Carbon Copy Cloner is good; but as the first article I linked to points out, it doesn't preserve doesn't preserve BSD flags, locked flag, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, or ACLs. (Same as the ditto command-line program it uses.)
If you never use these, or don't care about them -- and, more importantly, you know that none of the apps you use does either -- then by all means use it. But if you're not sure, it's worth considering something like SuperDuper! which does preserve all of that too.
That's why I switched, despite a few years of good service from Carbon Copy Cloner. Backups are too important to risk any problems.
In short, there are lots of different backup and cloning tools, from the Unix cp, ditto, and rsync commands up to the free Carbon Copy Cloner, cheap SuperDuper!, and expensive Retrospect. And very few of them preserve everything. HFS+ carries a lot of baggage from the old Mac OS, and adds a lot more stuff from Unix: there are resource forks, HFS+ extended attributes, BSD flags such as creation date and owner/group permissions, ACLs, symbolic links, aliases, and lots more -- and almost none of the options can preserve all of those.
You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.
Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.
But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!
How about regular click an edge to move the entire window, and control-click-drag anywhere on an edge to resize?
Click on what edge? Drag anywhere on what edge?
On Windows, windows waste several pixels on each edge just for this purpose. OS X windows don't; they generally reserve space for actual content, and show the window's edge by the shadow which it throws over surrounding windows. There is nothing to drag.
...this doesn't make me a Microsoft shill, and it doesn't mean I dislike non-MS software where appropriate
...this is such a common straw man.
Hating Microsoft has never been about hating their software and liking all the competition's. (Not for the perceptive and intelligent folk, anyway.) It's about hating their business practices. If they behaved fairly, if they didn't practise lock-in, FUD, vapourware, buying-out competitors, nobbling competition, doing shady deals for default installs, loss leading, and all the other illegal things they've been convicted for, then their software wouldn't matter; if it was good, it'd get used, and if not, it'd be ignored. People would act in their own best interests, and the software market would be all the better for it.
It's precisely due to their illegal and immoral business practices that we have to suffer their bad software today, and that so much good software from other sources has died.
I've certainly never had any pressure put on me to be "nicer" about MS in newsgroup/blog posts.
They clearly don't need to apply any pressure. It's all part of that tribal/group psychology thing. Once you feel some connection to MS, you identify with it to some degree; you start to take their PoV; you start to take attacks on them personally, and want to defend them. Only slightly, of course; it's all unconscious, subliminal, and in most cases very low-level. But it's there, and it happens to all of us far more often than we realise, every time we start to divide the world into 'us' and 'them' -- whether 'us' includes MS, or whether it includes Linux.
Resisted digital? Resisted digital??? That's a laugh. If anyone's resisting digital, it's the government, who won't even allow it to be broadcast in some areas (presumably, for fear that it might upset the French all those miles away). If we're lucky, they might change their minds sometime shortly before analogue gets cut off in 2012. Or they might not... Who knows?
I like the Windows and KDE shortcuts far better. Especially for Windows, there is much more standardization in third party apps.
Standardisation in Windows apps? That's a laugh...
Let's take just one example which bugs me every day I have to use Windows at work: Find again. In many apps I want to go through a page, stopping at each instance of a particular string. In most cases, you start off by pressing Ctrl+F for Find. But once you've found the first match, what do you do to skip to the next? Oh, that's easy, you press Ctrl+G. Except it's not. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Y (Y? Goodness knows.) Sometimes it's that nice memorable F3. And sometimes you can't do it at all; you have to keep the Find dialog visible, which means you have to reach for the mouse every time you switch between going to the next match and editing it. I am *forever* forgetting which strange method of control to use in which app.
And that's just one single almost-universal action, across a small handful of common big-name Windows apps I use every day. Compare that to the Mac, where it's Cmd+G in every app I've come across. And repeat across tons of other little shortcuts and common actions.
Those figures mean absolutely nothing without corresponding figures from good employees.
If exactly 0% of good employees have arrest records, then an arrest record would be a pretty good indicator of malicious intent; while it wouldn't allow you to catch the other 70% of baddies, it would give you pretty conclusive evidence against that 30%.
If, on the other hand, the records for good employees were the same (which I suspect is closer to the truth), then an arrest record (or lack of one) would tell you absolutely nothing about an employee's trustworthiness.
And if the records for good employees were generally higher than for bad ones, then an arrest record would be an indicator in FAVOUR of hiring, not against!
