewers know about such great works of art as:
..A great book that describes some of the details behind how open source has come to be, and the processes that go on in the background that make open source software advancement possible in a seemingly chaotic environment...Extremely well written, and very motivational to getting involved in the Open source community!
:)
Eric Raymond's - The Cathedral and The Bazaar (ISBN:1565927249)
Rebel Code: Linux and The Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody (ISBN: 0738203335) - An amazing history of the Linux and Open source, from the days of RMS building the GNU tools, right up to the now infamous IBM investment into Linux and Open source. This book filled in many of my gaps in knowledge of where some of the projects I use everyday came from...A truly great account of the Linux and Open source history.
Couple other simple things you could show:
- I can't imagine a more meaningful display of the benefit to Opensource software then finding a bug in a piece of open source software, submitting the bug and receiving a response from one of the main coders within 3 minutes to say that the problem has been addressed..Then conversely going into Windows getting IEXPLORE has crashed and you have the option to click OK or Cancel and thats about it...
- Mozilla Pop-up blocker! What a great piece of software that Mozilla is...!
- Mozilla Tabbed browsing! Another amazing, yet simple in concept feature, implemented in a piece of open source software...
- Any time the above two things are shown to non-Linux and non-Mozilla users they never cease to be impressed..it's a simple thing, but a very nice thing.
- Finally, for those users who still need their MS Office applications and/or Quicken...Throw on a copy of Codeweavers Crossover office. A great application built on Wine that helps thousands of people every day keep from having to reboot their computers!
Just a few random thoughts of mine....Good luck with the show, it's always a good show whenever I get a chance to watch it!
Jeff
Recently I have investigated this very issue with regards to automated web application testing. One of the most important things that came up in this venture was the requirement for managing service levels of a web application. To solve this problem a solution that could automatically perform web transactions and baseline the performance of the responses over time was necessary. During this time we looked at numerous web application testing tools, but none fully provided the flexibility and functionality that we needed. Mercury's software was close but still often failed creating a test case for complex web apps - beyond this the GUI and reporting interface was severely lacking. Anyway to make a long story short we've begun developing an application using many common Perl modules that allows to obtain accurate web transaction times and integrate those values into a network performance reporting tool. The abilities provided by Perl and the associated modules provided an amazing framework for obtaining the service level statistics we required.
Jeff
Bank of Nova Scotia provides two methods to connect to on-line banking. The first is a proprietary authorization software client, and the second is a simplified pure web-interface that in fact does work with Netscape in Linux. I e-mailed Bank of Nova scotia around two months ago with a complaint that they were eliminating a portion of their customer base by not supporting all OS's with their software (as well as their stupid software requirement meant that too use web banking on any other machine required the installation of that software...). Anyway shortly thereafter they put up the following site which, as you can see, no longer requires that software. The software was only necessary way back when browsers did not come with 128 bit encryption. Scotiabank wished to provide 128 bit encryption and thus created that piece of software to circumvent the absence of the encryption in the browsers of the time.
Correction, Bank of Nova Scotia uses a proprietary authorization client AS WELL as a simplified interface that in fact does work with Netscape in Linux. I e-mailed Bank of Nova scotia around a two months ago with a complaint that they were eliminating a portion of their customer base by not supporting all OS's with their software. Anyway shortly thereafter they put up the following site which, as you can see, no longer requires that software. The software was only necessary way back when browsers did not come with 128 bit encryption. Scotiabank wished to provide 128 bit encryption and thus created that piece of software to circumvent the absence of the encryption in the browsers of the time.