So presumably security, usability & interoperability don't get a look in then? As far as you're concerned, the more menu options & icons to click, the better then?
Ubuntu could drop all support for zip, bzip, etc., in favor of a proprietary new compression format that no other distro used and it would get glowing reviews and plaudits for it.
This statement is an oxymoron and demonstrates your lack of knowledge of open source.
The fact that any Linux distribution like Ubuntu gets used in the first place is because it has a high degree of compatibility with software that any other Linux distro uses - introducing a proprietary compression format would probably be the death of any distro because no-one would want to use it.
I suggest you need to go read about this more to become better informed - you'll then understand that a Linux distro is just about a particular way of packaging and presenting software to appeal to users of varying degrees of ability - ultimately, however, it's all comes from the same source code anyway.
Microsoft's one core function is to provide you with software that allows you to use your PC in the way you want it to - it is not there to make decisions about who you can and cannot do business with purely because its closed standards dictate that.
It's "tunnel-visioned" individuals like yourself that always turn arguments about cross-platform & open standards into "anti-Microsoft" ones - surely, the idea of an open standard is that everyone can use it???
1. 100% of Internet users are capable of using XPCom because they can all download and install Firefox. Less than 100% of Internet users can never use Windows API because they don't run Windows.
2. If older people use Internet banking, they probably have enough knowledge to download things like bank statements and click a "setup.exe" to install a program they need. Both "skills" are all you need to install Firefox - after that, the interface is similar enough to IE for them to use Firefox immediately.
3. Perhaps you'll reconsider your argument when, in the future, in order to continue accessing your bank account details online, you have to pay Microsoft a regular "rental" fee to use Windows and IE because that's the only software combination that let's you do it.
4. Please remember that the Internet of today exists because of open standards where the core functionality of things like web browsing, file transfer & remote connectivity are totally platform independent. It therefore makes sense to continue in that way and since people share a lot more information and documents online, they too should all be in an open standard.
5. How would you feel if you couldn't fill up your car at the petrol station nearest your home because it's fuel was incompatible with your car & you had to go to another petrol station 10 miles away? This is an equivalent analogy to the argument you are defending.
Sorry, but I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone within the games industry who moans about someone else within the games industry.
Go back 20 years & there were thousands of individuals & small groups of people producing games for the likes of the C64, Spectrum, etc. This meant that to make money out of the games industry, you had to create an innovative game that was either something entirely new or pushed the hardware beyond it's perceived limits.
However, along came the businessmen & all these independent games producers were either absorbed into much bigger companies or driven out of the games industry. With big money behind them, these companies could spend lots of money "packaging" the games with colourful boxes, shiny manuals & hugely complex pre-game or in-game movies.
As it stands today, small independent games developers, whilst they do a good job in many respects, are restricted to writing "smaller" games with less market appeal or penetration because they simply do not have the money to market their games or "package" them as they might want to.
Gabe Newell is a part of "today's" game-maker generation where the few big players that are left in the games industry, both hardware & software players, are trying to kill each other off so as to wrest control of more of it for themselves. This means that innovation and ease of programming get sacrificed in favour of expensive licensing and hardware lock-in - if Gabe can't see that for himself then he doesn't deserve to be in business.
As far as I am concerned, the sooner this version of the greedy games industry implodes in on itself, the better & if Newell is a casualty of that, then so be it - my sympathies lie with the likes of John Carmack and ID software who do genuinely work hard to encourage cross-platform games and give the source back to the smaller developers when they're done with it.
Please get away from the idea that any commercial venture gives you, the consumer, anything "for free" - it simply does not happen.
You incurred no additional charges for the expansions but you can bet your life they were factored into the original cost of the game you purchased & the fact that making those expansions "free" would generate more sales of the original game.
Yes, I'm sure you feel that you benefitted from this but you need to remember that no successful business does anything unless it is likely to make the business more money - otherwise, the shareholders will start complaining & dumping their stock.
