At a minimum of 10 songs average on a CD, I can usually get it for the equivalent of $9.99 myself. It's uncompressed and doesn't need to go through a second lossy conversion to get it back onto CD...
I can rip it to what devices I like at whatever bit-rate I like to as many devices I like...
My friends and family can borrow it and listen to it...
If I get bored with it, I can sell it and with the money I make put it towards the cost of another CD...
I can sit and read the sleeve notes while sitting on the toilet......and having saved money by buying a reasonably priced phone and music player, I can put the money towards a nice shiny hifi on which I can enjoy my nice shiny CD in all it's full uncompressed beauty...
So stick your iPhone and DRM where you think the sun shines out of...
I wonder if it's possible to sue them for misadvertising their products.
If I pay £15 for a DVD on which there is an anti-piracy advert that I have to sit through but can download a copy of the DVD free of charge from the Internet without the advert on it, then the assumption is that I am actually paying £15 for the advert, not the movie.
And since the advert is never stated on the box as being present on the DVD at the point I buy it, then quite clearly I am getting a different product for my money than the one I thought I was paying for.
And that surely comes under the UK Sale Of Goods Act as well as other consumer protection laws in other parts of the world that entitles you to a full refund if something is not sold as advertised.
I was pretty disappointed that after all the hype that you play as a scientists instead of a soldier your character was still heavily armored and a perfect shot....not coming home from the pub after 6 pints of Old Thumper real ale he wasn't!
As a huge Half-Life one fan, I used to think the same way as you and it took me 18 months after the release of Half-Life 2 to relent and go buy it.
Compared to the obnoxious DRM on BioShock and other modern games (which I refuse to buy or play), Steam is the lesser of two evils for the following reasons:
1. Once installed on your PC, you can put your game disk back in the box for good.
2. You can copy your Steam folder to other PCs as it is and just run the games - any other game and you more than likely need to reinstall it so that certain registry keys are set up correctly.
The downside of Steam is that unlike Half-Life 1 which has a doddle for setting up LAN play, for Steam it's a bit hit-and-miss trying to use one game license for multiple machines on the same LAN (where there's no need to connect anything to the Internet) although you can get it to work. But otherwise, most of my buddies have their own Steam accounts so it really has little effect anyway - plus the number of freebie mods and levels more than makes up for the inconvenience.
I've never bought anything from Steam in the same way that I've never paid for a music download - I like a nice tangible shiny disk when I part with my money.
But Steam *really* isn't as bad as you're making out and if you liked Half-Life 1 then you're doing yourself a disservice by not trying out the stuff in The Orange Box...
I have to admit that Half-Life is the only game ever where I've actually got a slight flutter in the stomach from "virtual vertigo" when doing the bits of jumping and climbing along the cliff face and jumping between the moving platforms on Xen.
Say, waiting at a dentist's office or during a 45min break between classes because of scheduling issues?
Here in the UK, they ask you to turn your mobile phone off when waiting in a surgery for a doctor or dentist whereas I've never been asked to put my book away.
Half-Life is definitely tops for modding and sheer entertainment value for money.
But please don't forget Dooms 1 & 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake 1 through 3, Unreal Tournament and UT2004 as well - plus a few more I've missed out. All of them at budget prices (some even Open Source and free now from perspective of the game engines) and choc-full of expandibility, community mods and levels.
I take what you say except that someone that takes time to think about the consequences of his/her actions probably would decide to not carry a knife in the first place.
If it's any consolation, I've been playing and re-playing Duke Nukem 3 and it's various ports, expansions and mods on-and-off for 10 years and I didn't notice your mistake until you very kindly pointed it out.
As someone at least 10 years your senior, I can tell you now that the crux of the matter when it comes to badly written communications is down to lack of patience and lack of attention span.
If someone writes you a letter or sends you an email that is well-punctuated and (nearly) grammatically correct, then the chances are that you will take that communication more seriously than one that isn't, simply because somebody who has taken the trouble to capitalise and punctuate has probably given a lot of thought to what they want to say and how to say it before they even started to write it. Likewise, they've probably used the "Backspace" key a lot while writing it...
For whatever reason, we're witnessing a disturbing trend in specifically the younger generation where many of its members seem to be far too busy to take the time to think about their actions or give the correct amount of time to doing something correctly. Here in the UK, this explains why there is so much more knife crime at the moment - not because the youngsters are necessarily intrinsically more violent but because they have neither the time nor inclination to exercise some self-control and think about the consequences of their actions before drawing that knife from their boot.
