I just don't believe we need that many "Media Studies" graduates, lawyers or people doing "Klingon Language" degrees.
Over here in the UK, I was destined to go to university until there was a family tragedy and I went straight out to work instead. I'm 45 years old now, a well paid IT & security consultant and totally convinced that work experience was far more beneficial to me than a degree.
The graduates I see coming into this field these days only *THINK* they know everything - in reality, they know very little...
It really would be nice to see a new Microsoft OS run fast and stable on the platforms of the day, rather than having to wait several years down the line when PCs have got faster, Service Packs have been applied & everyone has learnt all the tweaks & optimisations for the OS. For example, Windows XP came out in 2001 but it's only been in the time since SP2 that it's become (in my opinion at least) a stable and usable OS (after getting rid of the default kindergarten XP GUI anyway).
When are Microsoft going to get it into their *THICK MONEY-GRABBING SKULLS* that one operating system topology cannot be all things to all men. This is one of the major reasons why Linux is giving them an ass-kicking at the moment (and long may it continue to do so) - you take a single kernel that can itself be configured in a myriad of monolithic or modular ways, then throw on just about any combination of GNU tools that you like, meaning you can embed it into a mobile phone or put it on a big Beowulf (hurrah!) server cluster. You can run a GUI or not run a GUI and if you run a GUI, you can run a big fat one like KDE or a small thin one like FVWM - whatever you like.
This decision about supporting 64-bit only in future is *PURELY* about financial gain, nothing more. There will still be the endless layered bloat we are accustomed to that still ultimately drives your PC to a crawl, with (no doubt) the added instabilities of 32-bit software emulation as a poor attempt at providing backwards compatibility.
In the meantime you can take the 10% you are saving (and spending by replacing 3 times as often)
Sorry, you've lost me. Where did these numbers come from?
I'll sit here, smug as can be with my happy Macbook
I'm smug and happy with my HP laptop that dual boots Windows XP and Linux. I've never owned an Apple product, never found any justification or need to go and buy one, probably never will...
with apeloads of iTunes tracks on it,
My HP laptop has "apeloads" of MP3s on it, ripped from my own personal CD collection, all of which I can also quite happily play in nice high fidelity on my mid-range hifi system that I could afford to buy because I didn't buy any Apple products.
and a Nano leashed to my side happily living in utter bliss of the whole mess working together.
My cheapo MP3 player plugs straight into the USB port, automounts under Linux or Windows, and I just drag and drop files to it. What could be simpler?
Which is completely, but not entirely, unlike my experience with Windows, Linux, etc.
Bad Windows driver? Poorly configured Linux kernel? I'm no Microsoft lover by any stretch of the imagination but XP runs pretty smoothly once you ditch the kindergarten GUI on it - and Linux pays off admirably once you invest time and effort learning it properly. I get few problems with either these days...
I'm not a blind Apple fanboy. I'm a hard won Apple fanboy.
Read my sig - part of the cost of owning any Apple product is the "fashion statement" of being in an elitist club. Me, I just want as cheap stuff as possible that does as good a job as possible.
For starters, if you are showing up you've already got the iPod, the iTunes, etc.
I have a 2GB unbranded MP3 player that cost me about £20 UKP (=$35). It carries as much music/audio books as I need at any one moment in time and if it breaks or I lose it (quite likely for anything that's carried about in a pocket), it's no big issue and I can go buy another one from the small change in my pocket. Plus the player contains tracks I've ripped from CDs myself, not downloads that I've paid for and possibly have no backups of.
The iTunes store has a massive catalogue of music, so much so that I have yet to find something I wanted that it doesn't have.
iTunes started with a much smaller catalogue of music than what it has now. And by implication, in an un-DRMed music format like MP3, it will be much quicker to make (presumably legally licensed) MP3s for sale - tenuous, but no more so than your justifications!
Searching for Kraftwerk in Amazon... well I'll get kitchen appliances.
