[Hudlug] Elvis Costello! I spit on the floor!

[Chris Lindley]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 11:17, Chris Wood wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 September 2002 10:51 am, you wrote:
> > Poor Elvis, bit old out and out of touch. Well its like they say
> > "accidents will happen". I'm sure he didn't personally condone the DRM
> > aspect of the cd, but almost certainly, the ST did. I'll never buy it
> > again. Its the lowest of the low to back door such "upgrades". It begs
> > the question as to why anyone would use a M$ product- There are
> > literally no advantages in using the windows platform, their media
> > players suck and Office XP is overpriced krudd.
> >
> 
> I'm sure both ST, EC and his record company were all perfectly aware of how 
> the promotion was working.
> If you were a famous recording artist, how chuffed would you be if your 
> record sales were dropping because the general public were trading all your 
> music as mp3s? This is your livelihood remember! Careers tend to be short, 
> so you need to make as much money as you can whilst you are still famous.

But are they're any statistics linking MP3 trading with loss of sales of
music?  I d/l and listen to a lot of music.  I also buy lots of cds
(well at the moment I don't as I'm in the final unfunded year of my
PhD).  I'm sure the vast majority of music piracy are not your bedroom
to bedroom MP3 trades, but the large commercial cd copying criminal
groups.
> 
> I think most artists and record companies know that digital formats via the 
> internet are the future. 
> But they can't simply give that sort of material away, as there would then 
> be no record companies, and hence no beautifully recorded music, as it would 
> cost too much money to do more than record music in home studios.
> 
> I dunno - maybe your thoughts are different on this one.
> Don't get me wrong - I have a creative jukebox full of mp3s, but I do 
> personally own all the music on it as CDs as well. I ocassionally get mp3s 
> off mates, but I then generally go out and buy the CD if I liked the album.

I think the vast majority of MP3 listeners are the same.
> 
> Companies have to make money to survive. So do recording artists.
> Do them a favour - BUY their music if you like it.
> 
> Oh and as for advantages of MS products, I've used Unix for 10 years now, 
> and linux for 9. I use linux at home, and have done for many years, and have 
> used linux boxes as webservers, databases and firewalls in production 
> environments at work.
> Open office is getting quite good, and I'm writing this email on kmail.
> However, for word processing I would still fire up my Windows machine. No 
> question. The Office suite is still a country mile better than anything on 
> Unix.

Hey, don't dis OOo.  I've just submitted my thesis wrote entirely with
OOo.  I had some problems, and there were a few panicky emails to the
OOo mailing lists, but overall it was a pretty painfree experience.

All diagrams, figures tables were created with OOo, and the final 250
page document was all produced with this fine piece of software.  It's
come a long way since I started using it as StarOffice 3.0, and it's
only going to get better!  I particularly like the fact that I can open
a document (even a long complicated one) in OOo on my wife's win2k
machine, that I created using OOo here on GNU/Linux!  Apart from
problems if the same set of fonts are not installed on both machines,
there is hardly a hitch.  That's pretty good cross compatibility in my
opinion!

Cheers
Chris
 
-- 
  Chris Lindley                                  
  chris.lindley@scotgate.org          chrishl@bmb.leeds.ac.uk
  ICQ#157144010	    AIM#fergycool    jabber#fergy    IRC#Ferg
  Climb up it, kayak down it + make sure it runs on GNU/Linux