And in addition to what you've said, there is no feeling as good as walking into a shop, whether a new or used CD one, and finding an elusive CD or one that you've wanted for a while at a bargain price.
My view on people who say CDs are overpriced is that they probably are not buying the right music. When you've got a reasonable hifi (not necessarily hugely expensive) there is nothing quite like turning up a really good piece of music up really loud on it. And if you research your music really well, you only buy CDs that you know you'll enjoy - therefore they're great value for money, especially after hunting down the best prices.
Yep, maybe it's old fashioned now, but like you, I need sleeve notes, a shiny disc and a plastic case to put them in.
To me, music downloads have to be free and I will never pay to download music as the only reason I do it in the first place is to preview an album before I intend buying it - if I like it, I buy the CD and if I don't, I delete it because it's not even worth the hard disk space.
This is just another example of the EU trying to limit American companies so that they can force their own homegrown (and invariably inferior) products on their member states.
So what *does* America actually produce over and above what Europe produces? The biggest company in the world, Walmart, is American and a major importer from China and the third world, no different to we European states.
It's a real shame the EU doesn't fund innovation instead of lame copies, then it wouldn't have to spend so much money trying to keep outside products down.
Again, copies of what? What does the US produce that the EC copies?
This is why there are so many crappy films with half the crew being French, a quarter German and a quarter from Luxembourg.
And if you look carefully, a lot of the blockbusting reasonably good movies are not being filmed in the US any more - The Bourne Supremacy/Identity were both filmed in Eastern Europe mostly. That makes you a hypocrite.
The EU started out as a common market, to make trade easier between European countries. Now it's turned into an anti-America machine. Now everybody loses.
Wrong. As the EU solidifies it becomes a *BIGGER* single market than the US and therefore cannot be pushed aroud so much.
This specific corporation is funded by an obligatory (to UK TV-owning citizens) annual license fee that keeps the BBC's TV and radio programming totally advert free - incidentally I wholeheartedly support the license fee for this single reason.
But that does mean that since I help to fund the BBC through a "tax" (since I *MUST* pay the license fee as a TV owner), then I have every right to offer an opinion on how that money should be spent.
So, OSS fan boi's, enough of the "dont use WMV" - what SHOULD they use? And things without come form of control dont count:)
They should use nothing.
That's because as a British citizen, I pay a yearly license fee that goes towards the funding of the BBC to make TV and radio programming - something I whole-heartedly support if it keeps the BBC advert free.
Therefore, I've aleady "bought" those programs once and should therefore be free to use them as I see fit - and in an unrestricted fashion since, as a license fee payer, I'm also primarily a Linux user.
Incidentally, I happily buy BBC DVDs and video/hard-disk recorders have not killed DVD sales so far.
You had a break, but you wasted it commenting (at length) on a story that you seem to be actively disinterested in.
He's a Slashdot reader. He feels this piece of news is not important enough to be posted compared to other more important stuff. That's his comment. What's the problem?
You Apple fanbois need to loosen up a little and take the "I don't like what you say but I defend your right to say it" attitude a bit more.
The majority of people consider Apple users a bunch of elitist snobs and you've done nothing to change my viewpoint on that.
...as this can only explain the popularity of mobile phones & inkjet printers; both are a total 100% rip-off.
Inkjet ink works out to be more expensive, by volume, than the most expensive Bollinger champagne which is why the money-grabbing manufacturers can virtually give the printers away but rip you off for cartridges. In some cases, it is actually cheaper to throw the printer away and buy a new one than it is to buy replacement cartridges - how *GREAT* is that for our environment.
Grow up, people! Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost than what you can do on a home inkjet. Then invest in a cheap laser printer to just print letters and documents when you need to.
And the sooner VoIP phones and wireless access kicks out the price-fixing cellular phone providers, the better...
Google provides me with a number of services like Gmail, web search, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. All of these are very useful and free-of-charge but if I had to do without them I could find alternatives relatively easily.