Admittedly it will take a lot of people doing this to start denting the profits of the RIAA, so be it, but while it's a small thing for people to do it also has the advantage of being a cheap and anonymous way to start chipping away at the RIAA's monopoly.
An even cheaper way to f*ck over the RIAA is to just not buy any CDs.
Your method of the free distribution of CDs still gives them a target to attack and a scapegoat to blame for all the ills of "sharing" music.
The RIAA is interested in just *one* thing - money. That means they want everyone to buy their own copy of every CD or every downloaded song because that way they get even more money. Your demonstrations of "non-compliance" are irrelevant to the RIAA borg.
The solution to the RIAA problem is to remember that as a consumer in a capitalist society, you simply *don't* buy a product you do not think is value for money or is being sold by a corporation with dubious business or political motives - no matter how much you personally may *want* that product.
Do that and you start denting the profits of the record companies who, in turn, stop financing the RIAA because they're not achieving anything.
If I was a Microsoft shareholder, I'd be kicking up a fuss about how much more profitable MSFT would be if it stuck to it's strengths of eye candy and API obfuscation and took the free, stable, secure alternative to writing the difficult bits.
I must admit, I am truly *amazed* at the take up of Windows XP. Security holes aside, and as someone who can't quite yet abandon Microsoft completely, I actually think Windows 2000 is a pretty okay operating system for general purpose computing that includes gaming & desktop work.
However, in comparison, XP just sucks completely. The desktop eye candy visibly slows a PC down compared to the Windows 2000 classic desktop & the "our way or the highway" security tightening attitude of Service Pack 2 is absolutely ridiculous! I've had countless friends and relatives phoning me because they've got XP SP2 PCs that don't ping each other or can't be seen in "Network Neighbourhood" purely because SP2 treats every user like a 5-year old when it comes to security and, by default, locks just about everything down.
And whereas Windows Media Player 9 seems to play most things, WMP10 locks up and crashes with great frequency (at least on the PCs I've tried anyway).
XP is, very simply, a huge step backwards from Windows 2000 and is completely unusable, in my opinion.
I also doubt very much that many "hardcore" Linux users would install MS Office on their Linux PCs anyway. Sure, MS Office on Linux might convince a few more people to try Linux but the effect would be relatively minimal and the sales wouldn't justify MS doing it in the first place.
I'm no "communist hippie" type - if people want to pay for "out of the box" software then let them do it. But to me, and a large proportion of the Linux community, using Linux means having complete control over every aspect of how your PC runs and installing a closed source application on Linux would be an entirely "alien" thing to do. For that reason, I wouldn't buy or use MS Office if it was available for Linux.
Hmmm, not sure I agree with that statement. Whatever the adoption of Linux in the future, I think it's safe to assume that Joe Sixpack will only ever use Linux in a "standard" distro format like "Lindows" for example. And as soon as you have a widespread "standard" distribution, you have a whole heap of PCs that potentially suffer from the same security holes that all need the same software updates in order to become secure again.
On top of this. look at the number of Joe Sixpack users who currently log into their Windows PCs with administrator priveliges and you can bet the same people will always use "root" on their Lindows sessions.
No, viruses and worms will never be as bad within the Linux community as they are within the Windows community but targetted attacks designed to buffer overflow specific services on Linux PCs which haven't been locked down correctly will certainly increase.
To be perfectly honest, I'm more than happy for Linux to remain an operating system where you *must* spend some time learning how it works before you use it and let those people who just want a PC they can use a desktop machine stick with Windows.
As for spam, that's also very much a "Windows" thing. I receive spam mail but I never get to read it because I've setup procmail and SpamAssassin filtering that now deletes just about all of it before I ever see it. If everyone filtered spam mail, it would rarely get read and therefore negate the need for it to be sent in the first place. You can blame Microsoft for engendering the idea that you just install applications with little need to configure them that causes Joe Sixpack to use mail clients like Outlook Express without any thought of applying mail filtering.
