I understand what you're saying, and I somewhat agree. The example of Evanescence proves the point about a lack of innovation, because they're just a cheesy ripoff of a band called Lacuna Coil.
Actually, both Evanescence and Lacuna Coil made their first release in '98, so while their music may sound similar, it's not fair to call one a ripoff of the other.
How about "Haunted" by Poe? Or Enigma, some of their stuff is pretty unique. Innovation is not dead, it's just not as popular with the masses as it used to be.
But even so, what about Evanescence? They seem to have hit upon a new kind of niche by combining Sarah McLachlan type music with Linkin Park type music. It's not amazingly innovative or anything, but it's more than just another over-produced pop album...
And this is all major label stuff. If you want some really innovative, interesting music, go check out cdbaby.com
Oops, sorry, I guess I forgot for a second that not everyone likes the same languages as me;-) Actually though, I like C++ almost as much as Objective-C, it's just the mixing of the two that seems unwieldy to me.
Well, it is possible to mix Objective-C with C++ - the result being an abomination known as "Objective-C++" - but it's not something you typcially need to know about unless you're trying to do something weird, like use a C++ library from within an Objective-C program...
"It may be wrong of me to sodomize these prisoners with a glow stick, but IMHO what they did to us on 9/11 is more wrong than what I'm doing."
You're missing the point. I'm not trying to use the RIAA's actions to directly justify my pirating. I'd prefer to buy their music legitimately, but I won't do it becuase I feel that the immorality of supporting these lawsuits outweighs the immorality of pirating the material.
If you don't want to give your money to RIAA-member companies anymore, don't consume their product anymore! Stop being a jackass.
They don't give a damn whether I "consume" their music or not, they just care whether I give them money. What difference does it make to the RIAA whether I boycott or pirate?
Boycott them entirely and buy from independant artists instead.
That's pretty much what I do. The vast majority of the music I listen to now is indie stuff that I buy legitamitely. However, if I come across a major label artist that I like, I will pirate their stuff. If there were no way to listen to it without paying, I would just not listen to it at all, so in effect I actually am boycotting them.
I know that file sharing of unlicensed copyrighted works is illegal, but the practice of threatening lawsuits left and right still bothers me.
Yeah, I agree. I used to be very anti-piracy. I knew that the labels were corrupt and everything, but it wasn't enough for me to justify breaking the law and pirating more than the occasional song. When the lawsuits started though, that was it for me. Legal or not, I'm not willing to pay money to a company when I know my money is going to be used to do things like that. It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.
I'm sure they'd love to, but I don't think they have any legal ground to stand on. Older Macs used a proprietary ROM to boot the system, but new ones use Open Firmware which is, well, open. And the PowerPC instruction set isn't owned by Apple either...
However, I won't be surprised if they try to design future versions of OS X to be incompatible with PearPC. At the moment though, this thing is so slow that I doubt they're seeing it as a serious threat.
Could they actually do that though? If you patent a car that uses an engine as a pivotal part of the design, that doesn't mean you can make people pay license fees for car engines...
Why? It's not like it's turning into a flame war or anything. What's Slashdot for if not debating things?;-)
And the 'compression' argument doesn't hold water unless you have a $10k set of speakers to listen to it on powered by a McIntosh analog amp.
For some people that may be true, but hearing can vary widely from person to person. I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I can definitely hear the compression artifacts at the transcoded 112kbps MP3 level that you're suggesting. 128kbps AAC is just barely past the threshold of my hearing, so pretty much any transcoding is going to be too poor for my tastes. Not to mention that it's slow and inconvenient to burn and re-rip. With Hymn, it only takes about ten seconds per song.
Apple is not fighting this because they are evil, they are doing it becasue if they don't, record labels will be less interested in working with the iTunes Music Store.
That may be one of the reasons, but then there's also the fact that their DRM only works with iPods. The whole idea behind the music store is just to sell more iPods. If there was no DRM, people could use their music on non-iPod players that support AAC, but as it is they're locked into buying iPods forever unless they want to re-purchase all their music.
On the other hand though, it has a flash program on the front page that's constantly showing a slide show of new pics. You could leave a browser page open to the site all night, and it would just keep sucking up bandwidth.
