I work in telecoms & I doubt there's a musician out there that gives a damn about what I do or what I get paid as long as he/she can make a phone call to the person he/she needs to speak to when he/she wants. (Not that I have any real complaints about my job or salary anyway.)
So why the hell do I care about how bloated the music industry is or how much musicians get paid? As far as I'm concerned, 99% of what the music industry releases is crap but even that remaining quality 1% is more than I could possibly enjoy in my lifetime.
And because I love & enjoy music (& seeing live bands) so much (far more than TV or movies), I'm prepared to pur some effort into finding good music at a price I'm prepared to pay for it - and guess what, there's ***LOADS*** of it.
So as long as I stay discerning, I'm pretty happy with the output of the music industry in terms of what's there to please me. I think it's good value for money (again because I've music albums that I've enjoyed for 30+ years) and I'm more than happy to keep buying it.
1. How do I know if its worth the money? Where can I listen to a decent collection of music for free to find out if I want to buy it, without possibly running up against this monitoring?
Amazon? The artist's web site?
2. 2. What happens when the monitoring system reports that I downloaded copyrighted material that I never heard of?
No idea. But maybe if you can demonstrate that you legally own a fair proportion of what you listen to, then it would be more difficult to bring the case to a court? Maybe if people didn't download it free in the first place, that wouldn't give them an easy excuse for monitoring your activities? And why should I be affected when I don't do it?
1. If you're downloading music for free because it's not worth the money being asked for it, then you're either listening to the crappy music and/or not hunting down the best prices for your CDs.
2. Paying £10 for a classic album that might well stay with you for 50+ years of your life seems pretty good value for me. (Hell, I bought Led Zeppelin 4 on vinyl, tape & CD over the past 30-odd years & it's still worth every penny for the amount of times I get enjoyment from it).
3. Don't equate hoarding music to loving music - there's a big difference & the former is usually done by young males with small penises out to impress girls with 20,000 tracks on their iWanks^H^H^H^H^HPods.
4. So a particular CD only has 2 good tracks on it? Soution: buy it second hand or wait till it's in a bargain bin. If a good CD is worth £10 then a half-good CD is worth £5 - do the maths.
5. Read reviews, listen to samples & spend time researching your music - take-away food is quick, cheap & not very good for you, neither is take-away music.
6. No I don't work for the music industry & never have done - neither to I play an instrument, sing or have ever been part of a band. But I don't mind paying money for something that's good value.
7. As a regular CD buyer, how the *HELL* do you think I feel subsidising you people with your *FREE* music collections?
With all respect, there are some of us out here who are avid gamers who don't want to be playing "yet another car racing game", "World War 2 Soldier FPS v27" or "Yet Another EA Sports Sim".
Sure, we strategy gamers may be in a minority but the fact is you've no chance of playing "Galactic Civilizations", "Civilization" or, to change the pace, a decent flight simulator, on a console.
I'm sure you whippersnappers enjoy your "consistent" consoles but to many of us that just means "consistently forumulaic games".
My friend, packet loss is unlikely to be the fault of the OS unless it's a particularly ropey driver that's being used. And if you complained to Microsoft about packet loss on a Windows machine, the first thing they'd tell you to do is try a better driver.
It is absolutely no different for Ubuntu so please don't use it as an easy target, okay?
Thanks for your attention, please go back to what you were doing.
...a few months ago, after a particularly heavy coffee session, a video popped up on my PC screen that had some big fat sweaty bald bloke dancing across a big stage shouting "Developers" over and over again... and it was ALL the fault of that Java Sumatran blend...
You started off by raising an interesting question to which I'd personally love to know the answer to.
But the "Vista runs ok, Ubuntu sucks big time" comment was something a 5 year old would say and subsequently lessened your previous comments.
I personally cannot stand Vista but quite clearly it does not "suck" because there's quite a large number of people using it, just as with Ubuntu. So, in future, please try & stay in adult mode throughout your posting.
