It's a rare thing that a Soviet Russia meme is on-topic. This is perfect too, because the following is true:
A Russian computer expert, Aleksandr Gostev from Kaspersky Labs, has predicted that a large chunk of the Internet will be shut down tomorrow by cyber terrorists.
Chernobyl is well-known for a famous meltdown.
Too much Internet usage possibly could melt your brain.
In light of the evidence, I say the parent post is quite funny. Besides, it's an AC, you can't karma-whore as an AC (not that funny mods count towards karma anyway).
As a geek with a girlfriend, I can say the phone is critical. While IM is usefull for large numbers of people, the phone is better for personal conversations where voice inflection has more meaning.
And asking someone out on IM is just bad.
I call bullshit. Not on the fact that you have a girlfriend, hey, anything is possible... It may not be as romantic as using the telephone, but I know a lot of people that have successfully arranged dates through IM.
Here's a hint, it's not so much the medium you use as it is what you say. Sometimes people (especially us geeks) get so caught up in the technology behind the communications medium we forget what it's really for - exchanging thoughts and ideas.
If you're not able to talk to a girl in real life, talking via IM isn't going to suddenly turn you into an Internet Don Juan. Likewise, if you know how to talk to the opposite sex, it doesn't matter whether you're speaking on the phone, corresponding through snail-mail or using IM. It's what you say that matters, not the means of conveying the information.
That's really just due to the fact that eventually the CCFT backlight will croak. With most LCD displays, it's just a $15-$25 part and your LCD is back in business. If you factor in CCFT replacement, an LCD monitor should last as long as the controller circuitry keeps functioning - most likely, a LONG ASS TIME.
I think they're overestimating the demand for a portable video player. The appeal of a portable MP3 player is the ability to listen to what is in essence, a commercial-free radio station you control, while you're doing some other activity. I don't see too many people interested in trying to watch a movie while exercising, mowing the lawn, working, etc.
Generally, a movie is something you sit down for, relax and enjoy. If you're just going to be watching a movie, you may as well do it where the movie watching experience is better. Chances are, if you have the money to blow for a portable video player, you've got a relatively decent A/V setup back at home.
Now on the topic of having content for this video player, who really has a lot of (or any for that matter) Windows Media Video files? I know I certainly don't have any worthy of buying a portable player to watch. I'm sure most people's format of choice for a home movie collection is DVD. Unlike converting audio CDs to MP3s for a portable player, converting DVDs is a very slow and legally questionable (due to having to circumvent the CSS encryption) process. For anyone that wants to watch movies portably, an inexpensive portable DVD player has a lot more usability appeal.
While I'm sure eventually buying movies online will be a big deal, right now it offers none of the benfits of online purchasing. Puchasing music online allows you to buy just the tracks you want, purchasing a movie online screws you out of higher quality and a physical disc you can resell if you so desire.
But, as I pointed out in the ORIGINAL message, since ringtones have come into widespread use and that because they "entertain you," you leave your phone on ring instead of vibrate in all sorts of innappropriate places. You don't switch it back to vibrate when you walk into the theatre, classroom, or frankly, even the coffee shop.
I never said anything about leaving my phone's ringer on in places where it's inappropriate.
I seriously doubt anything has changed in terms of people's laziness (relating to switching into vibrate mode or switching the phone off completely) that directly correlates with using a custom ringtone vs a default ringer. There's just more people that own cell phones nowadays and most newer phones support custom ring tones. If custom ringtones disappeared overnight, people would still leave their phones in the loudest ring mode, not because they want the world to hear their phone, but because they're simply too lazy to remember to turn the ringer off.
Now if you really somehow feel that a default ringtone is less annoying than a few notes from a pop song, I really hope for your sake you learn to take life less seriously.
I agree, there's so many people pissing and moaning about ringtones... Is this a site for geeks or grumpy old men? "Turn that music down!!! You damn kids and your pop tunes are making my ears bleed!"
If you want to be a stick in the mud and people's choice of ringtones really bothers you, don't go out in public. There's always a chance in public you'll hear or see something you find offensive. Two guys might be holding hands, someone might say "fuck", you may hear a 30-second midi rendition of a pop song's chorus. The shock, the horror.
