>>If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one. > >Why can't you do the same in Windows? I've recently used Geoshell a lot and it was a real cool minimalist (much more so than KDE or Gnome) Explorer replacement. There are dozens more, and this community is actually thriving in these days.:-)
Cool. I didn't know that there was so much activity in that area these days.
Last time I looked into that stuff most of these replacement shells were either glorified skins and/or ugly hacks that could cause lots of unexpected problems. Of course, that was still in the days of Windows 98, so I won't blame it all on the shells:-)
Maybe I'll give it another shot. I still got to use XP every now and then...
>>If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can. > >Why can't you file a wishlist to an author of a Windows program? However, I agree about the modification advantage though, although I'm not experienced enough at Linux programming that I could use that freedom. I doubt many Windows users are either, so it's probably no advantage to many switchers.
True. Problem though is that while you may send a wishlist to large non-FOSS companies like MS or EA, chances are that it'll never even reach the developers. And even with medium sized companies your chances usually aren't good. Of course, there's lots of FOSS programs for Windows too. It's just not the norm, which in general makes these things a lot harder.
Pretty much my story too. I've used MS since DOS3. Never really got into *nix, as for a long time I had no way to try it out (no internet) and once I did get a chance to try it out on a Solaris machine, I found it sorely disappointing (CDE annoyed the heck out of me and I didn't know any of the CLI commands).
Then about 18 months ago I had to work on a Redhat desktop for a couple of months. I took some time to learn to use the CLI commands and eventually got hooked.
When I installed Mandrake at home, I set the machine up to boot into Windows by default. After only two weeks or so I noticed that I pretty much always chose to boot linux instead, so that became the default. Stayed that way ever since.
Why do I keep away from Windows? Two things mainly.
1) Pretty much everything I do except playing games and making PowerPoint presentations (OO.org is great, but Impress presentations don't always look perfect in PowerPoint, which I have to use for the actual presentation) can be done just as easily or more easily under linux.
2) I'm in charge of linux. Linux doesn't try to dictate how I should use my computer. If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one. If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can. If I want to get rid of some program I dislike, linux won't try to stop me. Etc. etc.
And of course the price is really nice too, but that's not as big a selling point to me as those other 2 points, since I can get cheap/free copies of Windows programs for most things that I need to do (student license for MS-Office, eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX, etc.)
>... Training students with a suite of programs that (unfortunately) aren't used by most of the corporate world? > >Yes, it's good for StarOffice to gain a foothold in the next generation. But being proficient in it won't get you a job.
I've never used StarOffice, but I hear that it's very similar to OpenOffice. If that's so, then for 99% of all users the difference between StarOffice and MS-Office is pretty minimal. It's not like WP5.1 vs Word 6.1 or anything. If you know how to use StarOffice/OO, you know how to use MS-Office.
The difference only becomes pronounced when you start to use the advanced features, but it's not like you learn to use those at school anyway.
>Just do tons of them, all over the shirt. Most will be distorted, but at least one should be good enough.
That might work. Another one I just thought of would be a necktie. Unlike t-shirts, those are supposed to stay flat (Dilbert's model excluded). The pattern's not even al that far-fetched.
>>Unless you've got an extremely flat abdomen, the positioning will get screwed up
>
>What about on the back of the t-shirt?
Here's an image of the pattern. As you can see, it's pretty subtle. Putting the shirt directly under a scanner will probably trigger the protection, but wearing it will almost certainly mess up the pattern enough for it not to be recognised. The human body just isn't very flat anywhere.
Of course, I haven't actually tried it myself, so I could be wrong. If that's so, then such a shirt would be wicked cool.
>Does anyone know of a source for T-shirts with this yellow five circle pattern? Any photo with you in it would be impossible to digitally edit with the new software.
Cool idea. Won't work though
The positioning of the circles with respect to the other circles is very important. Unless you've got an extremely flat abdomen, the positioning will get screwed up. And well, this being/. and all, I kinda doubt that you have such abs:-)
>A QT style license that requires purchasing tools and rights from Sun for commercial use, while allowing free software (under an acceptable license) to be developed for free would be the best idea in my opinion. I'm sure there will be great debate at Sun over how profitable this will be, but in the long run this is definitely the way to go.
I'm not familiar with the QT license, but going by what you described, using it on Java sounds patently rediculous to me. Right now anyone can develop anything they want in Java without paying any fees to Sun. If companies will suddenly have to start paying then you can be sure that many will move to a free (as in beer) alternative like C# while others will simply develop for older Java versions that don't require payment.
