The RIAA is acting just like Michael Wenton-Weakes.
The listening public has finally gotten the chance to try before they buy and they can now buy what they know they want. I wouldn't be surprised if the drop in sales of cds was due to all the people who figured out that they don't really want that Butthole Surfers cd afterall.
And doesn't that make the world a better place?
If I were the RIAA, I would be more worried about John Vanderslice and other rogue band leaders who give cd sales the finger.
Ads for movies haven't been entertaining or inspiring for a long time. The Matrix had a good idea for its ad campaign but most ads in the past couple years have sucked.
But even when ads were good, I would never trust the word of the reviewers they use in their ads. Of course they are going to use the best reviews for their movie even if the movie reeks there will be one or two positive reviews so that is not a good gauge for movie quality.
Right now the only purpose movie ads serve is to alert the general public that the movie exists but they aren't going to convince me one way or another. If I want to know about a movie I will look it up on Rotten Tomatoes or some other review site and look at all the reviews.
I am currently adding the total seconds of music I have on cd so when I rip it all to a hard drive I will know how much space it will take.
I currently have 71 albums at 212,749 seconds of music. Should I encode all that at 192kbps (which is a respectable rate with good quality sound) it would consume 5.1 Gb of space.
Just thought that would help put things in perspective. 71 albums in 5 gigs at high quality.
Sorry about that post; I was still logged in on a public computer for some reason and one of my friends thought it would be leet to spam my account for me.
I know it has been said but it must be said again for the record: the final comment by Michael was in very bad taste considering the topic of the post. I would think that someone so devoted to diversity in the marketplace would appreciate the competition HP has offered against Texas Instruments.
If it were not for HP (and, to a lesser extent, Casio), TI would have a monopoly on the calculator market. I dont think I need to spell out the hypocrisy anymore than I have.
I don't see how these micropayments have to be unpredictable. After enough use of the suggested system, people would begin to know what to expect for prices. The idea of micropayments would not only benefit the artists and other internet property holders but could possibly create a whole string of new subcompanies devoted to organizing and rating individual sites for security, most competative prices, and maybe even quality of the experience much like Bizrate and Gomez. That would give some type of user based quality control.
If consistent pricing wasn't enough, the artists could also offer subscriptions to their products for a flat fee. None of these are really new ideas but it seems like a shame to ditch a solid plan for fear that it might be too complex for consumers. The only way to win consumers over is to be consistent so they know what to expect from every site when it comes to making payments.
A) I think that everything that guy says in regard to people who review open source should be taken with a grain of salt. He obviously has an attitude problem and suffers from quite an overblown ego. That doesn't mean much other than we cannot trust his opinions on matters like Linux.
B) The comment about surprise that there has not been a super secure linux distro? What about khaOS?? And I cannot speak for other distributions but I know that there is a package for SuSE (6.4) in the security section that super secures the installation by removing all possible wholes in the system and blocking most all services. I know it isnt the same as in OpenBSD but it is enough to keep the newbie hackers from breaking down the walls of my modest server.
C) The complaint that most distributions come pre-configured for all sorts of software with no care for system security: WHAT THE HELL IS WINDOWS THEN?!?! It is so aggrivating to hear people bitch and moan all the time about hard linux is to install and how hard it is to use. So the distro manufactuers start making easy to use linux. People start buying it. Everyone is happy until someone complains that it is stupid to make things easy to use because it compromises security.
I am not saying we can't have our cake and eat it too but Linux needs to be cut some slack because everyone working on it is doing their best to make it accessible to the public and right now that means weaker security.
One more thing though: just because distros come with pre-configured installations, most people will choose to change the installation and make configurations of their own based on experience. It seems that it is only the new linux users that will be affected by the security flaws of base install. But then again, they probably wont be running a major website based on mysql and setting up their own firewall right away either so it all needs to be kept in perspective.
i know this is a wild thought, but when always read scifi books and see movies that work the idea of alternate dimensions existing at all points in time in parallel plans. In fact physicists are using that idea to determine the likelihood of life forming at all in the environment given by our universe...
but we have never experienced this empirically because it seems impossible. but now, as crazy as it seems, we are all able to experience not just a different point of view but a completely different scene!
we could each watch a baseball game and see a different ad based on the network provider for our television or if we were at the game
it is the same game, alternate reality.
and who is to determine which one was real?
the one with the ad in the background (as is shown in the article) or the one with the radar results?
even the people at the game couldnt say unless they were to walk right up to the display and feel it.
