Despite the poster's enthusiasm, it is worth noting that the test file is NOT DRM-wrapped (encrypted), which is why it works on mplayer / Linux. The downloaded songs surely would require licensing.
... there's gotta be a volume discount in the billions
McDonald's would have to negiotiate that with the labels directly, most likely. I'm sure Apple would be happy to break even on the deal, just for the promotion and getting people accustomed to building their music libraries in iTunes. However, according to most industry estimations Apple pays ~$0.70 US to the appropriate record label (for major label content) for each sale, so any volume discount they give would have to be at or around that price. The record labels would be wise, in my opinion, to sell these tracks to McDonald's / Apple for a reduced rate, say $0.40 US. While this lowers margins for everyone involved, it is great marketing for McDonald's, Apple, and those pesky labels. I look forward to this deal working out, it would be even bigger than the Pepsi deal for educating the public on the value of legal digital music.
The selection is a little more flexible on the WMA-based music side, as Microsoft is licensing the format and its DRM to anyone and everyone
Not exactly. At any time, Microsoft can force an upgrade to your system's DRM components -- and deny the issuing of licenses to you until they are upgraded. It's already been done once, to work around the 'freeme' crack for DRMv7. Granted it requires that the company implementing Microsoft's DRM software actually set the appropriate individualization options, but of course in the music world they will all be doing this to protect the content.
Not to mention, am I the only one who thought it strange that 9/11 was used a reason to go to war against Iraq?
Shockingly, over half of Americans surveyed just before the Iraq war began thought that the terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks were Iraqi. In reality, 90% of them were Saudi, but some creative language from the White House hype machine (and a lack of clarification from the media) convinced a gullible public otherwise.
There are some good Java IDEs, no doubt, but none of them can touch Visual Studio for, well, any single thing you could possibly want to do with an IDE. From designing interfaces, to writing code, to generating code, to debugging code, to remote debugging, it's just awesome and completely customizable.
A single thing you could want to do with an IDE? How about, hmmm, I don't know... editing? I'm in the midst of doing some.NET development, and the poor editor slows me down more than any of the supposedly helpful features speed me up. I use emacs with C# mode + Ant and everything works perfectly. Plus, deployments and builds don't require an expensive IDE. VS.NET is a good idea, but a poor implementation... it's too buggy, slow and kludgy to be useful unless someone heavily relies on the "helper" features.
Does this version actually include support for native threads? IIRC, there has been a "native" version of the JDK for FreeBSD for a while now but it only supported green threads when I last looked.
I like it when they include the pif in the return message, that way SpamAssassin files it away in my spam folder... without the pif it's seen (rightfully) as a legitimate message.
Only 5 more days until I stop receiving 500 "Returned mail" messages a day in my inbox courtesy of that little header spoofing bastard. Who says Windows viruses don't affect us Linux users?
One thing DRM does do is limit the user's legal liability. That is, if little Johnny shares daddy's DRM'ed Eric Clapton WMA on Kazaa he probably won't get sued because the file will be (should be) unplayable.
Funny you should ask -- track 1 of 50 Cent's album is 6 seconds long, and costs a full 99 pennies. You can hear the whole track in the sample, it's the sound of a 50 cent piece hitting a hard surface...
if I downloaded the song, would I be able to play it even without the ActiveX control? And if so, will I have gotten it without any DRM protection?
Windows Media DRM wrapped files have a license URL stored in the header. So if you downloaded and played the file, it would not find a license stored locally and your player would visit the license URL in search of one. Now, whether or not Buy.com has implemented the license post-delivery is yet to be seen. But it would probably involve putting in your Buy.com account credentials at which point you would receive a license.
The license download requires an Active-X control, which is only compatible with Internet Explorer.
This is garbage -- licenses don't need to be pre-delivered. They can be sent to the player after the download -- there is absolutely NO valid reason to require a particular browser for download. This is just laziness by Buymusic's development staff, who clearly rushed this product.