Microsoft provides me with an OS that's a good gaming platform and an office package. But I'm more Linux user these days anyhow, OpenOffice does all I ever need an office suite to do so I could, at a (small) push, live without Microsoft as well.
However, most people don't bother exploring alternatives and therefore losing MS would be worse for them than losing Google. Therefore, for them, it's MS's competition throttling that's the bigger issue.
I can't be objective about Mac OS X - I've never used it because I've never had a need to and I doubt that I ever will.
But I think you're mistaken if you believe that people who choose to migrate from Windows are flocking to Macs. The fact is that if you're a Windows user with a PC, running Mac OS X entails buying a new piece of hardware that is probably more expensive than the PC you already have. Here in the UK, I've been a techie in the I.T/telecoms/security arena for some 20+ years now and I can count the number of people I've seen using Macs, or people I know have them, on one hand - that's absolutely no lie.
If there is a "migration" away from Windows, and if there is I don't think it's a particularly big one, then it's by people dual-booting Ubuntu or some other Linux distro. I myself support and secure Linux (and UNIX) based application servers, I use Linux for about 90% of my overall computing time but even I cannot do without Windows XP and MS Office some of the time. Still, it doesn't bother me - a piece of software is a tool to get a job done and if you don't use the correct tool for a job, then you're a fool.
I've not played it personally but some friends of mine have. One of them has particular fun creating super heroes (or heroines) with suggestive names that manage to avoid the City Of Heroes name filtering system.
His favourite heroine so far dressed in a green costume covered in white spatters - she's called "Boo Khaki".
I've not actually tried it but I suspect you could also do something if you used your own local caching DNS server - give that to your Windows machines for DNS and then just put some dummy entries on that.
Any specific service on the Internet is uniquely identified by an IP address and a port number that's in the range of 0-65535.
Using (P)NAT, it's possible to map each one of those (potentially) 65536 services on a single real IP address to a unique machine on a reserved IP address (in the 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 192.168.x.x ranges). Since the reserved addresses are not routable, they can be used an infinite number of times provided that they connect to the Internet via a single real IP address.
The point I'm trying to make is that only an Internet server needs to be identified by a unique port on a unique IP address, everyone else can get away with using NAT-ed reserved IP addresses. Therefore, the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space really isn't that critical in the short term.
If you're that worried about software you run "phoning home" or collecting stats on you, then get hold of one of the myriad of free network sniffers (like Ethereal or Wireshark) and spend some time learning how to interpret what it sniffs.
Once you identify any weird or unwanted network connections, then it's relatively simple to stop them with a firewall rule or two, or to put a dummy entry in a hosts file somewhere.
Re:Stop with the Johnny Depp nonsense
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
So, grab the warez version, check out all the tracks, and if you like it, buy it?
Yep, exactly right. And if the album is good, I buy it and rip it myself, if it's bad I delete the downloads.
Re:Stop with the Johnny Depp nonsense
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
How exactly does someone become "sure that it is worth the money"?
Internet radio and review sites for starters. Yes, I even download MP3s "illegally" from Usenet or BitTorrent if I have to - but the end result is that I *either* buy the CD because I like it (and my personal CD collection is over 900 CDs) or I delete the downloads because they're not even worth the disk space.
how do you decide that a DVD is "worth the money" through some legal means?
Personally I'm more of a TV comedy fan than I am anything else - so most of the DVDs I buy are boxed sets UK comedy TV series because I tend to watch those over and over again, and I pretty much know the quality and content before I buy. For movie DVDs, I just read reviews a lot - the good thing about being in the UK is that any film that gets released in the cinemas or on DVD here will have already been released in the US so there are plenty of reviews to read.
According to you, nobody should ever buy another DVD again. That certainly makes things simple, even if you are hypocritical enough to not follow your own advice.
