Each Linux distribution has its own form of package management, thus gaim can't exactly offer ready made packages for each distribution. Most distributions have plenty of people out there building these packages, so you should be fine.
"
- How does the service/song expire ? Presumably you can upload the songs to a WMV player. Do those keep playing forever as long as you don't sync ? In other words can you keep a selection somewhere that you want to play for a long time without necessarily purchasing the songs and endlessly paying for the subscription?"
I'm actually not sure. I've heard that they won't, though I've also heard that digital music players need to have internal clocks in order to work with DRM music, which implies that they will (although a little tinkering with the local time setting seems like it would solve that problem). Of course they are not intended to be listened to after the subscription expires, as that is how Yahoo/Napster/Real are making their income.
"
- If you subscribe to your favourite cable channel, you can still tape the shows and keep them forever if you so wish."
Ok, so the analogy isn't perfect. Recording TV shows is defined as a legal activity for the purposes of timeshifting, which isn't an issue with music services. Though there probably are ways to get around it by recoding out of your computer, its just not neccessarily within the bounds of the service agreement. I'd guess it would be like recording DVDs you rent from the video store.
"
- I like to purchase whole albums. Itunes is great for that. As yahoo requires a CC# for me to sample the system, I can't find out if albums are available, is that the case ?"
You should be able to download the client for free and use it to browse the system, you just will only get to sample 30 seconds of each song. I know I didn't give them my credit card when I downloaded it (though they already had an old expired card number for me when I subscribed to a service of theirs a long time ago).
I work at a large company and there are plenty of career programmers who are over 40. In fact, when I started as a co-op we had two anniversary celebrations, one guy had been there 25 years, the other 30. Working for a larger company I would imagine would bring stability, if you have two kids about to enter college you are not about to start working at a company where at any minute you may be laid off when the company goes under.
Even if they provided links directly to the music itself, Google couldn't be sued (assuming they took some reasonable preventive steps when they learn about the infringement) thanks to a provision in the DMCA. Just no one knows about it since a provision protecting service providers would hurt the DMCA's image as being an evil bill.
BTW, one thing one looking for classical music online to remember, music sites geared towards popular music are usually going to have an interface that allows you to search by Artist, song, album, etc. This is the case with Yahoo, and as far as I know with other services such as iTunes, Napster, and Rhapsody. That is often not that useful when looking for classical music as there you are often going to be primarily concerned with the composer, not the group that performs the piece. To get around that, you can just search for a particular piece as the song or collection of works as the album. For instance if you are still interested in listening to Bach on Yahoo, I searched for "Air on a G String" and found dozens of versions of that very song. A search for Brandenburg concertos returned a number of results as well.
You can certainly try to complain to the customer service departments of these services and ask for a composer search as well, though it may be hard to convince them as the market for classical music isn't that great (not to imply that no one listens to it, but you can find plenty of copies of classical music for a low price or even for free (after all, Bach's copyrights have since expired). Though those may not exactly be very good copies...
"Your use of language is as careless as that you attribute to Wikipedia's editors. No proposition is "indubitably true", and no proposition can be proven by asserting its truth without providing any sort of argument to support the assertion."
Obviously that statement was being used as a literary device to say that it is fairly obvious to most readers that encyclopedias like Britannica are more concise than the Wikipedia. Obviously he wasn't trying to write a mathematical proof (in fact when you consider the very definition of indubitably, "Too apparent to be doubted; unquestionable", that becomes even more obvious). Thats ok because he was discussing an encyclopedia, not writing a paper on number theory.
This is why you need to understand the context behind statements before you can evaluate them.
Google is a publicly traded company. Their mission is to make money for all the nice investors. Their bussiness plan may be to organize information, but that is not their end goal. The Wikipedia, on the other hand, is owned by a non-profit organization. They live in two very different worlds.
"You cant buy the wikipedia anymore than you can buy linux..."
Tell that to SCO...
Actually, on second thought, don't. It might give them the idea to go out and buy a publishing company and claim they already own Wikipedia on the speculation that someone out there may have plagurized something from one of their books.
And why exactly would they do that? Just because Google is the darling of slashdot doesn't mean they are die-hard open source advocates who are willing to pay millions for something just to give it away.
No, you put it on your portable wmv player that supports expiring songs. Yahoo rents you wmvs, not mp3s. There are many mp3 players that don't support expiring wmv and thusly won't work with Yahoo, Napster, et all.
Actually the technical term is digital music player (the vast majority of the songs on it are in fact.oggs), but mp3 player is the term that most people are familiar with. If I get a cut on my hand, I'm not going to ask for a generic adhesive sterile bandage, I'm going to ask for a band-aid.