Aside from the advances in graphics capabilities, the only *real* innovation in gaming in the past few years has been MMORPGs & whilst I accept the appeal of these types of games, in reality these games are just "ports" of traditional pen-and-paper RPGs to computers.
The fact is that there has never been a better time for PC gaming than there is today purely because of the vast back catalogue of older games that can still be played natively on a PC or by using an emulator program.
Yes, realistic 3D graphics can help to sell a game but of more importance are the design of the game itself and, quite frankly, there is simply no more innovation coming out of the games companies because now it's *all* been done - there are simply only *so many* weapons that can be thought up for an FPS or only *so many* different types of cars that can be raced around a track.
I'm not a parent so I'm not overly experienced with kids but I've had my share of babysitting for nephews, nieces and friends' children and I've found that whilst they do have favourite modern games they like to play, they've found games like "Superfrog" and "Speedball 2" on my Amiga CD32, "Atic Atac" or "Manic Miner" on a ZX Spectrum emulator, etc, equally entertaining and engaging - hell, I even have a teenage niece who's now dropped "The Sims" completely since I installed "The Incredible Machine" (a very addictive puzzle game from the early 90s) via DOSBox on her PC.
Sure, the legalities of "abandonware" and emulation have yet to be fully decided but it's not difficult to find these old games on the Internet and it's a facet of gaming all too frequently ignored by avid gamers.
Only the other week, my buddies and I abandoned an Unreal Tournament LAN session in favour of an Amiga-emulated "Speedball 2" league evening and we had as much fun playing that as we do with UT normally.
My experience is that the vast majority of MS Office users probably only need about 10% of its features whereupon OpenOffice would more than adequately suffice as an alternative.
Personally, I wouldn't use MS Office on Linux, even if it was available - purely because I do not want to have to store my documents in a proprietary format that is only readable by one specific application. Added to that, I simply don't want to "tarnish" my Open Source Linux system with something that's closed source unless I really have to (as with nVidia graphics drivers for instance).
Plus I'm also of the mentality that if I have to do something clever to a document then I'd much rather have the option of having the document in as close to real text format as possible so I can write scripts and macros in the shell or Perl to do what I need to rather than having to learn a "new" macro language withing the application itself.
In reality, of course, MS Office on Linux will simply *never* happen - it would be partial commercial suicide for MS to do that simply because of the tie-in that Office has with Windows.
If people chose to use MS Office then good luck to them but be aware that, particularly in corporate environments, most people use it because "that's what they were given", not because they had any choice in the matter or need any of Office's advanced features.
Is anyone else reminded of the part in Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent & Trillian are on the planet Brontitall having been captured by Hig Hurtenflurst & his foot warriors?
Specifically the part where Hig orders the foot warriors to restrain Arthur & Trillian but because the foot warriors have terribly painful feet (caused by ill-fitting shoes) they are unable to do so.
So Hig gives out the order to Arthur and Trillian:
Who gives a damn whether or not Microsoft "accepts" Linux? Why does the ignorant media base Linux's success on whether or not Microsoft acknowledges its existence or not?
Linux exists *despite* Microsoft, not *because* of it - the "UNIX way" started 30+ years ago, long before Microsoft even had MS-DOS, let alone Windows.
Linux is my chosen way because it's stable, fulfilling to use, and makes me feel good being part of a global movement where people create because they want to rather than because of financial gain.
However, at the same time, my wife uses Windows because she does a lot of work with Excel, wants ease of use with her digital camera and just wants to stick with what she knows. She's aware Linux exists, she occasionally uses one of my machines to surf the Internet and now prefers Firefox to IE. But she has no interest in shell programming or command line skills.
The point I am trying to make is that neither Windows or Linux provides the answer to everyone's computing requirements and those of us who advocate Linux should only do it in so much as to make Windows users aware that there are alternatives to the Microsoft way.