Not the parent poster, but I assume that he pays with an ATM card, not a credit card. This is the norm in my own country (The Netherlands) and doesn't require you to sign the receipt, as you've already authorised the money transfer by punching your PIN code into a secure reader (most stores have one).
Actually both options come with their own problems. If I select a piece of text that is produced by a program running in an xterm and hit ctrl-c, then the program is aborted, which I most likely didn't intend. Not exactly ideal. (Yeah, I know that in some terminals you can use ctrl-shift-c. That works, but it's non-standard.)
With the other method, whenever I select a piece of text, my clipboard is updated, even though I may have selected it for an entirely different reason. (The most annoying case being when I select a piece of text that I wanted to replace by the text on the clipboard.) This is plain inefficient and counterintuitive to anyone coming from a Windows background. Also, AFAIK, there is no way to cut text in this way, while you can with ctrl-x.
Probably not a good idea to introduce to introduce a third way of copy-pasting, though. Sigh...
I continue to be very excited about this type of content release and especially in the case of the BBC so that all the Monty Python will be available.
Though I would love to see that happen, I don't think we'll ever see Monty Python released this way, as the BBC doesn't own the series. The Pythons themselves do.
I was a big Firefly fan, but I have to take exception to that... Firefly was very well written and horribly acted. Enterprise was written -- well, like any Trek -- and is acceptably acted.
Really? So far (the show hasn't ended yet over here), I've found the acting in Firefly to be above average, while I find much of the acting in Enterprise absolutely horrible. Especially Scott Bakula is easily worse than any of the actors in Firefly.
And seeing T'Pol with just her undies on makes up for any of the bad acting!
>Let's say Apple ruled the domain. Everyone ran on Apple's hardware, ran OSX, etc. Would everyone start treating them like they treat Microsoft?
>I guess where I am going is... is the hatred/.'ers have toward Microsoft truly due to their business practices, or simply because they dominate the market?
Though I cannot speak for all of/., I think it's the former because of the latter. After all, if they didn't dominate the market, then their business practices wouldn't matter nearly as much.
>Let's say Apple ruled the domain. Everyone ran on Apple's hardware, ran OSX, etc. Would everyone start treating them like they treat Microsoft?
>I guess where I am going is... is the hatred/.'ers have toward Microsoft truly due to their business practices, or simply because they dominate the market?
Though I cannot speak for all of/., I think it's the former because of the latter.
After all, if they didn't dominate the market, then their business practices wouldn't matter nearly as much.
>Again, my experience has been the opposite. And also again, to be fair, it hasn't always been full time sysadmin, but at least a primary individual responsible for these duties. Contrasting our 2 expereinces, maybe I've just had better luck finding organizations who realize they 'get what they pay for.'
I suppose this depends heavily on the types of organisations as hand. If their core business depends heavily on computers, then they most likely will have someone who is responsible for them. If not, well, then they probably won't.
For instance, in pretty much every office of 20+ people I've been to, there was someone qualified to take care of the computer systems. After all, people there can't get their work done without their computers. They're essential.
On the other hand, I don't know a single privately owned store (not counting computer stores) of around 20 people that has someone qualified to take care of their computers. They're simply not important enough for them to keep someone on staff just to take care of them. It'll certainly be inconvenient if they go down, but business will still be able to continue.
"if you believe that the RIAA is a monopoly then you cannot believe that they are useless middlemen! if they are a monopoly, then they MUST be providing some useful service that is worth the fees that they charge! certainly nobody is forced to sign with an RIAA label... there are hundreds of independent labels out there plus the esteemed "selling CDs out of the back of your trunk" that is spoken of so highly here."
The major record labels certainly provide some useful services. Some of these can also be provided by small labels (producing the physical product, selecting promising artists and giving them an advance so they can pay for equipment, etc.) and others can only be provided by the major labels (large scale promotion, getting the cds into every music store in the country and beyond, etc.).
So are the major labels useless middlemen? Definitely not. Are they severly overpaid middlemen, who get away with it because they can offer something that others cannot? Yup, that they are.
"As soon as RMS says something like "If your program is free software, it is basically ethical" I have to force myself to keep reading. It's a real bitch when that sentence is the first in the article."
I could not agree more. I like free software as much as the next/.er, but to say that it's the only way to develop software in an ethical way is plain ridiculous (yes I know this article doesn't put it exactly like that, but RMS regularly does so in other places).
