The REALLY neat thing about xine is that it has extremely good support for LIRC, too. LIRC is something really really neat -- it's basically an open source piece of hardware that hooks into your serial port and can read commands from almost any ordinary IR remote control. (The parts for it are around $13-$15 at Radio Shack, takes around an hour to build if you don't know much about electronics.) Combined with xine and a DVD drive whose firmware I've patched to make it regionless, my computer is now a fully functional, multi region, multi display standard DVD player!
Actually, if you want to get technical, Linux supports MORE hardware than WinXP because Linux' developers never get pressured by hardware makers to drop support for older hardware!
I have a 36 bit full size SCSI Mustek scanner hooked up to my Linux machine that I got for FREE because there's no Windows 2000 or XP drivers available for it, so its previous owner "upgraded" to a much smaller, 24 bit non-brand name USB scanner and gave me this behemoth. It took about 20 minutes to get working with SANE (most of which were spent figuring out what IRQ the cheap ISA SCSI card the guy gave me with the scanner was using)...
WinXP may support more extremely NEW hardware (actually, not "may" -- it very definitely does) but lately I've been repeatedly surprised by how quickly Linux support tends to show up for a lot of devices, and there's no question in my mind that if you don't feel compelled to rush out and by the latest video card, sound card, digital camera and USB dildo every single time a new one comes out, you'll find Linux is much less inclined to try to force you into it by dropping support for your hardware than Windows is.
I've been reading SlashDot for a week or two now, and you people seem to all pretty much agree that using Mozilla to block pop-up ads and SpamAssassin to block spam is great and wonderful. But you also all seem to agree that pirating music over P2P programs is a bad thing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Either content providers deserve to be compensated for the content they create or they do not. MP3.com provides me with free hosting for the music I record at home with my 4-track and you people have no problem with automatically ignoring the ads that make this hosting possible. But if I dare pirate the music of such no-talent hacks as Britney Spears and Fred Durst, you're going to tell me I'm doing something wrong?
I think another solution to piracy is to create something of genuine value that can only be attained if you purchase the CD legitimately. It amazes me that record companies are not conducting market research to determine what such "extras" would be best to motivate people to purchase their CD's.
Case in point -- I know a lot of people who've purchased copies of Blizzard's new "Warcraft III" game because with a pirated copy of the game, you can't login to Blizzard's Internet play servers and play against other users across the world. And this is clearly a feature that almost any player of the game is interested in.
Case in point -- Some DVD's contain things like extra angles for some scenes, dubs of the speech in the soundtrack into other languages or large photo galleries that can't be converted into JPG's automatically. This type of content can almost never be downloaded online, and people buy the DVD in order to get a hold of it.
Case in point -- The latest CD from Garbage contains a unique ID that allows you to subscribe to their web site, where you can download software that allows you to create your own unique remixes of some of the songs on the disc. While this didn't motivate me to purchase the disc personally as the software is only available for Windoze machines, I know several people who did purchase it for exactly this reason.
If record companies are concerned about CD sales, they should make this sort of thing the norm. They should be spending their money researching the best way to motivate people to purchase the CD, not on ways to stop people from downloading it. Unfortunately the problem with big business is that they almost never think about giving consumers more value for their buck. The idea is simply abhorrent to them. They can't wrap their tiny little minds around it.
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The REALLY neat thing about xine is that it has extremely good support for LIRC, too. LIRC is something really really neat -- it's basically an open source piece of hardware that hooks into your serial port and can read commands from almost any ordinary IR remote control. (The parts for it are around $13-$15 at Radio Shack, takes around an hour to build if you don't know much about electronics.) Combined with xine and a DVD drive whose firmware I've patched to make it regionless, my computer is now a fully functional, multi region, multi display standard DVD player!
I have a 36 bit full size SCSI Mustek scanner hooked up to my Linux machine that I got for FREE because there's no Windows 2000 or XP drivers available for it, so its previous owner "upgraded" to a much smaller, 24 bit non-brand name USB scanner and gave me this behemoth. It took about 20 minutes to get working with SANE (most of which were spent figuring out what IRQ the cheap ISA SCSI card the guy gave me with the scanner was using)...
WinXP may support more extremely NEW hardware (actually, not "may" -- it very definitely does) but lately I've been repeatedly surprised by how quickly Linux support tends to show up for a lot of devices, and there's no question in my mind that if you don't feel compelled to rush out and by the latest video card, sound card, digital camera and USB dildo every single time a new one comes out, you'll find Linux is much less inclined to try to force you into it by dropping support for your hardware than Windows is.
If Microsoft gets involved with these somehow, the Blue Screen of Death could really mean going blue and then dead... :P
I've been reading SlashDot for a week or two now, and you people seem to all pretty much agree that using Mozilla to block pop-up ads and SpamAssassin to block spam is great and wonderful. But you also all seem to agree that pirating music over P2P programs is a bad thing.
Is there something I'm missing here? Either content providers deserve to be compensated for the content they create or they do not. MP3.com provides me with free hosting for the music I record at home with my 4-track and you people have no problem with automatically ignoring the ads that make this hosting possible. But if I dare pirate the music of such no-talent hacks as Britney Spears and Fred Durst, you're going to tell me I'm doing something wrong?
You're all a bunch of hypocrites.
I think another solution to piracy is to create something of genuine value that can only be attained if you purchase the CD legitimately. It amazes me that record companies are not conducting market research to determine what such "extras" would be best to motivate people to purchase their CD's. Case in point -- I know a lot of people who've purchased copies of Blizzard's new "Warcraft III" game because with a pirated copy of the game, you can't login to Blizzard's Internet play servers and play against other users across the world. And this is clearly a feature that almost any player of the game is interested in. Case in point -- Some DVD's contain things like extra angles for some scenes, dubs of the speech in the soundtrack into other languages or large photo galleries that can't be converted into JPG's automatically. This type of content can almost never be downloaded online, and people buy the DVD in order to get a hold of it. Case in point -- The latest CD from Garbage contains a unique ID that allows you to subscribe to their web site, where you can download software that allows you to create your own unique remixes of some of the songs on the disc. While this didn't motivate me to purchase the disc personally as the software is only available for Windoze machines, I know several people who did purchase it for exactly this reason. If record companies are concerned about CD sales, they should make this sort of thing the norm. They should be spending their money researching the best way to motivate people to purchase the CD, not on ways to stop people from downloading it. Unfortunately the problem with big business is that they almost never think about giving consumers more value for their buck. The idea is simply abhorrent to them. They can't wrap their tiny little minds around it.