Sorry, but an absolutely *laughable* justification for blatant Apple fanboism. Whilst this may indicate the typical techincal abilities of the average Apple user, most other people are probably more adept at using product searches to filter out "kitchen appliances" when searching for "Kraftwerk".
The prices are also, noticeably, absent from the announcement.
Sure, but by virtue of the tracks being sold in an un-DRMed format, sellable by anyone and playable on any player, does this not create a prime environment for competition and price-cutting? Rather than "one" iTunes selling "one" DRM format "one" iPod?
Just admit your blindness due to Apple fanboism and have done with it...
Except for perhaps some 1980s Michael Jackson albums, the portion of an album that has been on top-200 radio typically costs about 4 USD at iTunes Store, if that.
With all respect, you've somewhat ungracefully dodged the original comment. He/she is saying that a CD costs $11, you're saying that the "top-200 radio" portion (i.e. the 3 or 4 singles from it) cost $4. On a 10-track average album, that works out at about the same price, minus the fact that you've no shiny disk, case or sleeve notes doing it your way.
My music store is Lev's Pawn Shop. If I buy two CDs there and one at Pest Buy, then yes, I am averaging less than 11 USD per CD.
I do agree with you on this point, however. Whilst I'm in the UK and listen mainly to rock and blues music from the late 60s to the present day, I can generally find classic albums at somewhere between £5-£6 ($9-$11 approx.) if I look hard enough - eBay and Amazon Marketplace are always worth looking at for bargains.
"If you have CDs with only 1 or 2 good songs on them, then you are not listening to the right sort of music."
Provided that you avoid the rip-off merchant high street (UK) stores like HMV and Virgin completely and buy your CDs online, on eBay or from second-hand stores, you can avoid paying premium prices for them.
Additionally, there are more than enough places on the Internet where you can download (samples of) MP3 tracks free of charge (legally or illegally) so that you can hear most (if not all of) an album before you decide to buy it - sure, you need to hunt sometimes but invariably you can find it.
I own over 900 original CDs and consider each one of them good value for money. Yes, not all of them are "classic" albums filled with 100% excellent tracks, but when I've only paid a couple of pounds for some of them, they still represent good value for money.
If you're the sort of person who can't sit through an entire CD then music downloads are probably better for you - to get good value from CDs, you need to spend time "trying before buying" and looking for the cheapest prices.
Since the launch of Vista in November, I've actually worked on *one* PC (a new laptop) that had Vista on it and know of one other person (an MS-focused developer at my workplace) who is running it.
As the long-standing local PC-repair geek for friends and family, compare this to 4 months after the launch of XP just about everyone who came to me with a PC problem was running XP.
I'm in a techie environment at work and (apart from the MS developer), none of my colleagues are running it.
In the local PC stores, copies of Vista are being sold at discount and the shelves always seem full of Vista boxes.
It doesn't "smell" like a success from this end...
I really have no great interest in these statistics and if Vista usage exceeds Linux usage then so be it, what do I care?
But how can anyone estimate the number of Linux desktop users? As a case in point, at home I have three cased PCs and two laptops. One of the cased PCs is a Linux server, one of the laptops runs only Linux, the other three dual-boot Windows XP and Linux. I have three OEM Windows XP licenses so someone somewhere knows that I account for three XP installations.
However, I run five instances of Gentoo Linux, all originally installed from a single installation CD that I downloaded from the Gentoo web site. I have no purchased/licensed Linux copies from, say, Red Hat or SuSE/Novell and since I use Firefox as my main browser on all the machines, find it difficult to believe that web server stats might indicate what OS I might be using at any moment in time.
Since I assume there are a lot of Linux users like me using downloaded installation CDs, whether it's Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc, how can the number of Linux users be reliably estimated in the first place? Admittedly, I work in a techie environment but most of the people I work with are at least giving Linux a try as a dual boot or on an older PC even if they're not running as a main OS.
I don't mind estimated numbers, provided there is some basis on which those estimates were made - but in this case it seems to be just a number plucked from the air.
With all respect, you need to have a better understanding of SAMBA than you probably do currently to understand what it really is capable of.