Suggested formats for your music products - in addition to Microsoft's proprietary format - would be MP3, Ogg Vorbis, et al.
Sorry, but you're complaining to the wrong people -- it's the labels that set the format and bitrate restrictions as well as the DRM rules. Buy would be in a LOT of trouble if they offered music in any other format.
The old, crufty Win32 that Slashbots loved to bash is finally being replaced
Not quite -- Microsoft can never fully "uncruft" Win32, because of the all important issue of compatibility. The popularity of Win32 is also a curse in this regard. It's not unreasonable to assume that any minor change to the core of Win32 will break someone's application. Win32 is full of hacks, but there are millions of lines of code out there in some rather important systems which rely on these hacks (whether knowingly or not).
Because Mozilla's customization layer is built on open standards (XUL/XML), it would be very simple to implement a simple IEAK type tool on top of it. I just don't think there has been enough demand yet.
Mozilla is incredibly customizable, and you don't need to jump through administrative hoops (IEAK) to customize it. I "Snoopified" my menu bar in a few short minutes of hacking... so my "Fizile" menu now says "Bizounce" instead of "Exit"... what, I never said the customization was useful.
Check this URL for a nice tutorial on hacking Mozilla / Phoenix / Firebird.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the poster's enthusiasm, it is worth noting that the test file is NOT DRM-wrapped (encrypted), which is why it works on mplayer / Linux. The downloaded songs surely would require licensing.
It's rather simple -- the test file is not protected content. Not much of a test ...
...thousands of slashdotters flocked to Netcraft website to check whether debian.org was running on IIS.
As any good Slashdotter knows, Netcraft is for newbies:
% lynx -mime_header http://www.debian.org/ | grep Server
Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) Debian GNU/Linux
And yet humans can solve in minutes some things which a computer couldn't solve in a thousand years.
And I have proof!
... there's gotta be a volume discount in the billions
McDonald's would have to negiotiate that with the labels directly, most likely. I'm sure Apple would be happy to break even on the deal, just for the promotion and getting people accustomed to building their music libraries in iTunes. However, according to most industry estimations Apple pays ~$0.70 US to the appropriate record label (for major label content) for each sale, so any volume discount they give would have to be at or around that price. The record labels would be wise, in my opinion, to sell these tracks to McDonald's / Apple for a reduced rate, say $0.40 US. While this lowers margins for everyone involved, it is great marketing for McDonald's, Apple, and those pesky labels. I look forward to this deal working out, it would be even bigger than the Pepsi deal for educating the public on the value of legal digital music.
The selection is a little more flexible on the WMA-based music side, as Microsoft is licensing the format and its DRM to anyone and everyone
Not exactly. At any time, Microsoft can force an upgrade to your system's DRM components -- and deny the issuing of licenses to you until they are upgraded. It's already been done once, to work around the 'freeme' crack for DRMv7. Granted it requires that the company implementing Microsoft's DRM software actually set the appropriate individualization options, but of course in the music world they will all be doing this to protect the content.
Not to mention, am I the only one who thought it strange that 9/11 was used a reason to go to war against Iraq?
Shockingly, over half of Americans surveyed just before the Iraq war began thought that the terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks were Iraqi. In reality, 90% of them were Saudi, but some creative language from the White House hype machine (and a lack of clarification from the media) convinced a gullible public otherwise.
What ever happened to the ancient art of bribing the reviewer?
Sounds like fun -- I mean, Amazon holds the crown in recommendations ... I can see the features now:
"Customers who searched for 'Asian Porn' also searched for: Azn N0rp, Hot Asian Sluts, Azn Porn"
"When searching for 'Barnes and Nobles': Did you mean: Amazon.com?"
I think they're a little late for the "one click searching" patent, however.