So far, I've been able to rip (for my personal use) any DVD from my own personal collection with no problem - therefore my fair use is unaffected to existing DRM on DVDs does not bother me. If I did buy a DVD I could not rip, then I would take it back to the vendor I bought it from and ask for a refund - I am more of a music than movie fan and I have already done this on three occasions with protected CDs which would not play on my PC or car hifi, I have no problem standing there and demanding to speak to a store manager if that's what's needed to get my money back.
If your webcam isn't supported under Linux, stop whining, spend some of the money you saved by not buying Windows, and buy a supported webcam.
Your attitude sucks, my friend.
Sure, we more experienced Linux users know that we have to choose hardware very carefully sometimes in order to ensure that it's supported by Linux. But the poster has asked a perfectly reasonable question and you say that he's whining - this is hardly a good way of encouraging people to try Linux out, is it?
Stop with the Johnny Depp nonsense
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Okay, so we're about to see the launch of the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie but let's have less of this "all pirates are likeable Robin Hood-type rogues" nonsense, can we?
I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing people justify their *ILLEGAL* copying activities which achieve *ABSOLUTELY NOTHING* for me as an honest consumer of music and movies.
For starters, the movie and music companies are nasty and greedy multi-national conglomerates who would like nothing more than to force every consumer into a rental model for their media so that they have a nice, regular revenue stream for basically doing nothing. All that piracy does here is to give those same companies the justification they need to do what they were going to do anyway - it just makes it easier for them to do it because piracy turns it into a political agenda meaning that governments can get involved in pushing DRM and the like through.
Secondly, there is the issue of the poor quality of movies and music in general today. Far too much of the populace believes the hype and marketing lies surrounding the release of new albums and movies which invariably leads to them being duped and paying out good money for rubbish. Consequently, people are wary of paying money for CDs, DVDs and cinema tickets so they justify piracy as a defence against not being ripped off. This, of course, leads the media companies to churn out the same rubbish but with tighter restrictions for all users, whether they are honest or not.
The idea that CDs and DVDs are overpriced is utter drivel, quite frankly. If you spend time looking for good music and movies at good prices, you become a discerning consumer who rapidly becomes pretty satisified with the quality of the albums and films that you buy. If an album has just one or two good songs on it then you don't buy it, it's that simple - and you never buy a CD or DVD until you are sure that it is worth the money.
Unfortunately, too many consumers have become far too liberal with their "disposable income". They're constantly buying new stuff, maybe to impress peers, without thinking about it, they end up getting ripped off and to ofset their anger at being ripped off, they go off again and treat themselves to more overhyped rubbish...
The solution is simple - if it's not worth the money, don't buy it. If it has DRM on it, don't buy it.
I have several issues with what you are suggesting:
1. Most people use a POP email client to retrieve their email to their local PC. Although the POP protocol does allow for leaving messages on the mail server and/or downloading selected messages, this level of control is not accessible from most clients and I, personally, would want to be able to control whether or not I downloaded an email with a 10MB attachment - especially if I was away from home on a slow link.
2. 10MB attachment sizes just makes lazy people even more lazy. There is no excuse for not compressing photo images to smaller resolution JPEGs before sending them and if you really *HAVE* to use the email system to send large files, then there's always the option of creating a self-extracting archive that's split into, say, 2MB chunks and then sent across multiple emails.
With the quality of most of the overhyped, trash sequels that Hollywood churns out these days, I can barely sit through a first watching of some movies, let alone DVD reruns.
The general idea is that the students will end up paying those taxes back, plus a bit more, so you're doing yourself a favor by paying their education.
And that's absolutely fine provided that they all become doctors, scientists, teachers and other useful careers that allow them to put something back into society. We don't need more lawyers, media studies graduates or graphic design people - if private enterprise wants those, then it should fund them themselves through on the job training and experience.
But, for experiment's sake, let's stop funding education and see what happens.
