Bit Torrent Shutdown
Jan 28 2005 19:44
#32
To make sure you can play stuff (most episodes and films with .avi extensions) you'll need the free player from http//www.divx.com , you can still play stuff in windows media player etc but you need to install divx player to get the decoding ability.
Jan 29 2005 00:40
#33
nah what u want is the ugly but functional VLC media player.
it plays everything!
divx is shite and has adverts in it.
Jan 29 2005 09:52
#34
what you really want is linux.
Jan 29 2005 09:59
#35
linux is for lifestylers 
Jan 29 2005 10:24
#36
then a lifestyler I am, I might even get a tshirt with tux on it to show off my amazing lifestyleness. Then all I need is a squat, a K habit, and a diet of food from peoples bins... I will be uber lifestyler.
(apoligies I'm still drunk from last night.)
Jan 31 2005 10:33
#37
Linux rules my world.
Jan 31 2005 11:48
#38
Revol. I've been meaning to have this open-source/piracy thrash out with you for a while because we never finished last time and it definitely needs to be done. How about here?
Jan 31 2005 12:07
#39
ha open source is good and all but its kinda like the Mutualism of the binary world. Piracy is more like the revolutionary bad boy who throws bombs into bourgeois cafes. tho i don't think the two are mutually exclusive.
Jan 31 2005 12:18
#40
OK, go.
Piracy is circumventing an entire circuit of capital, a circuit that has generated a lot of money and is quite crucially important in the tertiary economy we in the west now find ourselves in. With a shift from manufacturing industries to a mainly information-based economy, the restrictions to free flow of information are vitally important to maintaining the collection of revenue.
The development of file sharing as a technology has occurred as a response to this, and is now part of the public domain. A funny thing about technology is that it seem to lead social developments- there is little that can be done to do away with tech once it is available, and people have a knack of finding creative new applications for it. There is not now any going back, and the “creative industries” are frantically slapping lawsuits on people as they watch the inevitable destruction of the old frameworks for information exchange.
The lion’s share of profit from a CD sale goes to the companies, with all but the largest bands making a living from gigging, merchandising at gigs and record deals (I would have thought that the first two are the major source of income). In this respect little will change. As rkn said, art as a profession does seem a bit shit, but who are we to begrudge people making a living out of their talents? I don’t really care- but it will be cool to see the utterly bland and manufactured acts broken and dying as the financial incentive withers.
Jan 31 2005 12:24
#41
Free/Open software sidesteps corporate software to the point of making it obsolete. The less people using Microsoft Word to write documents, the less Microsoft Word becomes the standard format for documents, and the less people in general who are of the anti-piracy persuasion are likely to pay for shit like MS Word. (For instance). Free software undermines the strength of corporate software in all spheres rather than just amongst a few radicals. It provides a feasible alternative so that corporate software can be written out of the equation.
Open source is way more revolutionary.
Jan 31 2005 12:33
#42
and i suppouse people eating vegan slop instead of eating from mc donalds is more revolutionary?
see open source is the new lifestylism!
Jan 31 2005 12:44
#43
Using corporate software maintains a dependance on capitalism when there's an anti-capitalist alternative available without any inconvenience.
On the other hand, the choice between eating animals and not doesn't really have anything to do with the end of hierarchies between people.
Jan 31 2005 12:51
#44
yes but sure isn't vegan slop breaking a dependence on capitalist food chains 
.
basically open source is based on the idea of avoiding capitalism whilst piracy means saying fuck it i want everything capitalism has to offer but i ain't fucking paying for it mutha fucka. Of course this is a blatant over simplification.
basically open source is Proudhons "Peoples Bank" whilst piracy is the insurrectionary general strike!
Jan 31 2005 13:07
#45
revol68 wrote:
yes but sure isn't vegan slop breaking a dependence on capitalist food chains
No, cause you're usually having to buy the food. Unless you're running a gardening commune or something, in which case you're probably alienating yourself from the rest of the world anyway.
Quote:
basically open source is based on the idea of avoiding capitalism whilst piracy means saying fuck it i want everything capitalism has to offer but i ain't fucking paying for it mutha fucka. Of course this is a blatant over simplification.basically open source is Proudhons "Peoples Bank" whilst piracy is the insurrectionary general strike!
Open source doesn't just avoid capitalism. It provides something that's usually equal and often better than the capitalist options without paying for it (yeah, I'm one of those dickheads that thinks that linux is actually better than windows on it's own merits and not just for political reasons but then I started using it for a while before I got into anarchism anyway). Open source isn't about suffering in quality in order to avoid capitalism on political grounds. Also, once something is opensource, it doesn't matter who tries to take it closed-source, anyone else can use the source that was freely available up til that point to build on the product further in a free and open manner.
