"Over half of the songs were purchased as albums,"
At that point your paying around $12-$14 and could just buy the album from the record store for about the same price. Sure you have to actually leave your house, but at least you don't get restricted low quality files.(yes 128bitacc is low quality IMO).
Personally I wouldn't bother unless the songs were around.50 cents each and came in higher quality. Considering these files are just a copy of a copy and there is no delivery truck nor a physical cd case or disc, a dollar is too much.
Don't get me wrong, it is a really neat solution for Apple users, its just not my personal ideal as far digitial music delivery goes. Like I said my ideal is cheaper and higher quality, perhaps that's just a few years away if this venture proves successful.
So you would deny the use of free software only to those who are experts with their OS?
I say this as a longtime linux user and booster, if installing sofware on Windows was one-tenth as hard as it often is on Linux then everyone would be using Macs.
Ease of use really should be the ultimate goal with all appliances and software. Would it really be some benefit if cars were twice as difficult to use?
To take your example, Windows servers are not more vulnerable because they are easier to use, they are/were more vulnerable because MS shipped its OS with dumbass defaults. Make the same OS even easier to use and setup, but make more sane security choices and its even MORE secure while being easier to maintain.
"Was this article posted just to give zealots a chance to yammer about MS world conquest and other conspiracy theories?
Yes"
Actually No. The only zealous act here is what you say in your 7th point which bashes linux users. The poster asked directly about the future of gaming on Windows. The entire post along with its many questions on how this relates DIRECTLY TO GAMING ON WINDOWS is below if you feel like reading it again.
"We've heard an awful lot about how.NET is the future and how.NET signals the end for COM based Windows development, but how far does this go? Is it really the end of COM? Will ALL Windows programming be done with.NET? What about games development? Will games be developed with.NET? If games aren't developed with.NET and Microsoft is killing COM, then what future for games development on Windows? Will there be DirectX for.NET?"
Zealot - n.
The most overdone word in the geek lexicon.
That's pretty much an unfair comparison. It's not MS vs ALL opensource or even ALL commercial vs ALL opensource. To be fair you'd have to admit that many commercial programs come and go just like opensource ones do. Tons of commercial software fails every year regardless of how much money gets thrown at it. The good stuff sells and continue to be improved on but the same thing happen in the OSS world.
Opensource is not just one big company, so if 10 opensource projects cease development it really doesn't have the effect your implying since they are not all from the same group.
Your also bringing up the myth that all opensource programmers are drones and should all work on the same projects and not make competing ones. As has been pointed out a billion times, opensource programmers are not a single pool of resources to be pushed into whatever project YOU feel they should be working on.
Your right about MS having a lot of money so they can "afford more time to develop" a particular project but that's about it. When a really good OSS project comes along its going to make it regardless of how much money MS has. The advantage goes to the killer app.
"Besides, I don't think Linux's graphics acceleration support is so mature a casual Linux-user would get the best performance from their machine. At least my Radeon 8500 gives me less FPS than TNT2 I previously had."
Outright wrong and you obviously don't have your graphics card setup properly.
Linux > Mac for gaming performance in FPS's. I had also seen some tests where linux outpaced windows in framerates a while ago.
I find that hard to believe. If literally nobody made any money then they wouldn't do it. Artists may be falky but their not stupid. Sure maybe small time bands are not paid that much, but any band with name recognition can make money touring. The bottom line is if you can't make money touring your in the wrong business. If your good enough and "make the cut" then you'll make money. No one every said just because you want to be an artist you automatically get to make money at it.
The parent was right. CD's are basically just ads to come and see the show. Since the vast majority of artists don't many any money from CD's why not give them away for free? All they need to do is hand them to a few people to put on their websites and boom, off the music goes. Within days it would be on Kazaa, Donkey, etc, all with little to no cost for the artists.
The grateful dead model works and lets the artist concentrate on the part that pays, touring. The CD biz is afterall just a scam set up to make Recording companies rich. Why even participate in something like that?
"Documentation has been lacking, from my experience."
Quite possibly the biggest understatement of the year. Getting Wine to work is constantly hit or miss and I've yet to see a solution that gets it working every single time on every distro. If Wine were already running Office fine then then codeweavers would be out of business. The fact remains most people have significant trouble with Wine and the sucesss rate varies widely between distros and individual users. Everyone has a different way of setting it up and there is no standard config that is used. In the end its a kludge.
Like I've always said, native is better and Wine is just a crutch. If you really need win32 apps, run vmware or stick to windows. Bringing MS's control to yet another platform is about the worse thing you could do for linux. Die wine die.
