I live in the UK, and sorta stopped downloading music 2 years ago. Why? Because a) I had more music than I could listen to and b) I'd gotten out of uni and into a job, and could actually afford to buy CD's. I've been spending the intervening time legitamising my MP3 collection (well, now I've got the CD's, it's more of an ogg collection;).
BUT I still download some music. The Radio 1 Essential Mixes. Quite simply some of the best DJ sets I've ever heard. Lately I've started recording my own from the radio, but there are still hundreds knocking about P2P that I haven't heard yet, so I download them pretty religiously. And I share them (there seems to be a whole sub-clas of people out there like me who have gigs and gigs of these things, and we're always swapping them about).
Technically I believe this is illegal under UK law. The mixes contain copyrighted content. But I'm never given an opportunity to buy the CD's (as I don't think the BBC is allowed redistribution rights). So, if I want to hear them again and again, I have to download/record them myself.
I can understand this being legally wrong, but is it ethically wrong? Who loses out? No-one as far as I can tell.
I know it's a bit of a technicality, but some of the data on Magnetbox's RIAA list is a bit screwed. Personally, I'm big into my electronica and funk, and was rather disappointed to see one of my favourite acts (the Aphex Twin) listed as an RIAA confederate.
Of course, those of you familiar with him will know he is signed on Warp Records, one of the world premier electro labels based in the UK. Warp is completely independent, BUT alot of the US releases are published by the big bad RIAA companies. Records bought from Warpmart http://www.warprecords.com/?section=mart will be totally RIAA-free (worldwide shipping) AND you're supporting the artist, and you can also download DRM-free MP3's from Warp's excellent Bleep http://www.bleep.com/ music store (many of the MP3's created by the artists themselves, and they are also selling an awful lot of other UK indie label music thorugh it as well, such as Ninja Tune, another of my fave labels), which also does worldwide "shipping". I downloaded over 500MB of MP3's from them the other day. And no, I'm not an employee of Warp, I just think they have a brilliant and underexposed system going on.
Moral of ths story: Magnetbox's db is too US centric. *Always* check with the band and label first to see if they have their own shop. If it's an indie label or the band are just flogging their own stuff, you're sorted. The label or the artist gets all the cash, and the middleman gets sweet FA.
There's alot of talk in TFA about targetted ads, but how the hell will they know what to target? How can they tell, just by the way you play a game, what kind of stuff you're interested in plonking down hard cash for?
The only way I can think of is if they scan your internet bookmarks or web traffic.
Sorry, but the whole idea of in-game targetted ads not only fills me with dread, it also fills me with the need to edit my hosts file and reach for HijackThis. It just smacks of spyware.
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for it. I already have about 9 copies of PowerDVD and WinDVD for windows that come bundled with every £20 DVD drive I buy (yes, even the OEM ones!).
Can I go to the website adn buy myself a tarball of this thing? No.
Does the Linux build of WinDVD come with out-of-the-box support for LIRC, ALSA and all the rest of it? What about the ability to ignore region encoding (assuming I have a region 0 drive)?
Until these proprietary players are a) up to the standard of the FOSS equivalents and b) actually available, no-one will use them.
"d00d! j00 gt 2 chk out dis C++ map!" "WTF?!OLOLLOLLO!" "LOL, my infnit l00pz pwn j00!" "STFU, my 20 GOTO 10 will pwn all you campfags!" "LOL, eat my PERL BFG" *O'Reilly was fragged by L@rryW@ll* "Larry, u wallhack shitcock!" "ROFL" "d00d, this PHP has major lag" "my cracked Zend compiler 0WNZ ur PHP, fagg1t!" *Sanity has left the computer science universe*
I don't know about you, btu I'm using a cheap-as-hell budget nVidia card (lspci gives me 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev a4)) which cost me £35 from the ludicrously overpriced UK chain store PC World (I was in a hurry).
MPEG2 playback from my PVR-250 streams use *zero* CPU. MPEG4 (XviD) playback uses about 2-3% CPU, according to top.
Conversely, MPEG playback on my windows box with a GF4 Ti4200 uses a boatload of processing power.
I've just benched my quad Opteron 850's running 64 bit fully-optimised Gentoo against a comparable Intel CPU, and the Opteron *smashes* the Intel.
I used a dual Pentium Pro 100MHz for comparison.