Yes, and in your world "2 + 2" makes "57" does it? Where did I even allude to the idea of stopping the funding of education??? What I said was stop funding useless degrees - hell, even give students discounts on tuition fees if they do degrees in subjects where there are skill shortages and which can benefit society as a whole.
Society pays more for music and movies than they do for education.
Where did you get *that* idea from???
Sure, there is some public subsidy of "The Arts" but most of the music/movie money comes from people buying CDs and DVDs, going to the cinema and going to concerts - plus all the additional merchandising.
To cement their position, it seems that the MPAA/RIAA thinks they can get away with putting people in jail and taking their houses and life savings.
I am in 100% disagreement with what the MPAA/RIAA does - but we're talking about students here, who already leech off society...
With all respect, while students are having an easy time at university, they are not in employment and therefore not paying taxes. Therefore, as a tax payer, I am subsidising them.
Slashdot Mirror
And in addition to what you've said, there is no feeling as good as walking into a shop, whether a new or used CD one, and finding an elusive CD or one that you've wanted for a while at a bargain price.
My view on people who say CDs are overpriced is that they probably are not buying the right music. When you've got a reasonable hifi (not necessarily hugely expensive) there is nothing quite like turning up a really good piece of music up really loud on it. And if you research your music really well, you only buy CDs that you know you'll enjoy - therefore they're great value for money, especially after hunting down the best prices.
Yep, maybe it's old fashioned now, but like you, I need sleeve notes, a shiny disc and a plastic case to put them in.
To me, music downloads have to be free and I will never pay to download music as the only reason I do it in the first place is to preview an album before I intend buying it - if I like it, I buy the CD and if I don't, I delete it because it's not even worth the hard disk space.
This is just another example of the EU trying to limit American companies so that they can force their own homegrown (and invariably inferior) products on their member states.
So what *does* America actually produce over and above what Europe produces? The biggest company in the world, Walmart, is American and a major importer from China and the third world, no different to we European states.
It's a real shame the EU doesn't fund innovation instead of lame copies, then it wouldn't have to spend so much money trying to keep outside products down.
Again, copies of what? What does the US produce that the EC copies?
This is why there are so many crappy films with half the crew being French, a quarter German and a quarter from Luxembourg.
And if you look carefully, a lot of the blockbusting reasonably good movies are not being filmed in the US any more - The Bourne Supremacy/Identity were both filmed in Eastern Europe mostly. That makes you a hypocrite.
The EU started out as a common market, to make trade easier between European countries. Now it's turned into an anti-America machine. Now everybody loses.
Wrong. As the EU solidifies it becomes a *BIGGER* single market than the US and therefore cannot be pushed aroud so much.
This specific corporation is funded by an obligatory (to UK TV-owning citizens) annual license fee that keeps the BBC's TV and radio programming totally advert free - incidentally I wholeheartedly support the license fee for this single reason.
But that does mean that since I help to fund the BBC through a "tax" (since I *MUST* pay the license fee as a TV owner), then I have every right to offer an opinion on how that money should be spent.
They should use nothing.
That's because as a British citizen, I pay a yearly license fee that goes towards the funding of the BBC to make TV and radio programming - something I whole-heartedly support if it keeps the BBC advert free.
Therefore, I've aleady "bought" those programs once and should therefore be free to use them as I see fit - and in an unrestricted fashion since, as a license fee payer, I'm also primarily a Linux user.
Incidentally, I happily buy BBC DVDs and video/hard-disk recorders have not killed DVD sales so far.
He's a Slashdot reader. He feels this piece of news is not important enough to be posted compared to other more important stuff. That's his comment. What's the problem?
You Apple fanbois need to loosen up a little and take the "I don't like what you say but I defend your right to say it" attitude a bit more.
The majority of people consider Apple users a bunch of elitist snobs and you've done nothing to change my viewpoint on that.
Inkjet ink works out to be more expensive, by volume, than the most expensive Bollinger champagne which is why the money-grabbing manufacturers can virtually give the printers away but rip you off for cartridges. In some cases, it is actually cheaper to throw the printer away and buy a new one than it is to buy replacement cartridges - how *GREAT* is that for our environment.