I choose to use ringtones because it's entertaining TO ME and it's not the same old "beep beep beep". If that really bothers you that much, don't worry - you're not someone I'd want to associate with anyway.
Yay, more uninformed stupidness on TechTV
on
Build Your Own Stun Gun
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
After watching a video where they take apart a MuVo2 for its Hitachi Microdrive and then say the iPod mini has the same drive (correct, but the iPod's microdrive will NOT work in any digital cameras), I'm convinced TechTV's "dark tips" have become dangerously innacurate.
Don't do this. Compared to a stun gun, a photoflash capacitor stores a lower voltage, direct current high amperage charge which is delivered all at once. Yes, if delivered across the heart, it could be leathal. If delivered across flesh, it will burn you. In almost no cases will it stun you other than the surprise of getting shocked.
Real stun guns use a high frequency alternating current, VERY low amperage spark. Real stun guns are also quite cheap on eBay.
If you want to make a joke shocker from a disposable camera flash, here's a much safer method:
Get a cheap disposable camera and take it apart. Discharge the capacitor with a screwdriver. Get rid of the capacitor.
Notice the heavily insulated wire running to the center of the xenon photoflash bulb? Remove it from the photoflash bulb and attach a longer wire that will go to one of you're "shocker's" probes. Make sure the connection is well insulated.
Locate the portion of the circuit board that is shorted to activate the flash charging circuit. Usually, it's a small flexible metal "button" with plastic over it. Yank that sucker off of there and short the points on the board out with solder, or if you like, you can attach wires and add your own on/off switch.
Get a battery holder, some sort of case to put all this in, and a momentary pushbutton switch. Attach the wires from the battery holder to the circuit board, a wire from Negative to your other "shocker probe". Connect the momentary pushbutton switch to the trigger circuit (usually two peices of metal that were positioned near the shutter). Position the probes to be less than 1/8" apart. Put all this crap in a box and try it out. When you press the momentary pushbutton switch, you should get a nice spark.
The article is woefully skimpy on details, but it sounds like he's planning to sew a bunch of Peltier devices onto a sheet of nylon.
That's exactly what I thought of too... and it won't work. You need a LOT of surface area to get rid of, not only all the heat the peltiers move, but also all the heat from the wasted energy due to how inefficient peltiers are. Think beer keg turned metal porcupine. You'd still need fans too.
If I was going to design a system to do the same thing, I'd use a smallish portable compressor system. Take a R-134a compressor similar to one found in a mini-fridge, put it in a portable box with a fan-cooled compact condenser, immerse a compact evaporator in a reservoir containing a propylene glycol solution. Pump the chilled propylene glycol solution through insulated hoses to a vinyl keg-wrap that chills the keg. Sound familiar? Yea, it's the same thing people have done to refridgerate their CPU. Where's my $20,000?
It seems just the mere mention of beer has an intoxicating effect... I was expecting more geeks (especially those with refrideration/HVAC backgrounds) to spot how absurd the claims made in the article are.
if a member of your family said they wanted a new pc, what name are they going to associate with a new computer?
Most likely, they'd ask me to build a PC for them, as has been the situation in the past.
If it was some other family, chances are they'd be going to the local CompUSA, Circuit City or Best Buy and picking up whatever's on sale. That'd probably be either an HP or Sony (or an eMachines if they're feeling cheapish).
The point is... The PC industry is not controlled by one company. If people want AMD CPUs, they can buy from a manufacturer that uses them. Dell could disappear tommorow and it wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
If you RTFA, it's easy to figure out what how the prankster was blocking his caller ID.
With SprintPCS, you can call your voice mail and one of the options is to place a call. When you place a call using this method, your caller ID information isn't sent. Of course, Sprint still has logs of who you're calling so the only evil deed it's really good for is calling an ex-girlfriend and telling her you think she's fat and no good in bed.;)
Back in my day, kids that called bomb threats into the school used payphones... And they didn't get caught.
I mean hell... would YOU want something like Enter the Matrix when you could be watching a little girl have simulated sex?
That's sorta like asking if I'd prefer being burned to death or frozen to death. When I said "Give me Halo 2 or give me death", it was a figure of speech.
