Not really, the effects were a little more ethereal than is possible with xorg/etc. at present, and the theme looked more like an eveolution from the XP one than something taken from Linux. It probably looks like Linux in the same way that Windows with a theme and Linux with a theme just look fairly similar in general.
People love to laugh about how slow MS has been to release Vista, but in a lot of ways, Gnome/KDE are still playing catch up to XP.
Agreed. Although GNOME has done some fantastic work with usability, there's still some random and clear inconsistencies in their interface, often moreso than with Windows. Neither KDE nor GNOME is a clear beater of XP's user interface yet, and I feel sometimes people would be best bearing that in mind when laying into Vista's UI. The only thing better for general desktop use is (arguably) OSX, and quite frankly there is not a lot in it other than general prettiness between OSX and XP.
Yep. The really worrying thing is that it makes a good point.
Re:gaim works for me, but loses ground from here
on
Linux Instant Messengers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This whole complaint for the article is just stupid. Yeah, using linux really cuts you out from being able to communicate with people what with there only being a crapload of chat clients for it of which tkabber, Gabber, PSI and GAIM are only a few of the some 30 Jabber clients for the platform.
The issue here isn't that there's going to be ads on the internet. It's that ads on the internet do not have to be declared like other ads and forms of campaign contribution.
American Liberalism is entirely different to the classical form of liberalism, it's difficult for non-Americans to understand. Classical liberalism is a great deal closer to what is referred to in the US as "libertarianism". It's confusing because the two meanings of the term are so far apart that it makes very little sense.
Fun wikipedia links if you're really bored:
Liberalism (a.k.a. "classical liberalism"). Disputed article, I expect because of the American use of the word sneaking in, but I haven't checked this.
The -dev idea is interesting. I think it might actually be a semantic limitation of apt (I don't "do" RPM) rather than anything else. It might be possible to write a script to do it though.
Putting a CD into a Windows machine pops up a box, one of the options of which "Copy the music to your computer". Your boss must be really dumb.
Claiming it is non-trivial on Windows is fallacious though, it's certainly no more difficult. Windows Media Player is included with Windows (except in some versions in the EU!) and is capable of ripping CDs.
Unless they can be made easy to use, they have no real place (as default) in a user-oriented system, in my opinion. In a source-based system (like BSD or Gentoo's portage) that makes sense, but if it's a user-oriented system there's little point for them being there. The target user has no use for them, but they're easily available (as easily available as they are usable, in fact) if one needs them.
That said, there's always the argument that there's no good reason to omit them, I suppose. Hooray for going on forever:).
I'd ask what the problem is but we're probably veering wildly off-topic here. Generally the packages tell you what they're missing (and what they require) and searching in synaptic/apt should get you these. I have to say I can understand why many modern distributions leave them out, though — they're just not useful for most people.
Either make sure you have a meta-package that installs *all* of the things I might need to compile something, or have it there by default.
If you're talking about libraries, that seems pretty extreme — "all of the things I might need to compile something" is a crazy target. I've found that for many or most things, the "build-essentials" package on Ubuntu is fine, possibly with some of the libraries you need also (which is a matter of searching Synaptic for them, and that's fine with me — they're certainly not something which is useful to the average target user).
For clarification, the biggest problem with Ogg on portables is that it was designed to use floating point, and most portables don't have an FPU. There's a non-FP version of the decoder now, but as you say it's quite CPU-intensive.
Given this and overwhelming dominance of the iTMS in online music sales, it seems absurd for the author to claim the iPods are 'locked in' and assert the other players are 'open', when the other players are just as locked, but to different systems (and a smaller share of the market to boot).
This is where we disagree. As trendy as it is to bash Microsoft, they have (probably through not having a hardware offering of their own) offered a DRM system that can, and is encouraged to, be used by a number of different vendors. In this way the market is opened to competitors. Your statement "a smaller share of the market to boot" is flawed because with the iPod, in the DRMed music store market, there is no market. There is only one option — iTMS. As such, competition does not apply, and as such, talking about market share is meaningless. iTMS owns 100% of the market share for DRMed music downloads to be used on iPods (let's forget about Harmony until we know it's legally safe, which I sincerely hope it is). If you're talking about systems where the user can use a personal player, the markets do not intersect. In this environment, iTMS has no competition, and the other stores have each other. That's the difference since, as far as I'm aware, everyone else supports a DRM format that can be written to by more than one store.