I took the latest CVS snapshot of CRAPbench and SPECrubbish. Both were compiled with GCC (3.4 for the Opterons, 1.25.12395a-alpha for the Intel) with 64 bit extensions. Surprisingly, the AMD chips scored nearly 3295869 Bogotrons more than the Intel machine!
Hoho, joke over. As the comments here and in the article point out, the "review" is based on the wrong methodology and shoddy execution - appallingly limited set of benchmarks, errors in makefiles, non-64bitness of GCC options, top-end server chip vs. medium-end desktop chip, the works. Anadtech used to be my premier visit for seemingly honest reviews, but this one is just utter garbage. Even more worryingly, it isn't even garbage that looks like it was produced by a bribe from Intel; it just looks like it was done by someone without much of a clue as to what the hell they're doing.
I'm a self confessed AMD fanboy, but anyone can tell that this review is, essentially, a crock of shit.
Anandtech have a review done on this. Comparing 32 vs. 64 (unoptimised binaries) on SuSE on an Athlon64. Short version: 64 bit kicks ass, especially for apps that are heavily CPU bound with as much as ~50% performance increase.
At the company I work for, we often have highly sensitive (legal) data that we're forever scared shitless of contaminating some other entirely different data. Hence the boss insisted we have an enourmously complicated login structure, so that fi you're working on case X, it's impossible to even be aare that case Y exists.
Then the boss insits I give him an account with root level access to all the work because he says it takes too long switching between accounts.
Anandtech did a comparison of 32 bit vs. 64 bit code (largely unoptimised I think, but I don't know how SuSE make their packages) using SuSE. 64 bit code had as much as a 50% performance increase as opposed to the same code compiled under 32 bit - you see the main advantage under heavily maths-dependent stuff, like media encoding.
OK, well that's settled my qualms then. I haven't used GNOME for a while, and was still a n00b (but a tinker-junkie) when I decided to ditch it. I just thought that an integrated VNC app would be better served by an installable program rather than an inbuilt function that's going to be of fairly limited use to most people.
I still hope you can disable it though. As you probabaly gathered, I don't follow GNOME development much, as I moved to desktops I found more tinker-friendly, and popular opinion has discouraged me from taking the time to install and configure it much these days.
I'm still highly wary of the windows "bundle everything in as default and make it impossible to remove" effect.
I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated. Most Linux users (and windows too...?), I would have thought, would be happier with X11.
I hope you can choose not to install the VNC server... it's of utterly no use to me, and seems to smack of copying XP's built in remote desktop functionality.
There are several good VNC client/server packages out there for Linux, if you really want to use it.
Cue lots of "me, too!"-ness and "new GNOME sucks!" luddite-ness.
I first started using Linux with MDK 8.2 Cooker, and decided I liked GNOME (1.4 IIRC) better, mainly due to the aceness of Sawfish, hands down the best WM I've ever used. It fixed so much of what I hated about the windows UI (although Nautilus was dog slow).
My next step was RH8 and then 9, with GNOME 2. Hated hated hated. ALl my beloved options seemed to have disappeared, and the WM had been replaced by some hideously oversimplified contraption callde Metacity. I understand that sawfish was unmaintained, but was it really neccesary to use such a brain damaged WM? The only improvements were a (much) faster nautilus and prettier widgets. Since then, I ditched GNOME as being too power-user-hostile.
Like a great many people here have already said, I'd love to be able to select an "advanced" GNOME with all my beloved setting and config tools - AFAICT, lots of the config options still exist (tear-off menus!), they're just hidden deeply in the mass of confusion that is gconf.
I think until GNOME lets the more confident/reckless users get out of the incessant hand-holding GNOME seems to foist upon me in it's last few iterations, Ishall steer well clear of it. It might just be I'm not their target audience, but I always thought that less choice was always a bad thing. The choice doesn't even need to be displayed to the average user, hence why so many people are clamouring for an "advanced" option.
I threw myself a fairly cheap but high capacity file server together for a coupla of thou (£). Tyan dual Athlon MP board to get me some PCI-X slots, a 3ware 8 port SAAT RAID card, a giganic and six hard drives all in a nice 4U from Antec. It's only got 500GB of space in it, btu I'm only using 6 of the 8 ports, and only one of the RAID1 arrays has 250GB drives in it.