So, worrying as those numbers might sound, they're utterly meaningless here without some context and background!
AIUI, a 'sex offence' may not even include anything sexual. I heard of a guy who, caught short after a night clubbing, and finding no public lavatories, ended up urinating in a doorway. The police got him, and because urinating necessarily involves exposing part of oneself, it got logged as a public indecency, and conviction then put him on the sex offenders' register.
So yes, you could be a virgin, never having even seen anyone else naked, and still be a registered sex offender.
Still, I'm sure the police know what they're doing...
As you say, people know what water is. They see it every day, they relate to it, they know how it behaves and what it can do.
But millimetre waves? They have that scary, otherworldly, science-fictional quality to them. They're invisible, for one thing (and as any film director worth his/her chloride ions knows, what you can't see is always scarier than what you can). And they could do all sorts of unknown long-term damage. In short, they could scare people far beyond their actual capabilities.
Okay, it's not the way that the term 'FUD' is normally used, but it doesn't seem entirely out of place here either...
(I had one of the very original SONY Mini-disk recorders, and remember a passage of a Doobie Brothers track where some high pitched bells instead of sounding like high pitched bells sounded like someone sneezing... unacceptable... completely altered my experience of MD [...]
That's a shame; it's possible that your (and many people's) bad impressions of the quality of MD, CD, and MP3, aren't caused by anything inherent in the format, but by bad implementations.
While CD is a lossless format in the way we usually mean (i.e. unlike MP3), you still have to get the sound from analogue to 44.1kHz/16-bit digital, and that involves some work. In particular, you need to filter out absolutely all frequencies above 22.05kHz before sampling; I gather that in the first few years of CD, the filters that did this caused a lot of noticeable artefacts in lower frequencies too. (As I understand it, these days filters start a little lower down, are gentler, and behave a little better.) So the harsh, brittle sound of some early CDs may well be due to this effect. It may also be due to poor mastering generally, of course. Either way, more recent CD rereleases have shown that it's possible to get pretty good quality from CD.
Similar things apply to MD. Like many other lossy formats, MD's ATRAC completely specifies the decoder but leaves the details of encoding up to the implementation. MD was rushed out to compete with DCC, and those early encoders were pretty bad, especially with high frequency content. But as time passed and more research was done, encoders got a lot better at preserving more of the audible content.
And of course it's exactly the same with MP3. Most here will know of different MP3 encoders; lame, for example, is continually improving (a new version was released a couple of months ago).
So, just as we shouldn't judge the possibilities of vinyl from old 78s, we shouldn't let early bad experiences colour our view of other formats.
(That doesn't necessarily mean they're good enough for all users, of course, but it's wise to make an informed decision. Only your own ears can take that.)
Seconded. Getting some isolating earphones (aka canalphones) is probably the single greatest improvement in quality I've had in portable music (and I include moving from cassette tape to MD).
Even better than the one-size-fits-all (or even a-few-sizes-fit-all) approach of the mass-produced ones are ones like mine which were moulded to my own ear canals. Hassle and expensive, but well worth it for me at least: they're extremely comfortable to wear, give a LOT of sound isolation (I use them as earplugs), and the sound quality is pretty impressive too.
I got mine from ACS: see the T3 monitors here. (No connection other than as a happy customer, disclaim disclaim.)
Carbon Copy Cloner has saved my bacon, too. But it's not perfect -- like the command-line tool 'ditto' which it uses, it doesn't preserve BSD flags, creation date, or HFS+ extended attributes.
There's a pretty good analysis of the various tools available here. The only tool it recommends highly is SuperDuper, which I've since switched to, and had good results with.
(There's another analysis here, which has more mixed feelings.)
This worries me severely. It's one thing to allow people to run Windows apps with some hassle (e.g. dual booting, or within a 'Windows' OS X window). But it's quite another thing to run Windows apps as first-class citizens.
After all, we know what happened to the last OS which did this: by billing itself as "a better Windows than Windows", it signed its own death warrant. After all, who'd develop a native app when it runs Windows apps so well?
In fact, my First Rule of Java GUI Development is that any given layout, whether it starts off using a BorderLayout, FlowLayout, or whatever, will eventually get rewritten to use a GridBagLayout. None of the other LMs is sufficiently flexible or powerful, and you always end up hitting one of their limits.
People bemoan the complexity of GBL, but as you say, it's irreducible complexity. (With the possible exception of internal padding, which I never use.)