Great way to get people to open their software up: "Hey mister CEO, did you know that your company's been making money in an ethically tainted way, all these years? Why not allow people to copy and modify your products all they want. That way you'll be able to sleep much better. You'll thank us for it later."
If anything this'll only convince people that the open source community is some kind of weird religious cult with communistic tendencies.
>It had a false positive rate = false negative rate.
If false positive = false negative = 0% then that would be mighty impressive. I take it you meant something like false positive = true positive and/or false negative = true negative instead.
Tin-foil comment: What a thoroughly ridiculous idea. I'd almost think they fear the piracy might go down and their pro-legislation arguments might lose weight.
Article:
Downloading music gets more expensive
Ethan Smith Wall Street Journal Apr. 7, 2004 11:00 AM
To see the future of online music prices, look no further than "Fly or Die," the new album by rock-meets-hip-hop trio N.E.R.D.
For months, digital-music services have been touting albums for $9.99 to entice more people to buy online. But Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store has been charging $16.99 for "Fly or Die," while Roxio Inc.'s Napster service sells the 12-song collection for $13.99. Both prices are higher than the $13.49 that Amazon.com charges for the CD itself. The same pricing shifts are showing up on albums by a growing slate of artists, from Shakira to Bob Dylan.
Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers. In many cases, buying music online is still cheaper than shopping for CDs at retail outlets. But just a year after iTunes debuted with its 99-cent songs and mostly $9.99 albums, that affordable and straightforward pricing structure is already under pressure.
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases - to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49. It isn't clear how or when such a price hike would take place, and it could still be months away. Sales of such singles - prices have remained at 99 cents - still account for the majority of online music sales.
The industry is also mulling other ways to charge more for online singles. One option under consideration is bundling hit songs with less-desirable tracks. Another possibility is charging more for a single track if it is available online before the broader release of the entire album from which it is taken. There is also talk of lowering the price on some individual tracks from older albums.
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies.
The new pricing developments come as digital-music sales are growing steadily. Some 25 million digital tracks were sold in the first three months of this year, versus 19.2 million for all of the second half of last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
That growth is why some in the industry are uncomfortable with the talk of price increases. Most music-company executives believe that the download market is still in a critical early-growth stage, which could be disrupted by raising prices. "For us right now the issue is not, 'Do we make another $300,000 by raising the price five cents?"' says a music company executive. "It's making sure the market grows."
Revenues in the music industry have been dragging in recent years, in part because of the rise of illegal downloading services. Raising digital-music prices could spur additional illicit downloading. Weaning people off those illegal services by giving them an alternative that they consider viable is critical to the industry's future profitability.
N.E.R.D's "Fly or Die" is far from the only album that now costs significantly more to download from iTunes than to buy on CD. And many high-profile albums from two of the big five music companies, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group PLC, are now priced on iTunes and its competitors well above the $9.99 norm. Sony artist Pete Yorn's "Musicforthemorningafter," for example, costs $13.99 on iTunes and $10.88 on average in retail stores, according to the NPD Group. Albums by EMI artists from Kylie Minogue to Blur also cost more in digital than physical form. (EMI also distributes N.E.R.D.)
The reason this disparity is so pronounced at EMI and Sony is that both companies routinely set wholesale prices for online albums higher than their competitors, according to people familiar with the matter.
>Except when they can milk it for all it's worth, such as in the case of Half-Life, which they still want $40 for and is like 5 years old now.
>
>Fuck them, I have no love lost for Sierra.
More likely your local retailer is milking it. I got my copy (GotY edition) + Opposing Force + Counterstrike + Blue Shift for 14.95 euros. Pretty sweet, even if the game is indeed a few years old now.
I suggest you look around a bit for a shop that has more reasonable prices. If you happen to be in the Netherlands, then this is such a place.
1. If you're willing to pay for those oldies, then just let the owners of the rights know. A number of them have already made their old games available again because of such reactions, either at a small charge or even completely free. This is for instance the case with the various versions of the excellent space sim Elite or the various Cinemaware games such as Defender of the Crown.
2. Leisure Suit Larry was was created and published by Sierra, which obviously still exists. They are even quite fond of releasing old games at low prices or entirely free (the excellent Betrayal at Krondor, for instance).