I know this is just mindless nolstalgia but I remember The Wizard as one of the coolest movies of my childhood (not too long ago!) and my best friend and I would sit around after seeing that moving playing Mario brothers and thinkin "I could be the wizard!"
anyway it was pretty stupid true but the movie wasnt as bad as its subject and peopl still cherish arcade games even the extent of OWNING THEM.
just because microsoft wants linux users to use Office doesnt mean that we should all rush out and get it. We need to keep in mind that there are other office products out there (Applix, WordPerfect, Star Office) which are doing a good job of improving the linux app base and we shouldnt stop supporting the "little guys". That is of course what Microsoft wants...
First of all, your 486 is fast enough for what you need. My personal setup at in my room is a P90 with 24mb of ram that does all my IP forwarding and acts as a firewall. I dont know if I have the most secure setup but here are the tools I use and you will need to get this working:
dhcpcd
dhcpd
ndc (not a requirement but you may benefit from having a local name server instead of using the slow @home ones)
pmfirewall
rc.firewall
You can find the rc.firewall script here. It sets up all your forwarding modules for your network.
dhcpd and dhcpcd are used to assign an IP address to your main machine. I use them because I am lazy and dont want to bother with setting a static address.
Your dhcpd.conf should probably look something like this for your type of two computer network. dhcpcd just has to be run on your main computer and it will get all the info it needs from the dhcpd on the firewall computer.
Finally, you need your firewall program. I use pmfirewall because it is easy to install and use. It is basically a frontend to ipchains and it takes all the nasty configuration out of setting up a firewall.
The best thing about pmfirewall is how easy it is to allow complete access to one address (like your main computer) to everything you need and close off the important/scary ports to everyone else.
As long as your network cards are working, you should have no problems getting dhcpd to work and the rest of it installs very easily. As for your gnome ports, you can close those to everyone but you so you dont have to worry about screwing up gnome.
I dont know if this applies to everyone with @home service but I received my service a couple months after a friend of mine and in that time, our documentation changed from:
His: "No servers allowed."
to Mine: "If you should run a server, we are not responsible for any damage caused by doing so."
That alone should be enough support if they ever decided to question me about my small server. I just hope they don't migrate to something like AOL where you have to go through all of their servers to get to the internet. I know I am not the only one who doesn't use THEIR proxy but if they found a way to enforce its use, it could mean the end of any privacy we might have now.
In common with other posters on this topic, I run a few services (mail and web) but they don't put half the strain on the system as my windows/proxy using friends with napster running 24/7.
Apparently Rupert is working on his own Tivo/Replay system that will allow people to record all the tv they want from his satellites and fast forward through all the commericials they like but if the companies running the commericials pay him enough, he will disallow all fast forwarding through commericials for that company.
When I say "he" i of course refer to his company but still that says a lot about how tight the networks' grips are on our tv
i thought the BBC was a rip off! This is like telling you that you cant fast forward on your VCR! hmm...
anyway there is an article in Wired this month about it if you want more info.
wow, slashdot finally caught up to last month's Linux Journal
yeah it is actually on the cover
the article is on page 86
anyway i could just be jumping to conclusions because they watch may very well be a different watch but i wanted to complain and make a fool out of myself so i could be a "karma whore"
but i cant stomach the price tag. think of the possibilities! i want one but i think i will have to either wait for the price to drop or get a crappy less capable device...
the really sweet features to me are the ldc support and the ethernet support.
just put together a little minimum install system of your favorite distro and set it to boot up to the daily news as scooped from sitescooper or whatever and display it on your lcd for easy viewing with a small computer.
they seem to be missing the point: People get music "digitally" because they can get it for free.
Free.
It has little, if anything, to do with ease of access. Hell, my local cd store is only a couple blocks away but they want $20 a cd and napster doesnt have a pricetag. Life is a bitch isnt it?
The only people who will benefit from all this are the credit card companies. End users wont notice anything but less money in the bank and the labels will have more and the bands will still get paid jackshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like Hemos has Tivo envy.
i know you are just being difficult but YaST makes upgrading SuSE over ftp a breeze.