And yes, mine is one of the many digital music players that supports subscriptions (in contrast to iTunes which is supported by digital music player brand). Though if it wasn't, I could still have purchased songs for 80% of Apple's price.
No, that is not it either. The humans are not developing slower, they are learning in a fundementally different way than our close relatives. Please RTFA.
"- What happens when your subscribtion ends ? Can you still listen to your huge collection or does it expire ?"
Can you still watch your favorite TV channels after your cable subscription ends? No, that is the point of a subscription. You continue to recieve the service as long as you pay it. If you purchased any songs outright (at $.20 cheaper than the iTunes price if you are a member) you can keep those, everything else expires.
"- The choice on yahoo music does not appear to be great. I listen to classical music, I found a grand total of one (1) J.S. Bach album. It appears that I would then need to subscribe to multiple services to cater to my tastes. Would I still be saving money then ?"
Their selection (along with those of napster and rhapsody) is in the same ballpark as iTunes, in the range of 1-1.5 million songs. So yes, you may have to use multiple services if a single choice doesn't have everything you want (though you only have to subscribe to the one that has the most music you want and use the $1 a download system offered by most of these to fill it out). However, if you are going with the iPod/iTunes model, if your only choice (iTunes) doesn't have everything you want, you are pretty much screwed.
I think you are missing the point of the study. It is not intended to prove which animal is smarter, chimps or humans, but rather to understand how the human mind evolved. This does pretty much establish that our brains are not simply just better than chimp brains, but rather that we have a fundementally different thought pattern. Their hypothesis is that we learn more by imitation than the chimps, and this study seems to support that.
I'd say that if you have 3-4 year old children (the age mentioned in the study) who have skipped all the way to middle school, they have got to be doing something right.
BTW, this was not looking at who thought logically. It was who was more likely to imitate their teacher performing the unnecessary step (in this case the children) and who was more likely to skip straight to what appears to be the most direct route to the free meal (in this case the chimps). That could mean the chimps were better at reasoning how the box works, it could mean the kids (being completely dependent on adults) are more likely to faithfully imitate their teacher (which your experience with 3 year old middle school students would seem to contradict), or it could just mean the kids have more of an imagination and believe these extra steps performed by their teacher is doing something to make the food better.
What about them? They go to school in the US. They graduate in the US. They currently live in the US. And they likely will be working in the US. For all intensive purposes, they are Americans. Why shouldn't they count just because they don't have white skin?
Take for instance the subscription model of music distribution mentioned by the article. Many see it as what will soon be seen as the best way to get music online, and for good reason. I signed up with Yahoo a few weeks ago and so far I have downloaded what on iTunes would cost well over %500, all for a fraction of the price I pay the cable company each month. And yes, I get to put it all on my portable mp3 player. Even if I stay with them for the next 4 years and never download another song, I will still have saved money compared to iTunes.
Currently it would cost hundreds of dollars to fill up even a small music player at $.99 a song. No one is going to be able to rely on iTunes for more than just purchasing a few one hit wonders. In contrast, subscription services like Yahoo or Napster can be used to build up huge music collections from scratch (not all of us have a garage full of old CDs). Apple's decision to stick with iTunes and only iTunes for the iPod is thus holding back the music industry from moving to a model that can make significant use of the Internet.
In the first third of the article he is talking specifically about Open Office. He is using it as an example to refute the idea that "Many eyes make bugs shallow" (and to refute a statement like that, you really only need one example) but he certainly is not saying all open source software is buggy. You interpreted it the way you did because you want to feel angry at him for pointing out the limitations of what open source can do.
Sure, small open source projects can be very successful. But again, you are mischaracterizing the article. He is not arguing that all oos projects are doomed to be failures, just that they have limitations. The scope of the project cannot grow past the size of the developer base (which, despite what many oos advocates like to believe, is not infinite). Firefox hasn't reached those limitations yet (their growth has been limited by the desire to not become a bloated prduct like the old Mozilla). Open Office arguably has.
The fact is, most successful open source projects have been small and aimed to developers (which makes the GNU projects perfect for open source).
Almost all the work on it is now done by about 100 full-time Sun programmers. That is a tiny fraction of the armies Microsoft or Google can deploy to solve a problem.
That being said, I think most of us can agree the quality of MS Office is a fairly low bar to reach. If they want OO to become the dominant office suite they will have to reach much higher standards.
"He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software."
Like hell he does. He is specifically singling out "programs intended for use by the non-programming public", which end up being supported by a very small group of people. Exactly how much of this article did you end up actually reading before you decided you disagree with his conclusion so there is no use considering his arguments?
He discusses other open source technologies, if you ever feel like RTFA (I think every post I've made in the past week has involved requesting that the origional poster do this, failure to read before commenting has gone way past being just a bad joke around here).