LaTeX is way better than most windows apps for typesetting documents. OpenOffice writer is pretty much on par with MS Word. The only sane reason I could ever see for using Microsoft products is for computer gaming and even that's growing out of being an issue. There are opensource database and spreadsheet programs which work pretty similarly to those produced by MS. If you do graphics or audio then you probably want to be using a Mac anyway for the time being. So pretty much it comes down to computer games.
I'm not against piracy or anything. Just in terms of software, I don't generally need to pirate anything, because there are freeware versions of just about everything that MS does and more.
Jan 31 2005 13:11
#46
i was joking about the vegan slop shite. 
aye ur right i mean im using firefox cos it fucking rocks but essentially the only reason i use priated windows is for games.
Jan 31 2005 13:25
#47
[note. this applies to open-source software/piracy only. music and films are different.]
Point is though Revol. Vegan slop is still a saleable lifestyle (Tofurkey, baby). Apart from a few (worrying) aberrations, open-source is always free, and not free in a dumpster diving way, the popularity of commercial open-source packages probably equates similarly to ad-supported or paid file-sharing, so that argument's fairly mute.
The thing is, veganism provides a very different diet to a meat based one, and it's possible to eat really shit, processed vegan food or very nice meat-based food. Hence why it's only a lifestyle choice.
Open source however does everything that commercial software does, often considerably faster than commercial software, more compatible with different file formats, no spy/adware - not like slop or road-kill. Open-source distribution (which may be done through file-sharing software esp. bittorrent) doesn't have all the noise of piracy - no empty 1GB files, no intentionally incomplete files, less in the way of rushed out buggy cracks. In both cases you're getting something for free. But piracy takes a lot of work for the consumer - slow download times, working out which file is legit, share priviledges, and all the hassle that comes with illegalism - servers shut down, constant upgrages to technology to deal with security. It also does nothing to reduce dependency on microsoft or adobe or macromedia - people are still using the same software and many people will then buy it if they start using it professionally. The increased time spent sorting out warez - especially with on-line registration of software and new developments which make it trickier to crack, is much the same as the way capital forces us to spend more time as legal consumers. So people become experts at consumption (finding cracks), whereas open-source encourages people to learn more about how software itself works - you can contribute to development of the thing itself if you want to.
The support structure of open-source - mainly forum based, encourages mutual aid between people. Instead of the "u got GTA san andreas will swap for kurosawa box" exchanges you get on file-sharing networks, people go onto forums to ask questions or provide answers (or both) - much more sociable. Leeching is much less of an issue as well.
In Iraq just after victory was declared, Microsoft and other companies were flooding the country with pirate CDs of their software - in the hope that people would buy legit copies later on. Again, with open-source there's no such 'buy legit later' possibility, and it does the same stuff just as well or better in most cases.
Jan 31 2005 13:36
#48
yes but linix doesn't do games, plus piracy actually negates the whole idea of a fair exchange, essentially it doesn't give a fuck about whether or not the company is open source or not, it just takes what it wants.
again its no either or!
Jan 31 2005 13:38
#49
They're not all the same standard as corporate games (and some of them are just linux implementations of corporate games) but they're around.
And Winex is supposed to be available free by CVS for anyone who wants to download it and is supposed to run a lot of windows games on top of linux, although it may be a bit of a hassle.
Jan 31 2005 13:40
#50
bollocks got distracted mid post and missed Revol's admissions.
Alright, if piracy is the revolutionary general strike then how does it help everyone to start the factory up again? Open-source deals with capitalism at the point of production AND consumption, not just the latter. Consumer strike sounds a bit like a boycott to me, or "liberation shopping".
Should point out that I think sharing films (good ones anyway) and music is great, although I also don't think it hurts capitalism at all. Lots of people trade files and still buy CDs/DVDs because of the liner notes/quality.
Jan 31 2005 13:44
#51
Yep, you can run windows games under linux with wine, although I've never done it. And I think linux games (and music/graphic software) will improve the more people use it. It's no longer a techie subcultural thing, so there's lots of work in that direction, which means there'll be massive developments in that area over the next couple of years I reckon.
Should point out I'm using the windows bit of my dual-boot setup now though 
Jan 31 2005 13:46
#52
The only Windows I use at home is a copy of the dos prompt nicked from a Win 95 computer at uni to run emulators/abandonware games.
And as far as graphics software goes, Blender3d absolutely rules, The Gimp is fantastic and they're both entirely free. Blender3d has got a weird interface but it's way better for productivity once you get used to it than a lot of pure point+click things like 3dsMax etc.
The reason I said above that if you're doing sound or graphics work you probably want a mac is because their hardware is generally better for coping with graphics/audio intensive applications. Otherwise things like ardour (well ardour in a few years once it's grown up and isn't so empty/buggy) and blender3d would be perfect for that stuff.
Jan 31 2005 14:02
#53
I'll check out blender3d, haven't checked out ardour yet. And yes, the GIMP is great.
