The best gifts are things you wouldn't ever get yourself, but you find you can't live without once you have them... Now, I'm going to go take a nice hot bubble bath...
I take it you get a lot of gay porn and women's underwear as presents?
We should be supporting the game companies that port to Linux
Give me a break. Take off the blinders, cowboy. Remember Loki? Supporting them did a damn lot of good. It bought CEO Scott Draeker a nice new house, while completely shafting the entire staff of bearded, smelly, corduroy-wearing Linux hippies, and charging company expenses on their personal credit cards.
Oh wait, maybe that is a good reason to support Linux gaming companies. Nevermind.
Because the real reason we all have multiple boxes at home is because one computer setup or another will be inheriently more efficient at a given game than another.
Why? All the good platform-specific games (i.e. not netHack) are available for Windows. If you're a gamer, you only need a Wintel machine.
The only reason to have a dedicated Linux gaming machine is to play Tux Racer, and if that's the case, you've got more problems than the fact that you smell bad, your beard is too long, you live in your parents' basement, and you whack off to pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar every night.
Wow, it's amazing that you can talk so much, and not have any idea what you're blathering on about; desperately grasping for contradictions that don't exist to make yourself feel intelligent.
I know all about recoupable expenses and I also know that if you want to recoup your expenses more quickly, you set the price of the product higher from the outset.
Yobviously don't know "all about" recoupable expenses. Did you even read one word of what I wrote? The label doesn't want to "recoup its expenses" from the artist (even though most of those "expenses" are bogus), because as long as the artist is indebted to them, they're legally compelled to work off their debt. It's a modern permutation of sharecropping.
Does that mean all CDs should be a lot less so that record labels can't "strike it rich" when they discover an artist that's really hot?!? I don't think so - that's never going to fly because they won't ever take any risks if there isn't a good chance that they'll "RECOUP" their expenses.
You're a fucking moron. The record company will recoup their money no matter what. If they advance an artist $300,000 to make a record, that money is essentially a loan. If the album tanks, guess what? The artist STILL HAS TO PAY BACK THE MONEY, even if they have to work at Burger King to do it.
OK, so that all costs some money, right? Well, that's NOTHING compared with the cost of food, travel, housing that many recording labels provide their artists while they are recording.
You know jack shit about the music industry, my friend. All those things are what are called RECOUPABLE EXPENSES.
When a record label advances money to an artist, or spends money in certain areas, to make, market or promote a record, the artist must pay back that money before the label begins to split the profits with the artist. Paying back that money out of record sales is called "recouping." If the record stiffs, even at the fault of the label, the artist of course owes nothing. But if the record sells some units, and the label decides to put out another record, the debt is NOT wiped clean if the artist is unrecouped. This nasty little fact is called "cross collateralization" and what that means is that if the artist makes Record Number Two for the label, but hasn't recouped from Record Number One yet, the back owed funds come out of the sales from the new record before the artist ever sees a dime from the new record. So you can see how difficult it is to get ahead...which is how a label (meaning Def Jam) would explain why Slick Rick is unrecouped after all these years and 5 albums later.
As an example, let's say the artist has an unrecouped balance of $200,000 on the day his record drops (his advance and recording budget were $150,000 and $100,000 was spent on the video for the first single, half of which is recoupable--that's $200,000). Let's say the label did its job properly and had a good four month set up on the album (set up is the amount of work that goes into a project to build awareness prior to its release), and the artist has a strong buzz in the marketplace. So pre-orders are looking good (the amount of records the retail stores ask for, based on the anticipation of sales for the release) and the label decides to ship 300,000 units initially. If the label is in the Universal family, for example, and offers a sales discount because it's a new artist, a $16.98 anticipated retail price will position this CD at $10.78 wholesale. So the label can anticipate an income initially of $3,234,000 (300,000 x $10.78). And by the way, the label feels as though it has already lost $189,000, because the full retail selling price of $17.98 would have brought the label $3,423,000 (300,000 x $11.41) and since they discounted the record one dollar, they're already losing money. Here's the ugly side of label accounting and recouping: the artist's contract stipulates that the artist's share of the back end is 12 points, which really means 12% of the retail price (less a whole bunch of stupid provisions for breakage, free goods, return reserves, and container charges, producer royalties, etc) which leaves the artist about $1 a record. That means that the artist's share of the income from one record sold at $16.98 is roughly $1. Recouping means that the artist has to pay back the money spent out of his share (which is $1 a record sold). So in order to pay back that $200,000 spent prior to the record even coming out, 200,000 units must sell.
