Thanks for the snide comment. I did read the article, actually, but it doesn't change the usefulness of the tools I linked to nor the sluggishness of their current incarnation -- two things you seemed to have overlooked in your haste to nitpick.
Furthermore, the tools provided by Microsoft are usually not the GNU versions. If someone is used to using grep provided by Your_Favorite_Distro, there's still a learning curve as you realize that grep -r asdf * now requires different options -- something you don't have to worry about if you grab the direct ports.
I've got an MSDN subscription at my company, so I was installing and using SFU for awhile. Other posters have noticed that SFU's version of grep is slow, though, so I did a bit of research and I've taken to installing the Win32 ports of the GNU utilities also. There's a SourceForge project called UnixUtils that ships a bunch of them in either a zip file (unzip to %systemroot%\system32\) or as a binary installer. They work natively within cmd.exe, so there's no need to use a separate shell as SFU does.
It is missing a few things, but between grabbing SFU for its commands like ls and cp, and the unixutils package, you get the best of both worlds.
I think I'll wait for others this time around, thanks. My poor powerbook's battery life certainly can't take another hit while it's already flat on its back.
And no, it actually did affect the battery life on my machine, not just the timer.
Not usually, no. The Apple rep at my local store is quite the dick, and goes ape when a customer so much as asks to look at the machine's internals. (That might've been something to do with me returning three defective Airport Extreme cards in a row, though.) They take a pretty dim view of anyone taking anything into their store, especially electronics; I brought along a DVD once while trying a few of their players, and I got harassed by both employees and the security guard for it.
It'd be a lot more reasonable and easy to visit an online test site from CompUSA, but that definitely won't work for a small business or company that needs extensive testing.
This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.
My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:
Buy an iBook or Powerbook. They're pretty cheap, lovely to use, and you've got a good excuse for needing one. If your budget doesn't allow, check on eBay for a used G4 system (an eMac, for instance) and grab it instead.
Grab the only decent emulator I know of, Basilisk, and try to find someone with an Apple BIOS ROM and some System 7 CDs. That's as close as you'll get to emulating one, and no, it won't run OS X.
Use BrowserCam, a service that lets you (for a fee) see the results of your labor in a variety of browsers. It seems pretty cool, if you don't have any other option, but over time just buying a mac will pay for itself anyway.
Just because something is widespread doesn't make it morally right.
Actually, it does. There's only a few crimes that do not have reams of ethical gray areas: rape comes to mind, as does torture. Even things like murder are allowable when done in self-defense in many countries. Didn't some Frenchman write a thick novel whose events stem from the theft of a loaf of bread? (For the culturally inept: think Les Miserables.)
Life is filled with subjective morality, and it's the popularity of a sin that turns it from a crime into a vice. In case you've forgotten, both sins and crimes are defined by local communities; homosexuality is illegal in Egypt and Malaysia, but not in most of the rest of the world. Similarly, copyright infringement isn't illegal in plenty of other countries.
You seem to be forgetting two things: no one loses anything from some guy running an MP3 server, except the possibility of a sale. That's not theft, nor is it criminal. It's a civil tort, and given the figures others have posted in this article, it's something people really don't take seriously. Given the massive amounts of people sharing music, it's gone from being morally wrong to morally questionable. In two or three years, it might not be questionable, but simply right.
I think the CD you're talking about is Chimera. It's not copy-protected; I own most of Delerium's albums, and I've yet to find one that is. I had no problems ripping it with iTunes, and indeed, it doesn't show up on the Corrupt CD List.
I'm mad at Delerium for a different reason, though... they're only playing at over-21 venues near my area. As much as I'd pay double the ticket price to hear them play, it pisses me off that they can't seem to book a show at a less restrictive place. I've got plenty of friends my age that like them, too, but I guess we just have to hope they stay together for two more years.
Except that, in the case of Coke cans (to use an oft-quoted example) the packaging is the product. Same, in the case of most consumables. As for books and other 'unpackaged' things -- do you really think they'll start shrinkwrapping everything just to have somewhere extra to throw the RFIDs?
True, initial cost of producing a single CD is high. So is the initial cost of an amateur photographer producing his first photograph, an amateur videographer shooting her first movie, and plenty of other comparable hobbies.
