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Windows XP to Target MP3 Files
blown.penguin writes: "Reuters UK reports that Microsoft and RealNetworks plan to "wean customers way from MP3 files" and "limit the quality" of MP3 files that can be recorded on a computer running Windows XP. You can read all about it here." The entire Wall Street Journal story is here. Read it and weep. Dave Farber (who, incidentally, does understand the issues and isn't making this comment in a "get used to it" sense) has a great quote: "The consumer is going to eat what he's given."
They're just going to drive more and more users like me to Free OS'es more and more.
Subscribeware? bye.
Digital Content Protection? bye.
Messing with my MP3's (Many of which I legally own.)? bye.
I think Microsoft's got it all wrong. Oddly enough, the consumer market is about choice, not oppression. Bye bye Microsoft.
Windows 2000 was a fairly decent OS (although it made NT4 look lightweight). Stable, reasonably speedy...the whole NSA key issue really chapped me off. It was at that point that I really decided to bring my unix boxes to the desktop.
An operating system that doesn't limit me.
An operating system that doesn't police me.
An operating system that lets me know what's really going on under the hood.
An operating system doesn't suck.
FreeBSD
TGG
(And yes, sometimes even that other obscure OS, what's it called? Linux?)
And how different is this to NT4, 98 , 98 SE, ME, Win2k ????
THEY ALL LIMIT the free codec to 56kb max
ANY ONE can download the hacked warez codec, just
search the web for
"Fhg Radium MP3 codec v1.263"
http://membres.tripod.fr/binghamrcxu/
There's the rub, my friend... If M$ goes ahead with this crappy Certificate plan of theirs, they can ensure that NO software that is capable of burning a half decent MP3 will be allowed to run on Win XP! You've got Big Brother, who watches everything you do, then you've got Microsoft, who watches AND controls everything you do. I feel sorry for the future. Unless somebody stops the big corporations and the big governments, we will be a slaveworld before we know it. Everything's headed that way, and there is no significant resistance. Bitterman Mac OS X: An attempt by Steve Jobs and his FRIEND Bill Gates to kill Free Software by luring would-be Linuxers back into proprietary software. Apple and Microsoft are closer friends than you think.
Using decent headphones or stereo equipment, try listening to a 128k mp3 file sometime. Preferably one you recorded on your own, to ensure consistent quality.
;)
Decent, but not-quite CD quality. There is some loss but the better encoders (e.g. LAME) keep this pretty consistent through the frequency spectrum. Side note: please don't use the Xing encoder for this comparison
Now try encoding the same track into a 64k wma format. I guarantee you that you'll hear NOTICEABLE degradation especially in the higher frequencies. The music often sounds somewhat dull or muffled at best, and distorted at worst. At first glance it may sound ok but when you throw that CD in and play back the original track you'll be shocked how much you were missing.
Try CDex if you need a good Win32 encoder that supports several formats (including Ogg Vorbis now).
Built in codec in 98 already has mp3 encoding ability thats limited to 56k
WHATS FUCKING NEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
farks sake, FUD FUD from clueless journos and clueless sales/press people that are dumber than an ant.
I noticed a few weeks ago that RealPlayer Basic already restricts encodings to 96kbps. Of course, you can currently use a different encoder or buy the full version.
It's not bad to encourage people to move away from MP3s -- it's definitely not the best encoding technology out there. Of course, forcing people to use RealAudio or Windows Media Audio is not quite kosher..
[Insert OGG Vorbis plug..]
There is a question of legality, considering that Microsoft is again bundling a popular technology with their OS, rather than letting the market forces play out.
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Well, some software that worked on Win9x/Me probably doesn't work properly with XP, considering the mixed heritage with NT/2000. Things just work differently between the two branches, so 9x software might run into trouble.
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Who the hell uses Windows' built-in applications anyway?
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Don't forget that just because WMP8 provides the functionality doesn't mean that you have to use it. Even if the provided windows software is there and crappy, doesn't mean that people will never use MP3s again.... why can't they just use third party apps like they always have?
It's hardly an open standard- mp3 has lots of its own problems. But with the incredible hostility towards it, in a way that keeps Fraunhofer from running amok. Balance of power :)
Let's assume that Microsoft gets its way, that it genuinely does have the ability to make a majority of mp3 files 56K or whatever. To some extent this will proliferate WMA, but in addition it will simply proliferate 56K mp3 files: many people really don't seem to care.
So, rather than Napster being full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 128 with Xing, Napster (or its equivalent) will be full of major label music ripped skippily off CDs and encoded at 56K using an intentionally bad encoder- or at 128K with the same intentionally bad encoder, if people learn to change the registry key.
Meanwhile, some of us in the content producing and open source code writing arenas are busily producing content that can be encoded much better (LAME, with special settings to handle 'mastering' to mp3) from CD audio- and even that can be done much better than the industry's overcompressed, intentionally-full-of-errors-for-copy-protection efforts.
While there is still any channel for independent artistic expression- while it is still legal to make your own music and make mp3s of it and put them out there- the playing field is being tilted in two directions at once. It's being tilted legislatively away from indie content producers, and this is the obvious way. But! With all this cynical the-consumer-will-eat-slops-and-love-it thinking from the big corporations, the playing field of quality is being tilted TOWARD indies. I mean, when you can fool around with some synthesisers, maybe a bit of recording equipment, free audio software, and produce music that has audio quality that is _dramatically_ superior to the corporate product, there is something major happening, with major implications for the image of corporate entertainment. And you can- the fact that the big labels, that Microsoft _are_ capable of producing quality output does not mean they're going to, or that they want to. The labels are busy trying to out-loud each other on the increasingly ignored Top 40 radio stations- this is a well known scandal among mastering engineers. They're increasingly turning to cheap production methods like Pro Tools and _ignoring_ their ability to draw on really top of the line studios and talent. And Microsoft? Let me put it this way: "56K WMA built into the OS- 128K and up WMA available over .NET on a pay-per-encode basis!". This isn't 1998. Microsoft are NOT IN A POSITION to reproduce their previous successes with WMA- they have too much of a need to tie it in with .NET and this will get in the way of widespread adoption of it- the jaws of the trap are just too obvious this time, and the 'worse-is-better' alternative, mp3, is just too entrenched.
