Just keep the old machine and throw Linux on it - then it'll look and feel like a brand new machine.
And having personally played with computers for 30-odd years and worked on them for 25 years, I have never found the need or had the desire to buy one single Apple product.
I've no doubt people like their products but they are, and always will be, a niche market.
Everybody knows that you can get around Fairplay by ripping your CD's after burning them in itunes.
How about just buying the CDs and ripping them yourself with a free software tool?
If you're an honest music lover (like me) then the best way of showing that is demonstrating that you won't buy music in a restricted format. No "protected" CD I have ever encountered could not be ripped by using either cdparanoia in Linux or Exact Audio Copy in Windows - and both are free software.
And if you believe CDs only have one or two good tracks on each one (which is why you personally prefer downloads), then I suggest you're listening to the wrong sort of music...
Geeks never understand anything except technology.... hell they don't even know how to get laid... no point calling them retards.
Ahem!
May I present myself as a geek - a 45 year old Star Trek nut who asked for, and got given, a remote controlled dalek for his last birthday. I also read sci-fi, play Doom and Quake a lot, work in a UNIX/Linux security role and was programming RSX-11 on DEC PDP-11s in my 20s.
Oh, and I'm sure my wife of some 15 years will also find your comments amusing.
And when, on Windows, you can combine console commands in a script file that, for example, looks for illegal access attempts on your Internet connection and, when they happen, not only emails you to tell you they are happening but also reconfigures your firewall to block those IP addresses for an hour, works out the DNS domain from the IP address and then automatically emails a complaint to "abuse@" that domain reporting the problem, then give me a shout.
Unless you have any concepts of text manipulation, regular expressions and scripting, then please do not try to even begin to understand the power of the UNIX command line.
Because as a successful business person, you're keen to identify any areas where you might possibly make cost-savings for infrastructure, and maybe have a little more security at the same time to boot. This is why you would be keen to evaluate Linux in an objective fashion.
Therefore, the correct answer would have been to say that you've evaluated one or two Linux servers and not found them to be appropriate to your business needs for [insert reasons here].
But instead you resort to childish "Open sores" type comments which serve no other purpose than to categorise you as a troll.
And just to clarify one final point since you've obviously never done any real research into "Open Source" itself - whilst many Linux distros can be entirely made up of Open Source software, the two terms are not interchangeable as there is a lot of Open Source software for Windows also - e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, GIMP, etc.
So I suggest you need to check your PCs over in case - as there might be Open Source software dirtying your proprietary software environment already...
Music videos - IMHO music videos were the worst thing that ever happened to music anyhow, apart from actual live concert footage.
Funny adverts - in other words, ***VIRAL MARKETTING***. This means that people can stop wasting my valuable time sending me funny adverts via email.
Personal videos - if the people making those videos actually had anything interesting to say or do, a TV or film company would have bought the rights to it and made it professionally.
Yep, I'm a middle-aged old grouch but I never missed YouTube before it arrived and really won't miss it when it's gone.
As for Viacom, they own Paramount (amongst others) who own the Star Trek rights - which they have completely messed up since Gene Roddenberry died anyhow.
Here in the UK, I could build an 64-bit PC with something like an ATI 1950GT graphics card for the same price as a PS3. It would be as good as, if not better than, the PS3 for graphics, plus it would do all the other things a PC can do. Okay, it wouldn't have a Bluray drive for that price but if Bluray/HD-DVD takes off (and as an anti-DRM person I hope they both die in flames), in about 18 months I'll be able to buy a drive for about £50.
As a Gamecube owner who owns one just to play a few games that aren't on the PC, I see no reason to ever think of buying a PS3 - let alone the fact that I abhor Sony as a company anyhow.
Likewise I'm not Microsoft's number one fan but I'd consider an X-Box 360 if there were a few more titles on it that I couldn't get on the PC - but more than likely, I'll go for the Wii purely because the Gamecube has served me well for some great party games with drunken friends/sister's kids and the Wii will hopefully continue in that fashion.