You seem to forget, though, that once that initial expenditure is over, you're done. If you get your own mastering equipment and learn how to do it competently, it will arguably cost you less than having it done professionally for each CD you produce, and your investment will be the cheaper for each song you pass through. The quality may not be as perfect, but unless you haven't bothered to spend the time and money to get decent equipment, I find it hard to believe that you couldn't do a decent job of it yourself.
Last -- it is possible to make quality things cheaply. Read some of Matt Uelmen's comments on Blizzard.com when he was discussing the song Tristram from Diablo II -- it was made with pathetic equipment, yet it still sounds decent even by today's standards.
My point is, essentially, that a lot of the costs you mentioned should either be considered par for the course, and part of simply making the songs to begin with -- or are really not as large as you make them out to be.
If you're not prepared to spend a few $K on a hobby, it's probably not something you're truly interested in. My hobby is digital music, and accordingly, I've got upwards of $20K of equipment scattered around my house. Any hobby requires an investment of time, and money.
As for your figures above, I'm sure mastering is expensive. But it's a cost one must bear with if you want it done well, and so you'll just need to pay for it. You then quote reproduction costs for a thousand CDs, but CD Baby only requires one disc (and they didn't say it had to be professionally pressed, either.) You can buy CD-Rs that look decent, too, even if you don't write or print anything on them, and just get someone to print up some nice case inserts. One CD is all you need -- yet you're pricing for a thousand.
There is a one-time-ever $35 charge to set up a new CD in our store, with everything we described above. (It takes us about 30 minutes of work to put a new album into our system and website, that's why.)
CD Baby has that sort of mechanism, or at least something like it. Searching around the iTunes store didn't really help me much, because a lot of the music I listen to (Delerium, Balligomingo, Ceredwen, and assorted video game music) either isn't available, or really doesn't fall into any particular category. I went to read the article, then went to CD Baby and started browsing CDs. Their searching feature for something that "sounds like" a different artist caught my eye, and now I'm happily looking at different trance/tribal artists that, though certainly not mimicking Delerium, have a similar feel. I can't get that by going to a store, and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone give that sort of feature prominence.
Anyone know of other online stores that feature this? CD Baby's got a good start, but I'm really not keen on the million albums that require RealPlayer for me to listen to them.
I hate to say this, but I really preferred the old design better. It looks like this one was designed by committee, because there's just a complete lack of cohesion and theme -- not to mention gratuitous use of emphatic (<b>, for example) elements without much care for consistency. There seem to be two different color schemes vying for supremacy, that burnt yellow along with the gray and blue; and, of course, the markup doesn't bother validating (the CSS does, though.) None of the other pages on the new site (or any of the other Moz-family domains) changed either, so it's just as if someone mocked up a single page and then posted it to meet a deadline.
That all said -- I'm glad it got a facelift. I just really wish that the presentation was a bit better, because it doesn't seem like anyone spent any time really working on it.
Does the fact that the original poster made a harmless analogy somehow make him disrespectful? Does it somehow trivialize the fact that all of those people died?
No. All it does is make an analogy, and a very valid one at that. He ignored the lack of suffering and tormet because it doesn't matter in his argument. This isn't a history lesson, it's a technical discussion, and he doesn't need to elaborate on the misery of millions just to make a point any more than anyone mentioning the Mongols needs to describe their savagery ad nauseum.
Actually they have quite a few such things. Windows is one. Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way). MSN Messenger - virtually all my friends use it, because it has the features they want in a well designed and attractive piece of software.
Apple aren't the only ones who write pleasant to use software you know. They are however the only ones who have a blindly loyal userbase.
Office and Messenger, usable and attractive? I guess you don't work with either on a regular basis, because they're certainly not much of either -- unless splitting a plain white table cell and getting six differently colored cells is a great stride in usability. I guess not being able to specify customized Away messages on MSNIM is 'increased functionality,' too. Don't get me started on the pathetic interface metaphors they use, the total lack of features on MSNIM for OS X, or the fact that they disobey their own interface guidelines with every new version of Office either.
'fraid not. I wish that were true though. They make a lot of software that people really like. They make plenty that they don't as well of course.
