I get *REALLY* annoyed with the constant bombardment of crap from these idiots.
"Well guess what, everyone? The way we've been doing things up until now is completely wrong and this is how we're all going to be doing it in the future!"
Do these fools have no concept of the merest possibility that *JUST MAYBE* some of the stuff the human race has invented over the years has been pretty much refined to the best it can be, works as it is and therefore doesn't *NEED* to change?
For example, I think it's pretty safe to assume that wheels will always be round, that we'll probably always represent information as combinations of characters from an alphabet and that writing information on one or more sheets of near two-dimensional material is a pretty good way of storing and carrying information without any reliance on external power or much risk of mechanical breakdown.
I have a myriad of friends and work colleagues, most of whom are technology geeks, but I've yet to hear any of them clamouring for "more Internet worlds" or "the 3D Web" - most of them seem to spend a lot of their time nattering on about the fun they're having on World Of Warcraft.
If people are looking to the future, then they are probably looking forward to far more important things like a cure for cancer or world peace. Let's face it, 95% of the computer users in the world put up with a bloaty operating system without complaining about it, so why do they care about this stuff?
I really think it's about time that Slashdot stopped posting articles because some fat pig in a skyscraper somewhere thinks he's clever enough to dress up an advertisement for something pretty bloody bland and uninteresting into a "Here's what's coming next" psuedo-technology discussion.
Whilst I entirely agree with the core of what you are saying, the fact that DRM exists in any product you buy is deliberately obfuscated by clever advertising and marketing - for example, has any iPod advert ever mentioned that the music you buy to play on it has been restricted? No, instead you get silhouetted images of groups of people (at least in one advert I've seen) that kind of leads you to think the iPod is about "communities" of people whereas, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. MP3s aside, *YOU* buy iTunes songs for *YOUR* iPod for only *YOU* to listen to...
Personally, as someone who buys every DVD and CD that I like, music downloads have no interest for me and, as an honest buyer, I find it objectionable that I potentially will have DRM enforced on me even though I do not copy (for anyone else) the media that I own. Therefore DRM is evil and anyone who does their best to crack it or break it is someone I consider a hero.
However, aside from my personal opinions of DRM, there are far too many dumb people out there with far too much money to spend. Those same people buy things because they are "cool" or because lots of other people have them, without looking in greater depth about things like the erosion of their rights as a consumer. Because marketing has also hidden this important fact from them, what DVD Jon is doing helps to bring DRM into the public eye and, at least, goes some way to making sure that they have access to all the facts, good and bad, about DRM. That's why what he is doing is so important.
Not wishing to dampen your endless enthusiasm or anything, but has nobody told you that you still have to pay for all of that stuff at the end of the month?
The assimilation of Apple users is near completion
on
My Dream App For the Mac
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· Score: -1, Troll
First, your hardware platform got migrated across to x86...
Then your hardware had the ability to run Windows XP...
This time next year you'll be able to use all the killer apps Windows users have - because you will have *BECOME* Windows users...
You're kidding right? Linux distros try all they can to displace Windows, now it's quite unlikely that they could succeed of course.
Linux as an OS was not "designed" to kick Microsoft Windows from the desktop - it was the culmination of ideas from a number of people who just wanted a free alternative that mimicked UNIX. Sure, Red Hat, Novell, etc all *market* Linux that way but it's important not to get confused over this.
No, probably because of historical bagage, but in the same way Linux/Unix is stuck with a filesystem mess which is quite ridiculously complex.
I don't want to draw you into a "Linux vs Windows" argument because, as a user of both, they both have their problems. And as someone who does some Linux training at my place of work, people who come into my classes with only Windows experience do find the UNIX filesystem difficult to grasp - but, when you actually take the time to get to grips with it, it's very logical. Especially when it comes to home directories and pretty much being able to guarantee that your local settings for an application live in your home directory in a flat text file, not in a group of obfuscated entries in the registry, which ultimately makes migrating settings between machines (or between similar users) very easy.
I'm not touting Linux as a direct replacement for Windows because to use Linux effectively, you do need to sit down and learn how to use it - Joe Average who plays a few games, prints a few photos and surfs the Internet quite happily with Windows has no need to ever give Linux a second thought and that's the way it should stay.
And if that sounds elitist, it's not meant to be - I'm just as happy to buy a nice modern car and throw money at a mechanic to service it because I am just not interested in spending time learning how a car works to do it myself.
Please don't tar all of we Brits with the same brush.
Whilst I do agree that binge-drinking in rife in the UK, it is still a very small minority of people who end up getting blind drunk on a night out, and of those people, a smaller minority still that are violent in public.
Certain areas of our town and city centres are not nice places at night and are all starting to look like clones of each other. Part of the responsibility for this has to fall on our town planners and councils who, purely for financial reasons, have allowed countless plastic theme pub chains to take over entire streets in those centres - in my ex-home town of Reading (about 40 miles to the west of London), for example, the area around the old town hall that used to house banks, a few speciality shops and the main Post Office is now just wall-to-wall bars.