Just give it the ftp server and directory, it loads all the files to be installed, you select, and it does the rest.
The listening public has finally gotten the chance to try before they buy and they can now buy what they know they want. I wouldn't be surprised if the drop in sales of cds was due to all the people who figured out that they don't really want that Butthole Surfers cd afterall.
And doesn't that make the world a better place?
If I were the RIAA, I would be more worried about John Vanderslice and other rogue band leaders who give cd sales the finger.
By F Scott Fitzgerald
Another wildly popular unfinished novel.
But even when ads were good, I would never trust the word of the reviewers they use in their ads. Of course they are going to use the best reviews for their movie even if the movie reeks there will be one or two positive reviews so that is not a good gauge for movie quality.
Right now the only purpose movie ads serve is to alert the general public that the movie exists but they aren't going to convince me one way or another. If I want to know about a movie I will look it up on Rotten Tomatoes or some other review site and look at all the reviews.
I am currently adding the total seconds of music I have on cd so when I rip it all to a hard drive I will know how much space it will take.
I currently have 71 albums at 212,749 seconds of music. Should I encode all that at 192kbps (which is a respectable rate with good quality sound) it would consume 5.1 Gb of space.
Just thought that would help put things in perspective. 71 albums in 5 gigs at high quality.
Sorry about that post; I was still logged in on a public computer for some reason and one of my friends thought it would be leet to spam my account for me.
Good times.
1 l1k`ez karma
If it were not for HP (and, to a lesser extent, Casio), TI would have a monopoly on the calculator market. I dont think I need to spell out the hypocrisy anymore than I have.
I don't see how these micropayments have to be unpredictable. After enough use of the suggested system, people would begin to know what to expect for prices. The idea of micropayments would not only benefit the artists and other internet property holders but could possibly create a whole string of new subcompanies devoted to organizing and rating individual sites for security, most competative prices, and maybe even quality of the experience much like Bizrate and Gomez. That would give some type of user based quality control.
If consistent pricing wasn't enough, the artists could also offer subscriptions to their products for a flat fee. None of these are really new ideas but it seems like a shame to ditch a solid plan for fear that it might be too complex for consumers. The only way to win consumers over is to be consistent so they know what to expect from every site when it comes to making payments.
The other Shaltenak's jupelberry shrub is always a more movey shade of pinky russet
A) I think that everything that guy says in regard to people who review open source should be taken with a grain of salt. He obviously has an attitude problem and suffers from quite an overblown ego. That doesn't mean much other than we cannot trust his opinions on matters like Linux. B) The comment about surprise that there has not been a super secure linux distro? What about khaOS?? And I cannot speak for other distributions but I know that there is a package for SuSE (6.4) in the security section that super secures the installation by removing all possible wholes in the system and blocking most all services. I know it isnt the same as in OpenBSD but it is enough to keep the newbie hackers from breaking down the walls of my modest server. C) The complaint that most distributions come pre-configured for all sorts of software with no care for system security: WHAT THE HELL IS WINDOWS THEN?!?! It is so aggrivating to hear people bitch and moan all the time about hard linux is to install and how hard it is to use. So the distro manufactuers start making easy to use linux. People start buying it. Everyone is happy until someone complains that it is stupid to make things easy to use because it compromises security. I am not saying we can't have our cake and eat it too but Linux needs to be cut some slack because everyone working on it is doing their best to make it accessible to the public and right now that means weaker security. One more thing though: just because distros come with pre-configured installations, most people will choose to change the installation and make configurations of their own based on experience. It seems that it is only the new linux users that will be affected by the security flaws of base install. But then again, they probably wont be running a major website based on mysql and setting up their own firewall right away either so it all needs to be kept in perspective.
i know this is a wild thought, but when always read scifi books and see movies that work the idea of alternate dimensions existing at all points in time in parallel plans. In fact physicists are using that idea to determine the likelihood of life forming at all in the environment given by our universe...
but we have never experienced this empirically because it seems impossible. but now, as crazy as it seems, we are all able to experience not just a different point of view but a completely different scene!
we could each watch a baseball game and see a different ad based on the network provider for our television or if we were at the game
it is the same game, alternate reality.
and who is to determine which one was real?
the one with the ad in the background (as is shown in the article) or the one with the radar results?
even the people at the game couldnt say unless they were to walk right up to the display and feel it.
that is just amazing to me.