For example, one of the great benefits it brings in my work and home environments is that by creating network shares for Windows clients, the UNIX/Linux SAMBA server has the ability to access Windows files with shell scripts and OS commands that allow some very powerful automated manipulation of those files - not something that is easy to do in Windows alone.
I also dislike your use of the word "better" in this instance. Sure, SSH(FS) uses encryption and would therefore be deemed more secure than SAMBA. But security is as much about where a tool is deployed as well as how the tool itself functions - if SAMBA is used in a secure environment behind a firewall or two, the risks of unencrypted connections are mitigated to a great degree.
Sure, I'd never recommend using FTP and Telnet servers on the Internet but just about every computer in the world has an FTP and Telnet client on it and, in a secure controlled environment, these can still be useful tools to have.
There's not much that can beat the speed and stability of Solaris on decent Sun hardware, especially when it comes to mail servers, DNS and the call-centre application servers that I support at my place of work.
But I really cannot think of any reason why I would install Solaris instead of Linux on any x86-based hardware that I use for normal day-to-day work. Not only do I know Linux much better than Solaris, but the range of Linux hardware support is much greater. And dare I admit it but whilst I can work in and script on the Korn shell, I've been spoilt by BASH which comes as default on Linux.
Sun have a great OS in Solaris for running on their own hardware platforms and the combination can't be beaten for medium- to high-end servers in Internet, database and corporate environments. But it's a niche operating system now and has no need to copy Linux.
I run both Gentoo Linux and Windows XP on several PCs. Linux gives me a whole heap of nice free applications to play with and superb automation, XP gives me the ability to work in common document formats and to play games. Both OSes let me rip and burn CDs and DVDs, manipulate photos and graphics, etc. etc. Neither one fills all my needs but the pair together have about all of my needs covered.
So if someone defines a "desktop" as being a single machine that can cope with all the tasks a user requires, then in my case neither Linux or XP fulfill my needs 100%. However, at the same time, because I can embrace the best of both OSes, I am more productive and when I link the two together, more so - for example, using SAMBA to provide a network share to the XP machines but managing the files on that share (within Linux) using shell scripts. In other words, for me, the "whole" is "bigger than the sum of both parts".
I do not see what the big deal is with thin-client/networked desktops except that it gives already lazy people an even better excuse to divest the responsibility for their data onto someone else. Don't get me wrong, I use Google Mail for storing important documents on-line, I also collaborate with others using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I can guarantee that at any one moment in time, I have copies of all my online files held with me on a CD or USB flash disk also.
My data is my responsibility, end of story. If I lose important files, then it's my fault for not taking proper backups. I do not want to hand that responsibility to Microsoft or Red Hat because these are both corporations with shareholders whose prime concern is making money, not taking care of my data.
So if the "desktop" is about becoming less responsible then I'm not sure I want one anyway...
I've been in IT & Telecoms support for 20+ years now also, it's not always been enjoyable but at the moment I'm very happy doing what I am doing and have been for the past five years in my current company.
I've considered quitting my current job and working for myself only because I know that if I apply my techie skills in the right way, I can earn the same salary for working less hours - I don't "need" more money but would just like more recreational time due to having a second home in Spain.
Here in the UK, I believe there is a demand for IT support to peoples' homes, particularly when it comes to setting up and securing ADSL and home wireless networks - its more a question of how much people are prepared to pay for a home callout.
I'm also looking at offering VoIP deployments in Spain. With the amount of new building going on in Spain at the moment, mainly holiday homes, people don't necessarily want to pay monthly rentals for phone and ADSL lines, just to have a service when they're out here. I'm looking at using Asterisk PBX and wireless to meet those requirements.
People always need electricians, carpenters and plumbers - but with the way technology is at the moment, they also want Internet access and working PCs and do not get the support they need from ISPs and/or PC manufacturers; this is definitely something worth capitalising on; people will pay for good service and at least two on-call techies I know currently are inundated with work purely through word-of-mouth recommmendations.
So don't drop the skills you already have - keep them new and fresh, work for yourself but just work less.