In addition to this, these "designer bar chains" market themselves to appeal to the 18-25 generation which therefore automatically attracts all that generation brings with it - not least drugs and attitude. And of course, because ID and age verification systems in the UK are totally ineffective, these bars bring in the underage teenage drinkers who have the added advantage that our lax laws do not allow the police to do much more than move them on when they find them - it should not be forgotten that these same bars also stock a nice array of colourful "alcopop" drinks which, whatever the labels or the drink makers say, have been specifically targetted at teenagers.
However, whilst I appear to be painting a "doom and gloom" picture of UK towns and cities, the reality is that because "Generation X" are doing their own thing in the town centres (and let's face it, why would any other generation want to spend an evening in a faceless drinking establishment with MTV blasting out its plastic videos at full volume), our smaller towns and villages are blessed with some excellent traditional pubs and restaurants where the rest of us can go and have a more quiet and relaxed night out - I'm certainly not complaining.
There's no easy fix to this problem. The UK has enjoyed a pretty much stable economy for a few years now and whilst we are taxed for just about everything we do, most people seem to still have a fair degree of disposable income (or a complete disregards of credit card debt). With our 18-25s probably not burdened with mortgages or kids, advertising has targetted their money specifically with the endless "buy this product or be an uncool little twat" message, whilst magazines, (certain) newspapers and TV programmes sell them the idea that "everyone can be a celebrity, including the totally talentless". Mix that in with our inherent desire to always be "Jack The Lad" and teenage attitude, and you already know the results.
I should also say that here in the UK, we have more than our fair share of our own equivalent of the "Redneck Trailer Park dwellers". There are people for whom compliance and "fitting in with the crowd" are their only aims because they are just too stupid and ignorant to be individualists - they dress the same, like the same narrow range of music, drink the same drinks and will do stupid things purely to get praise from their peers. ("Happy slapping" was an activity invented for that particular group of our society.)
As someone who was a "leather-jacketed metal-head" between the late 70s and late 80s, I saw lots of drunk, happy people at concerts, rock festivals and in rock pubs but never any violence - even including one of my local hangouts that also attracted punks, skinheaded ska fans and mods.
As long as we have an environment that encourages conformity in the UK, we will have this problem - but there are plenty of other places the rest of us can go just to have fun.
Personally, as an experienced computer user, I find the default XP GUI not only totally unusable but completely patronising.
This was the one major thing that stopped me upgrading from Windows 2000 until just over a year ago when I realised that it was relatively straightforward to get back to the "Classic" interface which I infinitely prefer. Even then, I have to install TweakUI to take off all the menu fades and pop-ups.
But my real bugbear with XP is the fact that once you've spent hours building a really optimised system and installed all the updates, it's impossible (as far as I can tell anyway) of building a Ghost image for installation on another machine if there's too much of a hardware difference between the first and second machine - even though I have a proper unique registration key for each machine.
With Linux, all I really have to do is carefully build a modularised kernel on the first machine for all the hardware types I own, then it's just a case of copying the whole thing across.
I think Linux and the free UNIXes have become the major "spanner in the works" for Microsoft.
Commercial UNIXes were unable to compete with Windows on a price perspective and Microsoft capitalised, very well I might add, on that price difference and on a sales pitch that basically said any tool needing to be configured, run and managed from the command line would always be more complex than one administered from within a GUI environment. (Playing "devil's advocate here, I don't personally believe that, I'm looking at it from their perspective).
However, a tactical mistake they made was not to keep the GUI separate from the core OS from the outset - I guess greed played a big part in that because making the GUI much heavier and inseperable from the core kernel forced MS customers into hardware upgrades, which in turn meant more Windows sales.
Had Linux and the BSDs not come on the scene, Microsoft would be in the same situation with security and bugs that they are today but with less dissatisfaction from their customer base because there would be nothing to compare Windows to.
However, I'm sure that any intelligent Windows user now would have to agree that when it comes to tailoring a server for very specific uses, nothing beats the modularity and configurability of a UNIX-like OS.
The problem Microsoft are now faced with is that to change Windows such that the GUI became a modular, selectable part of the OS would be so vast a change that it would render a huge proportion of existing applications incompatible and take away one of the major reasons stopping a lot of their customer base putting in Linux or BSD servers in certain parts of the corporate enterprise. Add to that the fact that migration plans in enterprises are phased over lengthy periods of time, and MS have to maintain compatibility layers to give time for older applications to catch up - this adds to the bloat and the requirement for more raw processing power.
I wouldn't say that Linux or BSD have the power (or intention) of fully displacing Windows, but I do believe they have unintentionally forced Microsoft down a single track of having to make their OSes bigger and bloatier with each release, and this will get to the point where their OSes become unmanageable from a security and patching perspective.
I think it's inevitable that at some point in the near future, if MS stay in the OS game, then they will need to modularize Windows a lot more to make it manageable - that will have to lead to a lot of applications breaking, customers getting more angry and, perhaps, Linux and BSD becoming real viable alternatives in core enterprises where the likes of Exchange and MSSQL currently dominate.
..."if and when I become a movie studio mogul I will not jump automatically to making a turgid plasticized sequel to, or remake of, previously successful movies."
You've highlighted some valid plus points in MS branching out but please do not forget the likely negative points also - anything Microsoft (or Apple or any other hardware/software/media corporation for that matter) do in the future is likely to have a high degree of lock-in for any customer.