If there's a problem, it's with Sun's implementation of GBL. It's generally pretty good, but has a few unfortunate features, for example:
It only allows 512 children. (I believe this has been fixed in later JDK versions.)
It takes 12KB of memory regardless of how few components it's holding, and temporarily allocates a further 12KB each time it gets laid out or has its size calculated. (Ditto.)
If it can't lay out everything at its preferred size, it completely ignores preferred sizes and lays everything out based on their minimum sizes. This sounds logical, but means that layouts suddenly 'jump' when resized below the preferred size, and can look very strange at small sizes. Instead, it should scale components down smoothly from their preferred to minimum size, taking both into account.
It does very stupid things if it can't even give everything its minimum size (e.g. giving some components negative size in order to give others positive size). It should be much more intelligent about this.
Its alignment options should include one for text baseline as well as for component top and bottom.
If these were fixed, there'd be very very little GBL wouldn't be suited for. One of these days I'll try to write a drop-in replacement for GBL which fixes these things; it's been on my to-do list for ages, but I haven't found the time. (Understanding Sun'd implementation is also very hard.) Anyone tried it?
Ah, yes, well phrasal verbs are something else, and I wouldn't want to decry their use. It it's only unnecessary (and perhaps ignorant) addition of prepositions that annoys me.
And yes, verb-subject agreement is another awkward area. I had no idea that problems with 'committee' and other groups might be seen as a regional issue; I'd assumed it was more about fussy, old-fashioned, traditional use. You could also see it as a useful distinction between treating a group as a single-minded unit ('the committee feels that...'), and as a collection of individuals ('the committee feel that...').
Things get even more complicated when considering inanimate groups. Consider 'A lot of things have...', 'A number of things have...', 'A mass of things have...', 'A truckload of things have...', 'A group of things have...', 'A parcel of things have...'. Arguably the first of those is correct, and the last incorrect (should be 'has'); but where do you draw the line between them?
I wasn't asking whether would be compensated for having their music played on the radio; I was asking whether they'd be compensated if I recorded their music off the radio. Which is a different question entirely. Yes, in most cases I expect the copyright holders do get some form of compensation from having their music played on the radio. (Whether that actually makes much of a difference to the writers and/or performers is another matter, of course.) But they get that regardless of how many people happen to listen in, and of how many people happen to be recording the broadcast. If I choose to record, they make exactly the same as if I don't.
So my point stands: you can't call downloading from a web site illegal simply on the grounds that the artist doesn't make money from my doing so, because the artist similarly makes no money from my recording a radio broadcast, which is legal. Buzzer or no buzzer.
Indeed. I find it strange because in most cases, the Americanism is to add prepositions, not remove them.
For example, we have the concise form to 'beat someone'. Common UK usage lengthens that to 'beat someone up' (which is arguably justified by a slight change in meaning). The US usage seems to be 'beat up on someone', for which I can find no justification at all. (Why stop there? Why not 'beat up onto for at someone'?)
The other Americanism which really grates for me right now is the use of day and month names as adverbs. "A spokesman said Thursday..." No, he didn't. He didn't say the word 'Thursday' at all. What he did was say something on Thursday, which is completely different!
Lets say I downloaded David Gilmour album, did Mr. Gilmour get a cent?
Let's say you bought a David Gilmour CD from a second-hand store. Did he get a cent then? Or say you recorded it off the radio. Did he get a cent then?
The answer's 'No' in both cases. And yet both cases are completely legal. (At least, I'm pretty sure they are in most jurisdictions.) Arguably, they're both moral and ethical, too. So no, I don't think whether the artists recieve money directly is the only issue here.
That second example, by the way, is particularly relevant, because AIUI Allofmp3 is licensed in Russia effectively as a broadcaster. And, under that, it pays 15% of its takings to the Russian Licensing Societies. That may not amount to as much as they'd get from a physical album sale, true, but they do pay. (It's hardly Allofmp3's fault that the recording companies refuse on principle to collect, is it?)
So, our right to get robbed with a fake legit site and artists not getting anything at all
There's nothing fake about it. Up until now, at least, Allofmp3 has been completely legal in Russia -- chapter and verse here. (Despite this agreement claiming otherwise.) At one point, the Russian authorities started legal proceedings, but gave them up before it came to court because they couldn't find any evidence. And, as I said above, Allofmp3 is doing it's bit in getting 15% of the takings to the copyright owners. So both claims are wrong. It might not be the way that US and European music stores work, but up to now it's been completely legal and above-board in Russia.
Up until now...