However, there is *no* intent to destroy Microsoft or to aim for "more Linux desktops than Windows ones by 2010" type targets - if such is ever the case, it will be because people have chosen it to be so, not because of Linux winning some kind of "war".
Beyond downloading a few MP3s from Usenet to "try before I buy", I don't pirate so what do I care what the RIAA does? And if they stop MP3s on Usenet, then I won't get to try and won't buy... it won't be my loss.
So get the fuck off your high horse and stop buying RIAA-label CDs all together.
Why should I? If I'm getting a good piece of music at what I consider a fair price, why do I care who the money goes to ultimately? So they half the price of CDs, I potentially get to buy twice as many - but I'll still select carefully & buy only what I consider to be good music.
I *DO* care if a CD is copy protected & have taken back those CDs to vendor as "unfit for purpose" if I can't make my own MP3s or play them on a PC. And, believe me, I have stood there and complained until I've got my money back...
I don't care if stores like Virgin are cheaper than elsewhere, I won't buy shit there for the life of me.
Suit yourself - me, I'm just a discerning consumer. I'll look for the best price & if it's in a Virgin or HMV, then I'll buy it there. It's a rare occurrence, admittedly, but I just want the best value for my hard-earned cash.
And I haven't purchased an RIAA-label CD is at least 10 years.
That's your choice but then I choose my music based on what's pleasant to my ears and not deny myself missing something I might like purely because of having to make a political statement.
So quit acting like you're something special, you're funding their lawsuits.
I consider anyone who makes informed decisions as "special". Unfortunately, far too many people are taken in by media advertising these days and are parted with their money too easily. It's those "sheeple" who make it bad for the rest of us because they just "consume" what gets churned out to them rather than exercising discretion and self-control.
If we were all more discerning, these big corporations that fund the RIAA would have less money to do so because they would get less money from us consumers.
And that just about p*sses all over your argument.
If mice become immortal, they will need an infinite amount of cheese for food.
It therefore follows that they will have to enslave us humans to all work as dairy farmers and in cheese processing plants purely to create all the food they need to survive.
Trust the bloody Australians to sell out the human race to our new mice overlords!
I'm no fan of the RIAA (or its equivalent in the UK, the BPI) but to all those of you who think the RIAA is doing something wrong, why don't you get up from behind your computer screens and *actively* do something to fight back?
How about just *not buying* any DVDs or CDs? How about emailing the RIAA, the film producers and the record companies and tell them you're not buying their products because they're overpriced?
It doesn't matter how many times this discussion appears on Slashdot, the RIAA is not going to take a blind bit of notice until people start to hit them where it really hurts - in the wallet.
I personally use music downloading as a "try before I buy scheme" now - if I like it, I buy it because nothing beats having a nice shiny CD in a nice shiny case with some nice music on it; otherwise I delete it because it's just not worth the space on a hard disk or CDR.
With movies, I read reviews and go to the cinema or buy the DVD only when I am sure it's worth the money.
In both cases, rip-off high street stores like HMV or Virgin get *none* of my money unless they have prices that compete with on-line music and movie vendors.
As a result, I spend about 1/3 of what I used to spend on CDs, movies and DVDs and I'm now much happier with what I buy.
Unfortunately, it's the "sheeple" of the world that just sit there blindly consuming everything the music and movie companies churn out that are the problem - if we were all a lot more careful with what we spent our money on, this would send a very powerful message back to these companies and allow us, the consumer, to dictate what are fair prices and what we deem good quality products.
...Microsoft CEO Bill Gates today stated that it would be far cheaper to fit giant Windows XP-powered rocket motors to the moon and fly it to Redmond, whereupon Steve Ballmer could hop around it in his shirt sleeves shouting "Developers, developers!"
...which is precisely why modules exist so that you don't need to recompile the kernel everytime you make a hardware change.
Sometimes having only "half the knowledge" is worse than having none at all.
Incidentally, I hope the Windows team aren't surfing the Internet during their lunchbreak - because they'll need to install a virus killer, spyware detector and all the service packs and security updates first.