The best thing about the PS3 currently is that lots of people are trading in their older systems and games currently meaning that I'm picking up some excellent Gamecube titles for about £5 each in my local second-hand computer store.
If people are just after ever-improving graphics then good luck to them with their PS3s. But a great game is a great game no matter how good its graphics are and it's just the mindless trend-followers that rush to buy these new consoles when they're at a premium price with a minimal game catalogue.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there with there heads stuck up their own asses needing to intellectualise everything to bring it up into their level of existence.
These are the same people who like seeing pictures of naked women but are too scared to go look at them in case they get caught and are seen as seedy little people - instead, they get photos of women taken at weird angles through photo filters and call it "art" to justify it intellectually.
Games are entertainment. You play them or you don't. You like certain games but not others.
Most of us just get on and do it without giving a hoot what anyone else thinks - it's the intellectual-types who are so damned self-conscious that they need the approval of their peers before they find the strength of character to do anything.
It could be argued that if your CV (or resume) is that difficult to fill with interesting information about yourself that you have to mention "MS Office experience", then you probably need to go and spend some time getting some better skills.
I accept that more complex skills in MS Office like Excel programming, data merges, etc. are probably in demand by many employers - but for someone who just creates simple documents in MS Office, OpenOffice would probably take no more than a couple of hours to adjust to.
I'm like you in as much as I have a large collection of proper music CDs and much prefer to listen to my music from CD on a relatively decent hi-fi setup. I have ripped my complete collection to MP3 for portability purposes and I don't have any illegal downloads - occasionally, I'll see an album on Usenet that I like the look of in which case I download it and listen to it. If it's good, I buy it and if it's bad, I delete the downloads.
As for DRMed CDs, I have a few of them but they play fine on all my players; plus cdparanoia (Linux) and Exact Audio Copy (Windows) have absolutely no problem ripping them. So in this instance, DRM does not affect what I deem to be my fair usage of the CDs.
However, before I discovered those two programs for ripping, I did have two occasions where I could not rip the CDs. In both those cases, I went straight back to the store with them, demanding either an un-DRMed copy (which of course they could not supply me with) or my money back.
Only on one of those occasions did I have to insist to see the manager because the store person refused my refund. After some minutes of arguing with him, he eventually agreed to a refund - this was on the basis that I would report his store to UK Trading Standards for misleading me as a customer by not clearly placing copy-protected CDs in their own section in the store.
So it does pay to stand up for your rights and not let them get away with it, rather than, as a music lover, just not buying them any more.
And having such a method as an addition to your preferred packaging method for the 3rd software that is not available in repositories is against your religion?:-)
Ah, c'mon... that's a *lame* attack, man.
I'm just saying that if people want binary packages then let them have it and let them argue the toss about which one's the best.
Me? I prefer source packages and Gentoo's portage and me seem to play pretty well together.
I just don't want everyone on here assuming that Linux packages start with "RPMs" and end with "Debs", that's all.
And stop with the "religion" stuff, okay? I get a buzz from using Linux but if people prefer Windows over Linux, Emacs over vi or Postfix over Sendmail then I say good luck to them...
The "trap" as you put it is "control". In KDE you have control. When one uses Gnome someone else has control.
What in *GOD'S NAME* are you talking about??? What do you mean "someone else has control"??? KDE is one view of what a desktop environment should be, Gnome is another. Maybe you prefer KDE. So what? Have I not already stated that Linux is about choice??? As are package managers??? So what's your point???
If you don't feel "in control" then you're not a real man.
I'm sorry, but are you on some kind of mind altering drug??? Did you read my original posting???
When I have a choice, I choose what I want to use, therefore I am in control of what I am using.
But what the hell has this to do with being a "real man"??? I can't say my wife has noticed any impotence in me as a result of my Linux usage! And I'm sure there are single men, married men, homosexual men, anything men out there who like choice on the desktop.
That's why there's such resistance to solving the problem.
No. There is NO problem.
