" Yeah, what's wrong with XP's color management exactly?"
Read the Longhorn docs on what they are planning on doing with color management in the future and then you'll see how disjointed, inaccessible, and incomplete the color management support or lack of therefore is in XP.
Well in your case it would certainly be simple enough as long as your wife isn't using some sort of specialized windows only software. Although as you probably know forcing change on the wife isn't the nicest thing to do. If all she does is use the net and email though then something like Fedora or Ubuntu would work fine. No need to even bother spending $500 on a mini-mac. Why not cut commercial software completly out of the picture where possibe?
Forgot to mention you can read the flickr takeover faq at the flickr blog. Again not being a naive teenager and as someone who has followed yahoo since it began, why should I possibly believe that flickr won't become some sort of ad-filled yahoo cobranded site? They are already talking about how yahoo id's will now work at flickr. What, flickr is going to be the ONE yahoo property where your not assaulted with flash ads and somehow its going to remain independant? I will say congrats to the flickr guys. It's awesome that they are going to get paid. Just don't be too surprised when you lose control of things. I look forward to when one of your founders splits off from yahoo in a few years and createst the next cool thing.
Now all of those cool 3rd party projects will suddently becomes against terms of service. You can also now probably look foward to having to click "skip this ad" when trying to view photos I'm sure.
The lamest thing that could happen to a cool tech company is to be swallowed up by some big public company. I'm actually not anti-yahoo by any means, I just don't possibly see how this will be good for flickr. And I'm just sure that ipod toting pseudo hipster crowd is going to love paying money to yahoo now.
And finally worst of all is that I'm sure that the previous owners will convince themselves that somehow they will remain independant and that yahoo will just let them run things "like always". Yea right. Anyone want to buy a bridge?
I signed up with my gmail account and have not received ONE single piece of spam. When you sign up you simply don't check the two check boxes about future offers etc. That was 2 months ago and still, no spam. The two people I got to do offers have seen zero spam as well.
And not to defend their business model but they are pretty upfront about the whole thing. They don't lie to you and try to trick you in any way. The offers you have to do many times comes from reputable vendors like Blockbuster etc. And yea they cost you money. Why would you get a free Ipod by doing an offer that cost's nothing? Many of the offers there cost only $1 for a month's Trial.
Now if I ever get to 5 referrals and they screw me I'll probably be the first to curse them out. I can't vouch for them as someone you should do business with. But I've seen several people do the offers and play by the rules and get a Free Ipod. Worst case I'm out by a $1 and a little time. Seems like a decent risk to take IMHO.
Well according to official baseball records the percentage of baseball players who tested positive has gone from 11% in 2001 to something like 1.7 in 2004 IIRC. So judging by when Canseco played I'd hardly be surprised if the number was 25% or higher back in the day. Knowing that only a few years ago 1 out of every 10 players was caught(more were using obivously) is pretty dam sobering IMHO to hear how rampant it was/is.
I was never a huge fan of Jose but I also find it hypocrictical for so many players to bash him and then go and plead the 5th to Congress. Steriods is baseballs dirty secret and for the league to act like its never been a major problem is insulting to anyone who follows the sport.
It doesn't lend him a ton of credit that he's making money from writing a book on the subject, but judging by how everyone including the league has done their best to make him the posterboy for steriod abuse I can't blame him for trying to fight back.
FWIW last time I checked Opera was pretty much tied with Firefox for being standards complaint. Among browsers that normal human use that's saying a lot.
Do your own research and then get back to us. Download the eval versions and test them. Or were you planning on implementing an "Enterprise Solution" based on the whims of the/. readership? Giving you the slightest benefit of the doubt there are many other less public, more informed forums for this type of question. Why ask at/. where most of the users A) don't use linux anymore and b) are desktop users?
I though "which distro is best" discussions were banned by now?
Don't you think that if they could magically make OO.org run on P166 with 64MB of ram while at the same time offering most of what MS Office offers they would? OO.org has always been slow to launch except on Windows with quicklaunch, that's just the way it is. Once its up and running it quite useable, can't you get over the startup time? Your dad probably waits 10 minutes for AOL to launch and connect online and yet waiting 15 seconds the first time his Free office suite comes up is too much?