Paramount are basically nothing more than "rip-off" merchants when it comes to pricing the Trek series on DVD.
Over here in the UK, most TV series, including The Simpsons, 24, Babylon 5, The X-Files, etc. seem to be priced around £30 (=~$55) which, to me, is about right. However, the Star Trek series seem to be priced around £69.95 (=~$125) which is ridiculous.
I'm gradually collecting Trek on DVD, having sold my videos on Ebay while I could still get a reasonable price for them, and I just wait until the post-Christmas sales in stores or on-line retailers to buy the DVDs. So far, I have the complete TNG DVD set and I don't think I paid more than £40 for any one series.
I've emailed Paramount with some intelligent questions and comments about their pricing policy on Trek DVDs on a number of occasions (hoping that a lot of other people do the same) but never even get a confirmation of receipt of the email, let alone a response.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, did you *really* read your comments before posting??? How can an open standard be of a single vendor??? Isn't this a complete contradiction?
So presumably security, usability & interoperability don't get a look in then? As far as you're concerned, the more menu options & icons to click, the better then?
This statement is an oxymoron and demonstrates your lack of knowledge of open source.
The fact that any Linux distribution like Ubuntu gets used in the first place is because it has a high degree of compatibility with software that any other Linux distro uses - introducing a proprietary compression format would probably be the death of any distro because no-one would want to use it.
I suggest you need to go read about this more to become better informed - you'll then understand that a Linux distro is just about a particular way of packaging and presenting software to appeal to users of varying degrees of ability - ultimately, however, it's all comes from the same source code anyway.
It's "tunnel-visioned" individuals like yourself that always turn arguments about cross-platform & open standards into "anti-Microsoft" ones - surely, the idea of an open standard is that everyone can use it???
1. 100% of Internet users are capable of using XPCom because they can all download and install Firefox. Less than 100% of Internet users can never use Windows API because they don't run Windows.
2. If older people use Internet banking, they probably have enough knowledge to download things like bank statements and click a "setup.exe" to install a program they need. Both "skills" are all you need to install Firefox - after that, the interface is similar enough to IE for them to use Firefox immediately.
3. Perhaps you'll reconsider your argument when, in the future, in order to continue accessing your bank account details online, you have to pay Microsoft a regular "rental" fee to use Windows and IE because that's the only software combination that let's you do it.
4. Please remember that the Internet of today exists because of open standards where the core functionality of things like web browsing, file transfer & remote connectivity are totally platform independent. It therefore makes sense to continue in that way and since people share a lot more information and documents online, they too should all be in an open standard.
5. How would you feel if you couldn't fill up your car at the petrol station nearest your home because it's fuel was incompatible with your car & you had to go to another petrol station 10 miles away? This is an equivalent analogy to the argument you are defending.
Go back 20 years & there were thousands of individuals & small groups of people producing games for the likes of the C64, Spectrum, etc. This meant that to make money out of the games industry, you had to create an innovative game that was either something entirely new or pushed the hardware beyond it's perceived limits.
However, along came the businessmen & all these independent games producers were either absorbed into much bigger companies or driven out of the games industry. With big money behind them, these companies could spend lots of money "packaging" the games with colourful boxes, shiny manuals & hugely complex pre-game or in-game movies.
As it stands today, small independent games developers, whilst they do a good job in many respects, are restricted to writing "smaller" games with less market appeal or penetration because they simply do not have the money to market their games or "package" them as they might want to.
Gabe Newell is a part of "today's" game-maker generation where the few big players that are left in the games industry, both hardware & software players, are trying to kill each other off so as to wrest control of more of it for themselves. This means that innovation and ease of programming get sacrificed in favour of expensive licensing and hardware lock-in - if Gabe can't see that for himself then he doesn't deserve to be in business.
As far as I am concerned, the sooner this version of the greedy games industry implodes in on itself, the better & if Newell is a casualty of that, then so be it - my sympathies lie with the likes of John Carmack and ID software who do genuinely work hard to encourage cross-platform games and give the source back to the smaller developers when they're done with it.