Other than that, I'm interested in seeing any answers to this.
There seems to be conflicting information about this setting if you read information on the Internet - some say that unsetting this gets back up to 20% of your bandwidth while others say leave it alone as it's only used when QoS packets are sent, mainly when using VoIP.
It would be interesting to get a definitive answer on this.
Rubbish. It's just a method of increasing profit margins to put more money into the pockets of fat cats.
It's time for corporations to be forced, through taxation, to start having some degree of social responsibility. The fact is that if a company trades in a country then what it is doing is taking money out of the country & when it employs people in that country then it puts money back into the country. Therefore apply a heavier tax to the differential between the two, that's the solution.
Outsourcing just allows for exploitation of cheap workers in countries that have not yet developed minimum wages & employee rights and the money that's saved just goes straight into the pockets of shareholders.
How can this be a sustainable solution? What happens when most jobs in the Western World have been outsourced and because there's no money in those countries any more, the people there can't afford to buy the products? Outsourcing is short-termism based on greed, nothing more.
Hopefully, there will be something good to come out of the recession.
People will have to do without some of life's luxuries due to the shortage of money & when the flow of money increases again, they'll be used to doing without those same luxuries to the point where they'll start making more informed decisions before they start buying all that stuff again.
Perhaps we can look forward to people boycotting cheap imported goods in favour of slightly more expensive goods that are produced in-country. Take money from the pockets of the few fat cats exploiting third world labour & put it in the pockets of local workers who are paid a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.
It's just a shame our gutless Western governments didn't reign in some of the corporate power a couple of decades ago & start taxing heavily for outsourcing & on imports then. That would have kept investment a bit closer to home meaning that risky overseas investments that caused this problem in the first place might not have happened.
Based on the fact that "ninnie" is a Spanish word for "girl", so how did they ever decide what colour the Linux kernel should be, let alone cram it into a space probe?
Me & a few work buddies have done a fantastic job kitting out our "not in IT's domain of responsibility" test lab at work *BECAUSE* of cheap servers, LAN/WAN boxes & racking that's been sold for next-to-nothing on eBay...
So come on now, all together:
"If you are a corporate user with a computer more than 6 months old, the rest of us will be laughing behind your back because it proves you smell & have genital warts. Please demand an upgrade from your boss TODAY!"
But if his current OS runs all his software fine, why does he need to even consider Vista? It may run fine but it's heavier demands will make it *seem* slower compared to XP or an earlier MS Windows iteration.
I kept back some money for a post-Christmas PC upgrade spend in the hope that prices would fall with the recession & time of year - although working as a techie in the telecoms industry, I'm loathe to spend any money at the moment.
But aside from that fact, as a gamer I've been trying to find justification for upgrading but really can't think of anything. My current low-end dual core and Nvidia 7600GTX card runs all the Valve games (including Left 4 Dead) faultlessly on my 1280x1024 flatscreen monitor as it stands.
As a mainly FPS player, I enjoyed FarCry, Half-Life 2 plus Episodes enormously but found Doom 3 & F.E.A.R. boring. On-line for me is Left 4 Dead & UT 2004 which also run perfectly well.
I got given STALKER & UT 3 as Christmas presents but haven't installed either yet to try them - however, I can't really think of much else I'd like to try out - maybe FarCry 2 if it's not got the same ludicrous demands as Crysis.
And if that's not enough, I've been plodding through the Star Wars Jedi Academy/Outcast & am now looking at a few interesting mods for them and a few other engines.
Most of my game buying seems to have stopped at what was new in 2004 & I really can't think of any more modern FPS games that would hold any interest for me - especially because I'm more of a sci-fi buff anyway & modern or wartime FPS shooters don't really appeal to me.
Why do technogeeks feel the need to start berating someone the instant they don't know how to use a computer?