If that's your belief then so be it. In which case it proves you've never been to a rugby match in your life and are therefore entirely unqualified to have so vocal an opinion on it.
Personally, I will *NEVER* hand over my hard-earned cash for a music download - give me a shiny disk, cover sleeve and a plastic case any day.
Music is a major passion in my life, I'm very discerning about the CDs I buy and always hunt for the best prices for any CD once I know it's worth buying. As a result, I consider CDs to be great value for money because I only buy the ones that are worth the money. People who consider CDs to be overpriced are simply not listening to the right music and/or not buying them in the right places.
However, leave me to enjoy my music my way (as you've already said) and I'm more than happy to fight for you having the pay-to-download option that you want.
Mod this guy up for accepting it takes all types to make a world and that *ALL* we true music lovers despise DRM completely.
I am glad that I'm not a football (= soccer) fan particularly - because if I was I would be feeling totally pissed off and ripped off by the Clubs, the English football league and Sky.
I have a friend who has been a big supporter of Reading (his home town) for years. This season, Reading got into the Premier Division for the first time and my friend put up with the extra cost that was added to a season ticket in order to see the big teams play at the Reading home games. I can't remember the cost of the season ticket for the year but I'm sure it's in excess of £1000.
After all this, match start times are constantly changed in order to fit in with the televising schedule of Sky, car parking near the football ground is an absolutely extortionate price, you can't take alcohol into the stadium and the football strips are changed yearly in order to ensure the fans pay high prices annually for football shirts.
If we didn't have such a namby-pamby government in England, the trouble-making thugs would be weeded out and stopped from going to any games meaning that fans who can behave sensibly and control their alcohol intake could go and enjoy a game over a beer - perhaps even more families would go to matches also.
In years of supporting rugby (aside from it being a better game anyway!), I have never seen trouble between fans (there is always good natured piss-taking but never anything more) and you can enjoy a game with a beer or two. Plus tickets for the games are reasonably priced also.
I admire the devotion of many football supporters to their team of choice, but for most of them they allow that devotion to cloud their judgement and completely overlook the fact that they are being totally ripped off by everyone involved in football.
The DRM in iTunes is barely "honor system" quality, everyone knows that, Apple even tells you explicitly how to get rid of it.
Any DRM is bad DRM - so please stop trying to intelligently justify what is blatant Apple fanboi-ism.
And if you're worried about security holes in software,
There's ONE hole in a CD, and that's the one that sits on the spindle.
then you better worry about Windows Media Player and Real's music players.
Non-Apple fanboi != Microsoft fanboi.
VLC Media Player, Mplayer, Xine, etc. etc., all of which play media in a pretty much cross-platform, uncomplicated and open fashion and none of which are allied to either Apple or MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Over here in the UK, I was destined to go to university until there was a family tragedy and I went straight out to work instead. I'm 45 years old now, a well paid IT & security consultant and totally convinced that work experience was far more beneficial to me than a degree.
The graduates I see coming into this field these days only *THINK* they know everything - in reality, they know very little...
Sssh! That word is the Microsoft equivalent of the "N" word, please take extreme care when using it.
Mention *anything* about the command line and Ballmer starts on the furniture...
Ahem! You missed the words "demonic", "hellspawn" and "bastard" between "the" and "child". Do take more care in future.
Students = loud mouthed arrogant bastards with their heads up their own asses WHO LEECH FROM MY TAXES!
When are Microsoft going to get it into their *THICK MONEY-GRABBING SKULLS* that one operating system topology cannot be all things to all men. This is one of the major reasons why Linux is giving them an ass-kicking at the moment (and long may it continue to do so) - you take a single kernel that can itself be configured in a myriad of monolithic or modular ways, then throw on just about any combination of GNU tools that you like, meaning you can embed it into a mobile phone or put it on a big Beowulf (hurrah!) server cluster. You can run a GUI or not run a GUI and if you run a GUI, you can run a big fat one like KDE or a small thin one like FVWM - whatever you like.