It's a very good, though very nerve-racking, time to be involved with Free software, with indie music and arts. Rarely in history have our enemies been so powerful, but rarely have they been so sloppy, contemptuous, and full of hubris.
Frankly, it is not time to weep. It is time to kick ass and take no prisoners.
By supporting non-MS media formats, a media producer would get as much extra market share as by translating into Esperanto.
Extra market-share is extra market-share. Why not use MP3 when it gives you access to the whole Windows market, and all the other OS markets as well?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
But remember, it's not just loss of compatibility with non-Windows users, it's also loss of compatibility with everyone who owns a portable MP3 player or a hard drive or CD-based car MP3 player as well. That probably expands the number of people they are cutting out by a fairly wide margin.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Anything that Microsoft does to actively discourage the use of Microsoft applications weakens it's position. Anytime users in general are using something not owned by Microsoft, it becomes all that much easier to migrate them to another platform.
Applications can move across platforms. Provide a migration path and what you are calling fantastic will actually become quite possible.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Linux has infact gotten easier over time. There is simply no denying that. Care to compare Redhat 4.0 to Redhat 7.0? Where, exactly, has it NOT gotten easier?
Where things are difficult, Linux typically has considerably more flexibility. As far as flexibility goes, Linux always had that edge anyways.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The filesystem layer could detect when an MP3 file is being written by looking at the header. If the quality is too great, then it would interfere with the writing process; e.g. cause the WriteFile() system call to fail. Or it could even put a block of zeros into the file.
:)
Taken a step further, the operating system could require special authentication from the software before it allows a file with an MP3 header to be written at all. The authentication could be produced by requesting the app to produce a hash of a region of its machine code, just like what AOL did with their IM client.
Of course, what would happen is that the music sharing community would come up with a trivial way to disguise the MP3 file when it is stored on Windows. MP3 files will simply have to be ``pickled'' for storage on a Windows system. Decoders would read the pickled format as handily as raw MP3 and life goes on.
Because of the easy way to get around the scheme, I doubt it will be implemented. I suspect that this is may be a case of product management leaking their wishful thinking before checking the feasibility with development.
Whoever at MS thinks Joe User will stick to 56kbp is smoking crack.
I didn't see where it said they'd do that? What it said is that the MP3s are limited to that quality, but other formats aren't. Ergo, people will use the "higher-quality" formats..
Everyone will simply use Winamp or one of the hundreds of other MP3 tools.
Which "coincidentally" broke in the new Windows version, according to the article..
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
But I still fail to see why users will choose something that's more user-hostile when they don't have to.
My father uses some fancy proprietary sound format because he believes it will keep him from accidentally illegally copying files. Make of it what you will.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I'd love to know how this is going to be accomplished. Prevent Windows Media Player from playing mp3s / recording over a certain bitrate? Sure. Prevent another mp3 player from doing this? How, exactly?
I don't think they need to; most people will use what they're given, and if the Microsoft Spiffy Audio Format sounds better, they'll use that.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
It will be interesting to see what happens, but I am not expecting Microsoft to have to squeeze the OEMs too terribly hard. Especially since it is in the OEMs best interests to have Windows XP do well (it requires beefier hardware).
In the end, it will be up to the customers who decide if Windows XP will fly or not. If Microsoft pushes consumers or OEMs towards Windows XP too hard then you can bet that they will only increase the tendency of their customers to look for alternatives.
Microsoft could guarantee OS penetration with pre-loading when PC sales were going like crazy, but that's simply not the case anymore. For example, there are a lot more people using Windows 95 still than Windows ME, and these two OSes are basically compatible with each other. Meaning that it was perfectly safe for the Windows 9X user to purchase a computer with Windows ME on it and expect that his software would still run.
This isn't the case with Windows XP, and it is going to cause Microsoft more than its share of fits. Unless Microsoft discontinues Windows ME completely there are still going to be some people who will prefer it. Especially if it allows them to buy a less expensive computer.
As for developers, my guess is that they will almost certainly continue to develop software that runs on Win 9X. After all, that's where all of the customers are, and Windows XP doesn't really have any "features" that are so compelling that it would cause developers to want to narrow their market to just Windows XP users. Even Microsoft makes sure that new versions of their desktop software runs on Windows 95.
Once again, we'll see. They have got a lot of momentum, and they have the preload market locked up. But times are tight, and Windows XP is just an OS. In many ways it is less desireable to the home and small business user than Windows 9X, and Microsoft's new draconian IP rights technologies are not going to make people happy. A slow quarter for the computer market that was attributed to customer dissatisfaction with Windows XP would send Microsoft back to the drawing board, and it would accelerate "alternatives" like never before.
At the end of the day the old adage "the customer is always right" is the surest way to maintain your customer base, and if Microsoft keeps their antics up they will eventually learn that the hard way. I am not saying that Windows XP will be the crack in the dam that starts the flood of customers away from Windows. Microsoft still has a fairly commanding lead on the desktop, for now. They would have to push the OEMs fairly hard for there to be any chance of an open revolt. But it's only a matter of time if Microsoft doesn't worry more about their customers.