Ah well. Bang goes just about my only source of music over the last several years. Bang goes just about my only source for discovering new sounds, for trying out new artists, for finding new styles and old favourites. And bang goes just about my only vain hope that the US authorities have a shred of decency and aren't acting purely in their own narrow, biased, unfair, and immoral self-interest.
Hmmm. My best guess is more to do with neural nets. IIRC, they seem to benefit from frequent 'training periods'; in an undirected-learning mode, you send them random inputs and it helps them make new patterns and consolidate the ones they have.
AllOfMP3 may not be creating the music, but they certainly do add value. They provide:
a simple but powerful web site with good organisation, fast searching, and easy ordering;
a huge range of different types of music, from ancient to stuff that's just been released;
basic metadata (track names, artist and album name, art thumbnail)
immediate low-quality (but listenable) previews of all tracks;
good clean rips;
many different audio formats, including lossless, and a wide selection of quality and bitrate for most;
fast, solid downloads; and
good customer support.
You can argue how much all that is worth, but it's clearly worth something to folk like me who use allofmp3 in preference to P2P networks. Doesn't that work deserve any compensation?
Sites like Magnatune are doing a great job (I've bought from them myself) and I'd like to see more of them, but right now they can't match the ubiquity, range, and popularity of allofmp3's music.
Slashdot Mirror
If you never use these, or don't care about them -- and, more importantly, you know that none of the apps you use does either -- then by all means use it. But if you're not sure, it's worth considering something like SuperDuper! which does preserve all of that too.
That's why I switched, despite a few years of good service from Carbon Copy Cloner. Backups are too important to risk any problems.
Ah, but do you mean
or? I'm assuming the former, because the latter just simplifies toI'm no expert, but I can point you to a couple of interesting web pages by people who do seem to know a lot of the details:
- Mac Backup Software Harmful and the earlier The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X at plasticsfuture
- MacOS X Backups at Seth's Unix Tips
In short, there are lots of different backup and cloning tools, from the Unix cp, ditto, and rsync commands up to the free Carbon Copy Cloner, cheap SuperDuper!, and expensive Retrospect. And very few of them preserve everything. HFS+ carries a lot of baggage from the old Mac OS, and adds a lot more stuff from Unix: there are resource forks, HFS+ extended attributes, BSD flags such as creation date and owner/group permissions, ACLs, symbolic links, aliases, and lots more -- and almost none of the options can preserve all of those.You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.
Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.
But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!
Click on what edge? Drag anywhere on what edge?
On Windows, windows waste several pixels on each edge just for this purpose. OS X windows don't; they generally reserve space for actual content, and show the window's edge by the shadow which it throws over surrounding windows. There is nothing to drag.
Hating Microsoft has never been about hating their software and liking all the competition's. (Not for the perceptive and intelligent folk, anyway.) It's about hating their business practices. If they behaved fairly, if they didn't practise lock-in, FUD, vapourware, buying-out competitors, nobbling competition, doing shady deals for default installs, loss leading, and all the other illegal things they've been convicted for, then their software wouldn't matter; if it was good, it'd get used, and if not, it'd be ignored. People would act in their own best interests, and the software market would be all the better for it.
It's precisely due to their illegal and immoral business practices that we have to suffer their bad software today, and that so much good software from other sources has died.
They clearly don't need to apply any pressure. It's all part of that tribal/group psychology thing. Once you feel some connection to MS, you identify with it to some degree; you start to take their PoV; you start to take attacks on them personally, and want to defend them. Only slightly, of course; it's all unconscious, subliminal, and in most cases very low-level. But it's there, and it happens to all of us far more often than we realise, every time we start to divide the world into 'us' and 'them' -- whether 'us' includes MS, or whether it includes Linux.
Standardisation in Windows apps? That's a laugh...
Let's take just one example which bugs me every day I have to use Windows at work: Find again. In many apps I want to go through a page, stopping at each instance of a particular string. In most cases, you start off by pressing Ctrl+F for Find. But once you've found the first match, what do you do to skip to the next? Oh, that's easy, you press Ctrl+G. Except it's not. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Y (Y? Goodness knows.) Sometimes it's that nice memorable F3. And sometimes you can't do it at all; you have to keep the Find dialog visible, which means you have to reach for the mouse every time you switch between going to the next match and editing it. I am *forever* forgetting which strange method of control to use in which app.
And that's just one single almost-universal action, across a small handful of common big-name Windows apps I use every day. Compare that to the Mac, where it's Cmd+G in every app I've come across. And repeat across tons of other little shortcuts and common actions.