I know this is just mindless nolstalgia but I remember The Wizard as one of the coolest movies of my childhood (not too long ago!) and my best friend and I would sit around after seeing that moving playing Mario brothers and thinkin "I could be the wizard!"
anyway it was pretty stupid true but the movie wasnt as bad as its subject and peopl still cherish arcade games even the extent of OWNING THEM.
hmm
just because microsoft wants linux users to use Office doesnt mean that we should all rush out and get it. We need to keep in mind that there are other office products out there (Applix, WordPerfect, Star Office) which are doing a good job of improving the linux app base and we shouldnt stop supporting the "little guys". That is of course what Microsoft wants...
dhcpcd
dhcpd
ndc (not a requirement but you may benefit from having a local name server instead of using the slow @home ones)
pmfirewall
rc.firewall
You can find the rc.firewall script here. It sets up all your forwarding modules for your network.
dhcpd and dhcpcd are used to assign an IP address to your main machine. I use them because I am lazy and dont want to bother with setting a static address.
Your dhcpd.conf should probably look something like this for your type of two computer network. dhcpcd just has to be run on your main computer and it will get all the info it needs from the dhcpd on the firewall computer.
Finally, you need your firewall program. I use pmfirewall because it is easy to install and use. It is basically a frontend to ipchains and it takes all the nasty configuration out of setting up a firewall.
You can download it here.
The best thing about pmfirewall is how easy it is to allow complete access to one address (like your main computer) to everything you need and close off the important/scary ports to everyone else.
As long as your network cards are working, you should have no problems getting dhcpd to work and the rest of it installs very easily. As for your gnome ports, you can close those to everyone but you so you dont have to worry about screwing up gnome.
Hope that helps.
I dont know if this applies to everyone with @home service but I received my service a couple months after a friend of mine and in that time, our documentation changed from:
His: "No servers allowed."
to Mine: "If you should run a server, we are not responsible for any damage caused by doing so."
That alone should be enough support if they ever decided to question me about my small server. I just hope they don't migrate to something like AOL where you have to go through all of their servers to get to the internet. I know I am not the only one who doesn't use THEIR proxy but if they found a way to enforce its use, it could mean the end of any privacy we might have now.
In common with other posters on this topic, I run a few services (mail and web) but they don't put half the strain on the system as my windows/proxy using friends with napster running 24/7.
Just some thoughts...
When I say "he" i of course refer to his company but still that says a lot about how tight the networks' grips are on our tv
i thought the BBC was a rip off! This is like telling you that you cant fast forward on your VCR! hmm...
anyway there is an article in Wired this month about it if you want more info.
here is a link to the online article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archi ve/8.03/bskyb.html
why does everyone always blame the marketing?
i think stef is a perfectly good quake 2 player.
almost as good as me
yeah it is actually on the cover
the article is on page 86
anyway i could just be jumping to conclusions because they watch may very well be a different watch but i wanted to complain and make a fool out of myself so i could be a "karma whore"
here is the online article
but i cant stomach the price tag. think of the possibilities! i want one but i think i will have to either wait for the price to drop or get a crappy less capable device...
the really sweet features to me are the ldc support and the ethernet support.
just put together a little minimum install system of your favorite distro and set it to boot up to the daily news as scooped from sitescooper or whatever and display it on your lcd for easy viewing with a small computer.
neat
yes it might hold 80gb of pr0n....or....games, but if it sounds like a leer jet taking off in the middle of my house i wouldnt want to deal with it!
they seem to be missing the point: People get music "digitally" because they can get it for free.
Free.
It has little, if anything, to do with ease of access. Hell, my local cd store is only a couple blocks away but they want $20 a cd and napster doesnt have a pricetag. Life is a bitch isnt it?
The only people who will benefit from all this are the credit card companies. End users wont notice anything but less money in the bank and the labels will have more and the bands will still get paid jackshit.
But I could be a cynic.
that almost everything is written by people who walk in off the street, willing to get ripped off.
(see Guide entry for New York in the spring.)
things look very ugly when emotions run high.
they get even worse when people start to mix sarcasm, anger, and misinformation into multi-page rants.
but i suppose that is what the net is about.
:)