There is nothing wrong with the WMA format, other than the fact that it isn't an open format (you can only get a WMA player from Microsoft or one of their licensees), and that is has content management built in (meaning it will be possible to tie your WMAs to one machine).
Now, if you can't imagine a day when you might want to play your music on a non-Microsoft licensed piece of equipment, and you can't imagine ever wanting to move your files from your present computer to a future one, then you are right, the WMA file format is great.
Yes, I realize that this is paranoid, and probably delusional. But why would Microsoft build this sort of stuff into the format if they weren't planning on turning the features on eventually.
Fortunately, we can just as easily use the Ogg Vorbis format, which is also very good, and get most of the benefits of WMA without all of the hassles (and potential hassles). It's patent free, it's licensed under a BSD style license, and it is supported in all of the more popular players (including some upcoming hardware based players). My guess is that WMA will soon be the medium of choice for the music industry, and Ogg Vorbis will be the medium of choice for everyone else.
Good enough and less expensive always wins.
That's why I think that Windows XP is doomed unless Windows ME is taken off of the market.
The same could easily be said for Windows XP. Believe it or not Microsoft has got to sell Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have. This is nearly as dangerous for Microsoft as if the user had switched to Linux. Remember, Microsoft's biggest competitor isn't Corel, or Oracle, or IBM, or even the amorphous "Linux," Micrsoft's biggest competitor is previous versions of their own software.
Even worse issues like games and compatibility with work also make it more likely that people will stick with what they have. I don't know of any businesses that have rolled out Windows XP (nor do I know of any that have done a serious desktop rollout of Windows 2000, for that matter). They should be making their operating system as attractive to buyers as they possibly can. Instead they are lining up an initiative to treat their customers as copyright breaking thieves. Things like WMA and the new copy protection scheme aren't likely to entire current Windows users to this new OS.
Meanwhile Linux will continue to grow. naysayers have been predicting its imminent demise since it's first arrival on the scene, and they have always been spectacularly wrong. The reason for this is simple, Linux is too darned useful. It's price tag is a siren song for hackers and entrepreneurs everywhere, and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that keeps Linux alive is negligible. Microsoft can't bankrupt Linux, it can't buy Linux, and it can't intimidate enough Linuxers to make a difference.
This doesn't make Linux better than Windows. I personally don't think that Linux is ready for the desktop, for example. But it does guarantee that Linux will keep growing, and that it will continue to become a more viable alternative every day. If Microsoft continues to misuse their customers they will someday find that most of them are jumping ship.
Firstly, most users don't use Linux; their applications and the boundaries of their comfort zone (they're not hardcore hackers or open-source zealots, remember, but ordinary people who don't care about computers as long as they do the job) keep them bound to Windows; therefore, it would be far easier for them to switch to WMA.
Secondly, the goal of this is to encourage those producing content (i.e., unsigned bands, musicians, &c) to use WMA instead of MP3. If MP3 can only be heard by those savvy and picky enough to download WinAmp and WMA works out of the box, guess which they'll post on their web site?
Mind you, this seems to be, from the article, just about the audio encoding feature of MS's standard software. It will play MP3s at full rate (for the time being; though auto-degrading them in the name of defending copyright may be on the board), and you can create MP3s with other software (and presumably those who actually publish content will obtain such software).
If J. Random Newbie wants to use a proprietary Microsoft format for storing their ripped CDs on their home PC, it doesn't really affect MP3. Though in a few years time, a generation of users will associate audio with WMA, and MP3 being as obscure as Type 1 fonts on a PC, support for MP3 may be dropped across the board.
Copy control may be exactly why Linux on the desktop can only decline.
To whit: consumers will demand that their machines play media. Media producers (Hollywood, the Recording Racket, &c.) will not sanction any formats that's not locked down to the hilt. It is impossible to make a "trusted client" player on any system where the filthy thieving user can recompile the kernel to capture audio (oops, there goes your Secure Audio Path!) or bypass anti-debugging protection and pull encryption keys out of memory images.
If consumer Linux succeeds, it will be on sealed devices where the user cannot replace the kernel without voiding the warranty (and probably committing a felony under the DMCA).
Most people (who aren't information-wants-to-be-free radicals) don't care about formats, as long as the magic box works when they push the button. Less support for one file format when there are others provided (such as Windows Media) won't make them make the effort to download the extra software.
As for MP3 support, other companies may drop it as well. Do you think AOL Time Warner will zealously defend WinAMP's playback of uncontrolled MP3s, or (at the behest of their music division) drop it as soon as WMA becomes the dominant format, perhaps even encouraging users to migrate?
Most people (outside of here) use only Windows on the desktop. Non-Microsoft platforms are irrelevant from a numbers perspective.
By supporting non-MS media formats, a media producer would get as much extra market share as by translating into Esperanto.
By that argument, blocking the distribution of open-source DVD decoders is also restraint of trade, and is clearly not allowed. Though that's not what the courts said.
If Microsoft frame their restrictions on CD ripping (i.e., requiring ripping applications to be signed, and signing only those which strictly enforce copy control, or even only their own) as a measure to prevent piracy of recordings, they will most probably get away with it.
How do you participate in your culture then? By vegetating in front of your television, remote in hand? By sending feedback tto its creators through buying products advertised on the shows? Can you actually interact with it, or are you stuck just passively consuming it like tube-fed nutrients?
This is not being elitist; there is culture at all levels, though you're more likely to find it in the streets around your home than in the committee-scripted, machine-made TV shows beamed down from on on high.
The mass media is not culture. Culture is not something made by the beautiful freaks of Hollywood and an army of marketroids and handed down from the megacorps to the hungry, bored consumer masses below; culture is something people create and interact and participate in. And buying consumer goods product-placed in TV shows doesn't count as participation in culture.