Yes, that means hardware and software DRM - and when you're locked in for several years paying a "tax" to Microsoft, those plus points might well start looking less attractive...
This is a pretty much irrelevant point. The fact is the iTunes Store was the first widely successful legit way to download songs. Just because people still download illegaly doesn't make that point any less valid.
Apple may have been the first to seriously take on legal music downloads but this is still a battle being fought - iTunes is driven by Apple's proprietary DRM which makes them no different to Microsoft with DRM and Media Player in trying to lock users into a particular vendor. Whatever happens, I don't see Apple winning this battle - either "bigger and badder" Microsoft will push their proprietary DRM into the everyone's media players or (my hope) DRM will fail completely in which case established online names like Amazon or Google will push their way in.
Show me a player that can be controlled by the car audio controls, other than the iPod (coming straight from the factory, no third-party hacks). My guess is you can't. I agree that any player can pipe their output to a line-in on the car audio deck, but the only player with car audio control support is the iPod.
Again, this technology is still in it's infancy. We're already seeing in-car audio players with USB connectivity and Blaupunkt, a traditional player in in-car audio, is releasing players with hard disks; check out the specification of the Blaupunkt Casablanca player and you'll see there is no mention of the iPod.
So I guess you're opposed to satellite radio too, then? Not to mention he also listed radio shows (podcasts) that are high quality and absolutely free to download. The podcasts are basically ad free, with a mention of sponsors at the beginning and end of shows, while the subscriptions are definitely ad free. Being Slashdot, I realize that anything anti-iPod is marked informative, but comments like this bring it closer to the troll mod.
I'm not opposed to satellite radio, I just don't see it bringing anything new or innovative - it's just more information overload. What do most people care if there are "millions" of TV and radio staions if 99.9% of them are just Joe Averages without very much to say - let's face it, to broadcast anything of interest, they'll have to pay a license to someone somewhere which means they won't be able to offer a free service to listeners/viewers.
As regards radio shows, I'm lucky enough to be in the UK where I can enjoy the free radio service of the BBC without adverts. (And before anyone jumps in here, in the UK you pay a license fee for BBC TV but do not have to for radio.) I'm also looking forward to downloading archived shows from the BBC, there's probably enough material in there to last anyone's lifetime anyway.
Ok, I'm hoping this was a typo, but you must encode in a pretty small bitrate to last you an hour at the gym for 1 MB. And it definitely would NOT sound good.
Yep, sorry, typo. Encoding with LAMEENC at 128 kb/s on a 1GB player gives me between 2-3 hours of playing time. Sure, low bitrate but I encode my own CDs so I can recode them if I want higher.
doubt there are many that think the iPod is a generous charity. Apple fans are fine with paying more for apple products. They have put up with paying the Apple premium for years. It's just recently that that premium has actually been reduced to the point where they're quite competitive for the money you pay (just look at the MacBook). The only reason your post was modded informative was because of the anti-Apple fanboys that are so prevalent on this board.
Look, I'm not criticising just Apple fans, my view on people and "brand loyalty" has absolutely nothing to do with product quality but more to do with those people feeling they are part of an elitist little club - that goes the same for a whole lot of Linux fans (yes, I'm a Linux user) and Windows fans (I'm also a Windows user).
But in my 30+ years working and playing with computers and gadgets, I have never owned an Apple product - not because of any personal boycott, just because they've never made anything I particularly felt I wanted at a price I was prepared to pay. So I disagree that Apple has had that great an influence on the world.
I've no great love or hate for either Dell or HP but it should be remembered that HP poached away Randy Mott, a top Dell sales exec, a year or two ago.
This is just the results of dirty back-handed wheeling-and-dealing committed by all corporations and is probably nothing to be particularly proud of.
Cool! And I *REALLY* thought I was alone thinking this...
I played and loved original Doom, Duke Nukem, Heretic, the Quakes, the Unreal (Tournaments) and original Half-Life on the PC and have never owned an X-Box to this day.
One day, I went to a friend's house on his X-Box and we played Halo for four hours. Yep, it was good fun, don't get me wrong, but had nothing in it I hadn't seen before.
I therefore couldn't understand the big "hooha" over Halo but can appreciate it was great for gamers who'd not played FPSes before.
Because if they did, I can tell you it's really no big deal - after all, when you've seen one big-eyed schoolgirl being raped by a Cthulhoid tentacle, you've seen them all.
Day 100:
My ex-owner, who now suffers from schizophrenia due to excessive pot smoking, was committed to Arkham Asylum for suffering from a mental illness whereby he believes small electronic gadgets have intelligence and personality. I am therefore a figment of his imagination and have now ceased to be... ****POP***
1) It has pretty much consigned the old "boomboxes" to near-complete obsolescene (thank G** for that!). People now listen to their own music with generally not disturbing others in a package far more convenient than even the old cassette player Walkmans.
"Boomboxes" died out around the middle of the 90s and certainly weren't that popular, at least from the point of view of portable ones. At any rate, they died long before the iPod came to fruition. I for one had an MP3 CD player (similar to a CD Walkman) a couple of years before MP3 players took off.