Someone else had mentioned this but look at how long Photoshop takes to load on a 2GHz pc. Does the fact that's its slow to launch make the app not useable? Funny how I don't constantly hear that Photoshop is "bloated" everytime there is a story on it. Most people are happy enough with the features it offers to overlook the initial startup speed.
People need to look past the fact that OO.org doesn't launch exactly as fast as MS Office and look at what it offers instead. Namely a Free Open Source, Cross Platform Office suite that does what most business and home users need. Isn't that enough? If your waiting for OO.org to run on old slow hardware and somehow be feature perfect your going to be waiting a long long time.
When it comes to Free, full featured, OSS, Cross-Platform Office suites there is OO.org. End of Story. Let me know when MS Office or any other office suite can do that.
" stop concentrating so hard on their commercial offerings "
Their commercial offerings are what allow them to finance Fedora, Gnome, people like Alan Cox, and many other OSS initiatives. Plus they give away the source to that commercial offering.
"they leave their grassroots projects underdevloped and insufficient"
Says you. Fedora from the start has been in many users and reviewers opinions one of the better desktop linux distros available.
People need to get over the "Red Hat owes the community something" bullshit. Yes they moved away from the $79 one-size-fits-all model that everyone loved and many miss but they still contine to be a positive force in OSS.
"I don't know anybody who still drinks the Linux kool aid. It seemed like good stuff back in 1999, but then it went nowhere "
You mean the Linux Desktop went nowhere right? Because by any other measure Linux has about ten times the OS market share of Apple.
"not all nerds buy into the propaganda that hobbyist-made software is better than, or even as good as, professionally-made software."
Err ok. Good thing Apple, a company you apparently worship, didn't do anything stupid like bet the farm and base their OS on "hobbyist-made" software like *BSD and other OSS software. Yep none of that crappy unprofessionaly made OSS stuff in OS X.
"with some ISPs charging as little as $19 a month for DSL. I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection--twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"
I only pay like $29 a month for 3.0/768 from Verizon DSL so at least things can be pretty good here if you live in the right place. Of course the kicker as always is location, location, location. After having broadband for 5 years now I don't think I would even consider moving somewhere where its not available in either cable or dsl form.
Or people with enough initiative to at least spend 5 minutes looking at what one of the top two distros puts out.
Of course you have to realize that most people aren't as smart as me and wouldn't know to type Linux Directory Services in Google and see Novell's answer in the 5th link down.
Your right as I always used use "Hide ads" to preserve the page layout. You see the entire page load, then the ads go poof which makes the page load slower. I just didn't like the way "Remove ads" made some pages look so I never used it. I do stand by my first statement though, IMHO its the Flash ads that are the killer these days and flashblock fixes that nicely.
It turns all of those flash ads into little buttons you can press if you wish to view what's there. I rarely have to even use it since most flash these days ends up being in ads. And if you visit a site that uses Flash for something important it can be unblocked. Its really the bee's knee's.
It works so well that I don't use Adblock anymore. Really its the flash ads that slow things down and honestly I think Adblock slows page rendering down anyway although I did used to be a big booster of it. When the ads come down and are then removed it makes it seem like the page is taking longer to load and this in on a 3Mb dsl line. Anyway I highly suggest people use flashblock. Ieview, cutmenus, and of course session saver which is also great.
I don't get it. What do you mean there are no more Free versions of RedHat. What's this? ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enter prise/4/en/os/i386/SRPMS or this http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora /linux/core/3/i386/iso/
The Ent version may not be compiled for you but its there, its Free, and as its widely known several people compile and support it all for Free.
I know what you mean there are no ISO's of RedHat's Enterprise version sitting on their website, but the source is there and so is Fedora which is RedHat's "Free" distro. By any definition RedHat still puts a Free distro.