This is not an attempt at a fanboy post defending the iTMS - I'd prefer non DRM'd music too (even though the iTMS lets you burn unencumbered to audio CD, which is at least something - I just think the assertion made in the article is false and that its the music stores and their proprietary non-interoperable formats that are the problem, not the players, which by and large handle common formats (would be nice to see more Ogg Vorbis support though).
It's the media producers which push for the DRM, not the stores. They simply play by their rules. I don't blame the stores or the players in general for this particular phenomenon. iPod/iTMS is more restrictive, in my opinion, than other choices for buying this sort of content online (I hope I've clarified that above), but we're essentially still conceding that no, this is not our content, and no, we do not have the right to do with it as we please. This is not a good state of affairs. I'm not the sort who would buy from a DRMed store, but I do feel that the criticism the article was recieving for the iPod/iTMS assertion was unjustified.
If you buy an MP3 (i.e., non DRM music file) from Emusic, it will play just fine in your iPod or in iTunes-- no conversion required. You can buy a music file from any online service that doesn't use a proprietary DRM scheme, and it will play fine in iTunes or on your iPod. There's nothing there that precludes your choice.
Apologies if I was unclear, but I was talking about the "mainstream media" market when I mentioned "market" — this is not something that eMusic can really claim to be a part of. What precludes your choice is media companies who are unwilling to release media on non-DRMed systems like eMusic.
And since some 90% of the MP3 players are iPods and 80% of the online music purchases are from ITMS, the question of "choice" is almost academic.
The absence of a free market for downloaders in the "ecosystem" environment you describe could quite easily cause these figures, rather than excuse them.
The issue of choice comes from the DRM scheme, not necessarily the type of file. And the complaints of lack of choice is coming from music player vendors or online music stores that use their own DRM scheme, but not from the majority of consumers.
The majority of consumers don't care about there being a free market for them to choose from, but that does not stop it being a good thing for them. The DRM scheme that is used on iTMS has been, so far, protected by Apple so that they can continue their hold on this market, and prevent the competition of other stores offering a comparable service (as much as I'd like eMusic to be, and as much as for me it is, it's not in general). Whether or not they'd continue their hold on this market if they allowed competitors is debatable, but the fact is that, at present, they're simply not allowing competitors.
But the real trick up Harmony's sleeve is its digital rights management (DRM) technology, which allows it to support virtually every kind of mp3 player - including the iPod
Apple's lawyers are attempting to stop this, which seems anti-competitive to me, but I suppose the DMCA isn't really designed to aid competition, innovation, or the rights of anyone but big business, so they might well be successful. So it's a risky option, in theory.
In other words, Apple has built the only successful music "ecosystem" in the industry with iPod+iTunes+ITMS. So "stuck" seems to be an odd choice of words.
Being stuck with the most successful system does not make someone any less stuck. In fact, having owners of the most popular portable digital music player automatically stuck with the system would contribute to its popularity, making the statistics on the matter less meaningful anyway.
The article was talking about how to get the best value-for-money on online music stores (particularly those using DRM, since they have more of "what people want", I expect). The bottom line is, if you have an iPod and want to listen to the music you download on it, then you do not get to choose from stores in this market. It's comparable to buying a hi-fi system on the provision that you only buy CDs from HMV. HMV might be the best store in the world, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't get a choice.
You're stuck because you can't move to any other (DRMed) music store. That's anti-competitive, so if you buy an iPod, and want to purchase DRMed content, you're stuck into the iTMS's pricing policy, whatever that might be. You can love the iTMS all you like, but since you can't switch, you are "stuck". That's the point being made.