You people do realize that your tracks can be burned to CD-R and ripped back into.MP3 form, all without even leaving iTunes, right?
If that level of DRM bothers you, you are heading for a long, boring life devoid of any form of popular entertainment.
So what you're saying is, instead of buying large chunks of music (Read: $$$ for Apple!) and converting them to a DRM-free format en masse while preserving the metadata, I should buy SMALLER amounts of music so it will be easier and less time consuming to convert by the burn/re-rip method? Despite the flamebait mods from ravenous Apple fanboys, I still would much rather purchase my music from iTMS than from AllOfMP3...
The story earlier today showed how easily Apple can change it DRM scheme which could potentially effect your entire music collection and thousands of dollars tied up in the hardware and music files and you are happy about it and actually justifing the action. Meanwhile completely oblivious to the fact that you have absolutely no control over what they decide to do and you have no choice but to accept it. If MS, the RIAA, TurboTax, or any one else for that matter did something like this, it would be the collective trend that it was a scary thing. Not with Apple though. I feel sorry for you guys/
I couldn't agree more. I'm even willing to put my karma on the line to echo your sentiments.
Hey Apple, my shit works fine right now!!! Maybe other people like to trust Apple with a new iTunes version AND new iPod firmware at the same time... I'm more of the mindset that if something isn't broken, messing with it will probably break it. I don't want the newest hottest version of iTunes & iPod firmware just because Apple says so. It brings nothing to the table that I need and could potentially introduce new problems.
Then, there's the issue of DRM. I happen to own another MP3 player besides my iPod... Burning and re-ripping is slow and a pain in the ass. I had less than 19 songs before FairPlay - now I have over 150. It's funny how it seems more worth the $0.99 when I don't have to deal with DRM saying "No, you can't listen to tracks on your MuVo2 or laptop that still runs Windows98." This latest version of iTunes not only updates the DRM scheme so FairPlay no longer works, but it also reduces the number of unchanged playlist burns down to 7, from the original 10. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.
Fine, so don't upgrade, you say? I won't - and because of that fact, I can no longer make new purchases at the iTunes music store. Oh well, Pepsi's promotion is over anyway... Mark my words, it's all gonna be downhill from here... Do you honestly think $0.99 a track is going to last? If you believe that, I've got some "$9.99 albums" I'll sell you for $13.99.
That's what we're arguing about? You can take your music with you in your iPod but your other player can't do it? You can listen to your music on only "some" of your computers and not all of them like you want to?
It's the artificial playback restrictions placed upon the music that I have a problem with. I like my iPod and I think it's a great MP3 player, but it's not the end-all-be-all of portable audio playback. I've got a few gripes about the battery and the audio quality through headphones (due to having no user customisable IQ, just a bunch of worthless presets) so my iPod mostly gets used just in my car. I actually prefer my MuVo2 as a portable due to MUCH better battery life and audio quality.
Think about how much better you have it then people only 10 years ago.
Let's go back to 1994. I'm 15... I didn't own many CDs because they were pretty expensive. I primarally just listened to the radio and if I did record my own music, it was on casette tape as my computer didn't have a whole lot of space. Still, that didn't stop me, I have a few songs in 22KHz 8-bit stereo.VOC files that I recorded as early as 1994. Still have the files too. I downloaded my first MP3 only 2 years later, in 1996.
Getting music on my computers has always been about technical limitations of the hardware... As time marched on, I've been able to do more with newer hardware and faster online access - why should I have to settle for less?
What format are your next downloaded tunes going to be in? How much fun are those restrictions going to be to work around?
Ms Cleo says: WMA, most likely. Microsoft will use their dominance on the desktop to force people to use their music store, they'll undercut Apple on the pricing until Apple gives up. Apple will add WMA support to the iPod line. It'll be like Netscape all over again.
While you're at it tell me again how you're only able to buy these songs through iTunes Music Store? I'm lost on that part because I had this stupid idea that you could still just go buy a CD and make yourself some DRM free mp3's from it.
That assumes the purchaser is only interested in full albums, just like you assumed I was talking about owning a SINGLE computer incapable of running iTunes. Stop making assumptions, it doesn't make your argument look better.
