WTF? Piracy? Apple?!

This is interesting.

Somebody has the balls to call what the French are doing piracy. As a pirate I am offended. You can't call those cheese-eating, wine-drinking surrender monkeys pirates!

"Last week, the French National Assembly approved a bill that would force online music vendors to make their music compatible with any music player." I see no problem with that! No one in their right mind would see a problem with that. If you, the consumer, are forced to use one music store (iTunes Music Store) with one audio player (iTunes) with one device (iPod), I daresay you would be pissed at the lack of choice.

I'm a Linux user so I have a different perspective than others. The iTunes player does NOT work on Linux and most likely never will. Therefore, the iTunes Music Store canNOT be used and I canNOT get any music from them. If there was a music store that worked on Linux (natively, no emulated shit) and that worked with the iPod (or any other music player) you'd be able to get geeks to buy music instead of pirating it. The problem is that of convenience.

I see Apple as the RIAA [Recording Industry of America]. Everyone's a pirate to them because they're a monopoly.

This [FairPlay] makes Apple's ubiquitous iPod incompatible with music downloaded from any site other than iTunes, and songs downloaded from iTunes incompatible with other players.

The result is Apple's whopping 70 percent share of the market for digital music downloads.

I fucking wonder why they have 70 percent! Reason one: Idiot people fall for their genious marketing and buy the iPod because it looks cool. Reason two: You buy an iPod, you're using the iTunes Music Store and if you use the iTunes Music Store, you're using an iPod. We don't see this happen with any other music store or music player.

I'm going to finish with this rant by saying those surrender monkeys are doing a good deed for the consumer. I think I might stop calling them surrender monkeys just because of it...Nah.

WTF? Piracy? Apple?!

This is interesting.

Somebody has the balls to call what the French are doing piracy. As a pirate I am offended. You can't call those cheese-eating, wine-drinking surrender monkeys pirates!

"Last week, the French National Assembly approved a bill that would force online music vendors to make their music compatible with any music player." I see no problem with that! No one in their right mind would see a problem with that. If you, the consumer, are forced to use one music store (iTunes Music Store) with one audio player (iTunes) with one device (iPod), I daresay you would be pissed at the lack of choice.

I'm a Linux user so I have a different perspective than others. The iTunes player does NOT work on Linux and most likely never will. Therefore, the iTunes Music Store canNOT be used and I canNOT get any music from them. If there was a music store that worked on Linux (natively, no emulated shit) and that worked with the iPod (or any other music player) you'd be able to get geeks to buy music instead of pirating it. The problem is that of convenience.

I see Apple as the RIAA [Recording Industry of America]. Everyone's a pirate to them because they're a monopoly.

This [FairPlay] makes Apple's ubiquitous iPod incompatible with music downloaded from any site other than iTunes, and songs downloaded from iTunes incompatible with other players.

The result is Apple's whopping 70 percent share of the market for digital music downloads.

I fucking wonder why they have 70 percent! Reason one: Idiot people fall for their genious marketing and buy the iPod because it looks cool. Reason two: You buy an iPod, you're using the iTunes Music Store and if you use the iTunes Music Store, you're using an iPod. We don't see this happen with any other music store or music player.

I'm going to finish with this rant by saying those surrender monkeys are doing a good deed for the consumer. I think I might stop calling them surrender monkeys just because of it...Nah.

DFA sucks.

They suck period. It's bad for a band when remixes of their stuff sound better than the original. I just watched this video and I'm fracking astounded that people can listen to them. I may get blasted for having listened to some gangster nerd rap or for listening to 8-bit, but this stuff is crap, along with 90-something-% of "indie" (read independent college rock). And in case people say I didn't check out all their stuff, bullshit. Here are a few more videos found on Google Video. Finest Canadian export my fracking ass. There is no fine Canadian export when it comes to music right now, and that's what I'm sticking to.

In other news, I've released GNUFilter (finally!) and KonSort will be up tomorrow. My xml parser will also be updated.

Battlestar Galactica is one of the greatest science fiction that I've seen in a long time.

DFA sucks.

They suck period. It's bad for a band when remixes of their stuff sound better than the original. I just watched this video and I'm fracking astounded that people can listen to them. I may get blasted for having listened to some gangster nerd rap or for listening to 8-bit, but this stuff is crap, along with 90-something-% of "indie" (read independent college rock). And in case people say I didn't check out all their stuff, bullshit. Here are a few more videos found on Google Video. Finest Canadian export my fracking ass. There is no fine Canadian export when it comes to music right now, and that's what I'm sticking to.

In other news, I've released GNUFilter (finally!) and KonSort will be up tomorrow. My xml parser will also be updated.

Battlestar Galactica is one of the greatest science fiction that I've seen in a long time.

my girl, the princess

I've just tried KLiveJournal and it's not too bad aside from a few minor problems, like it won't let me post and the toolbars don't show, and I have to re-define the keyboard shortcuts. Otherwise, it's not a bad program. The code could look a little tidier somehow, maybe with a few comments in key places. But I like it and the fact that the author actually responded to my email and created a fix for it is nice too.

On to my programming news. I'm still in the process of cleaning up xParse (the lightweight C++ xml parser) and the cool thing that I'm adding today is a template function. I know that won't mean anything to a lot of you, but it's pretty damned important in the scheme of xParse. It should make adding elements easier for people and thus boost the use of it. My biggest problems when parsing are; multi-line data, and multiple begin/close tags on a single line. The latter I can work around using a loop, but the former is a bit more work and requires a clean-up of the parse function.

And on to other things...Check out Legal Torrents. I know that some of them are semi-crappy (some of the music for example), but some of it is pretty good, like the 8-bit music. Over 100 tracks of sweet gameboy music. Just great music. Anyway, I'm too tired and whipped (by C++) to write anything of note to regular (l)users.

Good night, and good luck.

my girl, the princess

I've just tried KLiveJournal and it's not too bad aside from a few minor problems, like it won't let me post and the toolbars don't show, and I have to re-define the keyboard shortcuts. Otherwise, it's not a bad program. The code could look a little tidier somehow, maybe with a few comments in key places. But I like it and the fact that the author actually responded to my email and created a fix for it is nice too.

On to my programming news. I'm still in the process of cleaning up xParse (the lightweight C++ xml parser) and the cool thing that I'm adding today is a template function. I know that won't mean anything to a lot of you, but it's pretty damned important in the scheme of xParse. It should make adding elements easier for people and thus boost the use of it. My biggest problems when parsing are; multi-line data, and multiple begin/close tags on a single line. The latter I can work around using a loop, but the former is a bit more work and requires a clean-up of the parse function.

And on to other things...Check out Legal Torrents. I know that some of them are semi-crappy (some of the music for example), but some of it is pretty good, like the 8-bit music. Over 100 tracks of sweet gameboy music. Just great music. Anyway, I'm too tired and whipped (by C++) to write anything of note to regular (l)users.

Good night, and good luck.