That's the reason for badly written communications - there's no attempt to even *try* to get it grammatically correct because there's far too much else to be getting on with.
As a 46 year old man with a mobile phone, I rarely text anyone because it takes me too damn long to do it! I'd rather call someone and speak to them directly rather than mess about on a phone keypad putting commas, capitals and full stops in the right places - and I refuse to use abbreviations and slang because, to me, it lessens the importance of what I am saying in it.
Methinks there's a big group of Dutch architects & builders trying to get themselves on an all-expenses paid "fact finding mission" to the Maldives here...
Dear Idiot (Well, you throw insults at me & you get them back)
Spam email is *not* the same as rootkits and trojans running on compromised Windows machines.
In other words, mostly those compromised Windows machines you seem to want to downplay.
Please read my original post. As a *mainly UNIX/Linux guy* it would be very easy to go off into the usual anti-Windows rant like the other zealots on here but I'm not going to. I'll argue for "either side" if I think it's correct, an OS to me is a tool to get something done in, not a "badge of office".
Actually, to correct you, it tends to be more compromised online email accounts (like Gmail and Hotmail) with guessable passwords than it is end client email viruses.
I'm a mainly Linux/UNIX guy but the above statement is entirely incorrect.
Most Spam originates through incorrectly configured mail servers that allow mail relaying. In reality, it's much easier to leave on open relay on something like Sendmail on Unix than it probably is on Microsoft Exchange.
1. You more than likely need a routable IPv4 address if you're running services to client devices, but even then you can do some stuff with NAT-ing to hide multiple servers behind one real IP address.
2. If you're a client device connected through an ISP (like most devices on the Internet), then you don't need a real IP address but can make do with one in the reserved address range behind a NAT router.
3. IPv4 address shortage is nothing to do with the actual number of unique addresses but more to do with how those addresses have been allocated to large organisations that probably don't use anywhere near all of the allocation they have.
4. The only real failing of IPv4 is that there is no built-in layer 2 or 3 encryption in the IP stack - but that's like saying a Boeing 747 with jet engines flies faster than a Douglas DC-3 with turboprops and ignoring the fact that the former was built 30 years later (or so) than the latter.
So please tell us geeks something new or interesting, not the stuff we all learnt in "TCP/IP for Dummies 101".
Okay, so you don't like Linux - that's fine, stick with your OS of choice and be happy with my blessing.
But please don't blame Linux for what is obviously a problem with a few data files in TomTom because that only serves to highlight your own ignorance as to how the device actually works.
As a (primarily) Linux user myself, my best advice to you is that you shouldn't use Linux unless you can think of a reason to do so.
But please do not tar those of us who do use it as "rebels". I myself work for a telecoms company where Linux has "swept the floor" as the core OS for most of the telephony products that we sell. No, it hasn't particularly displaced Windows in doing so, more the commercial UNIXes like Solaris and HP-UX and, if anything, we use Windows to handle most of the client-side stuff for integration into corporate networks.
But please don't pretend to have any understanding of why people like me use Linux as their primary OS at home because your comments show your ignorance. I fully accept that Linux lacks a lot of the Adobe-type applications and other things that a lot of existing Windows people currently want to use but please remember that it is not Linux's fault that is the case - rather the Adobes of the world who just haven't decided to port those apps across as of yet.
However, for most users like me who just do a bit of photo and graphics work, The GIMP more than suffices. Likewise, I need to do a few relatively straightforward spreadsheets, documents and presentations so OpenOffice is good enough for me. Plus I'm a shell and PERL monkey so I have access to tremendous automation power at the Linux shell prompt which, even if I wanted to do something similar in Windows, would need a steep learning curve with VB, DotNet or something else, assuming it was even possible.
I also like gaming and there's plenty of Linux games that I play, thanks mostly to the Open Sourcing of games engines like Doom and Quake. Yes, I keep XP around to play some more modern stuff (and because sometimes I need MS Office also) but even if you look at my XP machines, you'll see most of the tools I use are OSS or free ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, PuTTY, WinSCP, The GIMP, Irfanview, ImgBurn, etc. etc.
Unfortunately, you've made two very obtuse comments which only serve to highlight your total lack of Linux knowledge:
1. Linux is a lot more mature now than the last time you installed it during the 90s (just like Windows XP is a much better OS than Windows 95 and 98 were), and
2. Linux is really just the kernel and most of the other nice useful bits that go into an average Linux distro also happen to have Windows ports as well - so choosing not to use free software on the basis that "if it was good you could sell it" is just doing yourself a dis-service, no-one else.