Grow up, people! Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost than what you can do on a home inkjet. Then invest in a cheap laser printer to just print letters and documents when you need to.
And the sooner VoIP phones and wireless access kicks out the price-fixing cellular phone providers, the better...
s/technically sophisticated/gullible/g
Microsoft provides me with an OS that's a good gaming platform and an office package. But I'm more Linux user these days anyhow, OpenOffice does all I ever need an office suite to do so I could, at a (small) push, live without Microsoft as well.
However, most people don't bother exploring alternatives and therefore losing MS would be worse for them than losing Google. Therefore, for them, it's MS's competition throttling that's the bigger issue.
But I think you're mistaken if you believe that people who choose to migrate from Windows are flocking to Macs. The fact is that if you're a Windows user with a PC, running Mac OS X entails buying a new piece of hardware that is probably more expensive than the PC you already have. Here in the UK, I've been a techie in the I.T/telecoms/security arena for some 20+ years now and I can count the number of people I've seen using Macs, or people I know have them, on one hand - that's absolutely no lie.
If there is a "migration" away from Windows, and if there is I don't think it's a particularly big one, then it's by people dual-booting Ubuntu or some other Linux distro. I myself support and secure Linux (and UNIX) based application servers, I use Linux for about 90% of my overall computing time but even I cannot do without Windows XP and MS Office some of the time. Still, it doesn't bother me - a piece of software is a tool to get a job done and if you don't use the correct tool for a job, then you're a fool.
Hell, just nuke the site from orbit!
His favourite heroine so far dressed in a green costume covered in white spatters - she's called "Boo Khaki".
I've not actually tried it but I suspect you could also do something if you used your own local caching DNS server - give that to your Windows machines for DNS and then just put some dummy entries on that.
Using (P)NAT, it's possible to map each one of those (potentially) 65536 services on a single real IP address to a unique machine on a reserved IP address (in the 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 192.168.x.x ranges). Since the reserved addresses are not routable, they can be used an infinite number of times provided that they connect to the Internet via a single real IP address.
The point I'm trying to make is that only an Internet server needs to be identified by a unique port on a unique IP address, everyone else can get away with using NAT-ed reserved IP addresses. Therefore, the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space really isn't that critical in the short term.
Perhaps Peter should spend a bit more time debugging his code rather than sharing his "wisdom" with us.
Once you identify any weird or unwanted network connections, then it's relatively simple to stop them with a firewall rule or two, or to put a dummy entry in a hosts file somewhere.
Yep, exactly right. And if the album is good, I buy it and rip it myself, if it's bad I delete the downloads.
Internet radio and review sites for starters. Yes, I even download MP3s "illegally" from Usenet or BitTorrent if I have to - but the end result is that I *either* buy the CD because I like it (and my personal CD collection is over 900 CDs) or I delete the downloads because they're not even worth the disk space.
how do you decide that a DVD is "worth the money" through some legal means?
Personally I'm more of a TV comedy fan than I am anything else - so most of the DVDs I buy are boxed sets UK comedy TV series because I tend to watch those over and over again, and I pretty much know the quality and content before I buy. For movie DVDs, I just read reviews a lot - the good thing about being in the UK is that any film that gets released in the cinemas or on DVD here will have already been released in the US so there are plenty of reviews to read.
According to you, nobody should ever buy another DVD again. That certainly makes things simple, even if you are hypocritical enough to not follow your own advice.
So far, I've been able to rip (for my personal use) any DVD from my own personal collection with no problem - therefore my fair use is unaffected to existing DRM on DVDs does not bother me. If I did buy a DVD I could not rip, then I would take it back to the vendor I bought it from and ask for a refund - I am more of a music than movie fan and I have already done this on three occasions with protected CDs which would not play on my PC or car hifi, I have no problem standing there and demanding to speak to a store manager if that's what's needed to get my money back.