" Analysts say the chip bundle and software will transform the PC into an all-purpose multimedia device designed to function as a CD and DVD player, digital video recorder, game console, as well as a machine for traditional data processing and Internet"
Wish my computer could play cd/dvd's, record video, play games, do word processing and access the Internet! Man the future is gonna be cool!
I have to say you do have a very good point. Post 1.0 there are published security flaws in Firefox yet no client-side patches. Where are the patches? Fixed in CVS? Post 1.0 the firefox crew has imho dropped the ball in some areas. Seven months from 1.0 till 1.1 with no security updates in between? I know these aren't load a webpage and your computer explodes type flaws but they are flaws and should be addressed.
Btw lest people think "Ha gotcha!", the same problem occurs with IE. Many IE vulnerabilities hang around for months as well and with IE there is not even a remote chance of using a "nightly" which contains the proper fixes. Firefox even with these problems is still a better browser in every way over IE, but these delays in fixing published security flaws for end users have to end.
ex http://www.mikx.de/firedragging/ list http://secunia.com/product/4227/
Relax, I'm sure Bush's plan to cut the massive ever growing deficit will work out just fine. He is after so good at passing on ever single spending bill that ever comes across his desk. A true model for Fiscal Conservatism they'll all be saying in the future. Then we won't have to worry about that silly foreign powers who keep buying up all of our debt thing.
Besides its not like China and the others will ever lose faith in the good old dollar. I'm sure they'll just keep buying US debt forever and ever...And we all lived happier ever after. The End.
The worst possible outcome of all is an OS like OS X. You take a completely Free and Open OS and then weld a Proprietary hood on it. How is this good for Free software in the long run? It isn't. Imagine if Longorn were to run on GNU/Linux yet have a completely Proprietary graphics and windowing system with proprietary drivers for all. How would that be any different than OSX? Now 90% of the World's OS's run Proprietary Linux. How is this a victory for OSS?
Has the spirit of OSS been tainted by Apple? I think it has. I'm not saying Apple should give what they do away for Free. But acting like just because Apple is based on Darwin that automatically qualifies it as a "good thing" for OSS is Extremely shortsighted. I guess some people are just happy to see any OSS at all being used. I don't object to Apple using what developers put out there to be used in any way they see fit. I object to people pointing to OS X as a model of OSS success when it isn't.
Maybe that's really the future for OSS that advocates are going to see. Maybe all of OSS will be co-opted by companies like Apple and eventually a company like Microsoft. Maybe OSS never had a future to stand completely on its own in the first place. Then again maybe we can point this out to everyone before its too late and future generations think OSS means half OSS/half proprietary in most situations.
I think your wrong when you say that it doesn't hurt the OSS community. It hurts OSS exactly where it's most vulnerable. "Here have some quasi-Free software, trust me is MUCH less painful to use. Stop worrying about what is and isn't True OSS. Relax..." Sorry, don't want to be lulled into that way of thinking. Everytime I read about some OSS programmer(and there are a shitload of them) buying/bragging about a MAC they just bought it bothers me. Not because I believe you should never run a proprietary OS, I run XP on my laptop. But because they trick themselves into thinking OS X is somehow the "Best of both Worlds". I just don't buy into Apple's version of what the Free software world should look like no matter how easy Apple makes it seem. I believe in the GPL and I believe there are consequences to taking Non-Free shorcuts.
" If you didn't want DRM, you'd buy the CD. It seems like a lot of hassle to set up an account, buy the music, download the music, crack the music, then convert the music to get to the same end result."
Why should I buy an entire CD when I can buy the two or three songs I want via a brillant interface that's better than any other online music service? And its not a hassle. One-time setup of account, 99c a song and a quick run of Jhymn is hardly a hassle.
"but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.) "
So circumventing Apple's DRM one way is okay but another way isn't? Wow, great logic. Let me ask, if I record to a tape from my audio out of a DRM file is that illegal as well? If the end result is the same what's the difference? Who is being harmed when the end result in a unencrypted file in EVERY SINGLE CASE. What because your taking the extra step of going DRM-CD-RIP and someone else goes DRM-RIP your method is somehow better for Apple? In what way? Why are you even suggesting Burning and Ripping? Are you one of those people who upload all of your Itunes music to P2P? Oh no wait, that's what you Apple defenders are constantly accusing us paying customers of doing.
