"NT-based server configurations" "but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up"
What the HELL kind of servers would those be? Quake servers? $2000 might make a decent Linux server, but $2000 is barely a high end Intel based desktop, much less a server. Good NT servers (at least NT servers that handle a large volume of, well, just about anything) cost two to three times that and have at least a gigabyte of RAM. Now that many Intel server buyers are stuck buying RDRAM to get around the horrible problems of SDRAM on an RDRAM mobo, RAM certainly does eat up that much of the cost.
"I own three domains myself, and I am not particularly happy about this."
Well if you paid for them, then it won't be a problem for you. If you are just holding on to domains you registered and aren't using, you are just another cyber squatter, and deserve at least this, along with a thorough ass kicking!
And here are a few reasons why: 1- Because the only way to get it done would be to get ALL software makers to comply 100% so that no one company would get to have a big box. With companies like M$ out there, there isn't much hope for compliance.
2- Retailers want boxes like that. They encourage impulse buying, because so much can be crammed onto them with big pictures. Try that with a jewel case, which would make all the games look like Playstation games, which don't stand out in the crowd. Retailers didn't mind this with CD's, because CD longboxes are blank white (Although some retailers still sell them like this, such as Costco.) and rarely had much else on them.
3- Retailers also like those big boxes because they make it hard to steal games. Putting them in jewelboxes would require storing the games in locked areas, or using intense antitheft systems like record stores do.
Telling us the same things other people who write about the net were talking about years ago.
Come on, Katz. Try telling us something we haven't already heard a dozen times from other people. We know you can do it. Hell, you even seems to piss more people off that way.
America lagging behind some other part of the world in an area where reason and intelligence should make better decisions obvious? Imagine that?
Things like this never cease to amaze me for some reason. I love America, I was born and raised here, but I can't fucking stand Americans anymore. Our politics are dominated by a bunch of assholes who present their favorite assholes to a bunch of sheep that vote for whoever they are told to by their respective church/party/employer and then we end up with crap like this.
It just pisses me off. The US has more freedom, money, and resources than any other country on Earth, and people continue to fuck it up endlessly with unyeilding stupidity.
I think I've fallen in love with the concept of America, and grown to hate the execution. I don't know where the hell this country is going, but I'm going to save up for the next couple years and move my pasty geek ass to Spain. Sure they have plenty of morons there, too, but at least I'll be pissy in a country thats a bit more laid back.
I rarely see pinball machines in any small arcades anymore. When I ask the management why, I always get the same answer- nobody wants to do the upkeep.
Pinball machines are VERY sensitive, and many of the better maachines require almost daily tuning with heavy use. Without maintenance, the ball doesn't move correctly, and players lose too often. This is very annoying to good players, and very discouraging to pinball neophytes. Once the machine is out of whack, it doesn't make money, gets shipped out, and is replaced with the latest hot fighting/racing/shooter/etc. game, but rarely by a pinball machine.
The only pinball machine currently installed in a public area of the entire city and surrounding suburb I live in is a Medievel Madness machine at the local community college, and it rarely gets worked on. I remember several days in which the ball was stuck in the left hand ramp/tunnel thingy, and every time it was popped up, it hit a loose part and went right back down. This went on for DAYS. The score got into the high hundreds of millions, with plenty of extra plays. We would sit and watch it, and occaisionally someone would smack it and the ball would pop by the loose part and go into play, but other loose parts always sent it back. Eventually we jsut gave it up and a few days later it got fixed. I don't think it has been maintained since then, because the machine is now so out of whack that nobody can ever make 3 balls last more than 3 or 4 minutes. It kind of makes me want to cry.
At this point I guess all I can do is save up and buy a machine of my own. Playing in my house won't be nearly as fun as playing in an arcade/restaurant/etc., but I'd rather do that than drive over 20 miles to the nearest arcade with a pinball machine.
Actually, Verant never scanned user's machines. They simply ran a vote among the users to see if the majority of the players agreed. The majority did agree, however the president of Verant interactive decided not to do it because he just didn't feel right doing it himself.