Yes, I'd love to be in a situation where one OS could do everything I needed to do but the fact is neither Linux or Windows fit that requirement at this moment in time. However, because I'm not a zealot and prefer just to use the "right tool for the job", I really don't give a toss whether an application needs Linux or Windows to run - I just get on and use whatever I need to when I need to, satisfied in the knowledge that most of the stuff I use is truly free to use, and the commercial software I use is fully licensed.
I take your point but, quite frankly, I think there's much bigger things to worry about in Britain today than registration of mobile phones.
There's already huge dissatisfaction in this country about the lazy good-for-nothings who lack any form of personal pride and live on state benefits together with the high immigration - and a stupid government that doesn't realise that they can kill two birds with one stone by forcing the idle bastards to do the jobs that immigrants currently do, thus doing something positive about immigration as well.
Yes, I digress but the point I'm trying to make is that honest people here are totally pissed off whether or not mobile phones are registered or unregistered - so it's a minor issue in the whole scheme of things.
But hey, it's your freedom. I left because I saw it coming, that's the advantage of working in gov and military. No bloody way.
Like I said to the other poster, give me 5 to 10 years and I'll be out as well. Not because of surveillance but because I've earnt enough money from being an educated British person (and paid enough taxes also) that I can then give up working and live near a beach in Spain for the rest of my days. (Oh, and before you say anything, I'm just about fluent in Spanish and have more Spanish than English friends in Spain so let's not have any "Englishman abroad" comments either.)
Slashdot Mirror
I just by the CD...
At a minimum of 10 songs average on a CD, I can usually get it for the equivalent of $9.99 myself. It's uncompressed and doesn't need to go through a second lossy conversion to get it back onto CD...
I can rip it to what devices I like at whatever bit-rate I like to as many devices I like...
My friends and family can borrow it and listen to it...
If I get bored with it, I can sell it and with the money I make put it towards the cost of another CD...
I can sit and read the sleeve notes while sitting on the toilet... ...and having saved money by buying a reasonably priced phone and music player, I can put the money towards a nice shiny hifi on which I can enjoy my nice shiny CD in all it's full uncompressed beauty...
So stick your iPhone and DRM where you think the sun shines out of...
I wonder if it's possible to sue them for misadvertising their products.
If I pay £15 for a DVD on which there is an anti-piracy advert that I have to sit through but can download a copy of the DVD free of charge from the Internet without the advert on it, then the assumption is that I am actually paying £15 for the advert, not the movie.
And since the advert is never stated on the box as being present on the DVD at the point I buy it, then quite clearly I am getting a different product for my money than the one I thought I was paying for.
And that surely comes under the UK Sale Of Goods Act as well as other consumer protection laws in other parts of the world that entitles you to a full refund if something is not sold as advertised.
I was pretty disappointed that after all the hype that you play as a scientists instead of a soldier your character was still heavily armored and a perfect shot. ...not coming home from the pub after 6 pints of Old Thumper real ale he wasn't!
...Duke Nukem Forever will be 1 year old - if it's ready...
As a huge Half-Life one fan, I used to think the same way as you and it took me 18 months after the release of Half-Life 2 to relent and go buy it.
Compared to the obnoxious DRM on BioShock and other modern games (which I refuse to buy or play), Steam is the lesser of two evils for the following reasons:
1. Once installed on your PC, you can put your game disk back in the box for good.
2. You can copy your Steam folder to other PCs as it is and just run the games - any other game and you more than likely need to reinstall it so that certain registry keys are set up correctly.
The downside of Steam is that unlike Half-Life 1 which has a doddle for setting up LAN play, for Steam it's a bit hit-and-miss trying to use one game license for multiple machines on the same LAN (where there's no need to connect anything to the Internet) although you can get it to work. But otherwise, most of my buddies have their own Steam accounts so it really has little effect anyway - plus the number of freebie mods and levels more than makes up for the inconvenience.
I've never bought anything from Steam in the same way that I've never paid for a music download - I like a nice tangible shiny disk when I part with my money.
But Steam *really* isn't as bad as you're making out and if you liked Half-Life 1 then you're doing yourself a disservice by not trying out the stuff in The Orange Box...
I have to admit that Half-Life is the only game ever where I've actually got a slight flutter in the stomach from "virtual vertigo" when doing the bits of jumping and climbing along the cliff face and jumping between the moving platforms on Xen.
Say, waiting at a dentist's office or during a 45min break between classes because of scheduling issues?