If you want to see culture, go to a band venue and see some live bands, or to an art exhibition, or read a book. But if you don't make the effort to participate, it is not culture. Purchased experiences don't count.
There is little difference between a sedentary, passive couch potato and the most benighted barbarian; in fact, it is arguable that most "primitive" societies, with their rituals and oral traditions, have infinitely more culture per capita than contemporary Western consumerist society.
However, all that they said is that their recording software wouldn't record MP3s at a higher rate than 56k. So this leaves one of two things. Either
Either way you cut it, I think it smells like rotten fish and I'll resist it as long as I possibly can.
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Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Ogg Vorbis for OS/2
The only reason that MP3s are used more is because they are the standard now and since there are so much more of them out there compared to WMA, they will remain as the prime music format...until some radically different format comes out
Actually, mp3 is used more than wma because mp3 is an OPEN standard. It is supported on just about EVERY platform out there (win, mac, *nix, BSD, Be, etc...). It's good...it's small...it's easy...it's well-supported...it's portable...and it works.
In order for ANY format to "replace" mp3 as a "de facto" standard, it will have to match or beat mp3 on all of these points. wma doesn't do that. I'ts only supported on platforms MS sees fit to support it on. It's not portable - with all the copy-protection crap. Yes, it may compress better while still retaining sound quality - but compression isn't everything.
...ahem..."Cartman". One word.
CuteRip works just fine.
Andrew van der Stock
Windows Xp is targeted first and foremost as a consumer OS. It will be replacing Win Me, which in my personal opinion is excellent. No more DOS! No more instability.
Anyway, Win2K has not been, and is not a flop. Most of the places I'm working at now are getting ready to deploy it as SP1 is out, SP2 is on the way, and more large sites have done the guinea pig bit for them, so they, too, can be lemmings.
However, I do agree with you, there are certain business practices that Microsoft needs to stop and consider before doing or else this will be point historians will point at, and say "Microsoft's decline started in 2001, when customers balked at..." Microsoft is completely customer driven, and if the customers do not come across, then they are stuffed.
Andrew van der Stock
I say never let facts get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing article on /. For the very, very few of you using beta 2, the following registry key is of interest.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlaye r\ Settings\MP3Encoding]
"LowRate"=dword:0001f400
Just change it. The above will change it 128k (from 56k). The UI shows this and reflects it.
Also Media Player 8 will allow you to encode .wma files without setting the license keys. I'm not sure that this will make it to the final release, or even WMP9, but ...
Andrew van der Stock
/. ... Microsoft ... FUD... where to begin? Let's start with some facts from a beta tester.
In beta 2, the supplied MP3 encoder gets its Low Rate setting from the registry. This is set at the factory to 56k. You can go into the registry and change 56k to 128k or whatever. And it works, but 64k .wma files sound better than 128k mp3 files, and use less than half the space. And, so far, you can continue to turn off licensing your .wma files.
There are no NTFS or other deliberate data corruption ploys. I have existing MP3 files that play just fine in WMP and in WinAmp (which also continues to work).
CuteRip, my favorite ripper before WMP, continues to work, and continues to encode at whatever setting I set it to. WMP 8 plays these files just fine. But compared to WMP8, CuteRip is feature poor and slow. WMP8 not only goes and grabs the titles without paying for it, it retrieves album art work and orders it properly for you in your media library. As soon as you start ripping in WMP8, it starts playing the encoded files, and it encodes both .wma or .mp3 on my PIII/700 laptop about 3x real time. It's flawless. There seems to be no penalty for playing whilst ripping. It has digital and analog error correction if your CDs have a few scratches like mine do.
Microsoft may or may not ship a MP3 encoder with WMP 8, but it is in beta 2. Microsoft may or may not ship WMP 8 with the ability to turn off licensing .wma files, but it is in beta 2.
Sorry for the barrage of facts. I'm now returing you to your regularly scheduled fact-free Microsoft bash.
Andrew van der Stock
In other words, stuff that Linux has been doing for well on 3 years already. RipperX will let you not only play and rip at the same time, but it will rip the next song off the drive while encoding the current song -- this used to save me a bunch of time when I ran it on my P166; not so much on my Athlon 1ghz, though. It uses cdparanoia to do the scratch repair and such.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
WinXP will be leased, not bought. It will contact a server at Microsoft headquarters every n days to confirm whether it needs "system updates" or not. And if your net connection is down for more than k days, your system will refuse to run, so don't think you can just pull the ethernet jack and use a (crippled) system.
If a program to use your .FMS extension ever gets more than 1,000 users, Microsoft will patch the operating system to exclude it, and within a few days your workaround will stop working.
This will happen back and forth a few times until 99% of the userbase gets thoroughly sick of it and uses whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use. Ease-of-use, slow and steady, wins the race.
Don't think Microsoft will zap out your program from Redmond? Think DirecTV. They own the operating system from boot to shutdown. No matter how clever you are, they will take your program down remotely.
That's the short-term fix. In the long-term, 5 to 10 years, you will find that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers will team up to create an audio standard which requires you to know a secret key to put data to your computer's speakers. If you don't apply to Microsoft for a special license, your program will be unable to make noise -- without going through Microsoft's API, of course, which will make only noises guaranteed not to infringe copyright, like boops, beeps, or files stored in whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use.
Enterprising hackers will of course find and steal secret keys, so that they can release freeware MP3 players that run on Windows. But again, as soon as these programs get popular enough to show up on Microsoft's radar, the operating system will download the new patches which specifically forbid these programs from working.