2) It has changed the way we buy music, by legitimizing music downloads.
There are still far more illegal music downloads than there are legitimate ones going on and I seem to recall Apple almost getting caught up in a "monopoly" suit for automatically bundling iTunes with it.
3) It has actually made radio talk shows more popular, as many on-air talk shows are now available for subscription-based download (ESPN Radio's Radio Insider and Premiere Radio Networks' Streamlink programs for example). We are seeing rapid growth of specialized downloadable talk shows (This Week in Technology (TWiT) being one of the best examples of this).
Ah, so what you're saying is that the iPod introduced the concept of "paying for radio programs".... and that's a *GOOD* thing???
4) It has made it far more practical to not have to carry around your Compact Discs when listening to music in the car. Thanks to increased storage capacity on today's players you can "rip" your CD collection at higher sample rates and still put quite a lot of music on a single player for car playback. Also, many cars now offer standard auxiliary 1/8" jack input for all portable music players and some even offer special connectors to connect your newer-generation iPod so you can control the iPod from the car stereo controls and/or recharge the iPod's battery at the same time.
Firstly, what you describe can be done with just about any MP3 player at about 1/4 the cost of an iPod.
Secondly, if you're in the car long enough to justify having your complete music collection with you, then you're probably selecting songs while you are driving which is probably quite a dangerous thing to do. Personally, I've a 6 x CD player that came built in with my car, on long journeys I load the player with 6 and keep 6 more CDs in the glove compartment. The inconvenience of having to reload the CD player at a stop once during my journey has never justified the cost of an iPod for me - and a cheap 1MB player holds enough songs to last me at the gym or on the usual 2 hour flights I take.
The point I'm trying to make is that the iPod is just another little electronic gadget that you either like or think is overpriced for what it gives you - it's just an opinion, no different to supporting a particular football team or liking a particular TV series.
Apple has a similar duty as Microsoft when it comes to making as much money as possible for its shareholders - the sooner the Apple fanboys get to grip with this the better, rather than assuming that Apple is just this generous charity out to do it's best by them.
Usenet and IRC have long been major distribution routes for "illegal content" on the internet, more technically savvy people probably get content off of the newsgroups and irc each day than have ever gotten it off of bittorrent... faster generally too... bittorrents big bonus is... it's stupid easy, click the link wait a few hours.
What us, guv'nor? Illegal content? In 'ere? Nah, ya got the wrong bloke, mate! 'onest as the day is long, sunshine. I mean, who'd a thunk it... us... 'ere... downloadin' all them... mp3s, you say?... wass them then?... an' movies... nuh, not us guv! (etc.)
1. Coca Cola delivery trucks are not, to my knowledge, equipped with Tesla-coil like devices capable of illuminating light bulbs by some kind of electrical induction the moment that they drive past them - even during the Christmas holiday period.
2. Having performed an experiment with a dead goldfish and a can of Coke, I can confirm that it indeed does not, as you so like to state, "add life".
3. I just wondered how the "Teaching The World To Sing" campaign is getting on since the heady days of the 70s? I realise that this vast undertaking will take a long time to complete but could I ask that you bump Britney Spears up the list a bit?
Having said all that, I'm afraid I must ask that you prepare yourselves for something of a shock - after many years of analysis and experimentation I'm afraid I have to conclude that you product is nothing more than a fizzy drink.
I've never used allofmp3.com and have no problem with people viewing or buying any material of activities performed by consenting adults. But haven't a lot of child pr0n sellers/purchasers been traced through credit card transactions and does Visa take an equivalent moral high ground when it comes to removing it's credit card service from those???
But what about brand names? Sony and Panasonic price their products based on the fact that Joe Bloke believes their products are in some way better. So if you're a U2 fan buying the next (over-priced) U2 CD, are you any different than Joe Bloke buying an (over-priced) Sony TV because you happen to like Sony products?
And as to that "one company" statement - if you manufacture something then you need retailers to buy it from you in bulk. Therefore, you need to sell it cheap enough to retailers to get them to buy as many as possible. But the retailers will only stock what they think they can sell, and if their selling fewer copies because of P2P, then the price they buy it in for, and ultimately sell it for, is higher.
People want to hear different takes and that group of people includes the artist themselves.
Yes, sure the artist is going to listen to different takes before choosing the one(s) for an album and, yes, if you're a big enough fan of a musician, you may enjoy hearing other takes that musician made. None of that goes against what I've said so far.
Don't try and use grammaer nazi stuff to deviate from the point.
Well then don't try to convince me you're an "artist" when you can't be bothered to write English properly.
If you want to call my abilities as amusician into question, I play the guitar, bass, synthesizer, keyboard, piano. I write, produce, remix, engineer and work in close collaboration with one of the biggest music production software companies in the world.
So, just like me, you want to earn a living and to continue to do so. Fine, but by your own admission, you work in a music software company which, whatever that software actually does, can only serve to make music more sterile. So you're just protecting your job here.
Do you think hundreds of smelly kids high on drugs who just wanna jump up and down and just have some silly fun will be able to listen to the original version of The Wall in a night club?