The myth of open source rests on two improbable assumptions. The first is that a significant proportion of users can fix bugs. That is true at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concept of open source was first formalised in the 1980s by Richard Stallman and others, and it is true in some of the geekier corners of the internet. But on programs intended for use by the non-programming public, it's a very different story.
With software like Linux, you have a huge base of developers working to make the code better. And they have done a good job. But with Open Office, even though the code is technically 'open source', all the actual work is done by a relatively small team of engineers. You may have many eyes looking at the code, but you have very few hands actually doing anything.
I've seen this exact same thing on many open source projects I've worked with. It is often virtually impossible to get anything fixed (severe bugs open for years at a time are not all that uncommon), and even if you can dig your way through the poorly documented and just as poorly designed code to fix it yourself, there is a long process you have to go through to convince the official project to accept that fix. If a project doesn't have a deveopler base of a certain size, the only natural difference between it and a similar commericial project is that the developers have no financial motivation to support it beyond what is needed for their individual purposes.
Actually he attacked Christian fundementalists ('fundies'), not the Christian faith as implied by the/. summary (isn't yellow journalism fun?). Not all Christians are fundementalists.
"We have all depended on the compase on everything and with the movement it could cause catostrophic damages for plains, boats, and any other form of travle that depends widly on a compus."
Really? I didn't realize we were still in the 19th century. I thought we for the most part relied on GPS systems nowadays.
Sailors have known for centuries that their compasses vary. They have had to compensate for it since the days of Columbus.
Slashdot Mirror
Each Linux distribution has its own form of package management, thus gaim can't exactly offer ready made packages for each distribution. Most distributions have plenty of people out there building these packages, so you should be fine.
I'm actually not sure. I've heard that they won't, though I've also heard that digital music players need to have internal clocks in order to work with DRM music, which implies that they will (although a little tinkering with the local time setting seems like it would solve that problem). Of course they are not intended to be listened to after the subscription expires, as that is how Yahoo/Napster/Real are making their income.
" - If you subscribe to your favourite cable channel, you can still tape the shows and keep them forever if you so wish."
Ok, so the analogy isn't perfect. Recording TV shows is defined as a legal activity for the purposes of timeshifting, which isn't an issue with music services. Though there probably are ways to get around it by recoding out of your computer, its just not neccessarily within the bounds of the service agreement. I'd guess it would be like recording DVDs you rent from the video store.
" - I like to purchase whole albums. Itunes is great for that. As yahoo requires a CC# for me to sample the system, I can't find out if albums are available, is that the case ?"
You should be able to download the client for free and use it to browse the system, you just will only get to sample 30 seconds of each song. I know I didn't give them my credit card when I downloaded it (though they already had an old expired card number for me when I subscribed to a service of theirs a long time ago).
BTW, I'm bookmarking that site.
Even if they provided links directly to the music itself, Google couldn't be sued (assuming they took some reasonable preventive steps when they learn about the infringement) thanks to a provision in the DMCA. Just no one knows about it since a provision protecting service providers would hurt the DMCA's image as being an evil bill.
You can certainly try to complain to the customer service departments of these services and ask for a composer search as well, though it may be hard to convince them as the market for classical music isn't that great (not to imply that no one listens to it, but you can find plenty of copies of classical music for a low price or even for free (after all, Bach's copyrights have since expired). Though those may not exactly be very good copies...
Obviously that statement was being used as a literary device to say that it is fairly obvious to most readers that encyclopedias like Britannica are more concise than the Wikipedia. Obviously he wasn't trying to write a mathematical proof (in fact when you consider the very definition of indubitably, "Too apparent to be doubted; unquestionable", that becomes even more obvious). Thats ok because he was discussing an encyclopedia, not writing a paper on number theory.
This is why you need to understand the context behind statements before you can evaluate them.
Google is a publicly traded company. Their mission is to make money for all the nice investors. Their bussiness plan may be to organize information, but that is not their end goal. The Wikipedia, on the other hand, is owned by a non-profit organization. They live in two very different worlds.
Tell that to SCO...
Actually, on second thought, don't. It might give them the idea to go out and buy a publishing company and claim they already own Wikipedia on the speculation that someone out there may have plagurized something from one of their books.
And why exactly would they do that? Just because Google is the darling of slashdot doesn't mean they are die-hard open source advocates who are willing to pay millions for something just to give it away.
Actually the technical term is digital music player (the vast majority of the songs on it are in fact .oggs), but mp3 player is the term that most people are familiar with. If I get a cut on my hand, I'm not going to ask for a generic adhesive sterile bandage, I'm going to ask for a band-aid.