This makes me trease the following things even more:
1: DSL Lines 2: My burner 3: #cracks on EFNet
I drove them to this? Fine then. I'll just make disc images with cracks pre-applied and giggle when I think about all the money that these companies spend trying to stop me.
Perhaps if companies like Microsoft and Adobe, who have established monopolies in their respective fields, didn't greatly overcharge for their products (Why is a Photoshop "liscense" so expensive? Because it is the standard, and it is the product that most third party plugins work with.), perhaps consumers would be more willing to pay for them.
But I'll be damned before I pay over a hundred bucks for a buggy OS with a shitty web browser built in, and be expected to PAY for upgrades that are essentially just patches (Win 98 and 98SE) just to make it work right!
If you want to know about this sort of thing in advance, check out http://www.asiabiztech.com/. This site picks up stories from major Asian news sources and posts them in English. If you watch the site over time, you can pick up rising price stories in Asia before the American press catches on.
It's also a good way to watch and see when prices are going to go back down...
Sony does NOT lose money on a Playstation. They NEVER lost money on selling those things. The early Playstation models weren't huge profit makers, as the cost of making the processor was still a little high, as well as the R&D costs to be recouped, but the rest of the machine was dirt cheap. Now that all the development costs have been made up and the processor can be made cheaply with high yeilds (so cheaply that they use it as the IO controller on the new Playstation 2) so that brings the cost down even lower. Currently the cost to make a Playstation is ~$10. Sony sells them to retailers at a cost of ~$90-98 depending on the quantity ordered.
Pretty much all game consoles work this way. The price point drops any time a competitor does the same or manufacturing costs have dropped substantially, but these companies always make money off the systems after R&D costs are covered. The people that really lose out are the retailers, who pretty much lose money on the system by the time you add in the cost of shipping and storage. This is wwhy Sony doesn't like Bleem! and Virtual Game Station. If best buy sells a copy of an Emulator over a Playstation to make a profit, Sony will start losing out big time.
All of that sounds really nice, but it still misses the fact that for raw processing power, the X-box will still be the fastest console out there. Sure the PS2 might have a zillion extra little things that developers with lots of time and money can exploit, but only if they see fit to do so. The RDRAM is nice, but only if it gets used.
The big advantage to the X-box is a static architecture that presents easy ports, and is familiar to many game developers already, versus the PS2 which is a new world for the brave (apologies to A. Huxley for that one). A designer already good with X86 programming can do all kinds of wonderful stuff if he only has to work on one system. The big reason games today are still often far less pretty than we would like is that they cannot be optimized for any specific machine, whereas with the X-box developers can tweak to their hearts' content without having to worry about a tweak that works well on an N-Vidia chip killing performance on a chip from S3.
Don't assume I am just a rabid NVidia/X-Box fan. I don't really give a damn who wins the console/3D wars aslong as the games are good. I am just point out the obvious facts, that the X-Box is going to be able to do more than any other console out at the same time, which it rightfully should be given that it is to be released almost 2 years after the PS2 (remember, PS2 debuted much earlier in Japan than it will in the US).
"Don't complain because people running Windows get/have what they want"
I DO run Windows. That's why I complain. I run Windows 9x/NT4/2000, Sun Solaris, and SUSE Linux. And of them all, I know more and use Windows more than all of the others combined. It is bloated, unstable, buggy, insecure, and so on. I would much rather just be able to dedicate a machine to one good OS and not need to reboot into another OS just because I need to be able to work on something important without the machine crashing.
"Hell my 366 celeron witha 16 meg banshee runs hell of alot faster then 40fps."
Really? Perhaps you need to go download UTBench and check again. Either that or you are running at some ungodly low resolution with all detail levels dropped to the minimal settings.
"There is NO other off the shelf FPS title that does what unreal tournament does and with the 413 patches, no other FPS has the features nor network support that Unreal does. "
Other than Quake ]|[, which does more, and faster to boot.
"Windows isn't any more buggy or harder to code for then Linux nor any other os out there either."
Actually, it is. Why do you think so many console emulators were released for DOS instead of Windows? Because programming Windows is a bitch.