Really like? I think the words you were looking for were, "are forced to use." I can't use OO.o at work; I had to get an exception to use Mozilla even though I'm a web developer, and it took four bloody months to get a Linux box in when they wanted to run Bugzilla. People don't usually use Microsoft because they LIKE it: they use it because it's what they have to use at work, school, etc. That's the second edge of the sword called 'de facto standard.'
If Apple and Microsoft were reversed in that statement, it would rightly be sunk under a storm of -1 Trolls, but because it's bashing MS and pumping Apple it's insightful now. I'm not surprised, but it doesn't get any less irritating.
Oh, and so your post isn't quite blatantly pro-Microsoft enough that you have to bash Apple, too. I agree with the former poster: other than pretty colors, self-customizing menus (which are more bug than feature, IMHO) and emulation of Apple and other companies, Microsoft hasn't done a damn thing since Windows 95.
Except that it's not technically illegal: I'm not using the Product (Windows XP) to permit another Device to use/access/etc. the host computer, I'm using a different program. Similarly, their restriction on using other devices to use/access/etc. the operating system is so overly broad as to be completely unenforceable. Under the terms you quoted, technically you'd need another license for your monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Each. Additionally, do you really think they would get away with requiring separate licenses for each Smart Display they sell?
I got a 12" Powerbook as well. Doesn't mean I didn't find other uses for the equipment, but still, that money could've been better spent elsewhere. I'm selling the eMac (tonight, actually -- got a buyer yesterday) and thus recouping some of my loss. Truthfully, iTunes wasn't the ONLY justification for purchasing an Apple machine -- I'm a web developer, and I needed a PowerPC platform for testing; similarly, my 300 MHz PII laptop was getting a bit worn out. It was a major part of the reason for purchase, though. As far as "blowing three grand on electronic toys," I'll be as pissed as I like. I might be a young single man with lots of discretionary income, but it was my money, and finding out less than a year later that I could have saved that much money merely by waiting isn't exactly the best feeling.
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Thanks for the snide comment. I did read the article, actually, but it doesn't change the usefulness of the tools I linked to nor the sluggishness of their current incarnation -- two things you seemed to have overlooked in your haste to nitpick.
Furthermore, the tools provided by Microsoft are usually not the GNU versions. If someone is used to using grep provided by Your_Favorite_Distro, there's still a learning curve as you realize that grep -r asdf * now requires different options -- something you don't have to worry about if you grab the direct ports.
I've got an MSDN subscription at my company, so I was installing and using SFU for awhile. Other posters have noticed that SFU's version of grep is slow, though, so I did a bit of research and I've taken to installing the Win32 ports of the GNU utilities also. There's a SourceForge project called UnixUtils that ships a bunch of them in either a zip file (unzip to %systemroot%\system32\) or as a binary installer. They work natively within cmd.exe, so there's no need to use a separate shell as SFU does.
It is missing a few things, but between grabbing SFU for its commands like ls and cp, and the unixutils package, you get the best of both worlds.
I'm installing mine right away, how about you?
I think I'll wait for others this time around, thanks. My poor powerbook's battery life certainly can't take another hit while it's already flat on its back.
And no, it actually did affect the battery life on my machine, not just the timer.
Not usually, no. The Apple rep at my local store is quite the dick, and goes ape when a customer so much as asks to look at the machine's internals. (That might've been something to do with me returning three defective Airport Extreme cards in a row, though.) They take a pretty dim view of anyone taking anything into their store, especially electronics; I brought along a DVD once while trying a few of their players, and I got harassed by both employees and the security guard for it.
It'd be a lot more reasonable and easy to visit an online test site from CompUSA, but that definitely won't work for a small business or company that needs extensive testing.
This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.
My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:
Just because something is widespread doesn't make it morally right.
Actually, it does. There's only a few crimes that do not have reams of ethical gray areas: rape comes to mind, as does torture. Even things like murder are allowable when done in self-defense in many countries. Didn't some Frenchman write a thick novel whose events stem from the theft of a loaf of bread? (For the culturally inept: think Les Miserables.)
Life is filled with subjective morality, and it's the popularity of a sin that turns it from a crime into a vice. In case you've forgotten, both sins and crimes are defined by local communities; homosexuality is illegal in Egypt and Malaysia, but not in most of the rest of the world. Similarly, copyright infringement isn't illegal in plenty of other countries.