After the initial order is shipped, the artist incurs promotional costs which the label advances to him. The independent radio promoters, video promoters, tour support, remixes, etc, are all shared expenses that come out of the artist's money. So you can see how easy it is for an artist to remain unrecouped. If he finishes his project two or three singles deep, it's easy to come into the next project already at a high negative balance. The artist is artificially unrecouped, however, because the label has made back the money it spent off the top. Let's look at our above example. Let's say the label gets paid (meaning every retail store sells every copy with no returns) for every copy of the initial 300,000 units it shipped at $10.78 a copy. And let's also assume they did not spend any additional money to sell those records (also highly unlikely). The label has made $3,234,000. The label has also recouped $200,000 from the artist for the expenses, so that $3,234,000 is almost pure profit (except for the unrecouped costs of running their business and the overhead of running their business). Meanwhile, the artist has made only $100,000 (less the artist's overhead costs). According to my calculator, that's only 3% of the share.
And the massive screwjob doesn't stop there, not by far. Labels pay royalties on 90% of sales which assumes 10% breakage, a holdover from the vinyl days. From that amount is deducted the advances and recoupable expenses such as studio time, engineers, producer, etc. However, a distributer is often given 15-30% of his albums free on which there is no royalty. Overseas sales and sales to military stores are at a greatly reduced royalty. Some Talent may be more popular overseas than in America which means they see very little royalties. If albums are returned and then sold at discount, Talent receives virtually no royalty on those sales.
Blindly defending something with a completely uninformed argument? Was I doing that?
You were. "CMYK" is not patented, and you claimed the following: "CMYK is patented, and licensing this patent is not at all cheap.". Well, that's not true, is it? That's a prime example of an uninformed argument.
I was off a little in the details, but half an hour's research on google came up with more information, which backed up my original claim: the gimp didn't implement CMYK because of patent problems related to it.
See, now you're rewriting what you said. you didn't say "patents relating to CMYK prevent its implementaion", you said "CMYK is patented". You're inventing reality as we speak. How is anyone supposed to take you seriously?
And if you were paying attention, I said: It's not impossible (they're planning it for 2.0), and even if it did have CMYK support, the GIMP lacks support for 16-bit colour depth, which renders it useless for high-end applications (including using professional scanners). As such, as a product, it is not "on par" with Photoshop, and you've done nothing to prove that it is on par, save for make excuses about why it is "impossible".
Most likely not, though - I don't use any MS products, nor do I know anything much about any of them, so I'm not likely to step in with an explanation of why something is the way it is.
Ok, how can you make an informed decision about which is the best product to use if you don't "know anything much about any of them". How can you be sure you've chosen the best product if you have no knowledge of the competition? Once again, you're proving your blind allegiance to the inferior.
I realise you're trolling, by the way, so I won't respond to any more comments you make unless there's some real substance to them.
That's a great method of avoiding reality. Accuse those who speak the truth of "trolling" so you can ignore what they say and persist in your bizarro world where everything OSS beats the pants off every commercial product.
Your delusion is self-defeating twofold: 1) If you're not willing to admit that OSS has a ways to go before it's "as good as" commercial software, it's never going to progress. 2) Other people will take OSS less seriously, because information about it from proponents like you is not 100% factual, further hindering its adoption.
Does having personal preferences make me a zealot?
No, blindly defending a piece of Open Source software with a completely uninformed argument makes you a zealot. Would you have defended a Microsoft product with similar vehemence? I think not. Thanks for proving the stereotype.
Ok. You're flat wrong on this one. Aside from the fact that the CMYK process is not patented (there's certain "brand name" implementations of it, but the idea itself is not), if it's "not something that's possible", then why are they planning it for version 2.0?
And even if it did have CMYK, it would still be inferior, because it lacks support for 16-bit color depth.
Quit making excuses for sub-par Open Source Software, zealot.
So I decided never to use them again, regardless of all the other annoyances that they fob off on potential customers.
I feel the same about OSS. After I realized it fucking sucks, I decided never to use it again, regardless of all the other annoyances (zealots, crappy support, constant root exploits, poor documentation, etc, etc).
It's GUI is everey bit as intuitive (not that either are particulary so) as PS, and much more modern looking. My god, Adobe cranked those damn toolbars out in the MacOS 6 days and never updated them.