"3dfx VooDoo 5 6000 just BLOWS AWAY nVidia GeForce 2 according to early sightings"
So? The X-box won't be using the GeForce 2. The X-Box will be using a custom NVidia chip based on NVidia's next generation architecture. The GeForce 2 is also available NOW, at a price of $349.95 USD. The Voodoo 5 6000 will sell for $600. The Voodoo 5 6000 is also not yet available. There is not even an estimate for a release date because 3DFX is having trouble getting it to work.
The processor will still be much faster than the CPU of any other console on the market. It will only have to run at low resolutions of television screens (Just because it is HDTV compatible doesn't mean it can run those kind of resolutions.).
Like it or not, the X-Box will still be the fastest performing console available when it is released in Q4 2001.
I guess I can add Epic to my list of companies to no longer buy games from. Right up there with the fine folks at Blizzard who refuse to allow Linux ports of their games. Tim Sweeny just doesn't make any sense to me. Unreal was a decent game ruined by horrible netcode, and a tereribly buggy/unoptimized engine. The UT engine is just as much a bloated turd as the Unreal engine is, rarely topping 40 FPS on even the most powerful systems out there. Perhaps if Tim stepped back and tought about how it might have been easier to work with an OS that isn't so damned buggy and hard to code for, his own games might not have required the numerous patches that he had to write to fix all the horrible bugs.
Flag this one for redundancy, but damn it sure does feel nice to know that you guys want to stand up against this. Microsoft has gone too far, too many times, and this time they are really gambling. They MUST lose this gamble. We are here to back you guys up, Emmet. Give the word, us/.'ers will we out there doing our best to help you guys out like a herd of rabid wombats.
The suits will always be causing buggy releases. Why you ask? Because the marketing department will still have to get all their plans ready months in advance, and most companies will remain unwilling to blow a multimillion dollar ad campaign just to delay a product for more bugfixes. While this attitude towards keeping up with marketing deadlines is changing (even Micro$oft is trying. Just look at how long they kept testing/fixing/testing Win2k and now WinME, albeit not nearly enough) there is always going to be a point where somebody in a suit just says "Release. Now.."
Not a bad book review, but I have to wonder why it takes a book to figure this out. Takes the following points:
1: The markets go up and down. They always have. Sometimes they skyrocket, sometimes they crash.
2: It has been common knowledge that.coms have been burning up cash like crazy with no profits. Sure there are companies like ebay that can turn a profit, but what happens when big boys like Amazon.com and CDNow.com go broke later this year? Will investors be willing (stupid) enough to give these companies more capital through stock purchases? Not likely. These companies will go under, and will take the whole market with them just like Microsoft did just on the possibilty of a breakup (which would likely be GOOD for stockholders in the long run!).
Anyone could figure this out by reading Doonesbury on a regular basis.
It seems that a book like this is best fitting to suckers willing to pay for obvious investing tips, rather than just go to www.fool.com and read about the popular, most profitable long term strategy: BUY AND HOLD!
This is the perfect example of why mp3 is so great. Here we have a band with immense talent, posting full tracks as high quality mp3s. They are also now taking orders for their CD.
How many of you geeks that are waxing nostalgic over these tracks are going to help support this band? This a a perfect case for us to push for mp3s as a vehicle for promotion, and I think we need to make sure and put the collective money of the/. community where our collective mouths are, and buy those $9 cds from the Minibosses. I know I will.
So true. Do I have the right to give your books away to people just because they are used to getting copyrighted material from the net for free? I think it's high time someone did. We could call it the "help make Jon Katz broke project" and try to cut into his revenues.
Once again this is just Jon Katz showing what a moronic asshole he is, preaching to the choir of./ers who feel that they have the right to steal as long as they do it online.
Since they started making CD's. That's why they all have a little "no reproduction" disclaimer in the packaging somewhere. It has ALWAYS been illegal to copy music from a CD to a tape and pass it around without express permission from the holder of the copyright on the album.
When you buy a CD, you don't have any liscense to the music. You just have the CD, which you happen to be able to listen to on a CD player. And that's all. Period.
"is it possible that XML-based standard file formats suitable for word processor, spreadsheets, etc. could be created that forever do away with proprietary binary formats and inadequate file conversion routines?"