'Standardisation'? Hah.
If exactly 0% of good employees have arrest records, then an arrest record would be a pretty good indicator of malicious intent; while it wouldn't allow you to catch the other 70% of baddies, it would give you pretty conclusive evidence against that 30%.
If, on the other hand, the records for good employees were the same (which I suspect is closer to the truth), then an arrest record (or lack of one) would tell you absolutely nothing about an employee's trustworthiness.
And if the records for good employees were generally higher than for bad ones, then an arrest record would be an indicator in FAVOUR of hiring, not against!
So, worrying as those numbers might sound, they're utterly meaningless here without some context and background!
So yes, you could be a virgin, never having even seen anyone else naked, and still be a registered sex offender.
Still, I'm sure the police know what they're doing...
But millimetre waves? They have that scary, otherworldly, science-fictional quality to them. They're invisible, for one thing (and as any film director worth his/her chloride ions knows, what you can't see is always scarier than what you can). And they could do all sorts of unknown long-term damage. In short, they could scare people far beyond their actual capabilities.
Okay, it's not the way that the term 'FUD' is normally used, but it doesn't seem entirely out of place here either...
That's a shame; it's possible that your (and many people's) bad impressions of the quality of MD, CD, and MP3, aren't caused by anything inherent in the format, but by bad implementations.
While CD is a lossless format in the way we usually mean (i.e. unlike MP3), you still have to get the sound from analogue to 44.1kHz/16-bit digital, and that involves some work. In particular, you need to filter out absolutely all frequencies above 22.05kHz before sampling; I gather that in the first few years of CD, the filters that did this caused a lot of noticeable artefacts in lower frequencies too. (As I understand it, these days filters start a little lower down, are gentler, and behave a little better.) So the harsh, brittle sound of some early CDs may well be due to this effect. It may also be due to poor mastering generally, of course. Either way, more recent CD rereleases have shown that it's possible to get pretty good quality from CD.
Similar things apply to MD. Like many other lossy formats, MD's ATRAC completely specifies the decoder but leaves the details of encoding up to the implementation. MD was rushed out to compete with DCC, and those early encoders were pretty bad, especially with high frequency content. But as time passed and more research was done, encoders got a lot better at preserving more of the audible content.
And of course it's exactly the same with MP3. Most here will know of different MP3 encoders; lame, for example, is continually improving (a new version was released a couple of months ago).
So, just as we shouldn't judge the possibilities of vinyl from old 78s, we shouldn't let early bad experiences colour our view of other formats.
(That doesn't necessarily mean they're good enough for all users, of course, but it's wise to make an informed decision. Only your own ears can take that.)
Even better than the one-size-fits-all (or even a-few-sizes-fit-all) approach of the mass-produced ones are ones like mine which were moulded to my own ear canals. Hassle and expensive, but well worth it for me at least: they're extremely comfortable to wear, give a LOT of sound isolation (I use them as earplugs), and the sound quality is pretty impressive too.
I got mine from ACS: see the T3 monitors here. (No connection other than as a happy customer, disclaim disclaim.)
There's a pretty good analysis of the various tools available here. The only tool it recommends highly is SuperDuper, which I've since switched to, and had good results with.
(There's another analysis here, which has more mixed feelings.)
After all, we know what happened to the last OS which did this: by billing itself as "a better Windows than Windows", it signed its own death warrant. After all, who'd develop a native app when it runs Windows apps so well?
In fact, my First Rule of Java GUI Development is that any given layout, whether it starts off using a BorderLayout, FlowLayout, or whatever, will eventually get rewritten to use a GridBagLayout. None of the other LMs is sufficiently flexible or powerful, and you always end up hitting one of their limits.
People bemoan the complexity of GBL, but as you say, it's irreducible complexity. (With the possible exception of internal padding, which I never use.)
If there's a problem, it's with Sun's implementation of GBL. It's generally pretty good, but has a few unfortunate features, for example:
- It only allows 512 children. (I believe this has been fixed in later JDK versions.)
- It takes 12KB of memory regardless of how few components it's holding, and temporarily allocates a further 12KB each time it gets laid out or has its size calculated. (Ditto.)
- If it can't lay out everything at its preferred size, it completely ignores preferred sizes and lays everything out based on their minimum sizes. This sounds logical, but means that layouts suddenly 'jump' when resized below the preferred size, and can look very strange at small sizes. Instead, it should scale components down smoothly from their preferred to minimum size, taking both into account.