There are some good Java IDEs, no doubt, but none of them can touch Visual Studio for, well, any single thing you could possibly want to do with an IDE. From designing interfaces, to writing code, to generating code, to debugging code, to remote debugging, it's just awesome and completely customizable.
... editing? I'm in the midst of doing some .NET development, and the poor editor slows me down more than any of the supposedly helpful features speed me up. I use emacs with C# mode + Ant and everything works perfectly. Plus, deployments and builds don't require an expensive IDE. VS.NET is a good idea, but a poor implementation ... it's too buggy, slow and kludgy to be useful unless someone heavily relies on the "helper" features.
A single thing you could want to do with an IDE? How about, hmmm, I don't know
Does this version actually include support for native threads? IIRC, there has been a "native" version of the JDK for FreeBSD for a while now but it only supported green threads when I last looked.
I like it when they include the pif in the return message, that way SpamAssassin files it away in my spam folder ... without the pif it's seen (rightfully) as a legitimate message.
Only 5 more days until I stop receiving 500 "Returned mail" messages a day in my inbox courtesy of that little header spoofing bastard. Who says Windows viruses don't affect us Linux users?
One thing DRM does do is limit the user's legal liability. That is, if little Johnny shares daddy's DRM'ed Eric Clapton WMA on Kazaa he probably won't get sued because the file will be (should be) unplayable.
Wow, the effects have been brutal ... I snapped a pic of one of those affected at lunch today:
Click Here
Funny you should ask -- track 1 of 50 Cent's album is 6 seconds long, and costs a full 99 pennies. You can hear the whole track in the sample, it's the sound of a 50 cent piece hitting a hard surface ...
if I downloaded the song, would I be able to play it even without the ActiveX control? And if so, will I have gotten it without any DRM protection?
Windows Media DRM wrapped files have a license URL stored in the header. So if you downloaded and played the file, it would not find a license stored locally and your player would visit the license URL in search of one. Now, whether or not Buy.com has implemented the license post-delivery is yet to be seen. But it would probably involve putting in your Buy.com account credentials at which point you would receive a license.
The license download requires an Active-X
control, which is only compatible with Internet Explorer.
This is garbage -- licenses don't need to be pre-delivered. They can be sent to the player after the download -- there is absolutely NO valid reason to require a particular browser for download. This is just laziness by Buymusic's development staff, who clearly rushed this product.
Suggested formats for your music products - in addition to Microsoft's proprietary format - would be MP3, Ogg Vorbis, et al.
Sorry, but you're complaining to the wrong people -- it's the labels that set the format and bitrate restrictions as well as the DRM rules. Buy would be in a LOT of trouble if they offered music in any other format.
The old, crufty Win32 that Slashbots loved to bash is finally being replaced
Not quite -- Microsoft can never fully "uncruft" Win32, because of the all important issue of compatibility. The popularity of Win32 is also a curse in this regard. It's not unreasonable to assume that any minor change to the core of Win32 will break someone's application. Win32 is full of hacks, but there are millions of lines of code out there in some rather important systems which rely on these hacks (whether knowingly or not).
cat | mail username
/usr/bin/mail /usr/bin/mail /usr/bin/mail -> /dev/null
This is a mail message
^D
% which mail
% ls -al
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jul 3 14:22
mwahahahaha! foiled again!
Because Mozilla's customization layer is built on open standards (XUL/XML),
it would be very simple to implement a simple IEAK type tool on top of it. I
just don't think there has been enough demand yet.
more. what more could you want?
... less?
err
great post btw, lol
Mozilla is incredibly customizable, and you don't need to jump through administrative hoops (IEAK) to customize it. I "Snoopified" my menu bar in a few short minutes of hacking ... so my "Fizile" menu now says "Bizounce" instead of "Exit" ... what, I never said the customization was useful.
Check this URL for a nice tutorial on hacking Mozilla / Phoenix / Firebird.
The only decent browser is Lynx.
Nah, everybody knows that the only decent browser is w3m!