Unless you buy download your purchase as a dvd video (containing a specified structure of mpeg2 video and ac3, dts, pcm or mpeg audio) iso image, which you most certainly won't be able to do using any of these god-awful services, you will have to transcode it to dvd-video from whatever mpeg-4 like/windos media format you bought it in. Yeehaw! Your "backup" copy that the media companies so generously allow you to make, is inferior.
Since when do you want to transcode data beween lossy compression formats? You will end up with worse when you rerip, let's say a song you bought on iTunes from your "backup" on an audio cd created from the iTunes-fucked-up aac file to mp3, to actually be able to play the file on something as ironic as your expensive hi-fi set in your living room through your dvd player.
This leads us into a universe of interesting arguments. what rights will you want to give up? History has on many occasions proven that giving up any rights whatsoever that have become obvious could turn out to be an amazingly idiotic thing to do. This applies to everything from civic liberties such as labor unions to consumer rights to geopolitical affairs.
What if this form of restrictions-infected, horrible, crippled online content becomes really successful? The possibility to buy non-infected not self destructive physical media that you can use with non-bloated Free Software or "non-approved" hardware players might become very rare at some point. What if your entire music or movie collection is rendered useless as a consequence of some stock market catastrophe? Or what about outages in your internet access? If that same stock market crash causes you loose your job or if you have to pay huge medical bills and can't afford broadband, will you enjoy not being able to listen music or watch movies you've actually paid for over the years? And what if some items in your music collection will be considered unethical, indecent or not politically correct after the next war, terror attack or political scandal? I don't see the possibility that the pigfuckers who control big media would decide to retroactively end the availability of certain content you've downloaded especially from these eat-as-much-as-you-want services as very remote. These examples don't even sound that extreme, right? Needless to say, corporate control over the access to media and hideous closed standards could also have negative effects on future historians' access to today's popular culture
In a nutshell, does it really seem fair to give away all your rights to get material that becomes increasingly cheap to distribute for the rights owners?
There is a big difference between the quality and durability of factory pressed and burned optical media. I have cds that were manufactured in the 80's and early 90's that work just fine, while some (not all, though) of the cds i burned during the early 00's are already getting unreliable. pressed DVDs from the 90s work just fine, but what about those burned with some crappy laptop drive a couple of years ago? Should the normal consumer figure out how to (propably illegally) copy some CSS- and Macrovision and region code infected one and only legal dvd-video on dvd-r copy before it gets unreliable?
And besides, buying files that a
A) contain non-standard obfuscated data in some proprietary format that only hardware players of specific brands that have licenses for the format in question can play
B) require you to authenticate to some online service that will go down when the store you bought it from does the belly up thing
C) are only playable with some crappy, privacy invading non-free, outrageously incompatible piece of software
is obviously out of the question. I don't want to pay for neither music music or video that doesn't play on any setup i want it to. Today, illegal file sharing are the only *online* options for those who want anything that doesn't blatantly offend what all consumers should demand.
Ubuntu may be a serious contender if they manage to continue simplifying linux adminstration without obfuscating the system beneath the gui. We don't need another massive yast-infection, we don't need insane, non-human readable scripts and overly complicated file system layouts. To train new admins and users we need informative, flexible and educating frontends for everything from package management to package creation and compiling and hardware configuration that for example has an option to display a usable command for everything the user asks the frontend to do. Don't take away the simplicity and joy of learning to admin a system over ssh from the other side of the world. We need a system with a sense of minimalism, which the ubuntu team sort of seem to understand as they have a somewhat usable system on 1 cd. As most of their documentation as far as installation of extra software and expanding the system is based on command lines that the new user needs to figure out how to copy and paste into a terminal, i can't keep myself from thinking that this really might be a good way of starting a new linux distro, at least much better than having bad frontends for these tasks. Might the lack of *bad*, slow config guis be why Ubuntu seems to be so hyped as a desktop Debian by many not all that noobish and often even expert users?