Here in the UK, they ask you to turn your mobile phone off when waiting in a surgery for a doctor or dentist whereas I've never been asked to put my book away.
Half-Life is definitely tops for modding and sheer entertainment value for money.
But please don't forget Dooms 1 & 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Quake 1 through 3, Unreal Tournament and UT2004 as well - plus a few more I've missed out. All of them at budget prices (some even Open Source and free now from perspective of the game engines) and choc-full of expandibility, community mods and levels.
Plus honourable mention to Total Annihilation...
Can I have your email address please?
I was planning on buying a cheap £400 laptop (=$600) that will probably come with a Vista license that I won't use as I will install Linux on it.
But I'm more than happy to sell you the Vista license at a "bargain price" of $500!
I take what you say except that someone that takes time to think about the consequences of his/her actions probably would decide to not carry a knife in the first place.
If it's any consolation, I've been playing and re-playing Duke Nukem 3 and it's various ports, expansions and mods on-and-off for 10 years and I didn't notice your mistake until you very kindly pointed it out.
As someone at least 10 years your senior, I can tell you now that the crux of the matter when it comes to badly written communications is down to lack of patience and lack of attention span.
If someone writes you a letter or sends you an email that is well-punctuated and (nearly) grammatically correct, then the chances are that you will take that communication more seriously than one that isn't, simply because somebody who has taken the trouble to capitalise and punctuate has probably given a lot of thought to what they want to say and how to say it before they even started to write it. Likewise, they've probably used the "Backspace" key a lot while writing it...
For whatever reason, we're witnessing a disturbing trend in specifically the younger generation where many of its members seem to be far too busy to take the time to think about their actions or give the correct amount of time to doing something correctly. Here in the UK, this explains why there is so much more knife crime at the moment - not because the youngsters are necessarily intrinsically more violent but because they have neither the time nor inclination to exercise some self-control and think about the consequences of their actions before drawing that knife from their boot.
That's the reason for badly written communications - there's no attempt to even *try* to get it grammatically correct because there's far too much else to be getting on with.
As a 46 year old man with a mobile phone, I rarely text anyone because it takes me too damn long to do it! I'd rather call someone and speak to them directly rather than mess about on a phone keypad putting commas, capitals and full stops in the right places - and I refuse to use abbreviations and slang because, to me, it lessens the importance of what I am saying in it.
Methinks there's a big group of Dutch architects & builders trying to get themselves on an all-expenses paid "fact finding mission" to the Maldives here...
Dear Idiot (Well, you throw insults at me & you get them back)
Spam email is *not* the same as rootkits and trojans running on compromised Windows machines.
In other words, mostly those compromised Windows machines you seem to want to downplay.
Please read my original post. As a *mainly UNIX/Linux guy* it would be very easy to go off into the usual anti-Windows rant like the other zealots on here but I'm not going to. I'll argue for "either side" if I think it's correct, an OS to me is a tool to get something done in, not a "badge of office".
Oh, and go read the Sendmail manual...
Discussion closed.
Actually, to correct you, it tends to be more compromised online email accounts (like Gmail and Hotmail) with guessable passwords than it is end client email viruses.
Most SPAM originates from Windows machines.
I'm a mainly Linux/UNIX guy but the above statement is entirely incorrect.
Most Spam originates through incorrectly configured mail servers that allow mail relaying. In reality, it's much easier to leave on open relay on something like Sendmail on Unix than it probably is on Microsoft Exchange.
Apologies... with acknowledgement to the very wonderful and very funny Mr Lewis Black.
The "in the ears.. in the eyes" comments are also stolen from him as well.
Dear Alex
Learn some simple facts about IPv4:
1. You more than likely need a routable IPv4 address if you're running services to client devices, but even then you can do some stuff with NAT-ing to hide multiple servers behind one real IP address.
2. If you're a client device connected through an ISP (like most devices on the Internet), then you don't need a real IP address but can make do with one in the reserved address range behind a NAT router.
3. IPv4 address shortage is nothing to do with the actual number of unique addresses but more to do with how those addresses have been allocated to large organisations that probably don't use anywhere near all of the allocation they have.
4. The only real failing of IPv4 is that there is no built-in layer 2 or 3 encryption in the IP stack - but that's like saying a Boeing 747 with jet engines flies faster than a Douglas DC-3 with turboprops and ignoring the fact that the former was built 30 years later (or so) than the latter.
So please tell us geeks something new or interesting, not the stuff we all learnt in "TCP/IP for Dummies 101".
...not the eyes.