"I'd personally prefer if people who take this line didn't associate with Free software groups like the FSF. It is non-sensicle arguments like this one that give Free software authors a bad name, and that doesn't help anyone."
You do realize that many kids growing up today don't see any difference between going to freshmeat and downloading some apps and visiting Kazaa and downloading some apps? Both places you just do a search and click on the download link.
Its all just a few mouse clicks away and getting a copy of a copy of a copy is about as wrong as harming grass by stepping on it in millions upon millions of peoples eyes.
Copyright infringement will continue to exist as long as its so moronically easy to download anything you want anytime.
2003-04-18 15:06:30 MS says EULA prevents MS programs from running on (articles,microsoft) (rejected)
(orginally said "...on linux via WINE")
Like I said in my original submission, if MS sticks to calling running apps via WINE illegal due to the EULA, then distro like Suse, Xandros, and Lindows which are basing their distros on Wine are in big trouble.
Unless you have a really small music collection or or willing to spend hours and hours makes hundreds of playlists there just aren't any decent players for linux yet. The only one in recent memory that has half a chance or turning into something decent like someone else pointed out it Rythmbox(although dev has stalled??), maybe the fork will do better.
For now I use Zinf since its the only one which seems to makes an effort to let you organzie your music library in an easy manner. See a screenshot here http://www.zinf.org/images/zinf_mymusic_shot.png Zinf lets you graphically manages your Artists,Albums, and playlists by default. It still doesn't have everything I want, but its still better than Xmms. Xmms has albumlist but really that not nearly the same thing that Zinf has.
Linux mp3 players are stuck in 1997 and I'd use something like WMP9 in a hearbeat if it were ported to linux. Minimalist, featureless mp3 players are for people with minimal mp3 collections.
Verdana is still my favorite. Its what I use for my entire desktop and browser. I've tried a bunch of fonts and in linux over the years and its still the one I think looks best in most cases.
I guess I'll try out the Vera final though. I had tried out the beta but there were some problems with it, hopefully they are all fixed now.
"The browser Phoenix had a legitimate beef, I mean you have two browsers of the same name. That is really confusing. However the SQL Firebird people need to sit down and shut up.
Firebird is NOT an orignal name by any strech of the imagination. I can easily name one Firebird that predates both of them: the Pontiac Firebird (a car). When you pick a popular name, you need to be prepared for other people to use it as well. Also, if you aren't the first to use it, you certianly have no right ot bitch when someone else picks it up as well."
Its about respect. Who cares if there is a car, a bird, and a tv set called Firebird? Those are NOT Opensoure projects. Here in the opensource world we are supposed to show respect for fellow opensource projects. Mozilla.org did not do that.
They were made aware several times that Firbird was the name of an Opensource project and that it was bad policy to take the name of a fellow Opensource project. They choose not to care. They also proved their guilt by not contacting the Firebird DB team prior to the announcement. What kind of opensource project doesn't contact another opensource project when what they are about to do will have a Major impact on it?
Mozilla is in the wrong here and the fact that Firebird is also a billion other things doesn't mean shit. The fact that its the name of a another Opensource project does.
" Linux for Govt is a shady subject - since Govt is supported by taxpayers, including CORPORATE Taxpayers (ok ok, so what if loopholes let companies get off on 2 bucks a year:-) ), all govt software projects should be BSD Licensed"
Sorry I think your wrong and hardly think Linux for the Govt is a "shady" subject.
I disagree and think govt projects when possible should be GPL. The code should ALWAYS remain free no matter what. Some company shouldn't be allowd to come along and just take what others have worked on or more importantly paid for via taxes without giving back. That's only fair if your getting free code from MY dime. I'll be damned if some commercial company is going to close the source to some exiting project and sell it back to the unsuspecting public who ALREADY paid for it!
Every teddy bear who's been good, is sure of a treat today. There's lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play. Beneath the trees where nobody sees, They'll hide and seek as long as they please. Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.
What? You'd rather read more about GW & Co dismantling our citizens rights?
Republicans do a lot of talk about the need to dismantle the "bloated" Federal government but really they only want to dismantle some of it. They want to dismantle all of the social programs and consumer rights laws while at the same time building a permanent massive police state that invades every aspect of our lives.
Even worse then the spying are the secret search warrants which bypass the judicial system.
People are being held for anything, for any length of time, and without access to the outside all under the guise of "protecting the citizens(aka the state).
Librarians are being hushed with threat of jail time and we have a Pres. who has made it clear how he feels about those who don't support his right to conquer anyone for any reason.