Please get away from the idea that any commercial venture gives you, the consumer, anything "for free" - it simply does not happen.
You incurred no additional charges for the expansions but you can bet your life they were factored into the original cost of the game you purchased & the fact that making those expansions "free" would generate more sales of the original game.
Yes, I'm sure you feel that you benefitted from this but you need to remember that no successful business does anything unless it is likely to make the business more money - otherwise, the shareholders will start complaining & dumping their stock.
An even cheaper way to f*ck over the RIAA is to just not buy any CDs.
Your method of the free distribution of CDs still gives them a target to attack and a scapegoat to blame for all the ills of "sharing" music.
The RIAA is interested in just *one* thing - money. That means they want everyone to buy their own copy of every CD or every downloaded song because that way they get even more money. Your demonstrations of "non-compliance" are irrelevant to the RIAA borg.
The solution to the RIAA problem is to remember that as a consumer in a capitalist society, you simply *don't* buy a product you do not think is value for money or is being sold by a corporation with dubious business or political motives - no matter how much you personally may *want* that product.
Do that and you start denting the profits of the record companies who, in turn, stop financing the RIAA because they're not achieving anything.
I must admit, I am truly *amazed* at the take up of Windows XP. Security holes aside, and as someone who can't quite yet abandon Microsoft completely, I actually think Windows 2000 is a pretty okay operating system for general purpose computing that includes gaming & desktop work.
However, in comparison, XP just sucks completely. The desktop eye candy visibly slows a PC down compared to the Windows 2000 classic desktop & the "our way or the highway" security tightening attitude of Service Pack 2 is absolutely ridiculous! I've had countless friends and relatives phoning me because they've got XP SP2 PCs that don't ping each other or can't be seen in "Network Neighbourhood" purely because SP2 treats every user like a 5-year old when it comes to security and, by default, locks just about everything down.
And whereas Windows Media Player 9 seems to play most things, WMP10 locks up and crashes with great frequency (at least on the PCs I've tried anyway).
XP is, very simply, a huge step backwards from Windows 2000 and is completely unusable, in my opinion.
I'm no "communist hippie" type - if people want to pay for "out of the box" software then let them do it. But to me, and a large proportion of the Linux community, using Linux means having complete control over every aspect of how your PC runs and installing a closed source application on Linux would be an entirely "alien" thing to do. For that reason, I wouldn't buy or use MS Office if it was available for Linux.
Hmmm, not sure I agree with that statement. Whatever the adoption of Linux in the future, I think it's safe to assume that Joe Sixpack will only ever use Linux in a "standard" distro format like "Lindows" for example. And as soon as you have a widespread "standard" distribution, you have a whole heap of PCs that potentially suffer from the same security holes that all need the same software updates in order to become secure again.
On top of this. look at the number of Joe Sixpack users who currently log into their Windows PCs with administrator priveliges and you can bet the same people will always use "root" on their Lindows sessions.
No, viruses and worms will never be as bad within the Linux community as they are within the Windows community but targetted attacks designed to buffer overflow specific services on Linux PCs which haven't been locked down correctly will certainly increase.
To be perfectly honest, I'm more than happy for Linux to remain an operating system where you *must* spend some time learning how it works before you use it and let those people who just want a PC they can use a desktop machine stick with Windows.
As for spam, that's also very much a "Windows" thing. I receive spam mail but I never get to read it because I've setup procmail and SpamAssassin filtering that now deletes just about all of it before I ever see it. If everyone filtered spam mail, it would rarely get read and therefore negate the need for it to be sent in the first place. You can blame Microsoft for engendering the idea that you just install applications with little need to configure them that causes Joe Sixpack to use mail clients like Outlook Express without any thought of applying mail filtering.
The fact is that there has never been a better time for PC gaming than there is today purely because of the vast back catalogue of older games that can still be played natively on a PC or by using an emulator program.