"What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned"
Or they could point to the built in loophole of ripping from CD which rendered Apples DRM useless from day one.
"Thanks to the pirates,"
Excuse me? Pirates? Who? The people who PAID APPLE for each and every song and use a program which ONLY works if your the one who purchased the music in the first place? Yea those bastards!
The Pirates are on P2P sharing songs they never bought. The people using this tool aren't pirates. Get it straight already. And get over your holier than thou, how you dare use a product in a way other then intended attitude. You've benefitted more from reverse engineering and people using products in ways not intended then you could possibly imagine.
Its not a Speakeasy branded Firefox like everyone keeps saying, its a small extension which adds some bookmarks. *Cough* Why does everyone keep saying they are distributing a branded version? Am I wrong?
I hope I am wrong and they will start distributing an actual branded version to customers, but for now this looks like simple Extension to Firefox which is hardly worth the headlines and IMHO is kinda deceiving.
"The amount of spam and crossposting just made the signal-to-noise ratio too much."
Yes and then people invented News clients which could actually filter and killfile.
Google Groups is still one of the greatest sources of information on the planet. If you rely on Google so much are you really telling me you never search the groups for information? That would just be foolish.
Every year people claim usenet dead and every year they are wrong. Just because you don't subscribe to any groups or visit usenet anymore doesn't mean it fell off the face of the earth. When you close your eyes does the world disappear as well?
Slashdot Mirror
" Yeah, what's wrong with XP's color management exactly?"
l or /default.mspx
Read the Longhorn docs on what they are planning on doing with color management in the future and then you'll see how disjointed, inaccessible, and incomplete the color management support or lack of therefore is in XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/co
Well in your case it would certainly be simple enough as long as your wife isn't using some sort of specialized windows only software. Although as you probably know forcing change on the wife isn't the nicest thing to do. If all she does is use the net and email though then something like Fedora or Ubuntu would work fine. No need to even bother spending $500 on a mini-mac. Why not cut commercial software completly out of the picture where possibe?
Having more fun replying to myself. It's kinda sad to see all the "please don't change" responses here http://www.flickr.com/groups/topic/20864/
Forgot to mention you can read the flickr takeover faq at the flickr blog. Again not being a naive teenager and as someone who has followed yahoo since it began, why should I possibly believe that flickr won't become some sort of ad-filled yahoo cobranded site? They are already talking about how yahoo id's will now work at flickr. What, flickr is going to be the ONE yahoo property where your not assaulted with flash ads and somehow its going to remain independant?
I will say congrats to the flickr guys. It's awesome that they are going to get paid. Just don't be too surprised when you lose control of things. I look forward to when one of your founders splits off from yahoo in a few years and createst the next cool thing.
Now all of those cool 3rd party projects will suddently becomes against terms of service.
You can also now probably look foward to having to click "skip this ad" when trying to view photos I'm sure.
The lamest thing that could happen to a cool tech company is to be swallowed up by some big public company. I'm actually not anti-yahoo by any means, I just don't possibly see how this will be good for flickr. And I'm just sure that ipod toting pseudo hipster crowd is going to love paying money to yahoo now.
And finally worst of all is that I'm sure that the previous owners will convince themselves that somehow they will remain independant and that yahoo will just let them run things "like always". Yea right. Anyone want to buy a bridge?
I signed up with my gmail account and have not received ONE single piece of spam. When you sign up you simply don't check the two check boxes about future offers etc. That was 2 months ago and still, no spam. The two people I got to do offers have seen zero spam as well.
And not to defend their business model but they are pretty upfront about the whole thing. They don't lie to you and try to trick you in any way. The offers you have to do many times comes from reputable vendors like Blockbuster etc. And yea they cost you money. Why would you get a free Ipod by doing an offer that cost's nothing? Many of the offers there cost only $1 for a month's Trial.