This decision about supporting 64-bit only in future is *PURELY* about financial gain, nothing more. There will still be the endless layered bloat we are accustomed to that still ultimately drives your PC to a crawl, with (no doubt) the added instabilities of 32-bit software emulation as a poor attempt at providing backwards compatibility.
Sorry, you've lost me. Where did these numbers come from?
I'll sit here, smug as can be with my happy Macbook
I'm smug and happy with my HP laptop that dual boots Windows XP and Linux. I've never owned an Apple product, never found any justification or need to go and buy one, probably never will...
with apeloads of iTunes tracks on it,
My HP laptop has "apeloads" of MP3s on it, ripped from my own personal CD collection, all of which I can also quite happily play in nice high fidelity on my mid-range hifi system that I could afford to buy because I didn't buy any Apple products.
and a Nano leashed to my side happily living in utter bliss of the whole mess working together.
My cheapo MP3 player plugs straight into the USB port, automounts under Linux or Windows, and I just drag and drop files to it. What could be simpler?
Which is completely, but not entirely, unlike my experience with Windows, Linux, etc.
Bad Windows driver? Poorly configured Linux kernel? I'm no Microsoft lover by any stretch of the imagination but XP runs pretty smoothly once you ditch the kindergarten GUI on it - and Linux pays off admirably once you invest time and effort learning it properly. I get few problems with either these days...
I'm not a blind Apple fanboy. I'm a hard won Apple fanboy.
Read my sig - part of the cost of owning any Apple product is the "fashion statement" of being in an elitist club. Me, I just want as cheap stuff as possible that does as good a job as possible.
I have a 2GB unbranded MP3 player that cost me about £20 UKP (=$35). It carries as much music/audio books as I need at any one moment in time and if it breaks or I lose it (quite likely for anything that's carried about in a pocket), it's no big issue and I can go buy another one from the small change in my pocket. Plus the player contains tracks I've ripped from CDs myself, not downloads that I've paid for and possibly have no backups of.
The iTunes store has a massive catalogue of music, so much so that I have yet to find something I wanted that it doesn't have.
iTunes started with a much smaller catalogue of music than what it has now. And by implication, in an un-DRMed music format like MP3, it will be much quicker to make (presumably legally licensed) MP3s for sale - tenuous, but no more so than your justifications!
Searching for Kraftwerk in Amazon... well I'll get kitchen appliances.
Sorry, but an absolutely *laughable* justification for blatant Apple fanboism. Whilst this may indicate the typical techincal abilities of the average Apple user, most other people are probably more adept at using product searches to filter out "kitchen appliances" when searching for "Kraftwerk".
The prices are also, noticeably, absent from the announcement.
Sure, but by virtue of the tracks being sold in an un-DRMed format, sellable by anyone and playable on any player, does this not create a prime environment for competition and price-cutting? Rather than "one" iTunes selling "one" DRM format "one" iPod?
Just admit your blindness due to Apple fanboism and have done with it...
With all respect, you've somewhat ungracefully dodged the original comment. He/she is saying that a CD costs $11, you're saying that the "top-200 radio" portion (i.e. the 3 or 4 singles from it) cost $4. On a 10-track average album, that works out at about the same price, minus the fact that you've no shiny disk, case or sleeve notes doing it your way.
My music store is Lev's Pawn Shop. If I buy two CDs there and one at Pest Buy, then yes, I am averaging less than 11 USD per CD.
I do agree with you on this point, however. Whilst I'm in the UK and listen mainly to rock and blues music from the late 60s to the present day, I can generally find classic albums at somewhere between £5-£6 ($9-$11 approx.) if I look hard enough - eBay and Amazon Marketplace are always worth looking at for bargains.
"If you have CDs with only 1 or 2 good songs on them, then you are not listening to the right sort of music."
Provided that you avoid the rip-off merchant high street (UK) stores like HMV and Virgin completely and buy your CDs online, on eBay or from second-hand stores, you can avoid paying premium prices for them.