This is all like some bad dream and the 1984 jokes aren't even funny anymore. I no longer laugh at those Rednecks hiding in the woods waiting for the government to come and seize their guns.
" It's a great OS for the masses, $30 or less, $19.99 from the company if you download your own and just want the Product ID."
That makes it sound like you can't download it for free. AFAIK you have always been able to download it for free. For example the latest beta is available here. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/redm on d-linux/beta/
"Would be helpful if in the future editors who post stories that link to sites with lotsa eyecandy make a wget copy "
Things like this get suggested and ignored daily on/. You might as well ask for people to not make stupid comments along with the links to the articles.
Slashdot as a website does NOT practice good neighbor policies.
Just like much of society today I guess they continue to think if it doesn't happen to them who cares?
"Tax software. Two years ago I used Turbo Tax for the first time, and it was worthwhile."
Two tips since my future father-in-law is a CPA.
1) Don't bother with Turbo Tax.
2) Get an accoutant.
If you just want to "get your taxes over with" use a tax program. Or if you really really have it all figured out and just want and easy way to enter the numbers, use a tax program. If your like most normal people and just want to save money, hire an expert.
Most people especially the younger ones who are just starting out as contractors or consultants have no clue as to what is deductable. Good accoutants will minimize your taxable income much better than the average person can.
They will also do all the hard work for you and worst case you just have to round up the paperwork and answer a few questions.
You will most likely save enough money to pay for your accoutant and as a bonus not have to deal with hours of figuring it out yourself.
Like someone else already said Promise raid and low end raid cards are software raid.
When I've had to use software raid on servers I always feel a lot better having the OS manage it as opposed to some cheap wanna-be "raid" card. Those cards are just one more piece of hardware that you have to worry about not only finding drivers for, but failing as well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Over half of the songs were purchased as albums,"
.50 cents each and came in higher quality. Considering these files are just a copy of a copy and there is no delivery truck nor a physical cd case or disc, a dollar is too much.
At that point your paying around $12-$14 and could just buy the album from the record store for about the same price. Sure you have to actually leave your house, but at least you don't get restricted low quality files.(yes 128bitacc is low quality IMO).
Personally I wouldn't bother unless the songs were around
Don't get me wrong, it is a really neat solution for Apple users, its just not my personal ideal as far digitial music delivery goes. Like I said my ideal is cheaper and higher quality, perhaps that's just a few years away if this venture proves successful.
So you would deny the use of free software only to those who are experts with their OS?
I say this as a longtime linux user and booster, if installing sofware on Windows was one-tenth as hard as it often is on Linux then everyone would be using Macs.
Ease of use really should be the ultimate goal with all appliances and software. Would it really be some benefit if cars were twice as difficult to use?
To take your example, Windows servers are not more vulnerable because they are easier to use, they are/were more vulnerable because MS shipped its OS with dumbass defaults. Make the same OS even easier to use and setup, but make more sane security choices and its even MORE secure while being easier to maintain.
"Was this article posted just to give zealots a chance to yammer about MS world conquest and other conspiracy theories?
.NET is the future and how .NET signals the end for COM based Windows development, but how far does this go? Is it really the end of COM? Will ALL Windows programming be done with .NET? What about games development? Will games be developed with .NET? If games aren't developed with .NET and Microsoft is killing COM, then what future for games development on Windows? Will there be DirectX for .NET?"
Yes"
Actually No. The only zealous act here is what you say in your 7th point which bashes linux users. The poster asked directly about the future of gaming on Windows. The entire post along with its many questions on how this relates DIRECTLY TO GAMING ON WINDOWS is below if you feel like reading it again.
"We've heard an awful lot about how
Zealot - n.
The most overdone word in the geek lexicon.
I think Dell printers are made by lexmark.
Kinda like what happened to linux?
That's pretty much an unfair comparison. It's not MS vs ALL opensource or even ALL commercial vs ALL opensource. To be fair you'd have to admit that many commercial programs come and go just like opensource ones do. Tons of commercial software fails every year regardless of how much money gets thrown at it. The good stuff sells and continue to be improved on but the same thing happen in the OSS world.
Opensource is not just one big company, so if 10 opensource projects cease development it really doesn't have the effect your implying since they are not all from the same group.
Your also bringing up the myth that all opensource programmers are drones and should all work on the same projects and not make competing ones. As has been pointed out a billion times, opensource programmers are not a single pool of resources to be pushed into whatever project YOU feel they should be working on.