Have you even *seen* a recent version of Photoshop? Apparently not.
Taco's probably using a Linux system, with some popular Mail Transfer Agent like Sendmail or Postfix or [3 or 4 others] that are smart enough to be able to deliver mail without needing help, like just about any other Unix machine since we started using domain names in the mid-1980s.
Ok, but that isn't stopping Taco from getting a free yahoo/hotmail/myrealbox account, and emailing the "unreachable" Slash code developer from there. The DUL won't affect those free email services, and Taco obviously has a functioning web browser.
What's the fucking problem? Oh wait, Taco's a stubborn ass. As are you.
I guess free email isn't l33t enough for you L1nuX h4X0R3Z, even though it's FUCKING FUNCTIONAL.
You can check it out here. It's a pretty cool compilation of sounds from all sorts of sources in deep space, like pulsars. There's samples that you can listen to.
Why not the past and the future of something else?Like Star Trek: Voyager. Preferably we can put that suck-ass show in the past. Permanently in the past. So we never have to see it, or hear it again.
Just like my 8-year old girlfriend that "mysteriously disappeared".
You're co-director of *what*, exactly? It sounds to me like you're a fuckwit grade-school computer lab-monkey. They just gave you that title to lame your lame ass feel special.
Slashdot Mirror
The best gifts are things you wouldn't ever get yourself, but you find you can't live without once you have them... Now, I'm going to go take a nice hot bubble bath...
I take it you get a lot of gay porn and women's underwear as presents?
The author suggests a better way for handling the business problems that a lack of binaries is supposed to solve.
Yeah, or an even better way to handle some of the problems is to sell your products, instead of GIVING THEM AWAY FOR FREE.
We should be supporting the game companies that port to Linux
Give me a break. Take off the blinders, cowboy. Remember Loki? Supporting them did a damn lot of good. It bought CEO Scott Draeker a nice new house, while completely shafting the entire staff of bearded, smelly, corduroy-wearing Linux hippies, and charging company expenses on their personal credit cards.
Oh wait, maybe that is a good reason to support Linux gaming companies. Nevermind.
Because the real reason we all have multiple boxes at home is because one computer setup or another will be inheriently more efficient at a given game than another.
Why? All the good platform-specific games (i.e. not netHack) are available for Windows. If you're a gamer, you only need a Wintel machine.
The only reason to have a dedicated Linux gaming machine is to play Tux Racer, and if that's the case, you've got more problems than the fact that you smell bad, your beard is too long, you live in your parents' basement, and you whack off to pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar every night.
I'm defensive about nothing.
And it's "you're", not "your", genius. Maybe you need some grammar classes?
Wow, it's amazing that you can talk so much, and not have any idea what you're blathering on about; desperately grasping for contradictions that don't exist to make yourself feel intelligent.
Are you in politics? You should be.
It costs 30 cents to mail a CD. Even less if you don't mail it first class. $4.95 for "shipping and handling" is some expensive fucking handling.
You're contradicting yourself:
Am I? Do you know how to read? Maybe you just skipped this sentence:
"But if the record sells some units, and the label decides to put out another record, the debt is NOT wiped clean if the artist is unrecouped."
Thanks for paying attention. Really.
I know all about recoupable expenses and I also know that if you want to recoup your expenses more quickly, you set the price of the product higher from the outset.
Yobviously don't know "all about" recoupable expenses. Did you even read one word of what I wrote? The label doesn't want to "recoup its expenses" from the artist (even though most of those "expenses" are bogus), because as long as the artist is indebted to them, they're legally compelled to work off their debt. It's a modern permutation of sharecropping.
Does that mean all CDs should be a lot less so that record labels can't "strike it rich" when they discover an artist that's really hot?!? I don't think so - that's never going to fly because they won't ever take any risks if there isn't a good chance that they'll "RECOUP" their expenses.
You're a fucking moron. The record company will recoup their money no matter what. If they advance an artist $300,000 to make a record, that money is essentially a loan. If the album tanks, guess what? The artist STILL HAS TO PAY BACK THE MONEY, even if they have to work at Burger King to do it.
OK, so that all costs some money, right? Well, that's NOTHING compared with the cost of food, travel, housing that many recording labels provide their artists while they are recording.
You know jack shit about the music industry, my friend. All those things are what are called RECOUPABLE EXPENSES.