And I have to say that i neither believe in or like using gnome or gtk apps, so (k)ubuntu will continue to be my desktop distro of choice if the team continue to offer well polished ready to use desktops based on other environments and keep the package management more enjoyable to use than any rpm based system. And as far as minimalism and tendency to obfuscate everything is concerned, Ubuntu isn't exactly Slackware, but I'll be somewhat happy as long as nothing sodomizes my config files the way I have vaguely remember Suse's yast doing back in the 9.x days.
I'm not in any ways a first person witness. I have never traveled to the USA (and I'd never visit any states where you can be sentenced to death in anything as bizarre as a freaking jury trial) and I don't have any relatives there so I rely entirely on different media outlets when i try to shape a picture of the world i live in. That would explain my choice of words.
I'm glad you're not the kind of moron i was by trying to impersonate to entertain myself.;)
As you said, Bush will certainly be gone at some point, however, that will not in any way stop USA from being one badly retarded democracy. What I'm referring to is the very dirty way political campaigning is done, probably to some extent on both sides. Removing Bush won't remove the basically flawed concept of e-voting and the extra fraudulent elements that have been in the air lately, neither will it eliminate the horrible voting experience of standing in a line for hours that some people seem to go through. Same goes for that pathetic excuse for a judicial system and the presence of corporate interest national decision making.
yeah indeed. I'm on Ubuntu (upgraded to Edgy the other day, without any major issues, just had to use "the force" with dpkg a few times) on my main machine, because I'm a lazy bastard and want a shiny default desktop. The ubuntu packages for most desktop-environment related things (which i mostly use) are quite up to date, but as parent said, some other stuff tends to get quite old in ubuntu.
How strange it may seem at the first glance, I prefer to run Debian's never ending beta, testing on my home server. Maybe not a good idea for a production environment, (not really any security fixes, but new packages from unstable now and then), but since it's a never ending distro with updates every day i can keep up to date without ever having to worry about doing massive dist-upgrades or even boot because of an upgrade. A lot of small neat unix tools are much more up to date in debian testing than in Ubuntu, and testing doesn't seem to be likely to eat kittens in small scale home server use, although some desktop oriented packages seem to be temporarily missing now and then.
Or, use another never-ending distro such as the usually not so unstable debian unstable and testing. Quite bleeding edge, and a personal desktop with either of these simply won't take as much time to keep running as gentoo.
Anyone having any luck with the perverted act of running IE7 in wine?
I'm trying to run the installer from my.wine "c-drive" (wine "C:\IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe") with wine set to act like winxp. I get a dialog box from the installer; "Unable to find a volume for file extraction. Please verify that you have proper permissions". I'm not exactly a wine experts, so I'm probably ignoring some basic troubleshooting measures here...
I installed old ie versions with the nice IEs4Linux script available on www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux, just becouse I could. Remains to be seen if we get an IE7 installing version of that soon.
Cleaning up the piece of junk that I have understood that Windos is, without breaking compability, would certainly be more complicated than this cheap-ass bullshit annoyance "anti-piracy tech" that will "force" people who don't want to pay to use cracked unpatchable versions, or something like that. That is, the amount of time spent on this burglar alarm is probably not comparable to the actual process of putting (or gluing, or taping or whatever) together the rest of a new Micorsfot Windos release. This is is, however, just an uneducated guess from somebody who doesn't know shit about OS design.
I have recently experienced pretty much the same thing as the author of the parent post, about getting my act together and switching from Micorsfot Windos to Ubuntu on my main desktop, something i thought i would never be able to do, but since I have used a GNU/Linux system for SMB/NFS file sharing for some time, half of the dual boot pain is gone. Some of the small tools i need run in Wine, but the ATIs drivers, Flash 7 etc suck (but a copy of win32 Firefox in Wine fixes this) and I'd definitely be worse off if i did any creative artsy fartsy stuff with tools I would have gotten used. But anyway, I definitely agree. Additionally I've experienced a change of attitudes towards the monopolistic behaviour of certain tech firms among completely non-political ordinary boring people, and having Ubuntu CDs to hand out to folks like this is a pleasure.