You seem to be forgetting two things: no one loses anything from some guy running an MP3 server, except the possibility of a sale. That's not theft, nor is it criminal. It's a civil tort, and given the figures others have posted in this article, it's something people really don't take seriously. Given the massive amounts of people sharing music, it's gone from being morally wrong to morally questionable. In two or three years, it might not be questionable, but simply right.
I think the CD you're talking about is Chimera. It's not copy-protected; I own most of Delerium's albums, and I've yet to find one that is. I had no problems ripping it with iTunes, and indeed, it doesn't show up on the Corrupt CD List.
I'm mad at Delerium for a different reason, though ... they're only playing at over-21 venues near my area. As much as I'd pay double the ticket price to hear them play, it pisses me off that they can't seem to book a show at a less restrictive place. I've got plenty of friends my age that like them, too, but I guess we just have to hope they stay together for two more years.
Except that, in the case of Coke cans (to use an oft-quoted example) the packaging is the product. Same, in the case of most consumables. As for books and other 'unpackaged' things -- do you really think they'll start shrinkwrapping everything just to have somewhere extra to throw the RFIDs?
Do us all a favor, and buy an Xbox next then. :)
isn't it about time that we get more focus on this subject?
About time, sure. If I could get anything other than no-server cable, I'd be sure to jump on your bandwagon.
Can we focus on getting decent broadband to everyone first, and THEN start worrying about 12 ms of ping time? Good god, man.
Good thing there weren't millions of superpowers with nuclear ability, too. Analogy check.
True, initial cost of producing a single CD is high. So is the initial cost of an amateur photographer producing his first photograph, an amateur videographer shooting her first movie, and plenty of other comparable hobbies.
You seem to forget, though, that once that initial expenditure is over, you're done. If you get your own mastering equipment and learn how to do it competently, it will arguably cost you less than having it done professionally for each CD you produce, and your investment will be the cheaper for each song you pass through. The quality may not be as perfect, but unless you haven't bothered to spend the time and money to get decent equipment, I find it hard to believe that you couldn't do a decent job of it yourself.
Last -- it is possible to make quality things cheaply. Read some of Matt Uelmen's comments on Blizzard.com when he was discussing the song Tristram from Diablo II -- it was made with pathetic equipment, yet it still sounds decent even by today's standards.
My point is, essentially, that a lot of the costs you mentioned should either be considered par for the course, and part of simply making the songs to begin with -- or are really not as large as you make them out to be.
If you're not prepared to spend a few $K on a hobby, it's probably not something you're truly interested in. My hobby is digital music, and accordingly, I've got upwards of $20K of equipment scattered around my house. Any hobby requires an investment of time, and money.
As for your figures above, I'm sure mastering is expensive. But it's a cost one must bear with if you want it done well, and so you'll just need to pay for it. You then quote reproduction costs for a thousand CDs, but CD Baby only requires one disc (and they didn't say it had to be professionally pressed, either.) You can buy CD-Rs that look decent, too, even if you don't write or print anything on them, and just get someone to print up some nice case inserts. One CD is all you need -- yet you're pricing for a thousand.
From CD Baby.net:
There is a one-time-ever $35 charge to set up a new CD in our store, with everything we described above. (It takes us about 30 minutes of work to put a new album into our system and website, that's why.)
Hardly seems like a $3,000 setup fee to me...
I'd love to mod this up, but I'll reply instead.
CD Baby has that sort of mechanism, or at least something like it. Searching around the iTunes store didn't really help me much, because a lot of the music I listen to (Delerium, Balligomingo, Ceredwen, and assorted video game music) either isn't available, or really doesn't fall into any particular category. I went to read the article, then went to CD Baby and started browsing CDs. Their searching feature for something that "sounds like" a different artist caught my eye, and now I'm happily looking at different trance/tribal artists that, though certainly not mimicking Delerium, have a similar feel. I can't get that by going to a store, and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone give that sort of feature prominence.
Anyone know of other online stores that feature this? CD Baby's got a good start, but I'm really not keen on the million albums that require RealPlayer for me to listen to them.
The URL points to Griffin Technologies, a strange manufacturer with a poorly-designed site. It should point to Griffin Technology instead.
FYI, the math's wrong.