Yes, realistic 3D graphics can help to sell a game but of more importance are the design of the game itself and, quite frankly, there is simply no more innovation coming out of the games companies because now it's *all* been done - there are simply only *so many* weapons that can be thought up for an FPS or only *so many* different types of cars that can be raced around a track.
I'm not a parent so I'm not overly experienced with kids but I've had my share of babysitting for nephews, nieces and friends' children and I've found that whilst they do have favourite modern games they like to play, they've found games like "Superfrog" and "Speedball 2" on my Amiga CD32, "Atic Atac" or "Manic Miner" on a ZX Spectrum emulator, etc, equally entertaining and engaging - hell, I even have a teenage niece who's now dropped "The Sims" completely since I installed "The Incredible Machine" (a very addictive puzzle game from the early 90s) via DOSBox on her PC.
Sure, the legalities of "abandonware" and emulation have yet to be fully decided but it's not difficult to find these old games on the Internet and it's a facet of gaming all too frequently ignored by avid gamers.
Only the other week, my buddies and I abandoned an Unreal Tournament LAN session in favour of an Amiga-emulated "Speedball 2" league evening and we had as much fun playing that as we do with UT normally.
Personally, I wouldn't use MS Office on Linux, even if it was available - purely because I do not want to have to store my documents in a proprietary format that is only readable by one specific application. Added to that, I simply don't want to "tarnish" my Open Source Linux system with something that's closed source unless I really have to (as with nVidia graphics drivers for instance).
Plus I'm also of the mentality that if I have to do something clever to a document then I'd much rather have the option of having the document in as close to real text format as possible so I can write scripts and macros in the shell or Perl to do what I need to rather than having to learn a "new" macro language withing the application itself.
In reality, of course, MS Office on Linux will simply *never* happen - it would be partial commercial suicide for MS to do that simply because of the tie-in that Office has with Windows.
If people chose to use MS Office then good luck to them but be aware that, particularly in corporate environments, most people use it because "that's what they were given", not because they had any choice in the matter or need any of Office's advanced features.
Specifically the part where Hig orders the foot warriors to restrain Arthur & Trillian but because the foot warriors have terribly painful feet (caused by ill-fitting shoes) they are unable to do so.
So Hig gives out the order to Arthur and Trillian:
"Prisoners? Restrain yourselves!"
Linux exists *despite* Microsoft, not *because* of it - the "UNIX way" started 30+ years ago, long before Microsoft even had MS-DOS, let alone Windows.
Linux is my chosen way because it's stable, fulfilling to use, and makes me feel good being part of a global movement where people create because they want to rather than because of financial gain.
However, at the same time, my wife uses Windows because she does a lot of work with Excel, wants ease of use with her digital camera and just wants to stick with what she knows. She's aware Linux exists, she occasionally uses one of my machines to surf the Internet and now prefers Firefox to IE. But she has no interest in shell programming or command line skills.
The point I am trying to make is that neither Windows or Linux provides the answer to everyone's computing requirements and those of us who advocate Linux should only do it in so much as to make Windows users aware that there are alternatives to the Microsoft way.
However, there is *no* intent to destroy Microsoft or to aim for "more Linux desktops than Windows ones by 2010" type targets - if such is ever the case, it will be because people have chosen it to be so, not because of Linux winning some kind of "war".
So move along now, nothing to see here...
Beyond downloading a few MP3s from Usenet to "try before I buy", I don't pirate so what do I care what the RIAA does? And if they stop MP3s on Usenet, then I won't get to try and won't buy... it won't be my loss.
So get the fuck off your high horse and stop buying RIAA-label CDs all together.
Why should I? If I'm getting a good piece of music at what I consider a fair price, why do I care who the money goes to ultimately? So they half the price of CDs, I potentially get to buy twice as many - but I'll still select carefully & buy only what I consider to be good music.