Additionally, there are more than enough places on the Internet where you can download (samples of) MP3 tracks free of charge (legally or illegally) so that you can hear most (if not all of) an album before you decide to buy it - sure, you need to hunt sometimes but invariably you can find it.
I own over 900 original CDs and consider each one of them good value for money. Yes, not all of them are "classic" albums filled with 100% excellent tracks, but when I've only paid a couple of pounds for some of them, they still represent good value for money.
If you're the sort of person who can't sit through an entire CD then music downloads are probably better for you - to get good value from CDs, you need to spend time "trying before buying" and looking for the cheapest prices.
Good job they never originally called BITS the "Trusted Intelligent Transfer Service" then!
As the long-standing local PC-repair geek for friends and family, compare this to 4 months after the launch of XP just about everyone who came to me with a PC problem was running XP.
I'm in a techie environment at work and (apart from the MS developer), none of my colleagues are running it.
In the local PC stores, copies of Vista are being sold at discount and the shelves always seem full of Vista boxes.
It doesn't "smell" like a success from this end...
But how can anyone estimate the number of Linux desktop users? As a case in point, at home I have three cased PCs and two laptops. One of the cased PCs is a Linux server, one of the laptops runs only Linux, the other three dual-boot Windows XP and Linux. I have three OEM Windows XP licenses so someone somewhere knows that I account for three XP installations.
However, I run five instances of Gentoo Linux, all originally installed from a single installation CD that I downloaded from the Gentoo web site. I have no purchased/licensed Linux copies from, say, Red Hat or SuSE/Novell and since I use Firefox as my main browser on all the machines, find it difficult to believe that web server stats might indicate what OS I might be using at any moment in time.
Since I assume there are a lot of Linux users like me using downloaded installation CDs, whether it's Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc, how can the number of Linux users be reliably estimated in the first place? Admittedly, I work in a techie environment but most of the people I work with are at least giving Linux a try as a dual boot or on an older PC even if they're not running as a main OS.
I don't mind estimated numbers, provided there is some basis on which those estimates were made - but in this case it seems to be just a number plucked from the air.
For example, one of the great benefits it brings in my work and home environments is that by creating network shares for Windows clients, the UNIX/Linux SAMBA server has the ability to access Windows files with shell scripts and OS commands that allow some very powerful automated manipulation of those files - not something that is easy to do in Windows alone.
I also dislike your use of the word "better" in this instance. Sure, SSH(FS) uses encryption and would therefore be deemed more secure than SAMBA. But security is as much about where a tool is deployed as well as how the tool itself functions - if SAMBA is used in a secure environment behind a firewall or two, the risks of unencrypted connections are mitigated to a great degree.
Sure, I'd never recommend using FTP and Telnet servers on the Internet but just about every computer in the world has an FTP and Telnet client on it and, in a secure controlled environment, these can still be useful tools to have.
But I really cannot think of any reason why I would install Solaris instead of Linux on any x86-based hardware that I use for normal day-to-day work. Not only do I know Linux much better than Solaris, but the range of Linux hardware support is much greater. And dare I admit it but whilst I can work in and script on the Korn shell, I've been spoilt by BASH which comes as default on Linux.
Sun have a great OS in Solaris for running on their own hardware platforms and the combination can't be beaten for medium- to high-end servers in Internet, database and corporate environments. But it's a niche operating system now and has no need to copy Linux.
So if someone defines a "desktop" as being a single machine that can cope with all the tasks a user requires, then in my case neither Linux or XP fulfill my needs 100%. However, at the same time, because I can embrace the best of both OSes, I am more productive and when I link the two together, more so - for example, using SAMBA to provide a network share to the XP machines but managing the files on that share (within Linux) using shell scripts. In other words, for me, the "whole" is "bigger than the sum of both parts".
I do not see what the big deal is with thin-client/networked desktops except that it gives already lazy people an even better excuse to divest the responsibility for their data onto someone else. Don't get me wrong, I use Google Mail for storing important documents on-line, I also collaborate with others using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I can guarantee that at any one moment in time, I have copies of all my online files held with me on a CD or USB flash disk also.