Luckily, thus far, Apple have been pretty reasonable in their pricing. But they essentially have a monopoly position here (which is possibly why the "industry" has been pushing them to push up prices), and could continue raising prices until people just stopped using it, and started buying CDs instead, since that's their only other option if they want content from a company who will not distribute it non-DRM. These are the same companies, of course, that are introducing copy protection on CDs, leaving the users who want this content with only the iTMS to choose from. In pricing terms, there's little that one can do other than hope that Apple don't decide to jack up their pricing.
Of course, I hope that the companies who are using DRM to restrict the fair use of content that one pays for all collapse like the Roman Empire, but in the short-to-medium term, this is why people are concerned about being "stuck" with one vendor. I suspect that people would have a different tone if Microsoft had come out with an identical system.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really, the effects were a little more ethereal than is possible with xorg/etc. at present, and the theme looked more like an eveolution from the XP one than something taken from Linux. It probably looks like Linux in the same way that Windows with a theme and Linux with a theme just look fairly similar in general.
That quote confirms that he is improving Gaim, and not Google Talk. You have agreed with your parent post, which did not seem to be your intention.
Agreed. Although GNOME has done some fantastic work with usability, there's still some random and clear inconsistencies in their interface, often moreso than with Windows. Neither KDE nor GNOME is a clear beater of XP's user interface yet, and I feel sometimes people would be best bearing that in mind when laying into Vista's UI. The only thing better for general desktop use is (arguably) OSX, and quite frankly there is not a lot in it other than general prettiness between OSX and XP.
I think that mplayer is in the "multiverse" repository, if there's trouble there.
I'm pretty sure it's in the swish new "Add Applications" menu though, to ease that.
Yep. The really worrying thing is that it makes a good point.
That's not what the article is arguing at all.
The issue here isn't that there's going to be ads on the internet. It's that ads on the internet do not have to be declared like other ads and forms of campaign contribution.
American Liberalism is entirely different to the classical form of liberalism, it's difficult for non-Americans to understand. Classical liberalism is a great deal closer to what is referred to in the US as "libertarianism". It's confusing because the two meanings of the term are so far apart that it makes very little sense.
Fun wikipedia links if you're really bored:
The -dev idea is interesting. I think it might actually be a semantic limitation of apt (I don't "do" RPM) rather than anything else. It might be possible to write a script to do it though.
It's never actually been slow for me, but I supposed your milage may vary...
Putting a CD into a Windows machine pops up a box, one of the options of which "Copy the music to your computer". Your boss must be really dumb.
Claiming it is non-trivial on Windows is fallacious though, it's certainly no more difficult. Windows Media Player is included with Windows (except in some versions in the EU!) and is capable of ripping CDs.
It means 2^20 bytes or 10^6 bytes. Neither definition is wrong, although 2^20 is inconsistent with SI. Mebi- is not ambiguous, mega- is, is the point.
*looks at sibling posts*
Yep. I recommend people mod up the AC who had the contact info too. :)
Copied from the (non-text - grrr) downloadable copy of the letter on the EFF page:
Hope this helps.
(This is the point where someone shows me a list in text I could've just copied :))
Unless they can be made easy to use, they have no real place (as default) in a user-oriented system, in my opinion. In a source-based system (like BSD or Gentoo's portage) that makes sense, but if it's a user-oriented system there's little point for them being there. The target user has no use for them, but they're easily available (as easily available as they are usable, in fact) if one needs them.
That said, there's always the argument that there's no good reason to omit them, I suppose. Hooray for going on forever :).
I'd ask what the problem is but we're probably veering wildly off-topic here. Generally the packages tell you what they're missing (and what they require) and searching in synaptic/apt should get you these. I have to say I can understand why many modern distributions leave them out, though — they're just not useful for most people.
If you're talking about libraries, that seems pretty extreme — "all of the things I might need to compile something" is a crazy target. I've found that for many or most things, the "build-essentials" package on Ubuntu is fine, possibly with some of the libraries you need also (which is a matter of searching Synaptic for them, and that's fine with me — they're certainly not something which is useful to the average target user).
Personally, I'd say "Interesting". The guy you're replying to appears to be trolling there though, don't worry about it.
That actually looks like a really good licence. Nice stuff!
Is there anyone around to point out the "shortcomings" of this, compared to GPL?