Hard drives are much cheaper now that when I got mine, and the Antec I use has space for quite a few hard drives (9 IIRC) - if you bought a case that was mroe designed for stacks of hard drives (this is just a generic file server) then you'd be laughing.
That said, the Apple XServe looks very tempting for the price.
I can understand your frustration re: the socket A model: Athlon XP's are currently cheap as chips (ha ha) and very good performers for the price, whereas the socket A Sempron is a bit of a disappointment.
But the real meat of the Sempron line is getting a dirt cheap socket 754 CPU out there, to help speed up the transition to the new desktop socket. The 754 Semprons are very good performers for the price (since the Sempron is, IIRC, a redesign of the A64 core you'd expect it to work better on a socket 754 board) *and* come in much cheaper than the current breed of A64's.
Good news for the OEM's (cheap chips to flog to other people with more money than sense) and good for us, cos it'll mean cheaper A64 motherboards:)
Damn straight. When I watched TV "normally", the extra-loud volume just made me jump for the mute button (especially on Channel 4).
Now I watch all my TV through my MythTV box, which has inbuilt ad-detection and skipping, although it isn't highly reliable outside of the US AFAICT. I wish they'd introduce another detection method to incorporate volume increase (at the moment, it can detect scene changes, blank frames and channel logos).
Much like pop-ups, trying hard to make crappy garish adverts intrude upon us will eventually just make people go that extra length to circumvent them.
Be sure to check the small print though. A great many companies have a cryptically worded disclaimer which says they reserve the right to assasinate you if they're going through a bad patch;)
Holy shit! We've been using make config up until now, and it was taking us ages to figure out what all those scrappy little options were! This is gonna make my lawsuits SO much easier! Thank you!
Slashdot Mirror
If only it were that easy.
;).
I live in the UK, and sorta stopped downloading music 2 years ago. Why? Because a) I had more music than I could listen to and b) I'd gotten out of uni and into a job, and could actually afford to buy CD's. I've been spending the intervening time legitamising my MP3 collection (well, now I've got the CD's, it's more of an ogg collection
BUT I still download some music. The Radio 1 Essential Mixes. Quite simply some of the best DJ sets I've ever heard. Lately I've started recording my own from the radio, but there are still hundreds knocking about P2P that I haven't heard yet, so I download them pretty religiously. And I share them (there seems to be a whole sub-clas of people out there like me who have gigs and gigs of these things, and we're always swapping them about).
Technically I believe this is illegal under UK law. The mixes contain copyrighted content. But I'm never given an opportunity to buy the CD's (as I don't think the BBC is allowed redistribution rights). So, if I want to hear them again and again, I have to download/record them myself.
I can understand this being legally wrong, but is it ethically wrong? Who loses out? No-one as far as I can tell.
I know it's a bit of a technicality, but some of the data on Magnetbox's RIAA list is a bit screwed. Personally, I'm big into my electronica and funk, and was rather disappointed to see one of my favourite acts (the Aphex Twin) listed as an RIAA confederate.
Of course, those of you familiar with him will know he is signed on Warp Records, one of the world premier electro labels based in the UK. Warp is completely independent, BUT alot of the US releases are published by the big bad RIAA companies. Records bought from Warpmart http://www.warprecords.com/?section=mart will be totally RIAA-free (worldwide shipping) AND you're supporting the artist, and you can also download DRM-free MP3's from Warp's excellent Bleep http://www.bleep.com/ music store (many of the MP3's created by the artists themselves, and they are also selling an awful lot of other UK indie label music thorugh it as well, such as Ninja Tune, another of my fave labels), which also does worldwide "shipping". I downloaded over 500MB of MP3's from them the other day. And no, I'm not an employee of Warp, I just think they have a brilliant and underexposed system going on.
Moral of ths story: Magnetbox's db is too US centric. *Always* check with the band and label first to see if they have their own shop. If it's an indie label or the band are just flogging their own stuff, you're sorted. The label or the artist gets all the cash, and the middleman gets sweet FA.
This is where 40GB at 7200rpm becomes 288,000GB, right? ;)
There's alot of talk in TFA about targetted ads, but how the hell will they know what to target? How can they tell, just by the way you play a game, what kind of stuff you're interested in plonking down hard cash for?
The only way I can think of is if they scan your internet bookmarks or web traffic.
Sorry, but the whole idea of in-game targetted ads not only fills me with dread, it also fills me with the need to edit my hosts file and reach for HijackThis. It just smacks of spyware.