Your right about MS having a lot of money so they can "afford more time to develop" a particular project but that's about it. When a really good OSS project comes along its going to make it regardless of how much money MS has. The advantage goes to the killer app.
"Besides, I don't think Linux's graphics acceleration support is so mature a casual Linux-user would get the best performance from their machine. At least my Radeon 8500 gives me less FPS than TNT2 I previously had."
Outright wrong and you obviously don't have your graphics card setup properly.
Linux > Mac for gaming performance in FPS's. I had also seen some tests where linux outpaced windows in framerates a while ago.
"over 95% of bands do not make money touring"
I find that hard to believe. If literally nobody made any money then they wouldn't do it. Artists may be falky but their not stupid. Sure maybe small time bands are not paid that much, but any band with name recognition can make money touring. The bottom line is if you can't make money touring your in the wrong business. If your good enough and "make the cut" then you'll make money. No one every said just because you want to be an artist you automatically get to make money at it.
The parent was right. CD's are basically just ads to come and see the show. Since the vast majority of artists don't many any money from CD's why not give them away for free? All they need to do is hand them to a few people to put on their websites and boom, off the music goes. Within days it would be on Kazaa, Donkey, etc, all with little to no cost for the artists.
The grateful dead model works and lets the artist concentrate on the part that pays, touring. The CD biz is afterall just a scam set up to make Recording companies rich. Why even participate in something like that?
"Documentation has been lacking, from my experience."
Quite possibly the biggest understatement of the year. Getting Wine to work is constantly hit or miss and I've yet to see a solution that gets it working every single time on every distro. If Wine were already running Office fine then then codeweavers would be out of business. The fact remains most people have significant trouble with Wine and the sucesss rate varies widely between distros and individual users. Everyone has a different way of setting it up and there is no standard config that is used. In the end its a kludge.
Like I've always said, native is better and Wine is just a crutch. If you really need win32 apps, run vmware or stick to windows. Bringing MS's control to yet another platform is about the worse thing you could do for linux. Die wine die.
"I'd personally prefer if people who take this line didn't associate with Free software groups like the FSF. It is non-sensicle arguments like this one that give Free software authors a bad name, and that doesn't help anyone."
You do realize that many kids growing up today don't see any difference between going to freshmeat and downloading some apps and visiting Kazaa and downloading some apps? Both places you just do a search and click on the download link.
Its all just a few mouse clicks away and getting a copy of a copy of a copy is about as wrong as harming grass by stepping on it in millions upon millions of peoples eyes.
Copyright infringement will continue to exist as long as its so moronically easy to download anything you want anytime.
2003-04-18 15:06:30 MS says EULA prevents MS programs from running on (articles,microsoft) (rejected)
(orginally said "...on linux via WINE")
Like I said in my original submission, if MS sticks to calling running apps via WINE illegal due to the EULA, then distro like Suse, Xandros, and Lindows which are basing their distros on Wine are in big trouble.
Unless you have a really small music collection or or willing to spend hours and hours makes hundreds of playlists there just aren't any decent players for linux yet. The only one in recent memory that has half a chance or turning into something decent like someone else pointed out it Rythmbox(although dev has stalled??), maybe the fork will do better.
For now I use Zinf since its the only one which seems to makes an effort to let you organzie your music library in an easy manner. See a screenshot here http://www.zinf.org/images/zinf_mymusic_shot.png
Zinf lets you graphically manages your Artists,Albums, and playlists by default. It still doesn't have everything I want, but its still better than Xmms. Xmms has albumlist but really that not nearly the same thing that Zinf has.
Linux mp3 players are stuck in 1997 and I'd use something like WMP9 in a hearbeat if it were ported to linux. Minimalist, featureless mp3 players are for people with minimal mp3 collections.
"The page you are trying to reach is inaccessible because the
;)
user has exceeded their allotted daily quota."
Wow some host you got there. So which quota do you have? The 10MB daily one?
Verdana is still my favorite. Its what I use for my entire desktop and browser. I've tried a bunch of fonts and in linux over the years and its still the one I think looks best in most cases.
I guess I'll try out the Vera final though. I had tried out the beta but there were some problems with it, hopefully they are all fixed now.
"The browser Phoenix had a legitimate beef, I mean you have two browsers of the same name. That is really confusing. However the SQL Firebird people need to sit down and shut up.
Firebird is NOT an orignal name by any strech of the imagination. I can easily name one Firebird that predates both of them: the Pontiac Firebird (a car). When you pick a popular name, you need to be prepared for other people to use it as well. Also, if you aren't the first to use it, you certianly have no right ot bitch when someone else picks it up as well."