Yes, by all means show me a concert of some proper musicians playing live to an audience, or show me some historic footage of a band in a documentary.
But please don't show me pretty "mini-movies" that do nothing more than try to distract me from realising how crap the underlying music actually is.
MTV have done for music what pork fat has done for cardiac health.
Okay, so you don't like Linux - that's fine, stick with your OS of choice and be happy with my blessing.
But please don't blame Linux for what is obviously a problem with a few data files in TomTom because that only serves to highlight your own ignorance as to how the device actually works.
I hope you don't have a TomTom in that car of yours - that's one of the numerous small devices running Linux.
Not to mention countless web, mail and hosting servers at the ISP level.
And in my company running telephony servers handling thousands of VoiP calls per hour, SIP servers, call reporting software, etc. etc.
As a (primarily) Linux user myself, my best advice to you is that you shouldn't use Linux unless you can think of a reason to do so.
But please do not tar those of us who do use it as "rebels". I myself work for a telecoms company where Linux has "swept the floor" as the core OS for most of the telephony products that we sell. No, it hasn't particularly displaced Windows in doing so, more the commercial UNIXes like Solaris and HP-UX and, if anything, we use Windows to handle most of the client-side stuff for integration into corporate networks.
But please don't pretend to have any understanding of why people like me use Linux as their primary OS at home because your comments show your ignorance. I fully accept that Linux lacks a lot of the Adobe-type applications and other things that a lot of existing Windows people currently want to use but please remember that it is not Linux's fault that is the case - rather the Adobes of the world who just haven't decided to port those apps across as of yet.
However, for most users like me who just do a bit of photo and graphics work, The GIMP more than suffices. Likewise, I need to do a few relatively straightforward spreadsheets, documents and presentations so OpenOffice is good enough for me. Plus I'm a shell and PERL monkey so I have access to tremendous automation power at the Linux shell prompt which, even if I wanted to do something similar in Windows, would need a steep learning curve with VB, DotNet or something else, assuming it was even possible.
I also like gaming and there's plenty of Linux games that I play, thanks mostly to the Open Sourcing of games engines like Doom and Quake. Yes, I keep XP around to play some more modern stuff (and because sometimes I need MS Office also) but even if you look at my XP machines, you'll see most of the tools I use are OSS or free ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, PuTTY, WinSCP, The GIMP, Irfanview, ImgBurn, etc. etc.
Unfortunately, you've made two very obtuse comments which only serve to highlight your total lack of Linux knowledge:
1. Linux is a lot more mature now than the last time you installed it during the 90s (just like Windows XP is a much better OS than Windows 95 and 98 were), and
2. Linux is really just the kernel and most of the other nice useful bits that go into an average Linux distro also happen to have Windows ports as well - so choosing not to use free software on the basis that "if it was good you could sell it" is just doing yourself a dis-service, no-one else.
Yes, I'd love to be in a situation where one OS could do everything I needed to do but the fact is neither Linux or Windows fit that requirement at this moment in time. However, because I'm not a zealot and prefer just to use the "right tool for the job", I really don't give a toss whether an application needs Linux or Windows to run - I just get on and use whatever I need to when I need to, satisfied in the knowledge that most of the stuff I use is truly free to use, and the commercial software I use is fully licensed.
happiness metrics
It's a Sunday night at home, I've just finished a Linux kernel compile and now doing a bit of PERL scripting with the occasional look at Slashdot.
Then someone starts speaking like my manager at work... SHUDDER!!!
I take your point but, quite frankly, I think there's much bigger things to worry about in Britain today than registration of mobile phones.
There's already huge dissatisfaction in this country about the lazy good-for-nothings who lack any form of personal pride and live on state benefits together with the high immigration - and a stupid government that doesn't realise that they can kill two birds with one stone by forcing the idle bastards to do the jobs that immigrants currently do, thus doing something positive about immigration as well.
Yes, I digress but the point I'm trying to make is that honest people here are totally pissed off whether or not mobile phones are registered or unregistered - so it's a minor issue in the whole scheme of things.
But hey, it's your freedom. I left because I saw it coming, that's the advantage of working in gov and military. No bloody way.
Like I said to the other poster, give me 5 to 10 years and I'll be out as well. Not because of surveillance but because I've earnt enough money from being an educated British person (and paid enough taxes also) that I can then give up working and live near a beach in Spain for the rest of my days. (Oh, and before you say anything, I'm just about fluent in Spanish and have more Spanish than English friends in Spain so let's not have any "Englishman abroad" comments either.)