That's the main problem with both open-source and filesharing - trickier to do either for the hardware itself.
Jan 31 2005 15:13
#54
Free software (let's ditch "open source", that's a term recently made up by fuckwits like ESR to try and commercialise free software by not mentioning the ideals) is produced in an unalienated manner. The means of production and distribution is a computer so programmers have found that they have the MOP sitting there right in their bedrooms. That's where FS is kinda Prodhounish. But it also has revolutionary potential- in anarcho-communist terms, it's part of the new society built within the old. Also, post-revolution, if you want democratic control over computers you need the source code.
There's also many hidden dangers, for example for a long time (dunno if this is still the case) Lotus Notes could send encrypted emails, but while the code was strong enough to resist attacks by most people, they included information in the email that let the NSA crack it easily.
(for geeks it was standard PGP style encryption, 64-bit, and 24 bits of the private key were sent as part of the email, encoded with a 64 bit NSA public key- so to the NSA, the email's encryption was only a piddling 40 bits)
Feb 1 2005 00:00
#55
revol68 wrote:
yes but linix doesn't do games, plus piracy actually negates the whole idea of a fair exchange, essentially it doesn't give a fuck about whether or not the company is open source or not, it just takes what it wants.again its no either or!
Linux doesn't do games? hah, you aint played tux racer mate, it rocks.
Feb 1 2005 00:04
#56
AnarchoAl wrote:
Free software (let's ditch "open source", that's a term recently made up by fuckwits like ESR to try and commercialise free software by not mentioning the ideals) is produced in an unalienated manner. The means of production and distribution is a computer so programmers have found that they have the MOP sitting there right in their bedrooms. That's where FS is kinda Prodhounish. But it also has revolutionary potential- in anarcho-communist terms, it's part of the new society built within the old. Also, post-revolution, if you want democratic control over computers you need the source code.
Open source isn't a crap term because thats exactly what it is, the source code is open, I can tweak and alter my entire operating system and almost all of the applications that run on it however I like.
I can't really say much more as to why I believe *nix operating systems are better than windows ones than pheobe already has, but I dont see the reasons as political, they are purely in terms of how well my computer runs, how fast it runs and what I'm capable of doing on it.
Oct 11 2009 12:13
#57
Joe Hill wrote:
For any IT nerds out there - MS is planning a total takeover via its xbox and multimedia (about 2010ish), plus Sun is fucked.And Bill Gates is indeed a capitalist.
Time is running out.
Oct 23 2009 14:58
#58
Hmmm. I haven't noticed any problems in accessing files I want to download/share. Isohunt doesn't seem to be effected.
Also, why can't these musicians follow the lead of people like Trent Reznor, he just started putting all of his new albums up for free right on his own website and just tours more. Musicians should knock of the laziness and get out on the road. They made a living before records/8 tracks/cassettes/CDs. They can get creative because file sharing is not going to end.
Oct 23 2009 17:35
#59
Quote:
Also, why can't these musicians follow the lead of people like Trent Reznor, he just started putting all of his new albums up for free right on his own website and just tours more. Musicians should knock of the laziness and get out on the road. They made a living before records/8 tracks/cassettes/CDs. They can get creative because file sharing is not going to end.
Problem is that the Radiohead/NIN model only works if you're popular to begin with. If music is the way you're making money and you're not very popular then you're shit out of luck. Pirating less popular acts' music might actually stop them from being full time musicians as they have to sell their labour elsewhere.
Of course lots of new acts love that their albums are made available to as many people as possible, but new acts don't rely on their music for survival. Basically the main problem is that with generalized commodity production, piracy will have the effect of squeezing out those people not making enough money from their music (sadly). However, piracy obviously is one ingredient of how culture can be distributed in a communist society.
Oct 23 2009 17:56
#60
Khawaga wrote:
Problem is that the Radiohead/NIN model only works if you're popular to begin with. If music is the way you're making money and you're not very popular then you're shit out of luck. Pirating less popular acts' music might actually stop them from being full time musicians as they have to sell their labour elsewhere.
Yes but these less popular acts would have to be really really obscure and small-scale to actually be "put out of business" by piracy (and such acts do usually have equally small but devoted followings). I honestly can't think of an example where an artist or band was driven to abandon music as a profession due to piracy, but I can think of many new, little-known indie bands whose albums have been leaked even before the official market release date, and who are nonetheless still doing music full-time and not starving to death. Also, many people who download leaked albums from new aspiring bands end up buying the albums anyway just to support the band.
At the end of the day the truth is piracy does not considerably harm anyone but the music industry.
Quote:
However, piracy obviously is one ingredient of how culture can be distributed in a communist society.
except it wouldn't be piracy, it would just be sharing.
Instead of Windows Media Player, get MPlayer. It's free, opensource, and plays films a damn site better than real player or WMP (as well as not popping up with advertisements everywhere or trying to sell you anything)