Its about respect. Who cares if there is a car, a bird, and a tv set called Firebird? Those are NOT Opensoure projects. Here in the opensource world we are supposed to show respect for fellow opensource projects. Mozilla.org did not do that.
They were made aware several times that Firbird was the name of an Opensource project and that it was bad policy to take the name of a fellow Opensource project. They choose not to care. They also proved their guilt by not contacting the Firebird DB team prior to the announcement. What kind of opensource project doesn't contact another opensource project when what they are about to do will have a Major impact on it?
Mozilla is in the wrong here and the fact that Firebird is also a billion other things doesn't mean shit. The fact that its the name of a another Opensource project does.
" Linux for Govt is a shady subject - since Govt is supported by taxpayers, including CORPORATE Taxpayers (ok ok, so what if loopholes let companies get off on 2 bucks a year :-) ), all govt software projects should be BSD Licensed"
Sorry I think your wrong and hardly think Linux for the Govt is a "shady" subject.
I disagree and think govt projects when possible should be GPL. The code should ALWAYS remain free no matter what. Some company shouldn't be allowd to come along and just take what others have worked on or more importantly paid for via taxes without giving back. That's only fair if your getting free code from MY dime. I'll be damned if some commercial company is going to close the source to some exiting project and sell it back to the unsuspecting public who ALREADY paid for it!
Every teddy bear who's been good, is sure of a treat today.
There's lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play.
Beneath the trees where nobody sees,
They'll hide and seek as long as they please.
Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.
What? You'd rather read more about GW & Co dismantling our citizens rights?
Republicans do a lot of talk about the need to dismantle the "bloated" Federal government but really they only want to dismantle some of it. They want to dismantle all of the social programs and consumer rights laws while at the same time building a permanent massive police state that invades every aspect of our lives.
Even worse then the spying are the secret search warrants which bypass the judicial system.
People are being held for anything, for any length of time, and without access to the outside all under the guise of "protecting the citizens(aka the state).
Librarians are being hushed with threat of jail time and we have a Pres. who has made it clear how he feels about those who don't support his right to conquer anyone for any reason.
This is all like some bad dream and the 1984 jokes aren't even funny anymore. I no longer laugh at those Rednecks hiding in the woods waiting for the government to come and seize their guns.
"As for a quasi-obscure DB"
.2
Not if your into open source databases, which incidentally many people are.
This is like Apache renaming to xfce.
I actually don't think this will really hurt the Firebird DB project, its just kinda lame.
Fulltime Phoenix user since
" It's a great OS for the masses, $30 or less, $19.99 from the company if you download your own and just want the Product ID."
m on d-linux/beta/
That makes it sound like you can't download it for free. AFAIK you have always been able to download it for free. For example the latest beta is available here. Someone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/Linux/distributions/red
"Would be helpful if in the future editors who post stories that link to sites with lotsa eyecandy make a wget copy "
/. You might as well ask for people to not make stupid comments along with the links to the articles.
Things like this get suggested and ignored daily on
Slashdot as a website does NOT practice good neighbor policies.
Just like much of society today I guess they continue to think if it doesn't happen to them who cares?
The entire business world is still being held hostage or pushed around by a proprietary file format. How sad, annoying, and wasteful.
I always said during the DOJ trial all I wanted was to have the Office file formats opened. That would have really lead to some change.
Btw in case your new here, try OpenOffice you might like it.
www.openoffice.org
"Tax software. Two years ago I used Turbo Tax for the first time, and it was worthwhile."
Two tips since my future father-in-law is a CPA.
1) Don't bother with Turbo Tax.
2) Get an accoutant.
If you just want to "get your taxes over with" use a tax program. Or if you really really have it all figured out and just want and easy way to enter the numbers, use a tax program. If your like most normal people and just want to save money, hire an expert.
Most people especially the younger ones who are just starting out as contractors or consultants have no clue as to what is deductable. Good accoutants will minimize your taxable income much better than the average person can.
They will also do all the hard work for you and worst case you just have to round up the paperwork and answer a few questions.
You will most likely save enough money to pay for your accoutant and as a bonus not have to deal with hours of figuring it out yourself.
Like someone else already said Promise raid and low end raid cards are software raid.
When I've had to use software raid on servers I always feel a lot better having the OS manage it as opposed to some cheap wanna-be "raid" card. Those cards are just one more piece of hardware that you have to worry about not only finding drivers for, but failing as well.
Maybe its the file or just QT running crappy on anything but Apple hardware(Gee, go figure?)
Runs like shit on my XP1900,512MB, GF4 4400.