Finally, the average citizen can trust an out of the box installation of *the* operating system with the increasingly important task of limiting the childrens use of the internets.
Just install the Operating System, ban the children from using it for a month, after which the computer will be ready to provide a safe internets for an hour. Good parents should see the opportunity here, combined with a slow internets this restriction makes sure that the young ones won't have time to download any samples of the new threat: high definition porn!!
We have waited for this feature, but now it is finally here! Micorsfot will be in your computer, protect your internet and make sure that your computer won't run any pirated products, including the operating system itself!
Let's not get used to it without making some noise. To skip network neutrality is obviously a horrible thing to do from both the customer rights and freedom of speech point of view, and it will be a big step towards "totalitarian" corporation control of information and knowledge. Today's society is slowly defeloping towards this, but this has at least in some European countries been slowed down by strong consumer rights legislation. Those of us in europe who have grown up in real democracies don't want to live in satellite states of the american media Oligarchy (Coca Cola, sometimes War), so please, giving up like this becouse "it's completely natural" is not acceptable, no matter what the people with kinder gentler machine gun hands tell us.
Slashdot Mirror
hehe, duh'licious
Err, why is the parent post modded 0? At least it contains a correct definition of fascism
Nice indeed, but i guess i'd prefer x1A4
This Danish dude is going to like totally piss off the Elder Gods if he doesn't shut up
Unless you buy download your purchase as a dvd video (containing a specified structure of mpeg2 video and ac3, dts, pcm or mpeg audio) iso image, which you most certainly won't be able to do using any of these god-awful services, you will have to transcode it to dvd-video from whatever mpeg-4 like/windos media format you bought it in. Yeehaw! Your "backup" copy that the media companies so generously allow you to make, is inferior.
Since when do you want to transcode data beween lossy compression formats? You will end up with worse when you rerip, let's say a song you bought on iTunes from your "backup" on an audio cd created from the iTunes-fucked-up aac file to mp3, to actually be able to play the file on something as ironic as your expensive hi-fi set in your living room through your dvd player.
Breaking "only" CSS has been trivial for a long time, but it's also increasingly illegal as more and more countries adopt DMCA anti free speech lookalikes under pressure from entertainment industries (and if you happened to miss it, the entertainment industry gladly tried to ruin a young talented programmer's life even in a country where there was no DMCA look alike prohibiting dvd decryption at the time). And you fully ignore that all DRM formats inherently are as usable as a Spanish galleon on wheels when it comes to portability, freedom (nudge nudge, wink wink), usability and simply every consumer's (excluding you, seemingly) wish to avoid Pottersville patterns, as in not be tied to certain, often inferior proprietary hardware and software without being referred to as these pie-rat persons you continue to make noise about.
Have a pleasant evening wherever you are and please enjoy your AIDS
This leads us into a universe of interesting arguments. what rights will you want to give up? History has on many occasions proven that giving up any rights whatsoever that have become obvious could turn out to be an amazingly idiotic thing to do. This applies to everything from civic liberties such as labor unions to consumer rights to geopolitical affairs.
What if this form of restrictions-infected, horrible, crippled online content becomes really successful? The possibility to buy non-infected not self destructive physical media that you can use with non-bloated Free Software or "non-approved" hardware players might become very rare at some point. What if your entire music or movie collection is rendered useless as a consequence of some stock market catastrophe? Or what about outages in your internet access? If that same stock market crash causes you loose your job or if you have to pay huge medical bills and can't afford broadband, will you enjoy not being able to listen music or watch movies you've actually paid for over the years? And what if some items in your music collection will be considered unethical, indecent or not politically correct after the next war, terror attack or political scandal? I don't see the possibility that the pigfuckers who control big media would decide to retroactively end the availability of certain content you've downloaded especially from these eat-as-much-as-you-want services as very remote. These examples don't even sound that extreme, right? Needless to say, corporate control over the access to media and hideous closed standards could also have negative effects on future historians' access to today's popular culture
In a nutshell, does it really seem fair to give away all your rights to get material that becomes increasingly cheap to distribute for the rights owners?