Ugh. Just remembered that I actually do have a little bit to contribute. I've got my mp3s on a FAT32 partition so I can r/w from both Mandrake and WinXP. Apparently it was pretty badly fragmented. After I ran defrag from Windows the problem decreased significantly, but did not go away entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
>>If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one. :-)
:-)
>
>Why can't you do the same in Windows? I've recently used Geoshell a lot and it was a real cool minimalist (much more so than KDE or Gnome) Explorer replacement. There are dozens more, and this community is actually thriving in these days.
Cool. I didn't know that there was so much activity in that area these days.
Last time I looked into that stuff most of these replacement shells were either glorified skins and/or ugly hacks that could cause lots of unexpected problems. Of course, that was still in the days of Windows 98, so I won't blame it all on the shells
Maybe I'll give it another shot. I still got to use XP every now and then...
>>If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can.
>
>Why can't you file a wishlist to an author of a Windows program? However, I agree about the modification advantage though, although I'm not experienced enough at Linux programming that I could use that freedom. I doubt many Windows users are either, so it's probably no advantage to many switchers.
True. Problem though is that while you may send a wishlist to large non-FOSS companies like MS or EA, chances are that it'll never even reach the developers. And even with medium sized companies your chances usually aren't good. Of course, there's lots of FOSS programs for Windows too. It's just not the norm, which in general makes these things a lot harder.
Pretty much my story too. I've used MS since DOS3. Never really got into *nix, as for a long time I had no way to try it out (no internet) and once I did get a chance to try it out on a Solaris machine, I found it sorely disappointing (CDE annoyed the heck out of me and I didn't know any of the CLI commands).
Then about 18 months ago I had to work on a Redhat desktop for a couple of months. I took some time to learn to use the CLI commands and eventually got hooked.
When I installed Mandrake at home, I set the machine up to boot into Windows by default. After only two weeks or so I noticed that I pretty much always chose to boot linux instead, so that became the default. Stayed that way ever since.
Why do I keep away from Windows? Two things mainly.
1) Pretty much everything I do except playing games and making PowerPoint presentations (OO.org is great, but Impress presentations don't always look perfect in PowerPoint, which I have to use for the actual presentation) can be done just as easily or more easily under linux.
2) I'm in charge of linux. Linux doesn't try to dictate how I should use my computer. If I don't like the windows manager, I can choose another one. If I would like to have feature X in program Y, I can file a wishlist or make the modifications myself if I can. If I want to get rid of some program I dislike, linux won't try to stop me. Etc. etc.
And of course the price is really nice too, but that's not as big a selling point to me as those other 2 points, since I can get cheap/free copies of Windows programs for most things that I need to do (student license for MS-Office, eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX, etc.)
>... Training students with a suite of programs that (unfortunately) aren't used by most of the corporate world?
>
>Yes, it's good for StarOffice to gain a foothold in the next generation. But being proficient in it won't get you a job.
I've never used StarOffice, but I hear that it's very similar to OpenOffice. If that's so, then for 99% of all users the difference between StarOffice and MS-Office is pretty minimal. It's not like WP5.1 vs Word 6.1 or anything. If you know how to use StarOffice/OO, you know how to use MS-Office.
The difference only becomes pronounced when you start to use the advanced features, but it's not like you learn to use those at school anyway.
That might work. Another one I just thought of would be a necktie. Unlike t-shirts, those are supposed to stay flat (Dilbert's model excluded). The pattern's not even al that far-fetched.
>
>What about on the back of the t-shirt?
Here's an image of the pattern. As you can see, it's pretty subtle. Putting the shirt directly under a scanner will probably trigger the protection, but wearing it will almost certainly mess up the pattern enough for it not to be recognised. The human body just isn't very flat anywhere.
Of course, I haven't actually tried it myself, so I could be wrong. If that's so, then such a shirt would be wicked cool.
Cool idea. Won't work though
The positioning of the circles with respect to the other circles is very important. Unless you've got an extremely flat abdomen, the positioning will get screwed up. And well, this being /. and all, I kinda doubt that you have such abs :-)
>A QT style license that requires purchasing tools and rights from Sun for commercial use, while allowing free software (under an acceptable license) to be developed for free would be the best idea in my opinion. I'm sure there will be great debate at Sun over how profitable this will be, but in the long run this is definitely the way to go.
I'm not familiar with the QT license, but going by what you described, using it on Java sounds patently rediculous to me. Right now anyone can develop anything they want in Java without paying any fees to Sun. If companies will suddenly have to start paying then you can be sure that many will move to a free (as in beer) alternative like C# while others will simply develop for older Java versions that don't require payment.