Of course not. But then do you think sitting alone in a comfortable chair focusing and listening to a piece of music is the same kind of activity as those kids in a club? Again, no. In the first case, it's about doing nothing more than giving the music your complete attention (whether it's rock, jazz, classical, whatever) but in the latter case, what the "music" actually is is pretty much irrelevant - it just has to be loud and have enough beats per minute to be danceable to.
I excpect to listen to that mix of the track is in the poker machine room of some seedy redneck bar.
Live bands aside, you wouldn't go into a bar just to listen to music! You go to meet someone for a beer, and if they happened to have a good jukebox you'd throw on a song or two - fine, but music is not the prime activity there, is it?
You don't really know your sampling from your remixing and are keeping a closed mind about things.
Remixing is done purely because DJs want to feel "unique" or "special" in front of their audience - put on anything that's got enough beats per minute and the kids will dance to it. Great, good luck to them, it's not my scene but if they enjoy it, what the hell.
But let's not classify remixing as anything to do with music - it's a mechanical process purely to fill a market.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well guess what, everyone? The way we've been doing things up until now is completely wrong and this is how we're all going to be doing it in the future!"
Do these fools have no concept of the merest possibility that *JUST MAYBE* some of the stuff the human race has invented over the years has been pretty much refined to the best it can be, works as it is and therefore doesn't *NEED* to change?
For example, I think it's pretty safe to assume that wheels will always be round, that we'll probably always represent information as combinations of characters from an alphabet and that writing information on one or more sheets of near two-dimensional material is a pretty good way of storing and carrying information without any reliance on external power or much risk of mechanical breakdown.
I have a myriad of friends and work colleagues, most of whom are technology geeks, but I've yet to hear any of them clamouring for "more Internet worlds" or "the 3D Web" - most of them seem to spend a lot of their time nattering on about the fun they're having on World Of Warcraft.
If people are looking to the future, then they are probably looking forward to far more important things like a cure for cancer or world peace. Let's face it, 95% of the computer users in the world put up with a bloaty operating system without complaining about it, so why do they care about this stuff?
I really think it's about time that Slashdot stopped posting articles because some fat pig in a skyscraper somewhere thinks he's clever enough to dress up an advertisement for something pretty bloody bland and uninteresting into a "Here's what's coming next" psuedo-technology discussion.
Personally, as someone who buys every DVD and CD that I like, music downloads have no interest for me and, as an honest buyer, I find it objectionable that I potentially will have DRM enforced on me even though I do not copy (for anyone else) the media that I own. Therefore DRM is evil and anyone who does their best to crack it or break it is someone I consider a hero.
However, aside from my personal opinions of DRM, there are far too many dumb people out there with far too much money to spend. Those same people buy things because they are "cool" or because lots of other people have them, without looking in greater depth about things like the erosion of their rights as a consumer. Because marketing has also hidden this important fact from them, what DVD Jon is doing helps to bring DRM into the public eye and, at least, goes some way to making sure that they have access to all the facts, good and bad, about DRM. That's why what he is doing is so important.
Not wishing to dampen your endless enthusiasm or anything, but has nobody told you that you still have to pay for all of that stuff at the end of the month?
Then your hardware had the ability to run Windows XP...
This time next year you'll be able to use all the killer apps Windows users have - because you will have *BECOME* Windows users...
Linux as an OS was not "designed" to kick Microsoft Windows from the desktop - it was the culmination of ideas from a number of people who just wanted a free alternative that mimicked UNIX. Sure, Red Hat, Novell, etc all *market* Linux that way but it's important not to get confused over this.
No, probably because of historical bagage, but in the same way Linux/Unix is stuck with a filesystem mess which is quite ridiculously complex.
I don't want to draw you into a "Linux vs Windows" argument because, as a user of both, they both have their problems. And as someone who does some Linux training at my place of work, people who come into my classes with only Windows experience do find the UNIX filesystem difficult to grasp - but, when you actually take the time to get to grips with it, it's very logical. Especially when it comes to home directories and pretty much being able to guarantee that your local settings for an application live in your home directory in a flat text file, not in a group of obfuscated entries in the registry, which ultimately makes migrating settings between machines (or between similar users) very easy.
I'm not touting Linux as a direct replacement for Windows because to use Linux effectively, you do need to sit down and learn how to use it - Joe Average who plays a few games, prints a few photos and surfs the Internet quite happily with Windows has no need to ever give Linux a second thought and that's the way it should stay.
And if that sounds elitist, it's not meant to be - I'm just as happy to buy a nice modern car and throw money at a mechanic to service it because I am just not interested in spending time learning how a car works to do it myself.
Whilst I do agree that binge-drinking in rife in the UK, it is still a very small minority of people who end up getting blind drunk on a night out, and of those people, a smaller minority still that are violent in public.
Certain areas of our town and city centres are not nice places at night and are all starting to look like clones of each other. Part of the responsibility for this has to fall on our town planners and councils who, purely for financial reasons, have allowed countless plastic theme pub chains to take over entire streets in those centres - in my ex-home town of Reading (about 40 miles to the west of London), for example, the area around the old town hall that used to house banks, a few speciality shops and the main Post Office is now just wall-to-wall bars.