I bloody well hope so... Perhaps Sun should look into doing this in the next iteration of Staroffice. Sure M$ would try to destroy it, but they do that with everything now...
"Me: Nope, just ripped it myself, bought the CD with cash so there's no record. "
Them: BFD. Maybe if you had read the DMCA instead of just assuming a bunch of/. posters know the law, you would realize that you have no legal right to rip that cd. Assume the position....
"Seems like a good time to prepend "Fuck Metallica" to all my mp3 filenames and see if I get accused of trading their songs..."
Actually, that is a GREAT idea. Not a bad sort of civil disobedience.
I say we get all the./'ers out there to go to MP3.COM, get a few legit mp3's, insert "fuck_metallica_and_dr_dre" into the filenames and just leave our napster clients connected.
If Metallica's lawyers put together a list of all the users trading those files, then Napster can just giggle at them and say they refuse to work with such innacurate data, as they are not legally responsible for sifting thru it all.
Then Metallica would actually have to _HIRE_ someone to do nothing but listen to a the mp3's from every user that they want banned!
1: Will Napster REALLY have time to set up blocking for 355,000 users? I mean, I'm sure they never actually expected that they would need to do something like this and can only do it by hand. If Metallica just gave them a big printed list Napster would go broke just hiring data entry clerks to deal with it all. If other artisits/labels took this approach they might swamp Napster with user bans to the point that Napster can't cope and goes under, or refuses the bans.
Of course, Napster could require the user records in a database format so that they can just automate the process, but then they would have to hire coders and dedicate hardware to the task.
Regardless, if record companies just sent endless dumps of users known to be trading pirated tracks, this could be an easy weapon for Napster's destruction.
2: Ummmm... do the Metallica lawyers realize that even if Napster does ban the users, the users can just make new accounts? I mean, if these people are so heartless and cruel as to keep Lars from being able to afford a few more Porsches, then they must be evil enough to lie about their names, right?
Slashdot Mirror
"NT-based server configurations"
"but most servers cost, oh, we'll say $2000 and up"
What the HELL kind of servers would those be? Quake servers? $2000 might make a decent Linux server, but $2000 is barely a high end Intel based desktop, much less a server. Good NT servers (at least NT servers that handle a large volume of, well, just about anything) cost two to three times that and have at least a gigabyte of RAM. Now that many Intel server buyers are stuck buying RDRAM to get around the horrible problems of SDRAM on an RDRAM mobo, RAM certainly does eat up that much of the cost.
"I own three domains myself, and I am not particularly happy about this."
Well if you paid for them, then it won't be a problem for you. If you are just holding on to domains you registered and aren't using, you are just another cyber squatter, and deserve at least this, along with a thorough ass kicking!
And here are a few reasons why:
1- Because the only way to get it done would be to get ALL software makers to comply 100% so that no one company would get to have a big box. With companies like M$ out there, there isn't much hope for compliance.
2- Retailers want boxes like that. They encourage impulse buying, because so much can be crammed onto them with big pictures. Try that with a jewel case, which would make all the games look like Playstation games, which don't stand out in the crowd. Retailers didn't mind this with CD's, because CD longboxes are blank white (Although some retailers still sell them like this, such as Costco.) and rarely had much else on them.
3- Retailers also like those big boxes because they make it hard to steal games. Putting them in jewelboxes would require storing the games in locked areas, or using intense antitheft systems like record stores do.
Telling us the same things other people who write about the net were talking about years ago.
Come on, Katz. Try telling us something we haven't already heard a dozen times from other people. We know you can do it. Hell, you even seems to piss more people off that way.
America lagging behind some other part of the world in an area where reason and intelligence should make better decisions obvious? Imagine that?
Things like this never cease to amaze me for some reason. I love America, I was born and raised here, but I can't fucking stand Americans anymore. Our politics are dominated by a bunch of assholes who present their favorite assholes to a bunch of sheep that vote for whoever they are told to by their respective church/party/employer and then we end up with crap like this.
It just pisses me off. The US has more freedom, money, and resources than any other country on Earth, and people continue to fuck it up endlessly with unyeilding stupidity.