Not the parent poster, but I assume that he pays with an ATM card, not a credit card. This is the norm in my own country (The Netherlands) and doesn't require you to sign the receipt, as you've already authorised the money transfer by punching your PIN code into a secure reader (most stores have one).
Actually both options come with their own problems. If I select a piece of text that is produced by a program running in an xterm and hit ctrl-c, then the program is aborted, which I most likely didn't intend. Not exactly ideal. (Yeah, I know that in some terminals you can use ctrl-shift-c. That works, but it's non-standard.)
With the other method, whenever I select a piece of text, my clipboard is updated, even though I may have selected it for an entirely different reason. (The most annoying case being when I select a piece of text that I wanted to replace by the text on the clipboard.) This is plain inefficient and counterintuitive to anyone coming from a Windows background. Also, AFAIK, there is no way to cut text in this way, while you can with ctrl-x.
Probably not a good idea to introduce to introduce a third way of copy-pasting, though. Sigh...
I continue to be very excited about this type of content release and especially in the case of the BBC so that all the Monty Python will be available.
Though I would love to see that happen, I don't think we'll ever see Monty Python released this way, as the BBC doesn't own the series. The Pythons themselves do.
See here for more.
>Let's say Apple ruled the domain. Everyone ran on Apple's hardware, ran OSX, etc. Would everyone start treating them like they treat Microsoft?
>I guess where I am going is... is the hatred /.'ers have toward Microsoft truly due to their business practices, or simply because they dominate the market?
Though I cannot speak for all of /., I think it's the former because of the latter. After all, if they didn't dominate the market, then their business practices wouldn't matter nearly as much.
>Let's say Apple ruled the domain. Everyone ran on Apple's hardware, ran OSX, etc. Would everyone start treating them like they treat Microsoft? >I guess where I am going is... is the hatred /.'ers have toward Microsoft truly due to their business practices, or simply because they dominate the market?
Though I cannot speak for all of /., I think it's the former because of the latter.
After all, if they didn't dominate the market, then their business practices wouldn't matter nearly as much.
>Again, my experience has been the opposite. And also again, to be fair, it hasn't always been full time sysadmin, but at least a primary individual responsible for these duties. Contrasting our 2 expereinces, maybe I've just had better luck finding organizations who realize they 'get what they pay for.'
I suppose this depends heavily on the types of organisations as hand. If their core business depends heavily on computers, then they most likely will have someone who is responsible for them. If not, well, then they probably won't.
For instance, in pretty much every office of 20+ people I've been to, there was someone qualified to take care of the computer systems. After all, people there can't get their work done without their computers. They're essential.
On the other hand, I don't know a single privately owned store (not counting computer stores) of around 20 people that has someone qualified to take care of their computers. They're simply not important enough for them to keep someone on staff just to take care of them. It'll certainly be inconvenient if they go down, but business will still be able to continue.
The major record labels certainly provide some useful services. Some of these can also be provided by small labels (producing the physical product, selecting promising artists and giving them an advance so they can pay for equipment, etc.) and others can only be provided by the major labels (large scale promotion, getting the cds into every music store in the country and beyond, etc.).
So are the major labels useless middlemen? Definitely not. Are they severly overpaid middlemen, who get away with it because they can offer something that others cannot? Yup, that they are.
"As soon as RMS says something like "If your program is free software, it is basically ethical" I have to force myself to keep reading. It's a real bitch when that sentence is the first in the article."
/.er, but to say that it's the only way to develop software in an ethical way is plain ridiculous (yes I know this article doesn't put it exactly like that, but RMS regularly does so in other places).
I could not agree more. I like free software as much as the next
Great way to get people to open their software up: "Hey mister CEO, did you know that your company's been making money in an ethically tainted way, all these years? Why not allow people to copy and modify your products all they want. That way you'll be able to sleep much better. You'll thank us for it later."
If anything this'll only convince people that the open source community is some kind of weird religious cult with communistic tendencies.
>Is there a way to make eveything default to Firefox instead of Konq? or at least the random web links I can click various places?
Go to the Control Center (somewhere in your Start Menu), then Components, then File Associations and change the settings as you like.
>It had a false positive rate = false negative rate.
If false positive = false negative = 0% then that would be mighty impressive. I take it you meant something like false positive = true positive and/or false negative = true negative instead.