2000000 / 50 = 40000
I hate to say this, but I really preferred the old design better. It looks like this one was designed by committee, because there's just a complete lack of cohesion and theme -- not to mention gratuitous use of emphatic (<b>, for example) elements without much care for consistency. There seem to be two different color schemes vying for supremacy, that burnt yellow along with the gray and blue; and, of course, the markup doesn't bother validating (the CSS does, though.) None of the other pages on the new site (or any of the other Moz-family domains) changed either, so it's just as if someone mocked up a single page and then posted it to meet a deadline.
That all said -- I'm glad it got a facelift. I just really wish that the presentation was a bit better, because it doesn't seem like anyone spent any time really working on it.
Does the fact that the original poster made a harmless analogy somehow make him disrespectful? Does it somehow trivialize the fact that all of those people died?
No. All it does is make an analogy, and a very valid one at that. He ignored the lack of suffering and tormet because it doesn't matter in his argument. This isn't a history lesson, it's a technical discussion, and he doesn't need to elaborate on the misery of millions just to make a point any more than anyone mentioning the Mongols needs to describe their savagery ad nauseum.
Damn, and I'm out of mod points.
Actually they have quite a few such things. Windows is one. Office is another (most people who don't have any preference for free software prefer MS Office I've found by a long way). MSN Messenger - virtually all my friends use it, because it has the features they want in a well designed and attractive piece of software.
Apple aren't the only ones who write pleasant to use software you know. They are however the only ones who have a blindly loyal userbase.
Office and Messenger, usable and attractive? I guess you don't work with either on a regular basis, because they're certainly not much of either -- unless splitting a plain white table cell and getting six differently colored cells is a great stride in usability. I guess not being able to specify customized Away messages on MSNIM is 'increased functionality,' too. Don't get me started on the pathetic interface metaphors they use, the total lack of features on MSNIM for OS X, or the fact that they disobey their own interface guidelines with every new version of Office either.
'fraid not. I wish that were true though. They make a lot of software that people really like. They make plenty that they don't as well of course.
Really like? I think the words you were looking for were, "are forced to use." I can't use OO.o at work; I had to get an exception to use Mozilla even though I'm a web developer, and it took four bloody months to get a Linux box in when they wanted to run Bugzilla. People don't usually use Microsoft because they LIKE it: they use it because it's what they have to use at work, school, etc. That's the second edge of the sword called 'de facto standard.'
If Apple and Microsoft were reversed in that statement, it would rightly be sunk under a storm of -1 Trolls, but because it's bashing MS and pumping Apple it's insightful now. I'm not surprised, but it doesn't get any less irritating.
Oh, and so your post isn't quite blatantly pro-Microsoft enough that you have to bash Apple, too. I agree with the former poster: other than pretty colors, self-customizing menus (which are more bug than feature, IMHO) and emulation of Apple and other companies, Microsoft hasn't done a damn thing since Windows 95.
Or distribute copyrighted material, which is essentially what this guy's doing. So no, he does need the copyright holder's permission to sell.
12" Powerbooks with a SuperDrive write CDs at 8x. If they only use a Combo drive (like mine!) then CD recording goes at 24x.
Except that it's not technically illegal: I'm not using the Product (Windows XP) to permit another Device to use/access/etc. the host computer, I'm using a different program. Similarly, their restriction on using other devices to use/access/etc. the operating system is so overly broad as to be completely unenforceable. Under the terms you quoted, technically you'd need another license for your monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Each. Additionally, do you really think they would get away with requiring separate licenses for each Smart Display they sell?
I got a 12" Powerbook as well. Doesn't mean I didn't find other uses for the equipment, but still, that money could've been better spent elsewhere. I'm selling the eMac (tonight, actually -- got a buyer yesterday) and thus recouping some of my loss. Truthfully, iTunes wasn't the ONLY justification for purchasing an Apple machine -- I'm a web developer, and I needed a PowerPC platform for testing; similarly, my 300 MHz PII laptop was getting a bit worn out. It was a major part of the reason for purchase, though. As far as "blowing three grand on electronic toys," I'll be as pissed as I like. I might be a young single man with lots of discretionary income, but it was my money, and finding out less than a year later that I could have saved that much money merely by waiting isn't exactly the best feeling.