We don't. Just like the man who came to lay my driveway today didn't laugh at me because I couldn't do it. Don't tar us all with the same brush - some of us remember starting off with zero knowledge and having to ask questions of others.
But there's a distinct difference in asking for help & not even trying to find out the basics for yourself first.
We whine about being underpaid for our SKILLS, yet we expect everyone else to THINK LIKE US at the same time.
Not me, my friend. I'm happy with the pay I get & the job I do. I mean, I get to do my computing "hobby" as work - how cool is that?
The thing that Microsoft has always understood is that not everyone understands computers and most of them never will.
Rubbish. Microsoft is very good at taking other peoples' ideas and making money from them.
How long does a Windows PC *survive* in the hands of somebody with zero knowledge & zero administration? How many people just go buy a new PC when their old one slows down?
I like Linux, I quite like XP and I have both running on my home PCs without any real problems. But they *both* take equal adminstration time - on XP running virus checkers and anti-spyware tools, applying updates, defragging hard disks... yes, it's par for the course with Windows to keep it running smoothly and I'm not complaining; but it is still very time-consuming and needs some idea about what you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Answer me one question...
I work in telecoms & I doubt there's a musician out there that gives a damn about what I do or what I get paid as long as he/she can make a phone call to the person he/she needs to speak to when he/she wants. (Not that I have any real complaints about my job or salary anyway.)
So why the hell do I care about how bloated the music industry is or how much musicians get paid? As far as I'm concerned, 99% of what the music industry releases is crap but even that remaining quality 1% is more than I could possibly enjoy in my lifetime.
And because I love & enjoy music (& seeing live bands) so much (far more than TV or movies), I'm prepared to pur some effort into finding good music at a price I'm prepared to pay for it - and guess what, there's ***LOADS*** of it.
So as long as I stay discerning, I'm pretty happy with the output of the music industry in terms of what's there to please me. I think it's good value for money (again because I've music albums that I've enjoyed for 30+ years) and I'm more than happy to keep buying it.
Like a total sucker?
You got that it one - because "suckers" like me pay for our music, they make CDs in the first place for everyone else to pirate.
And if there were no suckers like me, there'd be nothing to download free.
So you stay in your dark little anonymous corner where it's nice & dark where no-one can see you...
You're arguing semantics.
Read my comments again - I'm specifically talking about music that is produced with the expectation that the listener pays something towards it.
1. How do I know if its worth the money? Where can I listen to a decent collection of music for free to find out if I want to buy it, without possibly running up against this monitoring?
Amazon? The artist's web site?
2. 2. What happens when the monitoring system reports that I downloaded copyrighted material that I never heard of?
No idea. But maybe if you can demonstrate that you legally own a fair proportion of what you listen to, then it would be more difficult to bring the case to a court? Maybe if people didn't download it free in the first place, that wouldn't give them an easy excuse for monitoring your activities? And why should I be affected when I don't do it?
...go buy the CD.
Sorry, people, but the facts are these:
1. If you're downloading music for free because it's not worth the money being asked for it, then you're either listening to the crappy music and/or not hunting down the best prices for your CDs.
2. Paying £10 for a classic album that might well stay with you for 50+ years of your life seems pretty good value for me. (Hell, I bought Led Zeppelin 4 on vinyl, tape & CD over the past 30-odd years & it's still worth every penny for the amount of times I get enjoyment from it).
3. Don't equate hoarding music to loving music - there's a big difference & the former is usually done by young males with small penises out to impress girls with 20,000 tracks on their iWanks^H^H^H^H^HPods.
4. So a particular CD only has 2 good tracks on it? Soution: buy it second hand or wait till it's in a bargain bin. If a good CD is worth £10 then a half-good CD is worth £5 - do the maths.
5. Read reviews, listen to samples & spend time researching your music - take-away food is quick, cheap & not very good for you, neither is take-away music.