I'd love to send a letter, but I'm not quite sure who I should be writing to. I know I could figure it out with a little googling, but if someone could post the relevent info it would probably help other people besides me...
Is this something we can expect to see in OSS anytime soon, or is there some kind of patent/copyright restriction? I would be thrilled if this feature showed up in Yafray or Blender...
On an unrelated note, I wonder if iTMS is going to start offering lossless files. That would be cool.
Yeah, that would be cool, but I'd be very surprised if they did that. The problem is that you could easily strip the DRM by burning it to a CD and re-ripping it, and unlike DRM'd lossy files, there would be no loss in quality from the transfer.
Well, not that I think that would be a problem, but I'll bet Apple would.
That sounds a little bit weird to me, as there shouldn't be any difference between AAC files that are DRM stripped and AAC files that never had DRM to begin with...
Yes Safari is based on the same HTML rendering engine as Konquerer, but the user interface is completely different. On the surface, Safari is far more similar to Firefox than Konquerer.
Re:Contents of the Letter (playfair.txt)
on
Update on Playfair
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· Score: 1
What do people expect? That by cracking the DRM of the music services the record industry will just give up completely on DRM?
I expect that by cracking the iTMS DRM, I will be able to play the music I purchased on my Linux machine.
By undermining this DRM it encourages record companies to sway towards enforcing more arcane DRM,not removing it.
If some record companies start using DRM that I have no way to circumvent, I will simply stop buying music that's crippled by that type of DRM. There's always eMusic or Audio Lunchbox, and if there's a song I really want that I can't download in an unrestricted format, I'll just buy the CD on eBay.
DAAP is the protocol used for the LAN sharing feature of iTunes. The music store has nothing to do with it.
In a sense though, this isn't completely new. The search interface was hacked long ago, so Apple added some encryption stuff to lock out non-iTunes clients. All that's been hacked is the encryption key.
Is it okay to pirate games and software? You know, stuff that programmers made? Can I pirate the fuck out of Doom 3 when it comes out? OH, THAT'S RIGHT--the subject of software piracy is never mentioned because Slashdot is made up of a lot of programmers and developers. Since software piracy would affect them, it's bad, right?
I think that if Microsoft started putting people in jail for pirating Windows, Slashdotters would be just as angry at them as they are at the MPAA right now.
All in all, I think what makes poeple angry is that the punishment is way out of proportion to the crime that was commited. That's why it was compared to the War on Drugs.
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means, but font rendering is really crappy on my Linux box too, and I've done a bit of research on this topic. I think that the bad results you're seeing are most likely due to the gamma of your monitor. On my system at least, font rendering suddenly becomes superb if I run 'xgamma -gamma 2'. The only problem is that the higher gamma settings make everything else on my screen look washed out...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, both Evanescence and Lacuna Coil made their first release in '98, so while their music may sound similar, it's not fair to call one a ripoff of the other.
But even so, what about Evanescence? They seem to have hit upon a new kind of niche by combining Sarah McLachlan type music with Linkin Park type music. It's not amazingly innovative or anything, but it's more than just another over-produced pop album...
And this is all major label stuff. If you want some really innovative, interesting music, go check out cdbaby.com
Oops, sorry, I guess I forgot for a second that not everyone likes the same languages as me ;-) Actually though, I like C++ almost as much as Objective-C, it's just the mixing of the two that seems unwieldy to me.
What ever happened to creating binaries from scratch in a hex editor??
Well, it is possible to mix Objective-C with C++ - the result being an abomination known as "Objective-C++" - but it's not something you typcially need to know about unless you're trying to do something weird, like use a C++ library from within an Objective-C program...
You're missing the point. I'm not trying to use the RIAA's actions to directly justify my pirating. I'd prefer to buy their music legitimately, but I won't do it becuase I feel that the immorality of supporting these lawsuits outweighs the immorality of pirating the material.
If you don't want to give your money to RIAA-member companies anymore, don't consume their product anymore! Stop being a jackass.
They don't give a damn whether I "consume" their music or not, they just care whether I give them money. What difference does it make to the RIAA whether I boycott or pirate?
That's pretty much what I do. The vast majority of the music I listen to now is indie stuff that I buy legitamitely. However, if I come across a major label artist that I like, I will pirate their stuff. If there were no way to listen to it without paying, I would just not listen to it at all, so in effect I actually am boycotting them.