What's the problem? Ask me in five years when that too is the "year of...". Maybe someone will come along and show you all that infinite choice isn't better than no choice, even if it makes you feel like a man.
Please stop with the mushrooms, okay? Now you're blathering... go have a strong coffee and come down a bit. Then we'll have a discussion - when I know what it is you're actually talking about.
1. I only use supported hardware - yes, I have to do some research before I buy any hardware on which to run Linux. That's especially true of wireless but I normally manage to get stuff working.
2. Whenever there are discussions about Linux on the desktop, people always seem to use Photoshop as an example. That's fine, no doubt it's a flagship package but I personally have never needed to use it. For the minimal photo editing I do, GIMP does far more than I need. So Photoshop (and CAD) is an irrelevance to me on Linux though I accept it's important to some.
3. At my place of work, Windows is the "corporate standard" for the desktop. However, working in a technical role for a telecoms company for whom the flagship products run on Linux, I pretty much get free reign with running Linux where and when I want to. If anything, because I'm one of the few people with excellent Linux skills, I'm actively encouraged to run Linux workshops for the techies who are more used to Windows. As long as I don't contravene corporate security & support my Linux boxes for myself (rather than expecting our official IT department to do it), I'm pretty much left alone.
Sure, I'd like to have to run just one OS (Linux) purely for the convenience of it - but I like playing a few games occasionally and use MS Office because I can knock documents I need to knock out quickly by using it. Other than that, Linux fits around 80% of my computing requirements, XP the remaining 20% and it is of no interest to me when Linux is deemed mainstream.
In the good old days of copyright piracy, we had to sit there in our Usenet groups with our uuencode/uudecode command-line tools and about 25 different types of de-archiving program for "zip" files, "ace" files, "gz" files and "rar" files in order to get our "warez".
Bloody kids these days don't know that they're born!
Gentoo will never be mainstream until it supports a user friendly installation method like Vista's MSI files.
And as a Gentoo user who has used it for a few years and can find absolutely no reason not to continue using it at the moment, your point is???
Please excuse me but I'd lived my life up to this point assuming that an operating system and its associated applications enabled a computer to do the things you want it to do in the ways you want them done. I wasn't aware that there was now a requirement that one's operating system of choice had to be in "this Autumn's colour scheme".
2007.0 should be out soon but I'm going to go ahead and load up with 2006.1 for now.
With all respect, making statements like the above only indicates that you don't fully understand what Gentoo versioning is about.
"200x.x" just applies to the downloadable fixed distribution of Gentoo and is really only relevant if you have brand spanking new hardware that you need to work at the point of installation - then, possibly, you might wait for 2007.0 to come out because that would boot from a later Linux kernel that supported that hardware.
Perhaps another reason might be that in building your Gentoo apps from source, 2007.0 will probably have a pretty recent GCC compiler version on it - whereas with 2006.1 you'd need to update the GCC and the toolchain first to get to what 2007.0 offers.
But otherwise, once you get Gentoo installed and start updating your system with Portage, you'll use one single portage tree no matter what version of Gentoo you originally installed with so at that point, the version you originally installed with becomes pretty much irrelevant.
Basically all we need is a script that asks the user if they're too damned lazy to expend any effort into their computing and want everything handed on a plate to them.
I've spent 25+ years working with computers but never once owned an Apple machine - best I've ever done is played with one occasionally.
Apples might well be good machines for certain types of people who want ease of use and that's fine.
But please do not make them sound like the "be all and end all" of computing because I personally have never found the justification to buy one - and bearing in mind that I'm surrounded at work and socially by hordes of computer users, I know of just one person who owns or uses a Mac. Sure, he likes it a lot and good luck to him but they're still a minority choice.
A one-size-fits-all solution is an absolute requirement if Linux is to gain any mainstream popularity.
But I absolutely, 100% do NOT CARE about Linux's "mainstream popularity".
I still use Windows XP for about 20% of my computing time because I enjoy a few games and like using a few Windows based apps. I'm not into political posturing or fashion - sorry.