>$16 for an album though... well, I'm right there with you.
Try 23 euros/29 USD for an album. That's getting increasingly common for popular new albums over here in the Netherlands.
And then they dare complain about decreasing sales...
Tin-foil comment: What a thoroughly ridiculous idea. I'd almost think they fear the piracy might go down and their pro-legislation arguments might lose weight.
Article:
Downloading music gets more expensive
Ethan Smith
Wall Street Journal
Apr. 7, 2004 11:00 AM
To see the future of online music prices, look no further than "Fly or Die," the new album by rock-meets-hip-hop trio N.E.R.D.
For months, digital-music services have been touting albums for $9.99 to entice more people to buy online. But Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store has been charging $16.99 for "Fly or Die," while Roxio Inc.'s Napster service sells the 12-song collection for $13.99. Both prices are higher than the $13.49 that Amazon.com charges for the CD itself. The same pricing shifts are showing up on albums by a growing slate of artists, from Shakira to Bob Dylan.
Unburdened by manufacturing and distribution costs, online music was supposed to usher in a new era of inexpensive, easy-to-access music for consumers. In many cases, buying music online is still cheaper than shopping for CDs at retail outlets. But just a year after iTunes debuted with its 99-cent songs and mostly $9.99 albums, that affordable and straightforward pricing structure is already under pressure.
All five of the major music companies are discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases - to anywhere from $1.25 to as much as $2.49. It isn't clear how or when such a price hike would take place, and it could still be months away. Sales of such singles - prices have remained at 99 cents - still account for the majority of online music sales.
The industry is also mulling other ways to charge more for online singles. One option under consideration is bundling hit songs with less-desirable tracks. Another possibility is charging more for a single track if it is available online before the broader release of the entire album from which it is taken. There is also talk of lowering the price on some individual tracks from older albums.
Several record-company executives acknowledged that pricing changes are being discussed at all five major companies.
The new pricing developments come as digital-music sales are growing steadily. Some 25 million digital tracks were sold in the first three months of this year, versus 19.2 million for all of the second half of last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
That growth is why some in the industry are uncomfortable with the talk of price increases. Most music-company executives believe that the download market is still in a critical early-growth stage, which could be disrupted by raising prices. "For us right now the issue is not, 'Do we make another $300,000 by raising the price five cents?"' says a music company executive. "It's making sure the market grows."
Revenues in the music industry have been dragging in recent years, in part because of the rise of illegal downloading services. Raising digital-music prices could spur additional illicit downloading. Weaning people off those illegal services by giving them an alternative that they consider viable is critical to the industry's future profitability.
N.E.R.D's "Fly or Die" is far from the only album that now costs significantly more to download from iTunes than to buy on CD. And many high-profile albums from two of the big five music companies, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group PLC, are now priced on iTunes and its competitors well above the $9.99 norm. Sony artist Pete Yorn's "Musicforthemorningafter," for example, costs $13.99 on iTunes and $10.88 on average in retail stores, according to the NPD Group. Albums by EMI artists from Kylie Minogue to Blur also cost more in digital than physical form. (EMI also distributes N.E.R.D.)
The reason this disparity is so pronounced at EMI and Sony is that both companies routinely set wholesale prices for online albums higher than their competitors, according to people familiar with the matter.
>
>Fuck them, I have no love lost for Sierra.
More likely your local retailer is milking it. I got my copy (GotY edition) + Opposing Force + Counterstrike + Blue Shift for 14.95 euros. Pretty sweet, even if the game is indeed a few years old now.
I suggest you look around a bit for a shop that has more reasonable prices. If you happen to be in the Netherlands, then this is such a place.
1. If you're willing to pay for those oldies, then just let the owners of the rights know. A number of them have already made their old games available again because of such reactions, either at a small charge or even completely free. This is for instance the case with the various versions of the excellent space sim Elite or the various Cinemaware games such as Defender of the Crown.
2. Leisure Suit Larry was was created and published by Sierra, which obviously still exists. They are even quite fond of releasing old games at low prices or entirely free (the excellent Betrayal at Krondor, for instance).
Do we really need to set the Shoggoths loose?
Ugh. Just remembered that I actually do have a little bit to contribute. I've got my mp3s on a FAT32 partition so I can r/w from both Mandrake and WinXP. Apparently it was pretty badly fragmented. After I ran defrag from Windows the problem decreased significantly, but did not go away entirely.