Now if I ever get to 5 referrals and they screw me I'll probably be the first to curse them out. I can't vouch for them as someone you should do business with. But I've seen several people do the offers and play by the rules and get a Free Ipod. Worst case I'm out by a $1 and a little time. Seems like a decent risk to take IMHO.
Well according to official baseball records the percentage of baseball players who tested positive has gone from 11% in 2001 to something like 1.7 in 2004 IIRC. So judging by when Canseco played I'd hardly be surprised if the number was 25% or higher back in the day. Knowing that only a few years ago 1 out of every 10 players was caught(more were using obivously) is pretty dam sobering IMHO to hear how rampant it was/is.
I was never a huge fan of Jose but I also find it hypocrictical for so many players to bash him and then go and plead the 5th to Congress. Steriods is baseballs dirty secret and for the league to act like its never been a major problem is insulting to anyone who follows the sport.
It doesn't lend him a ton of credit that he's making money from writing a book on the subject, but judging by how everyone including the league has done their best to make him the posterboy for steriod abuse I can't blame him for trying to fight back.
FWIW last time I checked Opera was pretty much tied with Firefox for being standards complaint. Among browsers that normal human use that's saying a lot.
Based on that I don't see what's laughable.
Bravo to the trickster. Nothing like seeing hardcore porn showup when you think your clicking onto a benign page about online gambling.
Do your own research and then get back to us. Download the eval versions and test them. Or were you planning on implementing an "Enterprise Solution" based on the whims of the /. readership? Giving you the slightest benefit of the doubt there are many other less public, more informed forums for this type of question. Why ask at /. where most of the users A) don't use linux anymore and b) are desktop users?
I though "which distro is best" discussions were banned by now?
Don't you think that if they could magically make OO.org run on P166 with 64MB of ram while at the same time offering most of what MS Office offers they would? OO.org has always been slow to launch except on Windows with quicklaunch, that's just the way it is. Once its up and running it quite useable, can't you get over the startup time? Your dad probably waits 10 minutes for AOL to launch and connect online and yet waiting 15 seconds the first time his Free office suite comes up is too much?
Someone else had mentioned this but look at how long Photoshop takes to load on a 2GHz pc. Does the fact that's its slow to launch make the app not useable? Funny how I don't constantly hear that Photoshop is "bloated" everytime there is a story on it. Most people are happy enough with the features it offers to overlook the initial startup speed.
People need to look past the fact that OO.org doesn't launch exactly as fast as MS Office and look at what it offers instead. Namely a Free Open Source, Cross Platform Office suite that does what most business and home users need. Isn't that enough? If your waiting for OO.org to run on old slow hardware and somehow be feature perfect your going to be waiting a long long time.
When it comes to Free, full featured, OSS, Cross-Platform Office suites there is OO.org. End of Story. Let me know when MS Office or any other office suite can do that.
" stop concentrating so hard on their commercial offerings "
Their commercial offerings are what allow them to finance Fedora, Gnome, people like Alan Cox, and many other OSS initiatives. Plus they give away the source to that commercial offering.
"they leave their grassroots projects underdevloped and insufficient"
Says you. Fedora from the start has been in many users and reviewers opinions one of the better desktop linux distros available.
People need to get over the "Red Hat owes the community something" bullshit. Yes they moved away from the $79 one-size-fits-all model that everyone loved and many miss but they still contine to be a positive force in OSS.
"I don't know anybody who still drinks the Linux kool aid. It seemed like good stuff back in 1999, but then it went nowhere "
You mean the Linux Desktop went nowhere right? Because by any other measure Linux has about ten times the OS market share of Apple.
"not all nerds buy into the propaganda that hobbyist-made software is better than, or even as good as, professionally-made software."
Err ok. Good thing Apple, a company you apparently worship, didn't do anything stupid like bet the farm and base their OS on "hobbyist-made" software like *BSD and other OSS software. Yep none of that crappy unprofessionaly made OSS stuff in OS X.
"with some ISPs charging as little as $19 a month for DSL. I pay $30 myself, for a 1.5-megabits-per-second (mbps) connection--twice the speed of my $50-a-month service back home in the United States.'"