For me, a computer is a tool for getting jobs done and having fun with. If one OS catered for all of my needs 100% of the time, then, yes, I accept it would be less inconvenient to not have to switch between two OSes on occasions. But otherwise, I just use what I need to when I need to.
Actually, I mostly use XFCE4 though have one box running Gnome.
But, once again, you've fallen into the "one size fits all" mentality trap.
KDE is very pretty and a great "ambassador" application for Linux on the desktop. Friends of mine love it and I help them to set it up and use it - but I cannot personally bear it's bloat on any of my machines. But that's fine because whereas my friends prefer GUI usage, I'm more of a command-line person anyhow.
But they like Linux their way, I like it mine. So what's the problem?
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I had totally forgotten how good a song this is and just stuck the MP3 on again to put a big smile on my face.
And having personally played with computers for 30-odd years and worked on them for 25 years, I have never found the need or had the desire to buy one single Apple product.
I've no doubt people like their products but they are, and always will be, a niche market.
How about just buying the CDs and ripping them yourself with a free software tool?
If you're an honest music lover (like me) then the best way of showing that is demonstrating that you won't buy music in a restricted format. No "protected" CD I have ever encountered could not be ripped by using either cdparanoia in Linux or Exact Audio Copy in Windows - and both are free software.
And if you believe CDs only have one or two good tracks on each one (which is why you personally prefer downloads), then I suggest you're listening to the wrong sort of music...
Ahem!
May I present myself as a geek - a 45 year old Star Trek nut who asked for, and got given, a remote controlled dalek for his last birthday. I also read sci-fi, play Doom and Quake a lot, work in a UNIX/Linux security role and was programming RSX-11 on DEC PDP-11s in my 20s.
Oh, and I'm sure my wife of some 15 years will also find your comments amusing.
And when, on Windows, you can combine console commands in a script file that, for example, looks for illegal access attempts on your Internet connection and, when they happen, not only emails you to tell you they are happening but also reconfigures your firewall to block those IP addresses for an hour, works out the DNS domain from the IP address and then automatically emails a complaint to "abuse@" that domain reporting the problem, then give me a shout.
Unless you have any concepts of text manipulation, regular expressions and scripting, then please do not try to even begin to understand the power of the UNIX command line.
Because as a successful business person, you're keen to identify any areas where you might possibly make cost-savings for infrastructure, and maybe have a little more security at the same time to boot. This is why you would be keen to evaluate Linux in an objective fashion.
Therefore, the correct answer would have been to say that you've evaluated one or two Linux servers and not found them to be appropriate to your business needs for [insert reasons here].
But instead you resort to childish "Open sores" type comments which serve no other purpose than to categorise you as a troll.
And just to clarify one final point since you've obviously never done any real research into "Open Source" itself - whilst many Linux distros can be entirely made up of Open Source software, the two terms are not interchangeable as there is a lot of Open Source software for Windows also - e.g. OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, GIMP, etc.
So I suggest you need to check your PCs over in case - as there might be Open Source software dirtying your proprietary software environment already...
Music videos - IMHO music videos were the worst thing that ever happened to music anyhow, apart from actual live concert footage.
Funny adverts - in other words, ***VIRAL MARKETTING***. This means that people can stop wasting my valuable time sending me funny adverts via email.
Personal videos - if the people making those videos actually had anything interesting to say or do, a TV or film company would have bought the rights to it and made it professionally.
Yep, I'm a middle-aged old grouch but I never missed YouTube before it arrived and really won't miss it when it's gone.
As for Viacom, they own Paramount (amongst others) who own the Star Trek rights - which they have completely messed up since Gene Roddenberry died anyhow.
Both Viacom and YouTube can die.
So how about you come join the Unreal Tournament server I just started on my Myth TV box with your Tivo? Oh wait, you can't...
As a Gamecube owner who owns one just to play a few games that aren't on the PC, I see no reason to ever think of buying a PS3 - let alone the fact that I abhor Sony as a company anyhow.