And yes, mine is one of the many digital music players that supports subscriptions (in contrast to iTunes which is supported by digital music player brand). Though if it wasn't, I could still have purchased songs for 80% of Apple's price.
No, that is not it either. The humans are not developing slower, they are learning in a fundementally different way than our close relatives. Please RTFA.
Can you still watch your favorite TV channels after your cable subscription ends? No, that is the point of a subscription. You continue to recieve the service as long as you pay it. If you purchased any songs outright (at $.20 cheaper than the iTunes price if you are a member) you can keep those, everything else expires.
"- The choice on yahoo music does not appear to be great. I listen to classical music, I found a grand total of one (1) J.S. Bach album. It appears that I would then need to subscribe to multiple services to cater to my tastes. Would I still be saving money then ?"
Their selection (along with those of napster and rhapsody) is in the same ballpark as iTunes, in the range of 1-1.5 million songs. So yes, you may have to use multiple services if a single choice doesn't have everything you want (though you only have to subscribe to the one that has the most music you want and use the $1 a download system offered by most of these to fill it out). However, if you are going with the iPod/iTunes model, if your only choice (iTunes) doesn't have everything you want, you are pretty much screwed.
I think you are missing the point of the study. It is not intended to prove which animal is smarter, chimps or humans, but rather to understand how the human mind evolved. This does pretty much establish that our brains are not simply just better than chimp brains, but rather that we have a fundementally different thought pattern. Their hypothesis is that we learn more by imitation than the chimps, and this study seems to support that.
BTW, this was not looking at who thought logically. It was who was more likely to imitate their teacher performing the unnecessary step (in this case the children) and who was more likely to skip straight to what appears to be the most direct route to the free meal (in this case the chimps). That could mean the chimps were better at reasoning how the box works, it could mean the kids (being completely dependent on adults) are more likely to faithfully imitate their teacher (which your experience with 3 year old middle school students would seem to contradict), or it could just mean the kids have more of an imagination and believe these extra steps performed by their teacher is doing something to make the food better.
What about them? They go to school in the US. They graduate in the US. They currently live in the US. And they likely will be working in the US. For all intensive purposes, they are Americans. Why shouldn't they count just because they don't have white skin?
Currently it would cost hundreds of dollars to fill up even a small music player at $.99 a song. No one is going to be able to rely on iTunes for more than just purchasing a few one hit wonders. In contrast, subscription services like Yahoo or Napster can be used to build up huge music collections from scratch (not all of us have a garage full of old CDs). Apple's decision to stick with iTunes and only iTunes for the iPod is thus holding back the music industry from moving to a model that can make significant use of the Internet.
In the first third of the article he is talking specifically about Open Office. He is using it as an example to refute the idea that "Many eyes make bugs shallow" (and to refute a statement like that, you really only need one example) but he certainly is not saying all open source software is buggy. You interpreted it the way you did because you want to feel angry at him for pointing out the limitations of what open source can do.
No and in fact their orientations after the fact in places like Hawaii was one of the major clues that these reversals happen.
The fact is, most successful open source projects have been small and aimed to developers (which makes the GNU projects perfect for open source).
That being said, I think most of us can agree the quality of MS Office is a fairly low bar to reach. If they want OO to become the dominant office suite they will have to reach much higher standards.
Like hell he does. He is specifically singling out "programs intended for use by the non-programming public", which end up being supported by a very small group of people. Exactly how much of this article did you end up actually reading before you decided you disagree with his conclusion so there is no use considering his arguments?
Do you just regard anything that is critical of something you love as flamebait? That isn't a very productive approach.
"The rest is some rant about OS people saying users can submit bug patches but hardly anybody does."
With software like Linux, you have a huge base of developers working to make the code better. And they have done a good job. But with Open Office, even though the code is technically 'open source', all the actual work is done by a relatively small team of engineers. You may have many eyes looking at the code, but you have very few hands actually doing anything.
I've seen this exact same thing on many open source projects I've worked with. It is often virtually impossible to get anything fixed (severe bugs open for years at a time are not all that uncommon), and even if you can dig your way through the poorly documented and just as poorly designed code to fix it yourself, there is a long process you have to go through to convince the official project to accept that fix. If a project doesn't have a deveopler base of a certain size, the only natural difference between it and a similar commericial project is that the developers have no financial motivation to support it beyond what is needed for their individual purposes.
Actually he attacked Christian fundementalists ('fundies'), not the Christian faith as implied by the /. summary (isn't yellow journalism fun?). Not all Christians are fundementalists.
Really? I didn't realize we were still in the 19th century. I thought we for the most part relied on GPS systems nowadays.
Sailors have known for centuries that their compasses vary. They have had to compensate for it since the days of Columbus.