In addition to this, these "designer bar chains" market themselves to appeal to the 18-25 generation which therefore automatically attracts all that generation brings with it - not least drugs and attitude. And of course, because ID and age verification systems in the UK are totally ineffective, these bars bring in the underage teenage drinkers who have the added advantage that our lax laws do not allow the police to do much more than move them on when they find them - it should not be forgotten that these same bars also stock a nice array of colourful "alcopop" drinks which, whatever the labels or the drink makers say, have been specifically targetted at teenagers.
However, whilst I appear to be painting a "doom and gloom" picture of UK towns and cities, the reality is that because "Generation X" are doing their own thing in the town centres (and let's face it, why would any other generation want to spend an evening in a faceless drinking establishment with MTV blasting out its plastic videos at full volume), our smaller towns and villages are blessed with some excellent traditional pubs and restaurants where the rest of us can go and have a more quiet and relaxed night out - I'm certainly not complaining.
There's no easy fix to this problem. The UK has enjoyed a pretty much stable economy for a few years now and whilst we are taxed for just about everything we do, most people seem to still have a fair degree of disposable income (or a complete disregards of credit card debt). With our 18-25s probably not burdened with mortgages or kids, advertising has targetted their money specifically with the endless "buy this product or be an uncool little twat" message, whilst magazines, (certain) newspapers and TV programmes sell them the idea that "everyone can be a celebrity, including the totally talentless". Mix that in with our inherent desire to always be "Jack The Lad" and teenage attitude, and you already know the results.
I should also say that here in the UK, we have more than our fair share of our own equivalent of the "Redneck Trailer Park dwellers". There are people for whom compliance and "fitting in with the crowd" are their only aims because they are just too stupid and ignorant to be individualists - they dress the same, like the same narrow range of music, drink the same drinks and will do stupid things purely to get praise from their peers. ("Happy slapping" was an activity invented for that particular group of our society.)
As someone who was a "leather-jacketed metal-head" between the late 70s and late 80s, I saw lots of drunk, happy people at concerts, rock festivals and in rock pubs but never any violence - even including one of my local hangouts that also attracted punks, skinheaded ska fans and mods.
As long as we have an environment that encourages conformity in the UK, we will have this problem - but there are plenty of other places the rest of us can go just to have fun.
This was the one major thing that stopped me upgrading from Windows 2000 until just over a year ago when I realised that it was relatively straightforward to get back to the "Classic" interface which I infinitely prefer. Even then, I have to install TweakUI to take off all the menu fades and pop-ups.
But my real bugbear with XP is the fact that once you've spent hours building a really optimised system and installed all the updates, it's impossible (as far as I can tell anyway) of building a Ghost image for installation on another machine if there's too much of a hardware difference between the first and second machine - even though I have a proper unique registration key for each machine.
With Linux, all I really have to do is carefully build a modularised kernel on the first machine for all the hardware types I own, then it's just a case of copying the whole thing across.
Commercial UNIXes were unable to compete with Windows on a price perspective and Microsoft capitalised, very well I might add, on that price difference and on a sales pitch that basically said any tool needing to be configured, run and managed from the command line would always be more complex than one administered from within a GUI environment. (Playing "devil's advocate here, I don't personally believe that, I'm looking at it from their perspective).
However, a tactical mistake they made was not to keep the GUI separate from the core OS from the outset - I guess greed played a big part in that because making the GUI much heavier and inseperable from the core kernel forced MS customers into hardware upgrades, which in turn meant more Windows sales.
Had Linux and the BSDs not come on the scene, Microsoft would be in the same situation with security and bugs that they are today but with less dissatisfaction from their customer base because there would be nothing to compare Windows to.
However, I'm sure that any intelligent Windows user now would have to agree that when it comes to tailoring a server for very specific uses, nothing beats the modularity and configurability of a UNIX-like OS.
The problem Microsoft are now faced with is that to change Windows such that the GUI became a modular, selectable part of the OS would be so vast a change that it would render a huge proportion of existing applications incompatible and take away one of the major reasons stopping a lot of their customer base putting in Linux or BSD servers in certain parts of the corporate enterprise. Add to that the fact that migration plans in enterprises are phased over lengthy periods of time, and MS have to maintain compatibility layers to give time for older applications to catch up - this adds to the bloat and the requirement for more raw processing power.
I wouldn't say that Linux or BSD have the power (or intention) of fully displacing Windows, but I do believe they have unintentionally forced Microsoft down a single track of having to make their OSes bigger and bloatier with each release, and this will get to the point where their OSes become unmanageable from a security and patching perspective.
I think it's inevitable that at some point in the near future, if MS stay in the OS game, then they will need to modularize Windows a lot more to make it manageable - that will have to lead to a lot of applications breaking, customers getting more angry and, perhaps, Linux and BSD becoming real viable alternatives in core enterprises where the likes of Exchange and MSSQL currently dominate.
..."if and when I become a movie studio mogul I will not jump automatically to making a turgid plasticized sequel to, or remake of, previously successful movies."
Yes, that means hardware and software DRM - and when you're locked in for several years paying a "tax" to Microsoft, those plus points might well start looking less attractive...