Try to understand. Microsoft's eventual plan is that you will not own your computer anymore. They will own your computer, and lease its use to you on very specific licensing terms. Their long-term goal is that people who try to use their computers like Turing machines, thinking they can make them do anything they want, will go to jail.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Okay... i like how the article says that MP3 is the only format that napster distributes (let's assume for a minute NAPSTER is the one doing it). So... um. How long do they think it will take before napster scans your drive for other formats? Seriously. Are people this blinded by the word technology? They think that there is some magical technological force at work here? Napster just shares files. People will use other programs to play MP3s other than Media Player and Real. What a concept. "Hey this sounds better with WinAmp, I'll use that." Wow, technology==magic.
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they are trying to kiss the government's ass and limit their exposure to supporting "an illegal activity". They are "doing their part" to end this crap.. I guess it is a lot like them trying to end the pirating of Windows itself..
I don't run Windows, nor will I probably ever install XP (who knows though), and I am glad for this fact... Even though I am not a huge fan of MP3's, I do have some and I think that this is a bad consumer move for MS.
dont underestimate the power of large groups of lusers...
:(
I could be wrong, but from what I have been seeing for the last few years, the clueless morons are buying more and more computers. Not that they understand them, but they are getting them. I fear the lusers are still a minority compared to the total number of computer users.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
You do realize that from recent articles comming from M$ employees (Yes, I'm being to lazy to look up the /. review) they like BSD license, which to me says they are using allot of BSD code. W2k is rather stable, not perfect, but I would never go back to dealing with w98 or nt4. So the stability had to come from somewhere...
maybe its bsd with a windows gui?
M$ will never truly catch up with unix, but they are trying, now if they could quit tripping over their own innovation.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Well, I have had a chance to see the new windows "Whislter" (or whatever its named) the other day, well to say the least I wasn't impressed. It reminds me of the win95 to 98 upgrade...take 95 and add some new graphics, and they were done. It took a second edition of win98 to make it almost bearable. The new windows is a w2k makover, the start button pulls up the integrated ms web page. Although you can set it to work like normal, this looks to be the moron's version of windows, designed for the webtv owner.
As for integrated software, I have toyed with win ME. The media player is not that great, and why in the world would you use that when there is quite a few quality mp3 player/rippers out there. Musicmatch jukebox is my favorite right now, and it can rip cd's with the best of them.
As for replacing mp3, well that will not really happen on the local computer. Where it will happen is the paid for downloads that will soon become available. That is where real and ms will get thier hooks into the people. They won't be able to leagaly stop windows users from playing mp3's or stop programs from doing it properly either, but they can start replacing the leagally downloadable version.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
Honestly, I don't think ms is really concerned with us. The target victim is the moron who really doens't understand any of this. They buy a computer with windows pre-installed and use whats there. They dont even realize they can dload something better. Now they decided to rip a cd, big step for them, and the windows format sounds better. To your average moron they think ms is wonderful because they make the music sound better than mp3. Although this isnt true, they don't realize this and to them its true.
Also all the buy it online music will start changing to this format, and for the moron it just confirms thier conviction ms format is better.
Try as we might its the moron that lets these things get out of hand. Due to lack of knowledge...or desire to get the knowledge, they accept what is handed to them regardless that it smells like crap. They just don't care.
If ignorance is bliss, the world is full of blissful people
It's here already. It's called Secure Audio Path. Windows ME can do it, and XP will ship with it built in. See this, among other items.
The idea is that with compliant audio hardware--presumably all audio hardware within a year or two--an encrypted stream will be handed to "smart" audio hardware. If it's a secured media format, it needs to be decrypted, upon authorization, by the hardware. If it's unencrypted, it will only play if it's not watermarked. Similar work has been done on video hardware that would refuse to display cracked, watermarked video streams.
Even if you have Linux drivers for this hardware, and even if you can get to your BIOS settings, which Microsoft now demands be undocumented onscreen as a condition to granting hardware certification, and somehow manage to install Linux on this new hardware, the audio hardware is doing rights management for you.
Air supply thus cut off. Checkmate.
You can record MP3s up to 320 Kbps in the Plus version of RealJukebox. Just because you can't do this in the free version doesn't mean you can't do it at all.
What, exactly, is the value for me the consumer in buying this POS operating system anyway?
My apps won't work, the interface is dumbed down and therefore aggravating, backwards compatibility is questionable, and let's not forget the damn thing won't even be servicable for two more service packs!
What? What the fsck is the POINT?
Honestly, I'm glad I've been looking into Linux, because I'm going to FORCED onto Linux!
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I know this isn't going to stop 3rd party developers from providing solutions but with 90% of the computing population willing to take whatever is handed to them Pre-Installed, this could corrupt MP3's usefullness as a sharing technology.
IMHO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If Microsoft wasn't a monopoly ( even in the eyes of the US courts ) which used that power to prevent products from getting to the PC users then your argument is acceptable. But that is NOT the case. I like the fact that some very nice software is free but what Microsoft did to Netscape and many others is BAD for the industry and bad for users. The fact that there is a operating system, which is free, has nothing to do with what Microsoft is doing with MP3's on pre-installed software and has everything to do with what Microsoft has done in the past to prevent competition in a open market. What Microsoft does is not within the framework of the laws governing capitalism....
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I wonder if the customers asked for Microsoft to downgrade the quality of MP3 recording capabilities? I wonder if customers asked for a non-standard Java implementation? I wonder if customers asked for a booting systems which makes it really hard to boot other OS's?
This is another Microsoft Embrace/Extend/Extinguish tacktic which gives them the right to dictate the contend on CUSTOMERS computers. What's next html, XML, smtp, or any open standard? Would Quicktime, Real, or other proprietary technology also get downgraded by Microsoft Pre-Installed applications?