I think I've fallen in love with the concept of America, and grown to hate the execution. I don't know where the hell this country is going, but I'm going to save up for the next couple years and move my pasty geek ass to Spain. Sure they have plenty of morons there, too, but at least I'll be pissy in a country thats a bit more laid back.
Pinball is dying, albeit slowly.
I rarely see pinball machines in any small arcades anymore. When I ask the management why, I always get the same answer- nobody wants to do the upkeep.
Pinball machines are VERY sensitive, and many of the better maachines require almost daily tuning with heavy use. Without maintenance, the ball doesn't move correctly, and players lose too often. This is very annoying to good players, and very discouraging to pinball neophytes. Once the machine is out of whack, it doesn't make money, gets shipped out, and is replaced with the latest hot fighting/racing/shooter/etc. game, but rarely by a pinball machine.
The only pinball machine currently installed in a public area of the entire city and surrounding suburb I live in is a Medievel Madness machine at the local community college, and it rarely gets worked on. I remember several days in which the ball was stuck in the left hand ramp/tunnel thingy, and every time it was popped up, it hit a loose part and went right back down. This went on for DAYS. The score got into the high hundreds of millions, with plenty of extra plays. We would sit and watch it, and occaisionally someone would smack it and the ball would pop by the loose part and go into play, but other loose parts always sent it back. Eventually we jsut gave it up and a few days later it got fixed. I don't think it has been maintained since then, because the machine is now so out of whack that nobody can ever make 3 balls last more than 3 or 4 minutes. It kind of makes me want to cry.
At this point I guess all I can do is save up and buy a machine of my own. Playing in my house won't be nearly as fun as playing in an arcade/restaurant/etc., but I'd rather do that than drive over 20 miles to the nearest arcade with a pinball machine.
Actually, Verant never scanned user's machines. They simply ran a vote among the users to see if the majority of the players agreed. The majority did agree, however the president of Verant interactive decided not to do it because he just didn't feel right doing it himself.
This makes me trease the following things even more:
1: DSL Lines
2: My burner
3: #cracks on EFNet
I drove them to this? Fine then. I'll just make disc images with cracks pre-applied and giggle when I think about all the money that these companies spend trying to stop me.
Perhaps if companies like Microsoft and Adobe, who have established monopolies in their respective fields, didn't greatly overcharge for their products (Why is a Photoshop "liscense" so expensive? Because it is the standard, and it is the product that most third party plugins work with.), perhaps consumers would be more willing to pay for them.
But I'll be damned before I pay over a hundred bucks for a buggy OS with a shitty web browser built in, and be expected to PAY for upgrades that are essentially just patches (Win 98 and 98SE) just to make it work right!
If you want to know about this sort of thing in advance, check out http://www.asiabiztech.com/. This site picks up stories from major Asian news sources and posts them in English. If you watch the site over time, you can pick up rising price stories in Asia before the American press catches on.
It's also a good way to watch and see when prices are going to go back down...
Sony does NOT lose money on a Playstation. They NEVER lost money on selling those things. The early Playstation models weren't huge profit makers, as the cost of making the processor was still a little high, as well as the R&D costs to be recouped, but the rest of the machine was dirt cheap. Now that all the development costs have been made up and the processor can be made cheaply with high yeilds (so cheaply that they use it as the IO controller on the new Playstation 2) so that brings the cost down even lower. Currently the cost to make a Playstation is ~$10. Sony sells them to retailers at a cost of ~$90-98 depending on the quantity ordered.
Pretty much all game consoles work this way. The price point drops any time a competitor does the same or manufacturing costs have dropped substantially, but these companies always make money off the systems after R&D costs are covered. The people that really lose out are the retailers, who pretty much lose money on the system by the time you add in the cost of shipping and storage. This is wwhy Sony doesn't like Bleem! and Virtual Game Station. If best buy sells a copy of an Emulator over a Playstation to make a profit, Sony will start losing out big time.
All of that sounds really nice, but it still misses the fact that for raw processing power, the X-box will still be the fastest console out there. Sure the PS2 might have a zillion extra little things that developers with lots of time and money can exploit, but only if they see fit to do so. The RDRAM is nice, but only if it gets used.