Apple may have been the first to seriously take on legal music downloads but this is still a battle being fought - iTunes is driven by Apple's proprietary DRM which makes them no different to Microsoft with DRM and Media Player in trying to lock users into a particular vendor. Whatever happens, I don't see Apple winning this battle - either "bigger and badder" Microsoft will push their proprietary DRM into the everyone's media players or (my hope) DRM will fail completely in which case established online names like Amazon or Google will push their way in. Show me a player that can be controlled by the car audio controls, other than the iPod (coming straight from the factory, no third-party hacks). My guess is you can't. I agree that any player can pipe their output to a line-in on the car audio deck, but the only player with car audio control support is the iPod.
Again, this technology is still in it's infancy. We're already seeing in-car audio players with USB connectivity and Blaupunkt, a traditional player in in-car audio, is releasing players with hard disks; check out the specification of the Blaupunkt Casablanca player and you'll see there is no mention of the iPod.
So I guess you're opposed to satellite radio too, then? Not to mention he also listed radio shows (podcasts) that are high quality and absolutely free to download. The podcasts are basically ad free, with a mention of sponsors at the beginning and end of shows, while the subscriptions are definitely ad free. Being Slashdot, I realize that anything anti-iPod is marked informative, but comments like this bring it closer to the troll mod.
I'm not opposed to satellite radio, I just don't see it bringing anything new or innovative - it's just more information overload. What do most people care if there are "millions" of TV and radio staions if 99.9% of them are just Joe Averages without very much to say - let's face it, to broadcast anything of interest, they'll have to pay a license to someone somewhere which means they won't be able to offer a free service to listeners/viewers.
As regards radio shows, I'm lucky enough to be in the UK where I can enjoy the free radio service of the BBC without adverts. (And before anyone jumps in here, in the UK you pay a license fee for BBC TV but do not have to for radio.) I'm also looking forward to downloading archived shows from the BBC, there's probably enough material in there to last anyone's lifetime anyway.
Ok, I'm hoping this was a typo, but you must encode in a pretty small bitrate to last you an hour at the gym for 1 MB. And it definitely would NOT sound good.
Yep, sorry, typo. Encoding with LAMEENC at 128 kb/s on a 1GB player gives me between 2-3 hours of playing time. Sure, low bitrate but I encode my own CDs so I can recode them if I want higher.
doubt there are many that think the iPod is a generous charity. Apple fans are fine with paying more for apple products. They have put up with paying the Apple premium for years. It's just recently that that premium has actually been reduced to the point where they're quite competitive for the money you pay (just look at the MacBook). The only reason your post was modded informative was because of the anti-Apple fanboys that are so prevalent on this board.
Look, I'm not criticising just Apple fans, my view on people and "brand loyalty" has absolutely nothing to do with product quality but more to do with those people feeling they are part of an elitist little club - that goes the same for a whole lot of Linux fans (yes, I'm a Linux user) and Windows fans (I'm also a Windows user).
But in my 30+ years working and playing with computers and gadgets, I have never owned an Apple product - not because of any personal boycott, just because they've never made anything I particularly felt I wanted at a price I was prepared to pay. So I disagree that Apple has had that great an influence on the world.
This is just the results of dirty back-handed wheeling-and-dealing committed by all corporations and is probably nothing to be particularly proud of.
I played and loved original Doom, Duke Nukem, Heretic, the Quakes, the Unreal (Tournaments) and original Half-Life on the PC and have never owned an X-Box to this day.
One day, I went to a friend's house on his X-Box and we played Halo for four hours. Yep, it was good fun, don't get me wrong, but had nothing in it I hadn't seen before.
I therefore couldn't understand the big "hooha" over Halo but can appreciate it was great for gamers who'd not played FPSes before.
Because if they did, I can tell you it's really no big deal - after all, when you've seen one big-eyed schoolgirl being raped by a Cthulhoid tentacle, you've seen them all.
Day 100: My ex-owner, who now suffers from schizophrenia due to excessive pot smoking, was committed to Arkham Asylum for suffering from a mental illness whereby he believes small electronic gadgets have intelligence and personality. I am therefore a figment of his imagination and have now ceased to be... ****POP***
"Boomboxes" died out around the middle of the 90s and certainly weren't that popular, at least from the point of view of portable ones. At any rate, they died long before the iPod came to fruition. I for one had an MP3 CD player (similar to a CD Walkman) a couple of years before MP3 players took off.
2) It has changed the way we buy music, by legitimizing music downloads.
There are still far more illegal music downloads than there are legitimate ones going on and I seem to recall Apple almost getting caught up in a "monopoly" suit for automatically bundling iTunes with it.
3) It has actually made radio talk shows more popular, as many on-air talk shows are now available for subscription-based download (ESPN Radio's Radio Insider and Premiere Radio Networks' Streamlink programs for example). We are seeing rapid growth of specialized downloadable talk shows (This Week in Technology (TWiT) being one of the best examples of this).
Ah, so what you're saying is that the iPod introduced the concept of "paying for radio programs".... and that's a *GOOD* thing???