Personally, I wouldn't mind paying for it. I already have about 9 copies of PowerDVD and WinDVD for windows that come bundled with every £20 DVD drive I buy (yes, even the OEM ones!).
Can I go to the website adn buy myself a tarball of this thing? No.
Does the Linux build of WinDVD come with out-of-the-box support for LIRC, ALSA and all the rest of it? What about the ability to ignore region encoding (assuming I have a region 0 drive)?
Until these proprietary players are a) up to the standard of the FOSS equivalents and b) actually available, no-one will use them.
Wow, computer science as a game...
"d00d! j00 gt 2 chk out dis C++ map!"
"WTF?!OLOLLOLLO!"
"LOL, my infnit l00pz pwn j00!"
"STFU, my 20 GOTO 10 will pwn all you campfags!"
"LOL, eat my PERL BFG"
*O'Reilly was fragged by L@rryW@ll*
"Larry, u wallhack shitcock!"
"ROFL"
"d00d, this PHP has major lag"
"my cracked Zend compiler 0WNZ ur PHP, fagg1t!"
*Sanity has left the computer science universe*
I don't know about you, btu I'm using a cheap-as-hell budget nVidia card (lspci gives me 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000 AGP 8x] (rev a4)) which cost me £35 from the ludicrously overpriced UK chain store PC World (I was in a hurry).
MPEG2 playback from my PVR-250 streams use *zero* CPU. MPEG4 (XviD) playback uses about 2-3% CPU, according to top.
Conversely, MPEG playback on my windows box with a GF4 Ti4200 uses a boatload of processing power.
Now it'll be twice as worthless.
I've just benched my quad Opteron 850's running 64 bit fully-optimised Gentoo against a comparable Intel CPU, and the Opteron *smashes* the Intel.
I used a dual Pentium Pro 100MHz for comparison.
I took the latest CVS snapshot of CRAPbench and SPECrubbish. Both were compiled with GCC (3.4 for the Opterons, 1.25.12395a-alpha for the Intel) with 64 bit extensions. Surprisingly, the AMD chips scored nearly 3295869 Bogotrons more than the Intel machine!
Hoho, joke over. As the comments here and in the article point out, the "review" is based on the wrong methodology and shoddy execution - appallingly limited set of benchmarks, errors in makefiles, non-64bitness of GCC options, top-end server chip vs. medium-end desktop chip, the works. Anadtech used to be my premier visit for seemingly honest reviews, but this one is just utter garbage. Even more worryingly, it isn't even garbage that looks like it was produced by a bribe from Intel; it just looks like it was done by someone without much of a clue as to what the hell they're doing.
I'm a self confessed AMD fanboy, but anyone can tell that this review is, essentially, a crock of shit.
Anandtech have a review done on this. Comparing 32 vs. 64 (unoptimised binaries) on SuSE on an Athlon64. Short version: 64 bit kicks ass, especially for apps that are heavily CPU bound with as much as ~50% performance increase.
http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2114
Damn straight.
At the company I work for, we often have highly sensitive (legal) data that we're forever scared shitless of contaminating some other entirely different data. Hence the boss insisted we have an enourmously complicated login structure, so that fi you're working on case X, it's impossible to even be aare that case Y exists.
Then the boss insits I give him an account with root level access to all the work because he says it takes too long switching between accounts.
Entire point of this whole exersize? Nothing.
Anandtech did a comparison of 32 bit vs. 64 bit code (largely unoptimised I think, but I don't know how SuSE make their packages) using SuSE. 64 bit code had as much as a 50% performance increase as opposed to the same code compiled under 32 bit - you see the main advantage under heavily maths-dependent stuff, like media encoding.
http://anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=2127
I'm aware of the fact that VNC came looong before XP's incarnation of it... I was just commenting on the integration bit :)
As an aside, readin other peoples posts I guess it does make sense, I was just being small minded again!
...that good typing skills are directly proportional to intelligence:
FISRT POSPTS!11
(P.S. it's a joke, kids)
OK, well that's settled my qualms then. I haven't used GNOME for a while, and was still a n00b (but a tinker-junkie) when I decided to ditch it. I just thought that an integrated VNC app would be better served by an installable program rather than an inbuilt function that's going to be of fairly limited use to most people.
If it's easily pluggable, then no biggie.