When a record label advances money to an artist, or spends money in certain areas, to make, market or promote a record, the artist must pay back that money before the label begins to split the profits with the artist. Paying back that money out of record sales is called "recouping." If the record stiffs, even at the fault of the label, the artist of course owes nothing. But if the record sells some units, and the label decides to put out another record, the debt is NOT wiped clean if the artist is unrecouped. This nasty little fact is called "cross collateralization" and what that means is that if the artist makes Record Number Two for the label, but hasn't recouped from Record Number One yet, the back owed funds come out of the sales from the new record before the artist ever sees a dime from the new record. So you can see how difficult it is to get ahead...which is how a label (meaning Def Jam) would explain why Slick Rick is unrecouped after all these years and 5 albums later.
As an example, let's say the artist has an unrecouped balance of $200,000 on the day his record drops (his advance and recording budget were $150,000 and $100,000 was spent on the video for the first single, half of which is recoupable--that's $200,000). Let's say the label did its job properly and had a good four month set up on the album (set up is the amount of work that goes into a project to build awareness prior to its release), and the artist has a strong buzz in the marketplace. So pre-orders are looking good (the amount of records the retail stores ask for, based on the anticipation of sales for the release) and the label decides to ship 300,000 units initially. If the label is in the Universal family, for example, and offers a sales discount because it's a new artist, a $16.98 anticipated retail price will position this CD at $10.78 wholesale. So the label can anticipate an income initially of $3,234,000 (300,000 x $10.78). And by the way, the label feels as though it has already lost $189,000, because the full retail selling price of $17.98 would have brought the label $3,423,000 (300,000 x $11.41) and since they discounted the record one dollar, they're already losing money. Here's the ugly side of label accounting and recouping: the artist's contract stipulates that the artist's share of the back end is 12 points, which really means 12% of the retail price (less a whole bunch of stupid provisions for breakage, free goods, return reserves, and container charges, producer royalties, etc) which leaves the artist about $1 a record. That means that the artist's share of the income from one record sold at $16.98 is roughly $1. Recouping means that the artist has to pay back the money spent out of his share (which is $1 a record sold). So in order to pay back that $200,000 spent prior to the record even coming out, 200,000 units must sell.
After the initial order is shipped, the artist incurs promotional costs which the label advances to him. The independent radio promoters, video promoters, tour support, remixes, etc, are all shared expenses that come out of the artist's money. So you can see how easy it is for an artist to remain unrecouped. If he finishes his project two or three singles deep, it's easy to come into the next project already at a high negative balance. The artist is artificially unrecouped, however, because the label has made back the money it spent off the top. Let's look at our above example. Let's say the label gets paid (meaning every retail store sells every copy with no returns) for every copy of the initial 300,000 units it shipped at $10.78 a copy. And let's also assume they did not spend any additional money to sell those records (also highly unlikely). The label has made $3,234,000. The label has also recouped $200,000 from the artist for the expenses, so that $3,234,000 is almost pure profit (except for the unrecouped costs of running their business and the overhead of running their business). Meanwhile, the artist has made only $100,000 (less the artist's overhead costs). According to my calculator, that's only 3% of the share.
And the massive screwjob doesn't stop there, not by far. Labels pay royalties on 90% of sales which assumes 10% breakage, a holdover from the vinyl days. From that amount is deducted the advances and recoupable expenses such as studio time, engineers, producer, etc. However, a distributer is often given 15-30% of his albums free on which there is no royalty. Overseas sales and sales to military stores are at a greatly reduced royalty. Some Talent may be more popular overseas than in America which means they see very little royalties. If albums are returned and then sold at discount, Talent receives virtually no royalty on those sales.
I find it disturbing that more people searched for the crack for Flash Mx than for tutorials on how to use it
Why is that disturbing? Consider the following:
1) Lots of people already know how to use it.
2) IT COMES WITH A FUCKING TUTORIAL.
Blindly defending something with a completely uninformed argument? Was I doing that?
You were. "CMYK" is not patented, and you claimed the following: "CMYK is patented, and licensing this patent is not at all cheap.". Well, that's not true, is it? That's a prime example of an uninformed argument.
I was off a little in the details, but half an hour's research on google came up with more information, which backed up my original claim: the gimp didn't implement CMYK because of patent problems related to it.
See, now you're rewriting what you said. you didn't say "patents relating to CMYK prevent its implementaion", you said "CMYK is patented". You're inventing reality as we speak. How is anyone supposed to take you seriously?