I see no hypocrisy here.
Your attitude sucks, my friend.
Sure, we more experienced Linux users know that we have to choose hardware very carefully sometimes in order to ensure that it's supported by Linux. But the poster has asked a perfectly reasonable question and you say that he's whining - this is hardly a good way of encouraging people to try Linux out, is it?
I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing people justify their *ILLEGAL* copying activities which achieve *ABSOLUTELY NOTHING* for me as an honest consumer of music and movies.
For starters, the movie and music companies are nasty and greedy multi-national conglomerates who would like nothing more than to force every consumer into a rental model for their media so that they have a nice, regular revenue stream for basically doing nothing. All that piracy does here is to give those same companies the justification they need to do what they were going to do anyway - it just makes it easier for them to do it because piracy turns it into a political agenda meaning that governments can get involved in pushing DRM and the like through.
Secondly, there is the issue of the poor quality of movies and music in general today. Far too much of the populace believes the hype and marketing lies surrounding the release of new albums and movies which invariably leads to them being duped and paying out good money for rubbish. Consequently, people are wary of paying money for CDs, DVDs and cinema tickets so they justify piracy as a defence against not being ripped off. This, of course, leads the media companies to churn out the same rubbish but with tighter restrictions for all users, whether they are honest or not.
The idea that CDs and DVDs are overpriced is utter drivel, quite frankly. If you spend time looking for good music and movies at good prices, you become a discerning consumer who rapidly becomes pretty satisified with the quality of the albums and films that you buy. If an album has just one or two good songs on it then you don't buy it, it's that simple - and you never buy a CD or DVD until you are sure that it is worth the money.
Unfortunately, too many consumers have become far too liberal with their "disposable income". They're constantly buying new stuff, maybe to impress peers, without thinking about it, they end up getting ripped off and to ofset their anger at being ripped off, they go off again and treat themselves to more overhyped rubbish...
The solution is simple - if it's not worth the money, don't buy it. If it has DRM on it, don't buy it.
1. Most people use a POP email client to retrieve their email to their local PC. Although the POP protocol does allow for leaving messages on the mail server and/or downloading selected messages, this level of control is not accessible from most clients and I, personally, would want to be able to control whether or not I downloaded an email with a 10MB attachment - especially if I was away from home on a slow link.
2. 10MB attachment sizes just makes lazy people even more lazy. There is no excuse for not compressing photo images to smaller resolution JPEGs before sending them and if you really *HAVE* to use the email system to send large files, then there's always the option of creating a self-extracting archive that's split into, say, 2MB chunks and then sent across multiple emails.
When does your parole come up?
With the quality of most of the overhyped, trash sequels that Hollywood churns out these days, I can barely sit through a first watching of some movies, let alone DVD reruns.
And that's absolutely fine provided that they all become doctors, scientists, teachers and other useful careers that allow them to put something back into society. We don't need more lawyers, media studies graduates or graphic design people - if private enterprise wants those, then it should fund them themselves through on the job training and experience. But, for experiment's sake, let's stop funding education and see what happens.
Yes, and in your world "2 + 2" makes "57" does it? Where did I even allude to the idea of stopping the funding of education??? What I said was stop funding useless degrees - hell, even give students discounts on tuition fees if they do degrees in subjects where there are skill shortages and which can benefit society as a whole.
Where did you get *that* idea from???
Sure, there is some public subsidy of "The Arts" but most of the music/movie money comes from people buying CDs and DVDs, going to the cinema and going to concerts - plus all the additional merchandising.
To cement their position, it seems that the MPAA/RIAA thinks they can get away with putting people in jail and taking their houses and life savings.
I am in 100% disagreement with what the MPAA/RIAA does - but we're talking about students here, who already leech off society...
With all respect, while students are having an easy time at university, they are not in employment and therefore not paying taxes. Therefore, as a tax payer, I am subsidising them.