And if you don't want to buy an iPod AND don't have a computer capable of running iTunes then I submit to you that the DRM is completely invisible since you ain't got none of those songs in your posession anyway (unless you downloaded them or copied them from someone else to spite "the man").
I do have an iPod. I do have several computers capable of running iTunes. I also have several computers incapable of running iTunes and a non-Apple portable MP3 player (a MuVo2). You assume too much. Why should I be forced by Apple to use my legally purchased music only on devices that have Apple's blessing through some artifically imposed technical restrictions?
If the iTunes music store goes under then it would probably be wise to have made some CD's out of them IMO. Of course if it goes under it will probably have something to do with a bunch of want to be activist bastards pissing of the labels enough to make them back off of the prospect of digital music. In that case I'll have a pretty good idea who to blame won't I?
DeCSS didn't cause production of DVDs to stop, did it? If iTunes folds, it will be due to competition from other online music stores, not because of people unprotecting songs they've legally purchased.
That's why I like random shuffle. It's much easier to skip tracks I don't feel like listening to at the time than sit down and try and make a playlist. [sarcasm]Wow, it's like radio, but with a greater variety and no commercials - who would have thought something like that would be popular?[/sarcasm]
As for the comment about the brain-damagedness of listening to individual tracks instead of complete albums, it sounds like flamebait or the blathering of a pissed off RIAA executive because people are buying a few $0.99 tracks instead of $17.99 albums.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a rare thing that a Soviet Russia meme is on-topic. This is perfect too, because the following is true:
A Russian computer expert, Aleksandr Gostev from Kaspersky Labs, has predicted that a large chunk of the Internet will be shut down tomorrow by cyber terrorists.
Chernobyl is well-known for a famous meltdown.
Too much Internet usage possibly could melt your brain.
In light of the evidence, I say the parent post is quite funny. Besides, it's an AC, you can't karma-whore as an AC (not that funny mods count towards karma anyway).
As a geek with a girlfriend, I can say the phone is critical. While IM is usefull for large numbers of people, the phone is better for personal conversations where voice inflection has more meaning.
And asking someone out on IM is just bad.
I call bullshit. Not on the fact that you have a girlfriend, hey, anything is possible... It may not be as romantic as using the telephone, but I know a lot of people that have successfully arranged dates through IM.
Here's a hint, it's not so much the medium you use as it is what you say. Sometimes people (especially us geeks) get so caught up in the technology behind the communications medium we forget what it's really for - exchanging thoughts and ideas.
If you're not able to talk to a girl in real life, talking via IM isn't going to suddenly turn you into an Internet Don Juan. Likewise, if you know how to talk to the opposite sex, it doesn't matter whether you're speaking on the phone, corresponding through snail-mail or using IM. It's what you say that matters, not the means of conveying the information.
...a ship made of unobtainium and a laser that can vaporize rock, and the sci-fi behind "The Core" won't be such a laughing stock!
I love Star Control 2.
LCD life is 45,000 hours
That's really just due to the fact that eventually the CCFT backlight will croak. With most LCD displays, it's just a $15-$25 part and your LCD is back in business. If you factor in CCFT replacement, an LCD monitor should last as long as the controller circuitry keeps functioning - most likely, a LONG ASS TIME.
I think they're overestimating the demand for a portable video player. The appeal of a portable MP3 player is the ability to listen to what is in essence, a commercial-free radio station you control, while you're doing some other activity. I don't see too many people interested in trying to watch a movie while exercising, mowing the lawn, working, etc.
Generally, a movie is something you sit down for, relax and enjoy. If you're just going to be watching a movie, you may as well do it where the movie watching experience is better. Chances are, if you have the money to blow for a portable video player, you've got a relatively decent A/V setup back at home.
Now on the topic of having content for this video player, who really has a lot of (or any for that matter) Windows Media Video files? I know I certainly don't have any worthy of buying a portable player to watch. I'm sure most people's format of choice for a home movie collection is DVD. Unlike converting audio CDs to MP3s for a portable player, converting DVDs is a very slow and legally questionable (due to having to circumvent the CSS encryption) process. For anyone that wants to watch movies portably, an inexpensive portable DVD player has a lot more usability appeal.