There is a big difference between the quality and durability of factory pressed and burned optical media. I have cds that were manufactured in the 80's and early 90's that work just fine, while some (not all, though) of the cds i burned during the early 00's are already getting unreliable. pressed DVDs from the 90s work just fine, but what about those burned with some crappy laptop drive a couple of years ago? Should the normal consumer figure out how to (propably illegally) copy some CSS- and Macrovision and region code infected one and only legal dvd-video on dvd-r copy before it gets unreliable?
And besides, buying files that a
A) contain non-standard obfuscated data in some proprietary format that only hardware players of specific brands that have licenses for the format in question can play
B) require you to authenticate to some online service that will go down when the store you bought it from does the belly up thing
C) are only playable with some crappy, privacy invading non-free, outrageously incompatible piece of software
is obviously out of the question. I don't want to pay for neither music music or video that doesn't play on any setup i want it to. Today, illegal file sharing are the only *online* options for those who want anything that doesn't blatantly offend what all consumers should demand.
Burn to dvd once? What the hell? It's anything but *fair*. It's fucking outrageous and ridiculous. It's useless.
And I can't use xvideo overlays properly even with the latest ati driver, so have to use video players that support opengl overlays instead.
Ubuntu may be a serious contender if they manage to continue simplifying linux adminstration without obfuscating the system beneath the gui. We don't need another massive yast-infection, we don't need insane, non-human readable scripts and overly complicated file system layouts. To train new admins and users we need informative, flexible and educating frontends for everything from package management to package creation and compiling and hardware configuration that for example has an option to display a usable command for everything the user asks the frontend to do. Don't take away the simplicity and joy of learning to admin a system over ssh from the other side of the world. We need a system with a sense of minimalism, which the ubuntu team sort of seem to understand as they have a somewhat usable system on 1 cd. As most of their documentation as far as installation of extra software and expanding the system is based on command lines that the new user needs to figure out how to copy and paste into a terminal, i can't keep myself from thinking that this really might be a good way of starting a new linux distro, at least much better than having bad frontends for these tasks. Might the lack of *bad*, slow config guis be why Ubuntu seems to be so hyped as a desktop Debian by many not all that noobish and often even expert users?
And I have to say that i neither believe in or like using gnome or gtk apps, so (k)ubuntu will continue to be my desktop distro of choice if the team continue to offer well polished ready to use desktops based on other environments and keep the package management more enjoyable to use than any rpm based system. And as far as minimalism and tendency to obfuscate everything is concerned, Ubuntu isn't exactly Slackware, but I'll be somewhat happy as long as nothing sodomizes my config files the way I have vaguely remember Suse's yast doing back in the 9.x days.
I'm not in any ways a first person witness. I have never traveled to the USA (and I'd never visit any states where you can be sentenced to death in anything as bizarre as a freaking jury trial) and I don't have any relatives there so I rely entirely on different media outlets when i try to shape a picture of the world i live in. That would explain my choice of words.
"See Emily Play"
I'm glad you're not the kind of moron i was by trying to impersonate to entertain myself. ;)
As you said, Bush will certainly be gone at some point, however, that will not in any way stop USA from being one badly retarded democracy. What I'm referring to is the very dirty way political campaigning is done, probably to some extent on both sides. Removing Bush won't remove the basically flawed concept of e-voting and the extra fraudulent elements that have been in the air lately, neither will it eliminate the horrible voting experience of standing in a line for hours that some people seem to go through. Same goes for that pathetic excuse for a judicial system and the presence of corporate interest national decision making.
Well don't download it all. just the things you need to pull down maps of your ranch, or in this case uhm.. liberal anti-american hate speech.
Remember that The Google can be downloaded in .avi!