My data is my responsibility, end of story. If I lose important files, then it's my fault for not taking proper backups. I do not want to hand that responsibility to Microsoft or Red Hat because these are both corporations with shareholders whose prime concern is making money, not taking care of my data.
So if the "desktop" is about becoming less responsible then I'm not sure I want one anyway...
I've considered quitting my current job and working for myself only because I know that if I apply my techie skills in the right way, I can earn the same salary for working less hours - I don't "need" more money but would just like more recreational time due to having a second home in Spain.
Here in the UK, I believe there is a demand for IT support to peoples' homes, particularly when it comes to setting up and securing ADSL and home wireless networks - its more a question of how much people are prepared to pay for a home callout.
I'm also looking at offering VoIP deployments in Spain. With the amount of new building going on in Spain at the moment, mainly holiday homes, people don't necessarily want to pay monthly rentals for phone and ADSL lines, just to have a service when they're out here. I'm looking at using Asterisk PBX and wireless to meet those requirements.
People always need electricians, carpenters and plumbers - but with the way technology is at the moment, they also want Internet access and working PCs and do not get the support they need from ISPs and/or PC manufacturers; this is definitely something worth capitalising on; people will pay for good service and at least two on-call techies I know currently are inundated with work purely through word-of-mouth recommmendations.
So don't drop the skills you already have - keep them new and fresh, work for yourself but just work less.
And the loss is to who?
More than enough said on the matter.
Music is a major passion in my life, I'm very discerning about the CDs I buy and always hunt for the best prices for any CD once I know it's worth buying. As a result, I consider CDs to be great value for money because I only buy the ones that are worth the money. People who consider CDs to be overpriced are simply not listening to the right music and/or not buying them in the right places.
However, leave me to enjoy my music my way (as you've already said) and I'm more than happy to fight for you having the pay-to-download option that you want.
Mod this guy up for accepting it takes all types to make a world and that *ALL* we true music lovers despise DRM completely.
Football = a gentleman's game played by thugs.
I'll be thinking of you while I'm drinking my pint of Guinness watching my next rugby match.
Enough said.
I have a friend who has been a big supporter of Reading (his home town) for years. This season, Reading got into the Premier Division for the first time and my friend put up with the extra cost that was added to a season ticket in order to see the big teams play at the Reading home games. I can't remember the cost of the season ticket for the year but I'm sure it's in excess of £1000.
After all this, match start times are constantly changed in order to fit in with the televising schedule of Sky, car parking near the football ground is an absolutely extortionate price, you can't take alcohol into the stadium and the football strips are changed yearly in order to ensure the fans pay high prices annually for football shirts.
If we didn't have such a namby-pamby government in England, the trouble-making thugs would be weeded out and stopped from going to any games meaning that fans who can behave sensibly and control their alcohol intake could go and enjoy a game over a beer - perhaps even more families would go to matches also.
In years of supporting rugby (aside from it being a better game anyway!), I have never seen trouble between fans (there is always good natured piss-taking but never anything more) and you can enjoy a game with a beer or two. Plus tickets for the games are reasonably priced also.
I admire the devotion of many football supporters to their team of choice, but for most of them they allow that devotion to cloud their judgement and completely overlook the fact that they are being totally ripped off by everyone involved in football.
Lesson 1 - People who remix other peoples' music are NOT musicians.
I listen to a *LOT* of music - but that doesn't mean I know the lyrics to *EVERY* song...
Any DRM is bad DRM - so please stop trying to intelligently justify what is blatant Apple fanboi-ism.
And if you're worried about security holes in software,
There's ONE hole in a CD, and that's the one that sits on the spindle.
then you better worry about Windows Media Player and Real's music players.
Non-Apple fanboi != Microsoft fanboi.
VLC Media Player, Mplayer, Xine, etc. etc., all of which play media in a pretty much cross-platform, uncomplicated and open fashion and none of which are allied to either Apple or MS.
What about a hobby? Then you can just get on with life and not give a toss about "what the next great game is" until it appears on a store shelf.