I only pay like $29 a month for 3.0/768 from Verizon DSL so at least things can be pretty good here if you live in the right place. Of course the kicker as always is location, location, location. After having broadband for 5 years now I don't think I would even consider moving somewhere where its not available in either cable or dsl form.
"Unfortunatly Linux is still for Hax0rs."
Or people with enough initiative to at least spend 5 minutes looking at what one of the top two distros puts out.
Of course you have to realize that most people aren't as smart as me and wouldn't know to type Linux Directory Services in Google and see Novell's answer in the 5th link down.
Your right as I always used use "Hide ads" to preserve the page layout. You see the entire page load, then the ads go poof which makes the page load slower. I just didn't like the way "Remove ads" made some pages look so I never used it. I do stand by my first statement though, IMHO its the Flash ads that are the killer these days and flashblock fixes that nicely.
Flashblock
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
It turns all of those flash ads into little buttons you can press if you wish to view what's there. I rarely have to even use it since most flash these days ends up being in ads. And if you visit a site that uses Flash for something important it can be unblocked. Its really the bee's knee's.
It works so well that I don't use Adblock anymore. Really its the flash ads that slow things down and honestly I think Adblock slows page rendering down anyway although I did used to be a big booster of it. When the ads come down and are then removed it makes it seem like the page is taking longer to load and this in on a 3Mb dsl line. Anyway I highly suggest people use flashblock. Ieview, cutmenus, and of course session saver which is also great.
I don't get it. What do you mean there are no more Free versions of RedHat. What's this?r prise/4 /en/os/i386/SRPMSa /linux /core/3/i386/iso/
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/ente
or this
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedor
The Ent version may not be compiled for you but its there, its Free, and as its widely known several people compile and support it all for Free.
I know what you mean there are no ISO's of RedHat's Enterprise version sitting on their website, but the source is there and so is Fedora which is RedHat's "Free" distro. By any definition RedHat still puts a Free distro.
" Analysts say the chip bundle and software will transform the PC into an all-purpose multimedia device designed to function as a CD and DVD player, digital video recorder, game console, as well as a machine for traditional data processing and Internet"
Wish my computer could play cd/dvd's, record video, play games, do word processing and access the Internet! Man the future is gonna be cool!
I have to say you do have a very good point. Post 1.0 there are published security flaws in Firefox yet no client-side patches. Where are the patches? Fixed in CVS? Post 1.0 the firefox crew has imho dropped the ball in some areas. Seven months from 1.0 till 1.1 with no security updates in between? I know these aren't load a webpage and your computer explodes type flaws but they are flaws and should be addressed.
Btw lest people think "Ha gotcha!", the same problem occurs with IE. Many IE vulnerabilities hang around for months as well and with IE there is not even a remote chance of using a "nightly" which contains the proper fixes. Firefox even with these problems is still a better browser in every way over IE, but these delays in fixing published security flaws for end users have to end.
ex http://www.mikx.de/firedragging/
list http://secunia.com/product/4227/
Relax, I'm sure Bush's plan to cut the massive ever growing deficit will work out just fine. He is after so good at passing on ever single spending bill that ever comes across his desk. A true model for Fiscal Conservatism they'll all be saying in the future. Then we won't have to worry about that silly foreign powers who keep buying up all of our debt thing.
Besides its not like China and the others will ever lose faith in the good old dollar. I'm sure they'll just keep buying US debt forever and ever...And we all lived happier ever after. The End.
I'm not anti-Bush, I'm pro-America.
The worst possible outcome of all is an OS like OS X. You take a completely Free and Open OS and then weld a Proprietary hood on it. How is this good for Free software in the long run? It isn't. Imagine if Longorn were to run on GNU/Linux yet have a completely Proprietary graphics and windowing system with proprietary drivers for all. How would that be any different than OSX? Now 90% of the World's OS's run Proprietary Linux. How is this a victory for OSS?