I *DO* care if a CD is copy protected & have taken back those CDs to vendor as "unfit for purpose" if I can't make my own MP3s or play them on a PC. And, believe me, I have stood there and complained until I've got my money back...
I don't care if stores like Virgin are cheaper than elsewhere, I won't buy shit there for the life of me.
Suit yourself - me, I'm just a discerning consumer. I'll look for the best price & if it's in a Virgin or HMV, then I'll buy it there. It's a rare occurrence, admittedly, but I just want the best value for my hard-earned cash.
And I haven't purchased an RIAA-label CD is at least 10 years.
That's your choice but then I choose my music based on what's pleasant to my ears and not deny myself missing something I might like purely because of having to make a political statement.
So quit acting like you're something special, you're funding their lawsuits.
I consider anyone who makes informed decisions as "special". Unfortunately, far too many people are taken in by media advertising these days and are parted with their money too easily. It's those "sheeple" who make it bad for the rest of us because they just "consume" what gets churned out to them rather than exercising discretion and self-control.
If we were all more discerning, these big corporations that fund the RIAA would have less money to do so because they would get less money from us consumers.
And that just about p*sses all over your argument.
It therefore follows that they will have to enslave us humans to all work as dairy farmers and in cheese processing plants purely to create all the food they need to survive.
Trust the bloody Australians to sell out the human race to our new mice overlords!
Don't tell me - we're about to go into the "swallows carrying coconuts" argument from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, aren't we?
Hah! Take that, you fiends!
Regenerating mouse = longer time to play with it before it dies and has to be eaten.
So now I will have no argument when my wife accuses me of being "hung like a mouse"...
How about just *not buying* any DVDs or CDs? How about emailing the RIAA, the film producers and the record companies and tell them you're not buying their products because they're overpriced?
It doesn't matter how many times this discussion appears on Slashdot, the RIAA is not going to take a blind bit of notice until people start to hit them where it really hurts - in the wallet.
I personally use music downloading as a "try before I buy scheme" now - if I like it, I buy it because nothing beats having a nice shiny CD in a nice shiny case with some nice music on it; otherwise I delete it because it's just not worth the space on a hard disk or CDR.
With movies, I read reviews and go to the cinema or buy the DVD only when I am sure it's worth the money.
In both cases, rip-off high street stores like HMV or Virgin get *none* of my money unless they have prices that compete with on-line music and movie vendors.
As a result, I spend about 1/3 of what I used to spend on CDs, movies and DVDs and I'm now much happier with what I buy.
Unfortunately, it's the "sheeple" of the world that just sit there blindly consuming everything the music and movie companies churn out that are the problem - if we were all a lot more careful with what we spent our money on, this would send a very powerful message back to these companies and allow us, the consumer, to dictate what are fair prices and what we deem good quality products.
...Microsoft CEO Bill Gates today stated that it would be far cheaper to fit giant Windows XP-powered rocket motors to the moon and fly it to Redmond, whereupon Steve Ballmer could hop around it in his shirt sleeves shouting "Developers, developers!"
Sometimes having only "half the knowledge" is worse than having none at all.
Incidentally, I hope the Windows team aren't surfing the Internet during their lunchbreak - because they'll need to install a virus killer, spyware detector and all the service packs and security updates first.
Over here in the UK, most TV series, including The Simpsons, 24, Babylon 5, The X-Files, etc. seem to be priced around £30 (=~$55) which, to me, is about right. However, the Star Trek series seem to be priced around £69.95 (=~$125) which is ridiculous.
I'm gradually collecting Trek on DVD, having sold my videos on Ebay while I could still get a reasonable price for them, and I just wait until the post-Christmas sales in stores or on-line retailers to buy the DVDs. So far, I have the complete TNG DVD set and I don't think I paid more than £40 for any one series.
I've emailed Paramount with some intelligent questions and comments about their pricing policy on Trek DVDs on a number of occasions (hoping that a lot of other people do the same) but never even get a confirmation of receipt of the email, let alone a response.