Does that include the Dead Parrot Sketch and "Netcraft confirms it, [something] is dying"?
yeah indeed. I'm on Ubuntu (upgraded to Edgy the other day, without any major issues, just had to use "the force" with dpkg a few times) on my main machine, because I'm a lazy bastard and want a shiny default desktop. The ubuntu packages for most desktop-environment related things (which i mostly use) are quite up to date, but as parent said, some other stuff tends to get quite old in ubuntu.
How strange it may seem at the first glance, I prefer to run Debian's never ending beta, testing on my home server. Maybe not a good idea for a production environment, (not really any security fixes, but new packages from unstable now and then), but since it's a never ending distro with updates every day i can keep up to date without ever having to worry about doing massive dist-upgrades or even boot because of an upgrade. A lot of small neat unix tools are much more up to date in debian testing than in Ubuntu, and testing doesn't seem to be likely to eat kittens in small scale home server use, although some desktop oriented packages seem to be temporarily missing now and then.
Or, use another never-ending distro such as the usually not so unstable debian unstable and testing. Quite bleeding edge, and a personal desktop with either of these simply won't take as much time to keep running as gentoo.
Anyone having any luck with the perverted act of running IE7 in wine? I'm trying to run the installer from my .wine "c-drive" (wine "C:\IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe") with wine set to act like winxp. I get a dialog box from the installer; "Unable to find a volume for file extraction. Please verify that you have proper permissions". I'm not exactly a wine experts, so I'm probably ignoring some basic troubleshooting measures here...
I installed old ie versions with the nice IEs4Linux script available on www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux, just becouse I could. Remains to be seen if we get an IE7 installing version of that soon.
Cleaning up the piece of junk that I have understood that Windos is, without breaking compability, would certainly be more complicated than this cheap-ass bullshit annoyance "anti-piracy tech" that will "force" people who don't want to pay to use cracked unpatchable versions, or something like that. That is, the amount of time spent on this burglar alarm is probably not comparable to the actual process of putting (or gluing, or taping or whatever) together the rest of a new Micorsfot Windos release. This is is, however, just an uneducated guess from somebody who doesn't know shit about OS design.
I have recently experienced pretty much the same thing as the author of the parent post, about getting my act together and switching from Micorsfot Windos to Ubuntu on my main desktop, something i thought i would never be able to do, but since I have used a GNU/Linux system for SMB/NFS file sharing for some time, half of the dual boot pain is gone. Some of the small tools i need run in Wine, but the ATIs drivers, Flash 7 etc suck (but a copy of win32 Firefox in Wine fixes this) and I'd definitely be worse off if i did any creative artsy fartsy stuff with tools I would have gotten used. But anyway, I definitely agree. Additionally I've experienced a change of attitudes towards the monopolistic behaviour of certain tech firms among completely non-political ordinary boring people, and having Ubuntu CDs to hand out to folks like this is a pleasure.
Finally, the average citizen can trust an out of the box installation of *the* operating system with the increasingly important task of limiting the childrens use of the internets. Just install the Operating System, ban the children from using it for a month, after which the computer will be ready to provide a safe internets for an hour. Good parents should see the opportunity here, combined with a slow internets this restriction makes sure that the young ones won't have time to download any samples of the new threat: high definition porn!! We have waited for this feature, but now it is finally here! Micorsfot will be in your computer, protect your internet and make sure that your computer won't run any pirated products, including the operating system itself!
Let's not get used to it without making some noise. To skip network neutrality is obviously a horrible thing to do from both the customer rights and freedom of speech point of view, and it will be a big step towards "totalitarian" corporation control of information and knowledge. Today's society is slowly defeloping towards this, but this has at least in some European countries been slowed down by strong consumer rights legislation. Those of us in europe who have grown up in real democracies don't want to live in satellite states of the american media Oligarchy (Coca Cola, sometimes War), so please, giving up like this becouse "it's completely natural" is not acceptable, no matter what the people with kinder gentler machine gun hands tell us.