- It does very stupid things if it can't even give everything its minimum size (e.g. giving some components negative size in order to give others positive size). It should be much more intelligent about this.
- Its alignment options should include one for text baseline as well as for component top and bottom.
If these were fixed, there'd be very very little GBL wouldn't be suited for. One of these days I'll try to write a drop-in replacement for GBL which fixes these things; it's been on my to-do list for ages, but I haven't found the time. (Understanding Sun'd implementation is also very hard.) Anyone tried it?And yes, verb-subject agreement is another awkward area. I had no idea that problems with 'committee' and other groups might be seen as a regional issue; I'd assumed it was more about fussy, old-fashioned, traditional use. You could also see it as a useful distinction between treating a group as a single-minded unit ('the committee feels that...'), and as a collection of individuals ('the committee feel that...').
Things get even more complicated when considering inanimate groups. Consider 'A lot of things have...', 'A number of things have...', 'A mass of things have...', 'A truckload of things have...', 'A group of things have...', 'A parcel of things have...'. Arguably the first of those is correct, and the last incorrect (should be 'has'); but where do you draw the line between them?
Except for Ireland, obviously.
And Cyprus.
And India was a bit dodgy.
And Palestine, of course...
(Though to be fair, in at least the first of those cases, the boundary was self-selected AIUI, not imposed.)
So my point stands: you can't call downloading from a web site illegal simply on the grounds that the artist doesn't make money from my doing so, because the artist similarly makes no money from my recording a radio broadcast, which is legal. Buzzer or no buzzer.
For example, we have the concise form to 'beat someone'. Common UK usage lengthens that to 'beat someone up' (which is arguably justified by a slight change in meaning). The US usage seems to be 'beat up on someone', for which I can find no justification at all. (Why stop there? Why not 'beat up onto for at someone'?)
The other Americanism which really grates for me right now is the use of day and month names as adverbs. "A spokesman said Thursday..." No, he didn't. He didn't say the word 'Thursday' at all. What he did was say something on Thursday, which is completely different!
Let's say you bought a David Gilmour CD from a second-hand store. Did he get a cent then? Or say you recorded it off the radio. Did he get a cent then?
The answer's 'No' in both cases. And yet both cases are completely legal. (At least, I'm pretty sure they are in most jurisdictions.) Arguably, they're both moral and ethical, too. So no, I don't think whether the artists recieve money directly is the only issue here.
That second example, by the way, is particularly relevant, because AIUI Allofmp3 is licensed in Russia effectively as a broadcaster. And, under that, it pays 15% of its takings to the Russian Licensing Societies. That may not amount to as much as they'd get from a physical album sale, true, but they do pay. (It's hardly Allofmp3's fault that the recording companies refuse on principle to collect, is it?)
There's nothing fake about it. Up until now, at least, Allofmp3 has been completely legal in Russia -- chapter and verse here. (Despite this agreement claiming otherwise.) At one point, the Russian authorities started legal proceedings, but gave them up before it came to court because they couldn't find any evidence. And, as I said above, Allofmp3 is doing it's bit in getting 15% of the takings to the copyright owners. So both claims are wrong. It might not be the way that US and European music stores work, but up to now it's been completely legal and above-board in Russia.
Up until now...
Ah well. Bang goes just about my only source of music over the last several years. Bang goes just about my only source for discovering new sounds, for trying out new artists, for finding new styles and old favourites. And bang goes just about my only vain hope that the US authorities have a shred of decency and aren't acting purely in their own narrow, biased, unfair, and immoral self-interest.
They have a dicussion area for chocolate bars??? Quick, tell me how to subscribe!!!
Sounds suspiciously like dreaming to me.
- a simple but powerful web site with good organisation, fast searching, and easy ordering;
- a huge range of different types of music, from ancient to stuff that's just been released;
- basic metadata (track names, artist and album name, art thumbnail)
- immediate low-quality (but listenable) previews of all tracks;
- good clean rips;
- many different audio formats, including lossless, and a wide selection of quality and bitrate for most;
- fast, solid downloads; and
- good customer support.
You can argue how much all that is worth, but it's clearly worth something to folk like me who use allofmp3 in preference to P2P networks. Doesn't that work deserve any compensation?Sites like Magnatune are doing a great job (I've bought from them myself) and I'd like to see more of them, but right now they can't match the ubiquity, range, and popularity of allofmp3's music.