Yeah, I agree. I used to be very anti-piracy. I knew that the labels were corrupt and everything, but it wasn't enough for me to justify breaking the law and pirating more than the occasional song. When the lawsuits started though, that was it for me. Legal or not, I'm not willing to pay money to a company when I know my money is going to be used to do things like that. It may be wrong of me to pirate, but IMHO what they're doing is more wrong than what I'm doing.
1) They're just in it for the money,
or
2) They're stupid/insane/sadistic or whatever.
The idea that they're "representing" anyone's interests other than their own seems laughable at this point.
However, I won't be surprised if they try to design future versions of OS X to be incompatible with PearPC. At the moment though, this thing is so slow that I doubt they're seeing it as a serious threat.
That sounds a lot like Freenet to me.
Could they actually do that though? If you patent a car that uses an engine as a pivotal part of the design, that doesn't mean you can make people pay license fees for car engines...
Why? It's not like it's turning into a flame war or anything. What's Slashdot for if not debating things? ;-)
And the 'compression' argument doesn't hold water unless you have a $10k set of speakers to listen to it on powered by a McIntosh analog amp.
For some people that may be true, but hearing can vary widely from person to person. I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I can definitely hear the compression artifacts at the transcoded 112kbps MP3 level that you're suggesting. 128kbps AAC is just barely past the threshold of my hearing, so pretty much any transcoding is going to be too poor for my tastes. Not to mention that it's slow and inconvenient to burn and re-rip. With Hymn, it only takes about ten seconds per song.
That may be one of the reasons, but then there's also the fact that their DRM only works with iPods. The whole idea behind the music store is just to sell more iPods. If there was no DRM, people could use their music on non-iPod players that support AAC, but as it is they're locked into buying iPods forever unless they want to re-purchase all their music.
On the other hand though, it has a flash program on the front page that's constantly showing a slide show of new pics. You could leave a browser page open to the site all night, and it would just keep sucking up bandwidth.
I'd love to send a letter, but I'm not quite sure who I should be writing to. I know I could figure it out with a little googling, but if someone could post the relevent info it would probably help other people besides me...
Is this something we can expect to see in OSS anytime soon, or is there some kind of patent/copyright restriction? I would be thrilled if this feature showed up in Yafray or Blender...
Yeah, that would be cool, but I'd be very surprised if they did that. The problem is that you could easily strip the DRM by burning it to a CD and re-ripping it, and unlike DRM'd lossy files, there would be no loss in quality from the transfer.
Well, not that I think that would be a problem, but I'll bet Apple would.
That sounds a little bit weird to me, as there shouldn't be any difference between AAC files that are DRM stripped and AAC files that never had DRM to begin with...
Yes Safari is based on the same HTML rendering engine as Konquerer, but the user interface is completely different. On the surface, Safari is far more similar to Firefox than Konquerer.
I expect that by cracking the iTMS DRM, I will be able to play the music I purchased on my Linux machine.
By undermining this DRM it encourages record companies to sway towards enforcing more arcane DRM,not removing it.
If some record companies start using DRM that I have no way to circumvent, I will simply stop buying music that's crippled by that type of DRM. There's always eMusic or Audio Lunchbox, and if there's a song I really want that I can't download in an unrestricted format, I'll just buy the CD on eBay.
Does anyone know if this affects IPv6? I wonder if this situation could somehow be leveraged to promote it...
In a sense though, this isn't completely new. The search interface was hacked long ago, so Apple added some encryption stuff to lock out non-iTunes clients. All that's been hacked is the encryption key.
I think that if Microsoft started putting people in jail for pirating Windows, Slashdotters would be just as angry at them as they are at the MPAA right now.
All in all, I think what makes poeple angry is that the punishment is way out of proportion to the crime that was commited. That's why it was compared to the War on Drugs.
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means, but font rendering is really crappy on my Linux box too, and I've done a bit of research on this topic. I think that the bad results you're seeing are most likely due to the gamma of your monitor. On my system at least, font rendering suddenly becomes superb if I run 'xgamma -gamma 2'. The only problem is that the higher gamma settings make everything else on my screen look washed out...