And if you were paying attention, I said: It's not impossible (they're planning it for 2.0), and even if it did have CMYK support, the GIMP lacks support for 16-bit colour depth, which renders it useless for high-end applications (including using professional scanners). As such, as a product, it is not "on par" with Photoshop, and you've done nothing to prove that it is on par, save for make excuses about why it is "impossible".
Furthermore, if the GIMP is not a poorly written hack, then why are they planning a massive rewrite for version 2.0? If it's so good, why rewrite it?
Most likely not, though - I don't use any MS products, nor do I know anything much about any of them, so I'm not likely to step in with an explanation of why something is the way it is.
Ok, how can you make an informed decision about which is the best product to use if you don't "know anything much about any of them". How can you be sure you've chosen the best product if you have no knowledge of the competition? Once again, you're proving your blind allegiance to the inferior.
I realise you're trolling, by the way, so I won't respond to any more comments you make unless there's some real substance to them.
That's a great method of avoiding reality. Accuse those who speak the truth of "trolling" so you can ignore what they say and persist in your bizarro world where everything OSS beats the pants off every commercial product.
Your delusion is self-defeating twofold: 1) If you're not willing to admit that OSS has a ways to go before it's "as good as" commercial software, it's never going to progress. 2) Other people will take OSS less seriously, because information about it from proponents like you is not 100% factual, further hindering its adoption.
Does having personal preferences make me a zealot?
No, blindly defending a piece of Open Source software with a completely uninformed argument makes you a zealot. Would you have defended a Microsoft product with similar vehemence? I think not. Thanks for proving the stereotype.
Ok. You're flat wrong on this one. Aside from the fact that the CMYK process is not patented (there's certain "brand name" implementations of it, but the idea itself is not), if it's "not something that's possible", then why are they planning it for version 2.0?
And even if it did have CMYK, it would still be inferior, because it lacks support for 16-bit color depth.
Quit making excuses for sub-par Open Source Software, zealot.
So I decided never to use them again, regardless of all the other annoyances that they fob off on potential customers.
I feel the same about OSS. After I realized it fucking sucks, I decided never to use it again, regardless of all the other annoyances (zealots, crappy support, constant root exploits, poor documentation, etc, etc).
CMYK support, for starters. Or is that "not important" because the GIMP can't do it?
Ignoring the inadequacies of an open source product again? Typical.
It's GUI is everey bit as intuitive (not that either are particulary so) as PS, and much more modern looking. My god, Adobe cranked those damn toolbars out in the MacOS 6 days and never updated them. Have you even *seen* a recent version of Photoshop? Apparently not.
Infeasible? I think the word you're looking for is "unpossible". As in the following sentence:
"Me? Fail English? That's unpossible!"
This English lesson has been brought to you by User 956
Taco's probably using a Linux system, with some popular Mail Transfer Agent like Sendmail or Postfix or [3 or 4 others] that are smart enough to be able to deliver mail without needing help, like just about any other Unix machine since we started using domain names in the mid-1980s.
Ok, but that isn't stopping Taco from getting a free yahoo/hotmail/myrealbox account, and emailing the "unreachable" Slash code developer from there. The DUL won't affect those free email services, and Taco obviously has a functioning web browser.
What's the fucking problem? Oh wait, Taco's a stubborn ass. As are you.
I guess free email isn't l33t enough for you L1nuX h4X0R3Z, even though it's FUCKING FUNCTIONAL.
Typical.
You can check it out here. It's a pretty cool compilation of sounds from all sorts of sources in deep space, like pulsars. There's samples that you can listen to.
You're just bitter because you made yourself look like an ass.
Suck it up and go fuck yourself.
I think it represents a downward spiral average IQ. The battle flag of the imbiscile.
But who is more of an imbecile? The "imbecile" to which you refer, or you, the person who can't even spell "imbecile" correctly?
Why not the past and the future of something else?Like Star Trek: Voyager. Preferably we can put that suck-ass show in the past. Permanently in the past. So we never have to see it, or hear it again.
Just like my 8-year old girlfriend that "mysteriously disappeared".
She did suck a mean one though.
I told you to give me back my fucking wallet. This is the second fucking time I've had to ask, and I don't ask a third.
.45, capeche?
And your nigger friends still won't turn down their fucking music. Either you turn it down, or I'll do it with my fucking
You're co-director of *what*, exactly? It sounds to me like you're a fuckwit grade-school computer lab-monkey. They just gave you that title to lame your lame ass feel special.
You're not, so stop pretending.