For clarification, the biggest problem with Ogg on portables is that it was designed to use floating point, and most portables don't have an FPU. There's a non-FP version of the decoder now, but as you say it's quite CPU-intensive.
This is where we disagree. As trendy as it is to bash Microsoft, they have (probably through not having a hardware offering of their own) offered a DRM system that can, and is encouraged to, be used by a number of different vendors. In this way the market is opened to competitors. Your statement "a smaller share of the market to boot" is flawed because with the iPod, in the DRMed music store market, there is no market. There is only one option — iTMS. As such, competition does not apply, and as such, talking about market share is meaningless. iTMS owns 100% of the market share for DRMed music downloads to be used on iPods (let's forget about Harmony until we know it's legally safe, which I sincerely hope it is). If you're talking about systems where the user can use a personal player, the markets do not intersect. In this environment, iTMS has no competition, and the other stores have each other. That's the difference since, as far as I'm aware, everyone else supports a DRM format that can be written to by more than one store.
It's the media producers which push for the DRM, not the stores. They simply play by their rules. I don't blame the stores or the players in general for this particular phenomenon. iPod/iTMS is more restrictive, in my opinion, than other choices for buying this sort of content online (I hope I've clarified that above), but we're essentially still conceding that no, this is not our content, and no, we do not have the right to do with it as we please. This is not a good state of affairs. I'm not the sort who would buy from a DRMed store, but I do feel that the criticism the article was recieving for the iPod/iTMS assertion was unjustified.
Apologies if I was unclear, but I was talking about the "mainstream media" market when I mentioned "market" — this is not something that eMusic can really claim to be a part of. What precludes your choice is media companies who are unwilling to release media on non-DRMed systems like eMusic.
The absence of a free market for downloaders in the "ecosystem" environment you describe could quite easily cause these figures, rather than excuse them.
The majority of consumers don't care about there being a free market for them to choose from, but that does not stop it being a good thing for them. The DRM scheme that is used on iTMS has been, so far, protected by Apple so that they can continue their hold on this market, and prevent the competition of other stores offering a comparable service (as much as I'd like eMusic to be, and as much as for me it is, it's not in general). Whether or not they'd continue their hold on this market if they allowed competitors is debatable, but the fact is that, at present, they're simply not allowing competitors.
Apple's lawyers are attempting to stop this, which seems anti-competitive to me, but I suppose the DMCA isn't really designed to aid competition, innovation, or the rights of anyone but big business, so they might well be successful. So it's a risky option, in theory.
Being stuck with the most successful system does not make someone any less stuck. In fact, having owners of the most popular portable digital music player automatically stuck with the system would contribute to its popularity, making the statistics on the matter less meaningful anyway.
The article was talking about how to get the best value-for-money on online music stores (particularly those using DRM, since they have more of "what people want", I expect). The bottom line is, if you have an iPod and want to listen to the music you download on it, then you do not get to choose from stores in this market. It's comparable to buying a hi-fi system on the provision that you only buy CDs from HMV. HMV might be the best store in the world, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't get a choice.
You're stuck because you can't move to any other (DRMed) music store. That's anti-competitive, so if you buy an iPod, and want to purchase DRMed content, you're stuck into the iTMS's pricing policy, whatever that might be. You can love the iTMS all you like, but since you can't switch, you are "stuck". That's the point being made.
Luckily, thus far, Apple have been pretty reasonable in their pricing. But they essentially have a monopoly position here (which is possibly why the "industry" has been pushing them to push up prices), and could continue raising prices until people just stopped using it, and started buying CDs instead, since that's their only other option if they want content from a company who will not distribute it non-DRM. These are the same companies, of course, that are introducing copy protection on CDs, leaving the users who want this content with only the iTMS to choose from. In pricing terms, there's little that one can do other than hope that Apple don't decide to jack up their pricing.
Of course, I hope that the companies who are using DRM to restrict the fair use of content that one pays for all collapse like the Roman Empire, but in the short-to-medium term, this is why people are concerned about being "stuck" with one vendor. I suspect that people would have a different tone if Microsoft had come out with an identical system.