6. No I don't work for the music industry & never have done - neither to I play an instrument, sing or have ever been part of a band. But I don't mind paying money for something that's good value.
7. As a regular CD buyer, how the *HELL* do you think I feel subsidising you people with your *FREE* music collections?
Rant over.
With all respect, there are some of us out here who are avid gamers who don't want to be playing "yet another car racing game", "World War 2 Soldier FPS v27" or "Yet Another EA Sports Sim".
Sure, we strategy gamers may be in a minority but the fact is you've no chance of playing "Galactic Civilizations", "Civilization" or, to change the pace, a decent flight simulator, on a console.
I'm sure you whippersnappers enjoy your "consistent" consoles but to many of us that just means "consistently forumulaic games".
My friend, packet loss is unlikely to be the fault of the OS unless it's a particularly ropey driver that's being used. And if you complained to Microsoft about packet loss on a Windows machine, the first thing they'd tell you to do is try a better driver.
It is absolutely no different for Ubuntu so please don't use it as an easy target, okay?
Thanks for your attention, please go back to what you were doing.
...a few months ago, after a particularly heavy coffee session, a video popped up on my PC screen that had some big fat sweaty bald bloke dancing across a big stage shouting "Developers" over and over again... and it was ALL the fault of that Java Sumatran blend...
Oh wait...
Ah, but we Linux users are all peace-loving Communist hippies without the knowledge to write efficient programs for warmongering.
It's a real shame, you know.
You started off by raising an interesting question to which I'd personally love to know the answer to.
But the "Vista runs ok, Ubuntu sucks big time" comment was something a 5 year old would say and subsequently lessened your previous comments.
I personally cannot stand Vista but quite clearly it does not "suck" because there's quite a large number of people using it, just as with Ubuntu. So, in future, please try & stay in adult mode throughout your posting.
Other than that, I'm interested in seeing any answers to this.
There's a setting in Windows XP that, by default, is set to allow bandwidth reservation for QoS packets. In the Group Policy Editor, it's:
Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Network / QOS Packet Scheduler / Limit Reservable Bandwidth
Could that be the cause of this differential?
There seems to be conflicting information about this setting if you read information on the Internet - some say that unsetting this gets back up to 20% of your bandwidth while others say leave it alone as it's only used when QoS packets are sent, mainly when using VoIP.
It would be interesting to get a definitive answer on this.
Rubbish. It's just a method of increasing profit margins to put more money into the pockets of fat cats.
It's time for corporations to be forced, through taxation, to start having some degree of social responsibility. The fact is that if a company trades in a country then what it is doing is taking money out of the country & when it employs people in that country then it puts money back into the country. Therefore apply a heavier tax to the differential between the two, that's the solution.
Outsourcing just allows for exploitation of cheap workers in countries that have not yet developed minimum wages & employee rights and the money that's saved just goes straight into the pockets of shareholders.
How can this be a sustainable solution? What happens when most jobs in the Western World have been outsourced and because there's no money in those countries any more, the people there can't afford to buy the products? Outsourcing is short-termism based on greed, nothing more.
Hopefully, there will be something good to come out of the recession.
People will have to do without some of life's luxuries due to the shortage of money & when the flow of money increases again, they'll be used to doing without those same luxuries to the point where they'll start making more informed decisions before they start buying all that stuff again.
Perhaps we can look forward to people boycotting cheap imported goods in favour of slightly more expensive goods that are produced in-country. Take money from the pockets of the few fat cats exploiting third world labour & put it in the pockets of local workers who are paid a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.
It's just a shame our gutless Western governments didn't reign in some of the corporate power a couple of decades ago & start taxing heavily for outsourcing & on imports then. That would have kept investment a bit closer to home meaning that risky overseas investments that caused this problem in the first place might not have happened.
Based on the fact that "ninnie" is a Spanish word for "girl", so how did they ever decide what colour the Linux kernel should be, let alone cram it into a space probe?