While I'm sure eventually buying movies online will be a big deal, right now it offers none of the benfits of online purchasing. Puchasing music online allows you to buy just the tracks you want, purchasing a movie online screws you out of higher quality and a physical disc you can resell if you so desire.
But, as I pointed out in the ORIGINAL message, since ringtones have come into widespread use and that because they "entertain you," you leave your phone on ring instead of vibrate in all sorts of innappropriate places. You don't switch it back to vibrate when you walk into the theatre, classroom, or frankly, even the coffee shop.
I never said anything about leaving my phone's ringer on in places where it's inappropriate.
I seriously doubt anything has changed in terms of people's laziness (relating to switching into vibrate mode or switching the phone off completely) that directly correlates with using a custom ringtone vs a default ringer. There's just more people that own cell phones nowadays and most newer phones support custom ring tones. If custom ringtones disappeared overnight, people would still leave their phones in the loudest ring mode, not because they want the world to hear their phone, but because they're simply too lazy to remember to turn the ringer off.
Now if you really somehow feel that a default ringtone is less annoying than a few notes from a pop song, I really hope for your sake you learn to take life less seriously.
Pop music is automatically uncool.
Boy, this oxygen stuff I breath sure is popular... So to be cool, I have to stop breathing. Thanks!
*thump*
I agree, there's so many people pissing and moaning about ringtones... Is this a site for geeks or grumpy old men? "Turn that music down!!! You damn kids and your pop tunes are making my ears bleed!"
If you want to be a stick in the mud and people's choice of ringtones really bothers you, don't go out in public. There's always a chance in public you'll hear or see something you find offensive. Two guys might be holding hands, someone might say "fuck", you may hear a 30-second midi rendition of a pop song's chorus. The shock, the horror.
I choose to use ringtones because it's entertaining TO ME and it's not the same old "beep beep beep". If that really bothers you that much, don't worry - you're not someone I'd want to associate with anyway.
After watching a video where they take apart a MuVo2 for its Hitachi Microdrive and then say the iPod mini has the same drive (correct, but the iPod's microdrive will NOT work in any digital cameras), I'm convinced TechTV's "dark tips" have become dangerously innacurate.
Don't do this. Compared to a stun gun, a photoflash capacitor stores a lower voltage, direct current high amperage charge which is delivered all at once. Yes, if delivered across the heart, it could be leathal. If delivered across flesh, it will burn you. In almost no cases will it stun you other than the surprise of getting shocked.
Real stun guns use a high frequency alternating current, VERY low amperage spark. Real stun guns are also quite cheap on eBay.
If you want to make a joke shocker from a disposable camera flash, here's a much safer method:
Get a cheap disposable camera and take it apart. Discharge the capacitor with a screwdriver. Get rid of the capacitor.
Notice the heavily insulated wire running to the center of the xenon photoflash bulb? Remove it from the photoflash bulb and attach a longer wire that will go to one of you're "shocker's" probes. Make sure the connection is well insulated.
Locate the portion of the circuit board that is shorted to activate the flash charging circuit. Usually, it's a small flexible metal "button" with plastic over it. Yank that sucker off of there and short the points on the board out with solder, or if you like, you can attach wires and add your own on/off switch.
Get a battery holder, some sort of case to put all this in, and a momentary pushbutton switch. Attach the wires from the battery holder to the circuit board, a wire from Negative to your other "shocker probe". Connect the momentary pushbutton switch to the trigger circuit (usually two peices of metal that were positioned near the shutter). Position the probes to be less than 1/8" apart. Put all this crap in a box and try it out. When you press the momentary pushbutton switch, you should get a nice spark.
The article is woefully skimpy on details, but it sounds like he's planning to sew a bunch of Peltier devices onto a sheet of nylon.
That's exactly what I thought of too... and it won't work. You need a LOT of surface area to get rid of, not only all the heat the peltiers move, but also all the heat from the wasted energy due to how inefficient peltiers are. Think beer keg turned metal porcupine. You'd still need fans too.
If I was going to design a system to do the same thing, I'd use a smallish portable compressor system. Take a R-134a compressor similar to one found in a mini-fridge, put it in a portable box with a fan-cooled compact condenser, immerse a compact evaporator in a reservoir containing a propylene glycol solution. Pump the chilled propylene glycol solution through insulated hoses to a vinyl keg-wrap that chills the keg. Sound familiar? Yea, it's the same thing people have done to refridgerate their CPU. Where's my $20,000?