I think THAT is why people are upset about this. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
On Linux:
.ogg files and have them converted to CDA files. Yet.
Ripper: Grip
Player: Xmms (with plugin)
On Windows:
Ripper: CD-Ex (untested)
Player: Sonique, WinAmp(with Plugin)
What's the next excuse?
Oh, I've got one: MP3CD Players occasionally play WMAs and never play Ogg files. Yeah, and you can't DnD
Ogg Vorbis is a great format. I wish it luck.
The party's over as soon as the ad-ware people figure out how to use the banner images as a decryption key to unlock part of the program. Then, not only will your ad-ware fail to work without it's constant ad supply, but it will be illegal under the DMCA for you to try to crack those restrictions because they are used as encryption to control access to a copyrighted work.
0 1 - just my two bits
The big draw for corporations to use Windows is MS Office and Outlook. It'll be a cold day in hell when those apps migrate to linux.
0 1 - just my two bits
When Wine can emulate games, we're all set.
It's coming. DirectX support is underway. The new cvs versions of wine can use hardware acceleration for Direct3D games. I've seen screenshots and howtos (don't have the address handy, sorry) for setting up Half-Life to run under wine.
0 1 - just my two bits
errorneously written as as
Hehehe.
Great! Yet Another Reason Not To Upgrade To Windows XP
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Sure, but this will also cause large corporations (groups that actually read the EULA) not to adopt this product because they won't be able to develop cross-platform applications for internal use, per what you say.
-Steve
Does anyone not remember that Windows NEVER came with a high quality MP3 codec? They had a rather restricted codec (56kbps, I believe) which was licensed from FhG included with Media Player 7 (I believe). Big deal... Just install your licensed codec and things are back to normal. I highly doubt that anyone at Microsoft would be ignorant enough to limit the types of codecs which can be installed, as this would eliminate the possiblity that XP be used for Audio / Video production.
-Steve
I just call em "ogg"s. It's two less syllables than the clunky "mp3" name, and sounds kinda neat. :)
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I find it amusing that they are trying what history has shown has always failed: Balkanization. It didn't work for Metternick and it won't work for Gates.
They are still attempting to lock-in their user base.
If that had worked we'd all still be using the length of the king's thumb (le pouce) to measure lengths of cloth, using different sized wax cylinders to make recordings and forget about power utilities: AC vs. DC and a bazillion different voltages would insure that there was no such thing as an electronic industry.
There is a thriving film and camera industry because T.A. Edison held his thumb and fore-finger 35 milimeters apart when asked how big film should be and everybody made that a standard and followed it.
That's not to say that there aren't other film formats: 120mm, 70mm, 140mm.
But 35mm and the SLR hand-held are overwhelmingly accepted for a host of uss because the form fits humans and that's all there is to it.
MP3s being denied to consumers because its inconvenient for M$. Please, that approach's about as smart as left-handed monkey wrenches.
MP3 is not the ultimate format, but, like T.A.E. finger-width, its a good base, until some plutocrat decides to try to deprive consumers of what they want.
Now is there any doubt left that Bill Gates and the other playground bullies just want your money and don't give a crap about you and would leave your broken bodies by the side of the road as they walk away with your wallet from the scene of the crime?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What is happening, and what will continue to happen, is that the corporate interests will come together to limit the consumer's IP rights not through legislation (though they are trying that route very successfully as well) but through the coercive force of product lines. By making it very inconvinient for the average consumer (and face it folks, /. readers aren't average consumers of computer gear!) to excercise their rights under current copyright law, the manufacturers can errode those rights.
If you can't make a recording for fair use without hacking hardware and software, then you won't be making that recording, if you are the average consumer. And after a few years of virtually no-one excercising their rights to fair-use, the notion that those rights exist will slowly be eroded and THEN it will be far easier to pass legislation outright stripping those rights from the public.
The problem with this, and similar stories, is that no effective public information campaign will be fought against it. Anyone who stands up and yells "foul" will be shot down as either an evil napster-esque hacker/cracker or an anti-Microsoft bigot. In either case you will be considered safe to ignore by the average consumer - adn the result will be that teh sheople will do what the corporations want them to do.
The only real way to counter this trend is to get congress to pass legislation that mandates that any consumer recording/playback device include the ability for people to excercise their fair use rights on all media forms that are handled in recording/playback -- either in the product or in an optional add-on. This will stop the trend of making products that are "broken" with regards to fair-use by design. Unfortunately, it will have the side-effect of increasing cost of consumer goods, as the corporate entities will use that sort of law as an excuse to raise prices.
Of course, such a law will never happen, congress is far to beholden to the big corporations to ever do anything to actually protect the people from bad corporate policies. So those of us who are clued can watch in frustration as our ability to excercise our first amendment rights are slowly and meticulously stripped from us by the refusal of corporations to provide the consumers the means to excercise those rights. But we'll all be happy 'cuase we'll have such nice cheap products to entertain us!
Most folks out there don't know how to rip MP3s. They either need to get help from a friend, or they need apps bundled with Windows. Otherwise they're just left wondering "what is a ripper?" For them, shit vs. cake is going to be a question of crippled MP3 or full-quality WMA. With the scales so tipped, MP3 is not the cake!
sounds like your answer to all this evil is simple...
Linux + BSD.
the two things that really pisses off almost every lawyer and software manufacturer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This looks prety anticompetitive to me, (no suprise really). So how is AOL going to feel when WinAMP is no longer a conduit to everyones desktop? Any other takers out there?
So, they'll limit the quality of what can be recorded on a WinXP machine. But they're not talking about limiting the quality of what can be played on a WinXP machine, or, indeed, any OS.