The big advantage to the X-box is a static architecture that presents easy ports, and is familiar to many game developers already, versus the PS2 which is a new world for the brave (apologies to A. Huxley for that one). A designer already good with X86 programming can do all kinds of wonderful stuff if he only has to work on one system. The big reason games today are still often far less pretty than we would like is that they cannot be optimized for any specific machine, whereas with the X-box developers can tweak to their hearts' content without having to worry about a tweak that works well on an N-Vidia chip killing performance on a chip from S3.
Don't assume I am just a rabid NVidia/X-Box fan. I don't really give a damn who wins the console/3D wars aslong as the games are good. I am just point out the obvious facts, that the X-Box is going to be able to do more than any other console out at the same time, which it rightfully should be given that it is to be released almost 2 years after the PS2 (remember, PS2 debuted much earlier in Japan than it will in the US).
"Don't complain because people running Windows get/have what they want"
I DO run Windows. That's why I complain. I run Windows 9x/NT4/2000, Sun Solaris, and SUSE Linux. And of them all, I know more and use Windows more than all of the others combined. It is bloated, unstable, buggy, insecure, and so on. I would much rather just be able to dedicate a machine to one good OS and not need to reboot into another OS just because I need to be able to work on something important without the machine crashing.
"Hell my 366 celeron witha 16 meg banshee runs hell of alot faster then 40fps."
Really? Perhaps you need to go download UTBench and check again. Either that or you are running at some ungodly low resolution with all detail levels dropped to the minimal settings.
"There is NO other off the shelf FPS title that does what unreal tournament does and with the 413 patches, no other FPS has the features nor network support that Unreal does. "
Other than Quake ]|[, which does more, and faster to boot.
"Windows isn't any more buggy or harder to code for then Linux nor any other os out there either."
Actually, it is. Why do you think so many console emulators were released for DOS instead of Windows? Because programming Windows is a bitch.
"3dfx VooDoo 5 6000 just BLOWS AWAY nVidia GeForce 2 according to early sightings"
So? The X-box won't be using the GeForce 2. The X-Box will be using a custom NVidia chip based on NVidia's next generation architecture. The GeForce 2 is also available NOW, at a price of $349.95 USD. The Voodoo 5 6000 will sell for $600. The Voodoo 5 6000 is also not yet available. There is not even an estimate for a release date because 3DFX is having trouble getting it to work.
The processor will still be much faster than the CPU of any other console on the market. It will only have to run at low resolutions of television screens (Just because it is HDTV compatible doesn't mean it can run those kind of resolutions.).
Like it or not, the X-Box will still be the fastest performing console available when it is released in Q4 2001.
I guess I can add Epic to my list of companies to no longer buy games from. Right up there with the fine folks at Blizzard who refuse to allow Linux ports of their games. Tim Sweeny just doesn't make any sense to me. Unreal was a decent game ruined by horrible netcode, and a tereribly buggy/unoptimized engine. The UT engine is just as much a bloated turd as the Unreal engine is, rarely topping 40 FPS on even the most powerful systems out there. Perhaps if Tim stepped back and tought about how it might have been easier to work with an OS that isn't so damned buggy and hard to code for, his own games might not have required the numerous patches that he had to write to fix all the horrible bugs.
Flag this one for redundancy, but damn it sure does feel nice to know that you guys want to stand up against this. Microsoft has gone too far, too many times, and this time they are really gambling. They MUST lose this gamble. We are here to back you guys up, Emmet. Give the word, us /.'ers will we out there doing our best to help you guys out like a herd of rabid wombats.
The suits will always be causing buggy releases. Why you ask? Because the marketing department will still have to get all their plans ready months in advance, and most companies will remain unwilling to blow a multimillion dollar ad campaign just to delay a product for more bugfixes. While this attitude towards keeping up with marketing deadlines is changing (even Micro$oft is trying. Just look at how long they kept testing/fixing/testing Win2k and now WinME, albeit not nearly enough) there is always going to be a point where somebody in a suit just says "Release. Now.."