It seems just the mere mention of beer has an intoxicating effect... I was expecting more geeks (especially those with refrideration/HVAC backgrounds) to spot how absurd the claims made in the article are.
if a member of your family said they wanted a new pc, what name are they going to associate with a new computer?
Most likely, they'd ask me to build a PC for them, as has been the situation in the past.
If it was some other family, chances are they'd be going to the local CompUSA, Circuit City or Best Buy and picking up whatever's on sale. That'd probably be either an HP or Sony (or an eMachines if they're feeling cheapish).
The point is... The PC industry is not controlled by one company. If people want AMD CPUs, they can buy from a manufacturer that uses them. Dell could disappear tommorow and it wouldn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
Fsck Dell.
If you RTFA, it's easy to figure out what how the prankster was blocking his caller ID.
;)
With SprintPCS, you can call your voice mail and one of the options is to place a call. When you place a call using this method, your caller ID information isn't sent. Of course, Sprint still has logs of who you're calling so the only evil deed it's really good for is calling an ex-girlfriend and telling her you think she's fat and no good in bed.
Back in my day, kids that called bomb threats into the school used payphones... And they didn't get caught.
Slashdot: Where t-r-u-t-h is spelled t-r-o-l-l.
On a lighter-but-still-bad-for-Apple note, DeDRMS can be patched to decode the new FairPlay version 2 songs by removing the following code:
if( Encoding.ASCII.GetString( adPRIV, 0, 4 ) != "itun" )
{
throw new Exception( "Decryption of 'priv' atom failed" );
}
You still need your DRM keys, but you can get them with VLC by copying your songs to a computer running an older version of iTunes.
I mean hell... would YOU want something like Enter the Matrix when you could be watching a little girl have simulated sex?
That's sorta like asking if I'd prefer being burned to death or frozen to death. When I said "Give me Halo 2 or give me death", it was a figure of speech.
Penny Arcade called, they want their joke back.
You people do realize that your tracks can be burned to CD-R and ripped back into .MP3 form, all without even leaving iTunes, right?
If that level of DRM bothers you, you are heading for a long, boring life devoid of any form of popular entertainment.
So what you're saying is, instead of buying large chunks of music (Read: $$$ for Apple!) and converting them to a DRM-free format en masse while preserving the metadata, I should buy SMALLER amounts of music so it will be easier and less time consuming to convert by the burn/re-rip method? Despite the flamebait mods from ravenous Apple fanboys, I still would much rather purchase my music from iTMS than from AllOfMP3...
Time will tell if FairPlay rides again.
The story earlier today showed how easily Apple can change it DRM scheme which could potentially effect your entire music collection and thousands of dollars tied up in the hardware and music files and you are happy about it and actually justifing the action. Meanwhile completely oblivious to the fact that you have absolutely no control over what they decide to do and you have no choice but to accept it. If MS, the RIAA, TurboTax, or any one else for that matter did something like this, it would be the collective trend that it was a scary thing. Not with Apple though. I feel sorry for you guys/
I couldn't agree more. I'm even willing to put my karma on the line to echo your sentiments.
Hey Apple, my shit works fine right now!!! Maybe other people like to trust Apple with a new iTunes version AND new iPod firmware at the same time... I'm more of the mindset that if something isn't broken, messing with it will probably break it. I don't want the newest hottest version of iTunes & iPod firmware just because Apple says so. It brings nothing to the table that I need and could potentially introduce new problems.
Then, there's the issue of DRM. I happen to own another MP3 player besides my iPod... Burning and re-ripping is slow and a pain in the ass. I had less than 19 songs before FairPlay - now I have over 150. It's funny how it seems more worth the $0.99 when I don't have to deal with DRM saying "No, you can't listen to tracks on your MuVo2 or laptop that still runs Windows98." This latest version of iTunes not only updates the DRM scheme so FairPlay no longer works, but it also reduces the number of unchanged playlist burns down to 7, from the original 10. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.