So, those who are recording MP3's simply don't use Windows XP to do it. Use Windows 98. Use a Mac (which, in its current TV ads, is encouraging people to record music CD's). Use Linux/Solaris/whatever.
I really don't think that this is going to have a big effect on music piracy here -- I think it will let Microsoft say they tried.
Dejaffa
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
I never liked to be the one caught with a dick in my mouth.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
So as long as the death penalty is carried out with a device that's computer controlled instead of something where a person "pushes the switch" then it's ok?
Personally, I'm for the death penalty.. you commit a pre-meditated murder (and no, being the switch pursher doesn't count).. you blew your chance, and you deserve to die. End of story.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
All the more reason to agressively push for the adoption and penetration of Ogg Vorbis.
By know, everyone in the know should have checked out the Xiphophorus company homepage, and taken a look at Ogg and Vorbis.
If we can create a Napster-like groundswell for an open audio codec such as Vorbis, then it will not matter if Windows XP ships with only Windows Media Audio and the Windows Media Player. The fact is, while WMA is good, it isn't open or free, and and the Windows player isn't as strong as WinAmp or XMMS.
Free is good. That is why Napster did so well. If the downloadable audio market is saturated by ".ogg" files and flooded with high quality and free audio players, then Ogg Vorbis has a chance of beating those nasty little ".wma"'s.
So you're trying to tell everyone that WindowsXP won't play WAV or CDA files anymore? Yeah good fucking logic you've got there. THe majority of audio formats around right now have zero copyright protection as most of them started out for use in sound sampler software. If you're so fucking concerned don't use WindowsXP and stop bitching about it. You're acting like Microsoft is somehow expected to write an operating system for the people by the people, they write an OS to make fucking money and can impliment anything they want into the OS in order to make money. It's called capitalism.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Well unfortunately for you Microsoft writes their fucking operating system. They can do whatever they damn fucking please with their software. How come the double standard? Linux zealots cream their pants howling about Microsoft's lack of interoperability yet run either GNOME or KDE? What the FUCK is your fucking problem. Microsoft writes their OS to their specifications as does anyone else who writes software. In this little concept the world calls capitalism, you sell things. Often times you only sell things because your product has scant few extra features than your competition. No one bitches at Ford because their cars won't accept Mopar parts do they?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Fuck Netscape, if they can't figure out how to get their product in front of users they DESERVE to go out of business. Shit dude, when Microsoft started packaging IE with Windows people spent the time to download Netscape. That was of course until Netscape decided a quality product was not something they would ship. Users want working software and IE worked when Netscape didn't. What Microsoft does is the same thing every other fucking successful company does. Where do you fucking people get these ideas thato ne corporate entitity is in any way more wholesome than another? Just because AMD is the underdog in the processor market doesn't make them a better corporation. IBM did the same shit Microsoft does now for YEARS and no one really gave a shit. My Ford analogy works just fucking fine because Ford has a monopoly on their niche of the market. I want to use Mopar parts in a mustang god dammit but Ford won't let me. I think I'm going to sue them! You fucking idiots.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Compressed and uncompressed media alike are both run through audio out drivers (either direct WAV out or DirectSound). There's nothing in DirectSound output that prohibits the playing of compressed media. As long as I don't use Microsoft's decoder in WindowsXP it doesn't give a flying fuck what music I'm playing.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Another great "new feature" from those "innovators" at Microsoft - Grip has been able to rip mp3s at top speed for quite a while now. Sounds like WM7 was a great step back from the existing tools for mp3.
DVD playback would be nice, though, but I'm not sure what I'd do with album art. I don't sit there and watch my mp3 player, I launch it and then listen to music while doing other stuff. I suppose the art would be nice to have if I got curious about it, but it's not really a world-changing feature IMHO.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
How prophetic - in fact, Fraunhoefer is already starting to charge creators of encoders. Just because they haven't totally cracked down on it yet doesn't mean that they won't do so in the future, just like Unisys did with GIFs.
I agree that fragmentation is bad, but I don't see any alternatives at this point. I guess we'll see if using a free format is important enough to people for them to pass up any compression improvements from WMA. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for the non-/. crowd, though.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
wow! someone who categorizes ripping mp3s as real work! any openings at your company?
Non impediti ratione cogitationis.
When are these marketing folks going to learn that there is no product without the customer. The customer is the one who ultimately determines which products will exist. Microsoft is really going to hurt themselves with this strategy, since people will not upgrade to Microsoft's latest and greatest, and use their proprietary technology.
.mp3 files on a users harddrive. So the user has to convert all their .mps's to MS format now? This is crazy. Even if it is done in batch, you still end up with a proprietary standard, which your other family members or friends will not be able to use until they have succumb to the Microsoft muscle.
The latest issue of "Linux Journal" has a figure of 500 to be the average number of
Doesn't Microsoft remember the reason why they got into business in the first place? Didn't they want to do away with all the proprietary standards, and open things up? Seems to me like they are going to strangle themselves with the philosophy that they tried so hard to undo.
This is the next DivX. (As in the dvd pay per view ripoff scam.) The consumer who knows and cares about MP3s does have a technical ear to the ground with respect to this technology and the word will get out.
Last weekend my 2 sisters (technically unsavvy) cornered me at a family party and asked me if Linux was ready on the desktop yet. I said Yes and there was a brand new distribution in test (Mandrake 8) that I would be happy to install on their windows machines. They are both suffering from windows bitrot on 1 year old pentium III machines and hate it.
Yep. The consumer can just Eat Elsewhere because they are not liking what Micro$oft is feeding them.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Nowhere does it say that they won't play MP3s.
Looks like Microsoft is at it again. If you can't
beat him eliminate them with their OS.
I hate monopolies.