Has the spirit of OSS been tainted by Apple? I think it has. I'm not saying Apple should give what they do away for Free. But acting like just because Apple is based on Darwin that automatically qualifies it as a "good thing" for OSS is Extremely shortsighted. I guess some people are just happy to see any OSS at all being used. I don't object to Apple using what developers put out there to be used in any way they see fit. I object to people pointing to OS X as a model of OSS success when it isn't.
Maybe that's really the future for OSS that advocates are going to see. Maybe all of OSS will be co-opted by companies like Apple and eventually a company like Microsoft. Maybe OSS never had a future to stand completely on its own in the first place. Then again maybe we can point this out to everyone before its too late and future generations think OSS means half OSS/half proprietary in most situations.
I think your wrong when you say that it doesn't hurt the OSS community. It hurts OSS exactly where it's most vulnerable. "Here have some quasi-Free software, trust me is MUCH less painful to use. Stop worrying about what is and isn't True OSS. Relax..." Sorry, don't want to be lulled into that way of thinking. Everytime I read about some OSS programmer(and there are a shitload of them) buying/bragging about a MAC they just bought it bothers me. Not because I believe you should never run a proprietary OS, I run XP on my laptop. But because they trick themselves into thinking OS X is somehow the "Best of both Worlds". I just don't buy into Apple's version of what the Free software world should look like no matter how easy Apple makes it seem. I believe in the GPL and I believe there are consequences to taking Non-Free shorcuts.
" If you didn't want DRM, you'd buy the CD. It seems like a lot of hassle to set up an account, buy the music, download the music, crack the music, then convert the music to get to the same end result."
Why should I buy an entire CD when I can buy the two or three songs I want via a brillant interface that's better than any other online music service? And its not a hassle. One-time setup of account, 99c a song and a quick run of Jhymn is hardly a hassle.
"but in this case "the man" is giving you virtually everything you asked for (inexpensive music you can try before you buy with the ability to download exactly what you want and make mix CDs, which you could then rip as well without needing this tool.) "
So circumventing Apple's DRM one way is okay but another way isn't? Wow, great logic. Let me ask, if I record to a tape from my audio out of a DRM file is that illegal as well? If the end result is the same what's the difference? Who is being harmed when the end result in a unencrypted file in EVERY SINGLE CASE. What because your taking the extra step of going DRM-CD-RIP and someone else goes DRM-RIP your method is somehow better for Apple? In what way? Why are you even suggesting Burning and Ripping? Are you one of those people who upload all of your Itunes music to P2P? Oh no wait, that's what you Apple defenders are constantly accusing us paying customers of doing.
"What does this win us? The music industry can point to this as another example of why the restrictions need to be in the hardware and the hardware manufacturers are already in their pocket as far as the next generation of motherboards are concerned"
Or they could point to the built in loophole of ripping from CD which rendered Apples DRM useless from day one.
"Thanks to the pirates,"
Excuse me? Pirates? Who? The people who PAID APPLE for each and every song and use a program which ONLY works if your the one who purchased the music in the first place? Yea those bastards!
The Pirates are on P2P sharing songs they never bought. The people using this tool aren't pirates. Get it straight already. And get over your holier than thou, how you dare use a product in a way other then intended attitude. You've benefitted more from reverse engineering and people using products in ways not intended then you could possibly imagine.
Its not a Speakeasy branded Firefox like everyone keeps saying, its a small extension which adds some bookmarks. *Cough*
Why does everyone keep saying they are distributing a branded version? Am I wrong?
I hope I am wrong and they will start distributing an actual branded version to customers, but for now this looks like simple Extension to Firefox which is hardly worth the headlines and IMHO is kinda deceiving.
"The amount of spam and crossposting just made the signal-to-noise ratio too much."
Yes and then people invented News clients which could actually filter and killfile.
Google Groups is still one of the greatest sources of information on the planet. If you rely on Google so much are you really telling me you never search the groups for information? That would just be foolish.
Every year people claim usenet dead and every year they are wrong. Just because you don't subscribe to any groups or visit usenet anymore doesn't mean it fell off the face of the earth. When you close your eyes does the world disappear as well?