NOOO!!!! DON'T TELL HIM THAT!!!
Me & a few work buddies have done a fantastic job kitting out our "not in IT's domain of responsibility" test lab at work *BECAUSE* of cheap servers, LAN/WAN boxes & racking that's been sold for next-to-nothing on eBay...
So come on now, all together:
"If you are a corporate user with a computer more than 6 months old, the rest of us will be laughing behind your back because it proves you smell & have genital warts. Please demand an upgrade from your boss TODAY!"
But if his current OS runs all his software fine, why does he need to even consider Vista? It may run fine but it's heavier demands will make it *seem* slower compared to XP or an earlier MS Windows iteration.
I kept back some money for a post-Christmas PC upgrade spend in the hope that prices would fall with the recession & time of year - although working as a techie in the telecoms industry, I'm loathe to spend any money at the moment.
But aside from that fact, as a gamer I've been trying to find justification for upgrading but really can't think of anything. My current low-end dual core and Nvidia 7600GTX card runs all the Valve games (including Left 4 Dead) faultlessly on my 1280x1024 flatscreen monitor as it stands.
As a mainly FPS player, I enjoyed FarCry, Half-Life 2 plus Episodes enormously but found Doom 3 & F.E.A.R. boring. On-line for me is Left 4 Dead & UT 2004 which also run perfectly well.
I got given STALKER & UT 3 as Christmas presents but haven't installed either yet to try them - however, I can't really think of much else I'd like to try out - maybe FarCry 2 if it's not got the same ludicrous demands as Crysis.
And if that's not enough, I've been plodding through the Star Wars Jedi Academy/Outcast & am now looking at a few interesting mods for them and a few other engines.
Most of my game buying seems to have stopped at what was new in 2004 & I really can't think of any more modern FPS games that would hold any interest for me - especially because I'm more of a sci-fi buff anyway & modern or wartime FPS shooters don't really appeal to me.
Added to which, of course, it's probably gone through countless BIOS, driver & software updates to the point where it runs nice and stable as well.
In buying a new PC it would be at least a year until everything had "run in" enough so it ran faultlessly.
Ah, finally an admission from an Apple fanboi that an electronic gadget must look fashionable in order to appeal.
Thanks. I'll frame that response.
UGGHHH! I mean, where can you get designer jeans & jackets to match ***THAT*** as a desktop?
You're correct - it's the episode featuring a distinct lack of Spock's Brain that we try to forget.
As long as they do not pull the clone out before it is fully developed. That could be bad...
You've not seen any photos of Steve "Slight Mixup With The Genetic Coding" Ballmer then?
I heard it was his German cousin, Hans Jobs.
Ice is cool - but totally tasteless...
Why do technogeeks feel the need to start berating someone the instant they don't know how to use a computer?
We don't. Just like the man who came to lay my driveway today didn't laugh at me because I couldn't do it. Don't tar us all with the same brush - some of us remember starting off with zero knowledge and having to ask questions of others.
But there's a distinct difference in asking for help & not even trying to find out the basics for yourself first.
We whine about being underpaid for our SKILLS, yet we expect everyone else to THINK LIKE US at the same time.
Not me, my friend. I'm happy with the pay I get & the job I do. I mean, I get to do my computing "hobby" as work - how cool is that?
The thing that Microsoft has always understood is that not everyone understands computers and most of them never will.
Rubbish. Microsoft is very good at taking other peoples' ideas and making money from them.
How long does a Windows PC *survive* in the hands of somebody with zero knowledge & zero administration? How many people just go buy a new PC when their old one slows down?
I like Linux, I quite like XP and I have both running on my home PCs without any real problems. But they *both* take equal adminstration time - on XP running virus checkers and anti-spyware tools, applying updates, defragging hard disks... yes, it's par for the course with Windows to keep it running smoothly and I'm not complaining; but it is still very time-consuming and needs some idea about what you're doing.