Likewise I'm not Microsoft's number one fan but I'd consider an X-Box 360 if there were a few more titles on it that I couldn't get on the PC - but more than likely, I'll go for the Wii purely because the Gamecube has served me well for some great party games with drunken friends/sister's kids and the Wii will hopefully continue in that fashion.
The best thing about the PS3 currently is that lots of people are trading in their older systems and games currently meaning that I'm picking up some excellent Gamecube titles for about £5 each in my local second-hand computer store.
If people are just after ever-improving graphics then good luck to them with their PS3s. But a great game is a great game no matter how good its graphics are and it's just the mindless trend-followers that rush to buy these new consoles when they're at a premium price with a minimal game catalogue.
Let's start by getting Tony Blair and his Labour government cronies self aware first...
Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there with there heads stuck up their own asses needing to intellectualise everything to bring it up into their level of existence.
These are the same people who like seeing pictures of naked women but are too scared to go look at them in case they get caught and are seen as seedy little people - instead, they get photos of women taken at weird angles through photo filters and call it "art" to justify it intellectually.
Games are entertainment. You play them or you don't. You like certain games but not others.
Most of us just get on and do it without giving a hoot what anyone else thinks - it's the intellectual-types who are so damned self-conscious that they need the approval of their peers before they find the strength of character to do anything.
Just ignore them. They're idiots.
I accept that more complex skills in MS Office like Excel programming, data merges, etc. are probably in demand by many employers - but for someone who just creates simple documents in MS Office, OpenOffice would probably take no more than a couple of hours to adjust to.
As for DRMed CDs, I have a few of them but they play fine on all my players; plus cdparanoia (Linux) and Exact Audio Copy (Windows) have absolutely no problem ripping them. So in this instance, DRM does not affect what I deem to be my fair usage of the CDs.
However, before I discovered those two programs for ripping, I did have two occasions where I could not rip the CDs. In both those cases, I went straight back to the store with them, demanding either an un-DRMed copy (which of course they could not supply me with) or my money back.
Only on one of those occasions did I have to insist to see the manager because the store person refused my refund. After some minutes of arguing with him, he eventually agreed to a refund - this was on the basis that I would report his store to UK Trading Standards for misleading me as a customer by not clearly placing copy-protected CDs in their own section in the store.
So it does pay to stand up for your rights and not let them get away with it, rather than, as a music lover, just not buying them any more.
Ah, c'mon... that's a *lame* attack, man.
I'm just saying that if people want binary packages then let them have it and let them argue the toss about which one's the best.
Me? I prefer source packages and Gentoo's portage and me seem to play pretty well together.
I just don't want everyone on here assuming that Linux packages start with "RPMs" and end with "Debs", that's all.
And stop with the "religion" stuff, okay? I get a buzz from using Linux but if people prefer Windows over Linux, Emacs over vi or Postfix over Sendmail then I say good luck to them...
Good point - I must admit I'd forgotten about "good old" WinModems...
Word came with MS Works that came free with her PC.
What in *GOD'S NAME* are you talking about??? What do you mean "someone else has control"??? KDE is one view of what a desktop environment should be, Gnome is another. Maybe you prefer KDE. So what? Have I not already stated that Linux is about choice??? As are package managers??? So what's your point???
If you don't feel "in control" then you're not a real man.
I'm sorry, but are you on some kind of mind altering drug??? Did you read my original posting???
When I have a choice, I choose what I want to use, therefore I am in control of what I am using.
But what the hell has this to do with being a "real man"??? I can't say my wife has noticed any impotence in me as a result of my Linux usage! And I'm sure there are single men, married men, homosexual men, anything men out there who like choice on the desktop.
That's why there's such resistance to solving the problem.
No. There is NO problem.
What's the problem? Ask me in five years when that too is the "year of...". Maybe someone will come along and show you all that infinite choice isn't better than no choice, even if it makes you feel like a man.