Fine, so don't upgrade, you say? I won't - and because of that fact, I can no longer make new purchases at the iTunes music store. Oh well, Pepsi's promotion is over anyway... Mark my words, it's all gonna be downhill from here... Do you honestly think $0.99 a track is going to last? If you believe that, I've got some "$9.99 albums" I'll sell you for $13.99.
Apple can keep their update.
First goatse.cx gets shutdown, now Andromeda.
Let me say with total sincerity that I mourn the loss of goatse more than anything network television has ever created.
What's next - Lucasfilm is cancelling Episode III!!?!?
That would be better news than SCO suing the RIAA and MPAA out of existance then choking to death on all the money.
Viagra only works where the sun doesn't shine!
That's what we're arguing about? You can take your music with you in your iPod but your other player can't do it? You can listen to your music on only "some" of your computers and not all of them like you want to?
.VOC files that I recorded as early as 1994. Still have the files too. I downloaded my first MP3 only 2 years later, in 1996.
It's the artificial playback restrictions placed upon the music that I have a problem with. I like my iPod and I think it's a great MP3 player, but it's not the end-all-be-all of portable audio playback. I've got a few gripes about the battery and the audio quality through headphones (due to having no user customisable IQ, just a bunch of worthless presets) so my iPod mostly gets used just in my car. I actually prefer my MuVo2 as a portable due to MUCH better battery life and audio quality.
Think about how much better you have it then people only 10 years ago.
Let's go back to 1994. I'm 15... I didn't own many CDs because they were pretty expensive. I primarally just listened to the radio and if I did record my own music, it was on casette tape as my computer didn't have a whole lot of space. Still, that didn't stop me, I have a few songs in 22KHz 8-bit stereo
Getting music on my computers has always been about technical limitations of the hardware... As time marched on, I've been able to do more with newer hardware and faster online access - why should I have to settle for less?
What format are your next downloaded tunes going to be in? How much fun are those restrictions going to be to work around?
Ms Cleo says: WMA, most likely. Microsoft will use their dominance on the desktop to force people to use their music store, they'll undercut Apple on the pricing until Apple gives up. Apple will add WMA support to the iPod line. It'll be like Netscape all over again.
Damn.
While you're at it tell me again how you're only able to buy these songs through iTunes Music Store? I'm lost on that part because I had this stupid idea that you could still just go buy a CD and make yourself some DRM free mp3's from it.
That assumes the purchaser is only interested in full albums, just like you assumed I was talking about owning a SINGLE computer incapable of running iTunes. Stop making assumptions, it doesn't make your argument look better.
And if you don't want to buy an iPod AND don't have a computer capable of running iTunes then I submit to you that the DRM is completely invisible since you ain't got none of those songs in your posession anyway (unless you downloaded them or copied them from someone else to spite "the man").
I do have an iPod. I do have several computers capable of running iTunes. I also have several computers incapable of running iTunes and a non-Apple portable MP3 player (a MuVo2). You assume too much. Why should I be forced by Apple to use my legally purchased music only on devices that have Apple's blessing through some artifically imposed technical restrictions?
If the iTunes music store goes under then it would probably be wise to have made some CD's out of them IMO. Of course if it goes under it will probably have something to do with a bunch of want to be activist bastards pissing of the labels enough to make them back off of the prospect of digital music. In that case I'll have a pretty good idea who to blame won't I?
DeCSS didn't cause production of DVDs to stop, did it? If iTunes folds, it will be due to competition from other online music stores, not because of people unprotecting songs they've legally purchased.
That's why I like random shuffle. It's much easier to skip tracks I don't feel like listening to at the time than sit down and try and make a playlist. [sarcasm]Wow, it's like radio, but with a greater variety and no commercials - who would have thought something like that would be popular?[/sarcasm]
As for the comment about the brain-damagedness of listening to individual tracks instead of complete albums, it sounds like flamebait or the blathering of a pissed off RIAA executive because people are buying a few $0.99 tracks instead of $17.99 albums.
Almost invisible if you don't want to buy an iPod?
Almost invisible if you have a computer that can't run iTunes?
Almost invisible if the iTunes store goes under?
What's really almost invisible are your FAIR USE RIGHTS TO THINGS YOU HAVE LEGALLY PURCHASED!