Not a bad book review, but I have to wonder why it takes a book to figure this out. Takes the following points:
.coms have been burning up cash like crazy with no profits. Sure there are companies like ebay that can turn a profit, but what happens when big boys like Amazon.com and CDNow.com go broke later this year? Will investors be willing (stupid) enough to give these companies more capital through stock purchases? Not likely. These companies will go under, and will take the whole market with them just like Microsoft did just on the possibilty of a breakup (which would likely be GOOD for stockholders in the long run!).
1: The markets go up and down. They always have. Sometimes they skyrocket, sometimes they crash.
2: It has been common knowledge that
Anyone could figure this out by reading Doonesbury on a regular basis.
It seems that a book like this is best fitting to suckers willing to pay for obvious investing tips, rather than just go to www.fool.com and read about the popular, most profitable long term strategy: BUY AND HOLD!
This is the perfect example of why mp3 is so great. Here we have a band with immense talent, posting full tracks as high quality mp3s. They are also now taking orders for their CD.
/. community where our collective mouths are, and buy those $9 cds from the Minibosses. I know I will.
How many of you geeks that are waxing nostalgic over these tracks are going to help support this band? This a a perfect case for us to push for mp3s as a vehicle for promotion, and I think we need to make sure and put the collective money of the
Yes, please ask them this. I'm sure that they could get all information that they need just from a simple "Ask /."
So true. Do I have the right to give your books away to people just because they are used to getting copyrighted material from the net for free? I think it's high time someone did. We could call it the "help make Jon Katz broke project" and try to cut into his revenues.
./ers who feel that they have the right to steal as long as they do it online.
Once again this is just Jon Katz showing what a moronic asshole he is, preaching to the choir of
Since they started making CD's. That's why they all have a little "no reproduction" disclaimer in the packaging somewhere. It has ALWAYS been illegal to copy music from a CD to a tape and pass it around without express permission from the holder of the copyright on the album.
When you buy a CD, you don't have any liscense to the music. You just have the CD, which you happen to be able to listen to on a CD player. And that's all. Period.
"is it possible that XML-based standard file formats suitable for word processor, spreadsheets, etc. could be created that forever do away with proprietary binary formats and inadequate file conversion routines?"
I bloody well hope so... Perhaps Sun should look into doing this in the next iteration of Staroffice. Sure M$ would try to destroy it, but they do that with everything now...
"Me: Nope, just ripped it myself, bought the CD with cash so there's no record. "
/. posters know the law, you would realize that you have no legal right to rip that cd. Assume the position....
Them: BFD. Maybe if you had read the DMCA instead of just assuming a bunch of
"Seems like a good time to prepend "Fuck Metallica" to all my mp3 filenames and see if I get accused of trading their songs..."
./'ers out there to go to MP3.COM, get a few legit mp3's, insert "fuck_metallica_and_dr_dre" into the filenames and just leave our napster clients connected.
Actually, that is a GREAT idea. Not a bad sort of civil disobedience.
I say we get all the
If Metallica's lawyers put together a list of all the users trading those files, then Napster can just giggle at them and say they refuse to work with such innacurate data, as they are not legally responsible for sifting thru it all.
Then Metallica would actually have to _HIRE_ someone to do nothing but listen to a the mp3's from every user that they want banned!
1: Will Napster REALLY have time to set up blocking for 355,000 users? I mean, I'm sure they never actually expected that they would need to do something like this and can only do it by hand. If Metallica just gave them a big printed list Napster would go broke just hiring data entry clerks to deal with it all. If other artisits/labels took this approach they might swamp Napster with user bans to the point that Napster can't cope and goes under, or refuses the bans.
.02.
Of course, Napster could require the user records in a database format so that they can just automate the process, but then they would have to hire coders and dedicate hardware to the task.
Regardless, if record companies just sent endless dumps of users known to be trading pirated tracks, this could be an easy weapon for Napster's destruction.
2: Ummmm... do the Metallica lawyers realize that even if Napster does ban the users, the users can just make new accounts? I mean, if these people are so heartless and cruel as to keep Lars from being able to afford a few more Porsches, then they must be evil enough to lie about their names, right?
Anyway, thats my