Please stop with the mushrooms, okay? Now you're blathering... go have a strong coffee and come down a bit. Then we'll have a discussion - when I know what it is you're actually talking about.
1. I only use supported hardware - yes, I have to do some research before I buy any hardware on which to run Linux. That's especially true of wireless but I normally manage to get stuff working.
2. Whenever there are discussions about Linux on the desktop, people always seem to use Photoshop as an example. That's fine, no doubt it's a flagship package but I personally have never needed to use it. For the minimal photo editing I do, GIMP does far more than I need. So Photoshop (and CAD) is an irrelevance to me on Linux though I accept it's important to some.
3. At my place of work, Windows is the "corporate standard" for the desktop. However, working in a technical role for a telecoms company for whom the flagship products run on Linux, I pretty much get free reign with running Linux where and when I want to. If anything, because I'm one of the few people with excellent Linux skills, I'm actively encouraged to run Linux workshops for the techies who are more used to Windows. As long as I don't contravene corporate security & support my Linux boxes for myself (rather than expecting our official IT department to do it), I'm pretty much left alone.
Sure, I'd like to have to run just one OS (Linux) purely for the convenience of it - but I like playing a few games occasionally and use MS Office because I can knock documents I need to knock out quickly by using it. Other than that, Linux fits around 80% of my computing requirements, XP the remaining 20% and it is of no interest to me when Linux is deemed mainstream.
Bloody kids these days don't know that they're born!
And as a Gentoo user who has used it for a few years and can find absolutely no reason not to continue using it at the moment, your point is???
Please excuse me but I'd lived my life up to this point assuming that an operating system and its associated applications enabled a computer to do the things you want it to do in the ways you want them done. I wasn't aware that there was now a requirement that one's operating system of choice had to be in "this Autumn's colour scheme".
With all respect, making statements like the above only indicates that you don't fully understand what Gentoo versioning is about.
"200x.x" just applies to the downloadable fixed distribution of Gentoo and is really only relevant if you have brand spanking new hardware that you need to work at the point of installation - then, possibly, you might wait for 2007.0 to come out because that would boot from a later Linux kernel that supported that hardware.
Perhaps another reason might be that in building your Gentoo apps from source, 2007.0 will probably have a pretty recent GCC compiler version on it - whereas with 2006.1 you'd need to update the GCC and the toolchain first to get to what 2007.0 offers.
But otherwise, once you get Gentoo installed and start updating your system with Portage, you'll use one single portage tree no matter what version of Gentoo you originally installed with so at that point, the version you originally installed with becomes pretty much irrelevant.
Basically all we need is a script that asks the user if they're too damned lazy to expend any effort into their computing and want everything handed on a plate to them.
Apples might well be good machines for certain types of people who want ease of use and that's fine.
But please do not make them sound like the "be all and end all" of computing because I personally have never found the justification to buy one - and bearing in mind that I'm surrounded at work and socially by hordes of computer users, I know of just one person who owns or uses a Mac. Sure, he likes it a lot and good luck to him but they're still a minority choice.
But I absolutely, 100% do NOT CARE about Linux's "mainstream popularity".
I still use Windows XP for about 20% of my computing time because I enjoy a few games and like using a few Windows based apps. I'm not into political posturing or fashion - sorry.
For me, a computer is a tool for getting jobs done and having fun with. If one OS catered for all of my needs 100% of the time, then, yes, I accept it would be less inconvenient to not have to switch between two OSes on occasions. But otherwise, I just use what I need to when I need to.
Actually, I mostly use XFCE4 though have one box running Gnome.
But, once again, you've fallen into the "one size fits all" mentality trap.
KDE is very pretty and a great "ambassador" application for Linux on the desktop. Friends of mine love it and I help them to set it up and use it - but I cannot personally bear it's bloat on any of my machines. But that's fine because whereas my friends prefer GUI usage, I'm more of a command-line person anyhow.
But they like Linux their way, I like it mine. So what's the problem?