4) It has made it far more practical to not have to carry around your Compact Discs when listening to music in the car. Thanks to increased storage capacity on today's players you can "rip" your CD collection at higher sample rates and still put quite a lot of music on a single player for car playback. Also, many cars now offer standard auxiliary 1/8" jack input for all portable music players and some even offer special connectors to connect your newer-generation iPod so you can control the iPod from the car stereo controls and/or recharge the iPod's battery at the same time.
Firstly, what you describe can be done with just about any MP3 player at about 1/4 the cost of an iPod.
Secondly, if you're in the car long enough to justify having your complete music collection with you, then you're probably selecting songs while you are driving which is probably quite a dangerous thing to do. Personally, I've a 6 x CD player that came built in with my car, on long journeys I load the player with 6 and keep 6 more CDs in the glove compartment. The inconvenience of having to reload the CD player at a stop once during my journey has never justified the cost of an iPod for me - and a cheap 1MB player holds enough songs to last me at the gym or on the usual 2 hour flights I take.
The point I'm trying to make is that the iPod is just another little electronic gadget that you either like or think is overpriced for what it gives you - it's just an opinion, no different to supporting a particular football team or liking a particular TV series.
Apple has a similar duty as Microsoft when it comes to making as much money as possible for its shareholders - the sooner the Apple fanboys get to grip with this the better, rather than assuming that Apple is just this generous charity out to do it's best by them.
And I would know because I'm British and you Americans just need to *look* at our teeth!
Isn't that the same sor of question as "Is it illegal for me to sell naked pictures of myself as a child"?
What us, guv'nor? Illegal content? In 'ere? Nah, ya got the wrong bloke, mate! 'onest as the day is long, sunshine. I mean, who'd a thunk it... us... 'ere... downloadin' all them... mp3s, you say?... wass them then?... an' movies... nuh, not us guv! (etc.)
The first rule of Slashdot is that we don't talk about Usenet.
And it's quite possible someone here may give you a Chinese burn for mentioning NNTP.
1. Coca Cola delivery trucks are not, to my knowledge, equipped with Tesla-coil like devices capable of illuminating light bulbs by some kind of electrical induction the moment that they drive past them - even during the Christmas holiday period.
2. Having performed an experiment with a dead goldfish and a can of Coke, I can confirm that it indeed does not, as you so like to state, "add life".
3. I just wondered how the "Teaching The World To Sing" campaign is getting on since the heady days of the 70s? I realise that this vast undertaking will take a long time to complete but could I ask that you bump Britney Spears up the list a bit?
Having said all that, I'm afraid I must ask that you prepare yourselves for something of a shock - after many years of analysis and experimentation I'm afraid I have to conclude that you product is nothing more than a fizzy drink.
Kind Regards
A. Consumer
Just curious...
Well, shall we just agree on the media companies being monopolistic, thieving bastards then? :-)
But what about brand names? Sony and Panasonic price their products based on the fact that Joe Bloke believes their products are in some way better. So if you're a U2 fan buying the next (over-priced) U2 CD, are you any different than Joe Bloke buying an (over-priced) Sony TV because you happen to like Sony products?
And as to that "one company" statement - if you manufacture something then you need retailers to buy it from you in bulk. Therefore, you need to sell it cheap enough to retailers to get them to buy as many as possible. But the retailers will only stock what they think they can sell, and if their selling fewer copies because of P2P, then the price they buy it in for, and ultimately sell it for, is higher.
Yes, sure the artist is going to listen to different takes before choosing the one(s) for an album and, yes, if you're a big enough fan of a musician, you may enjoy hearing other takes that musician made. None of that goes against what I've said so far.
Don't try and use grammaer nazi stuff to deviate from the point.
Well then don't try to convince me you're an "artist" when you can't be bothered to write English properly.
If you want to call my abilities as amusician into question, I play the guitar, bass, synthesizer, keyboard, piano. I write, produce, remix, engineer and work in close collaboration with one of the biggest music production software companies in the world.
So, just like me, you want to earn a living and to continue to do so. Fine, but by your own admission, you work in a music software company which, whatever that software actually does, can only serve to make music more sterile. So you're just protecting your job here.
Do you think hundreds of smelly kids high on drugs who just wanna jump up and down and just have some silly fun will be able to listen to the original version of The Wall in a night club?
Of course not. But then do you think sitting alone in a comfortable chair focusing and listening to a piece of music is the same kind of activity as those kids in a club? Again, no. In the first case, it's about doing nothing more than giving the music your complete attention (whether it's rock, jazz, classical, whatever) but in the latter case, what the "music" actually is is pretty much irrelevant - it just has to be loud and have enough beats per minute to be danceable to.
I excpect to listen to that mix of the track is in the poker machine room of some seedy redneck bar.
Live bands aside, you wouldn't go into a bar just to listen to music! You go to meet someone for a beer, and if they happened to have a good jukebox you'd throw on a song or two - fine, but music is not the prime activity there, is it?
You don't really know your sampling from your remixing and are keeping a closed mind about things.
Remixing is done purely because DJs want to feel "unique" or "special" in front of their audience - put on anything that's got enough beats per minute and the kids will dance to it. Great, good luck to them, it's not my scene but if they enjoy it, what the hell.
But let's not classify remixing as anything to do with music - it's a mechanical process purely to fill a market.