OK, point taken :)
I still hope you can disable it though. As you probabaly gathered, I don't follow GNOME development much, as I moved to desktops I found more tinker-friendly, and popular opinion has discouraged me from taking the time to install and configure it much these days.
I'm still highly wary of the windows "bundle everything in as default and make it impossible to remove" effect.
I'm confused as to why VNC has been integrated. Most Linux users (and windows too...?), I would have thought, would be happier with X11.
I hope you can choose not to install the VNC server... it's of utterly no use to me, and seems to smack of copying XP's built in remote desktop functionality.
There are several good VNC client/server packages out there for Linux, if you really want to use it.
Cue lots of "me, too!"-ness and "new GNOME sucks!" luddite-ness.
I first started using Linux with MDK 8.2 Cooker, and decided I liked GNOME (1.4 IIRC) better, mainly due to the aceness of Sawfish, hands down the best WM I've ever used. It fixed so much of what I hated about the windows UI (although Nautilus was dog slow).
My next step was RH8 and then 9, with GNOME 2. Hated hated hated. ALl my beloved options seemed to have disappeared, and the WM had been replaced by some hideously oversimplified contraption callde Metacity. I understand that sawfish was unmaintained, but was it really neccesary to use such a brain damaged WM? The only improvements were a (much) faster nautilus and prettier widgets. Since then, I ditched GNOME as being too power-user-hostile.
Like a great many people here have already said, I'd love to be able to select an "advanced" GNOME with all my beloved setting and config tools - AFAICT, lots of the config options still exist (tear-off menus!), they're just hidden deeply in the mass of confusion that is gconf.
I think until GNOME lets the more confident/reckless users get out of the incessant hand-holding GNOME seems to foist upon me in it's last few iterations, Ishall steer well clear of it. It might just be I'm not their target audience, but I always thought that less choice was always a bad thing. The choice doesn't even need to be displayed to the average user, hence why so many people are clamouring for an "advanced" option.
It's a sign that the new Apple iNtrigue will be released shortly. It's the iPod Mini combined with a mobile phone and the Spanish Inquisition.
I bet you didn't expect that!
Big brother... watching nubile young sist^H^H^H^Hwomen...
;)
There's a joke in there somewhere
I threw myself a fairly cheap but high capacity file server together for a coupla of thou (£). Tyan dual Athlon MP board to get me some PCI-X slots, a 3ware 8 port SAAT RAID card, a giganic and six hard drives all in a nice 4U from Antec. It's only got 500GB of space in it, btu I'm only using 6 of the 8 ports, and only one of the RAID1 arrays has 250GB drives in it.
Hard drives are much cheaper now that when I got mine, and the Antec I use has space for quite a few hard drives (9 IIRC) - if you bought a case that was mroe designed for stacks of hard drives (this is just a generic file server) then you'd be laughing.
That said, the Apple XServe looks very tempting for the price.
I can understand your frustration re: the socket A model: Athlon XP's are currently cheap as chips (ha ha) and very good performers for the price, whereas the socket A Sempron is a bit of a disappointment.
:)
But the real meat of the Sempron line is getting a dirt cheap socket 754 CPU out there, to help speed up the transition to the new desktop socket. The 754 Semprons are very good performers for the price (since the Sempron is, IIRC, a redesign of the A64 core you'd expect it to work better on a socket 754 board) *and* come in much cheaper than the current breed of A64's.
Good news for the OEM's (cheap chips to flog to other people with more money than sense) and good for us, cos it'll mean cheaper A64 motherboards
Damn straight. When I watched TV "normally", the extra-loud volume just made me jump for the mute button (especially on Channel 4).
Now I watch all my TV through my MythTV box, which has inbuilt ad-detection and skipping, although it isn't highly reliable outside of the US AFAICT. I wish they'd introduce another detection method to incorporate volume increase (at the moment, it can detect scene changes, blank frames and channel logos).
Much like pop-ups, trying hard to make crappy garish adverts intrude upon us will eventually just make people go that extra length to circumvent them.
Whichever comes first.
;)
Be sure to check the small print though. A great many companies have a cryptically worded disclaimer which says they reserve the right to assasinate you if they're going through a bad patch
make menuconfig?!
Holy shit! We've been using make config up until now, and it was taking us ages to figure out what all those scrappy little options were! This is gonna make my lawsuits SO much easier! Thank you!
Yours, Darl