I'm tempted to go completely OGG now.
john
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
Tesco are the UK's biggest supermarket, you know... :-)
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
nobody uses media player to encode mp3's. media player doesn't do that! they are ADDING that functionality, but only up to 56k. and now they're going to get condemned on slashdot doing that, and probably also for introducing a format that sounds better and is smaller.
There was an artical on Motly fools detailing a conversation between a Mac user and a Windows user.
The Windows user was trying to convert the Mac user. He failed.
The Mac user was defending his choice. His defence was the same issue detailed in this artical.
The Windows user insisted that this was not so. The Mac user had to have gotten it from a propaganda website (this is Ms FUD-Speak for "Slashdot")... Now here is the kicker...
Here is the artical... he COULD NOT HAVE gotten it from Slashdot... It's only been Slashdotted... just now...
Ops...
I don't actually exist.
The consummers.. um well no.... Microsoft just kinda stuffed Windows down the consummers throats.
The PC makers... well no... same problem...
IBM? Maybe... and even IBM was tricked...
It seems Bill Gates made Microsoft god...
To bad he isn't running the show.. Or maybe it's a good thing...
To the dislusioned Windows masses...
I recomend looking between Linux and Mac Os...
If your idea of upgrade means openning the case.. Linux... if your idea of upgrade means buying a new system.. Mac Os X...
Before anyone gets the wrong ideas...
Mac Os us very powerful and Linux is easy.
Linux however was designed for the expert/programmer/hacker from ground up and just caters better to the expert userbase better. Experts won't find MacOs lacking...
Linux is easy but it's still stiff in the learning area... New users will find Linux lacking...
This is why I recomend this way...
I don't actually exist.
The sad thing is, XP has a lot of good things going for it, too. Things like the ability to detatch processes and run them after you log off, etc. I mean, it's nothing Unix hasn't had for years, but it's a step in the right direction.
/. story awhile back, no? if not, forgive my mistake) and now this....
But it seems that for everything they do *right* in XP, they do something else wrong. Changing the way CDRoms are read, only allowing signed drivers to be installed (this was in a
I have a copy of XP beta 2. What they mean by "buit-in software" is just Windows Media Player. Anyone who has the latest version of Windows Media Player knows that it rips audio cd's using the wma format. This is the same thing that is built into XP. They've just further integrated Media Player. For instance, if you highlight a bunch of MP3's, a button in the new "Task Bar" appears that says "Play All". When you click on it, Windows Media Player launches (this can be changed however). This article doesn't really report anything new. So calm down, there's nothing to worry about.
- "Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system, Windows XP, according to the report.""Under Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second -- MP3 music "sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst who researches Internet audio issues for Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. (Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality.)"
This part sounds like an easy thing to overcome. The problem is...- "if MS somehow disabled or crippled the ability of other MP3 encoders to work under XP."
This sounds more like Microsoft's past practices. (1) Microsoft has in the past, for the benefit of its customers, crippled their OS in ways the caused odd failures with their windows product line. Those targeted were DR DOS, Novell DOS, and Borland, to name a few. (2) With Microsoft's current mode of updating, they do not need to ship a crippled XP, they can progressively over time reduce the ability of other MP3 encoders functionality. This would be done as part of their BUG fixes. Try to name a MS patch which has not broken something new. This set of patches will just happen to have a target.In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Moreover, since Microsoft would have to pay a $2.50 licensing fee to Fraunhofer for each copy of Windows shipped, it seems as though they have a very valid reason for not wanting to encode at rates above 56kb/s.
;)
It's a no-brainer; because it would cost Microsoft, financially and in terms of market share, to support someone else's high-quality standard, they simply won't. This decision is no more malicious than any of Microsoft's other moves. I'd be willing to bet that if Microsoft had been able to include support for encoding high-quality MP3s for nothing, they would have.
Furthermore, someone in the WSJ article argues that if Microsoft ships something with Windows it will become the de facto standard. How about Sound Recorder? Wordpad? Paint? MS Telnet? Hyperterminal? How about Microsoft's ubiquitous MSN icons every time you install anything? I think that there is ample precedent that if one of the default Windows programs is greatly lacking in features or quality, people will go out onto the net or to their local store and buy something that does what they want. I can't think of an example of a product that was seriously crappy that won out simply because it was in Windows. Except, that is, for Windows itself.
Dream on. Windows 2000 is doing pretty well, and probably XP will do well. It's gonna have some innovative UI features which should spark a lot of interest among users.
MSFT has always done well with their operating systems and there's no reason to believe anything has changed. Corporations tend to buy Microsoft products; there are lots of companies with tens of thousands of workstations running NT or 2000 and MS Office, and they're all going to eventually get XP, and all new machines will have XP preinstalled.
I guess we'll eventually have to dual boot to Linux to play our MP3s.
--
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
It seems like Microsoft, not the customer is the one trying to slip out of a license :).
I've never used MS products to record or play MP3's, so I could care less about MS's lack of support.
Compare all of this to Apple, who just released the best MP3 encoder/ripper/song manager/cd burner program I've ever used, iTunes. Oh yeah, Apple makes their product free to everyone, too. With OSX running both MS Office, apple apps and all of my favorite unix tools, why would I upgrade to Win XP instead of throwing out my PC and getting a G4? Maybe even a Titanium G4 with a GeForce3... :)
-m
This is sensationalized, like everything else lately.
MS Said that 'Media player will not record mp3's at above 56kbps, because MS does not want to pay royalties to Fraunhoffer/whoever...'
They also mentioned that 'Current recording software seems buggy under WinXP... of *course* it does, with MS changing api's and shit. LOTS of stuff is buggy. Wait for it to finish, and for software to catch up.
This is no big deal; it just means MS isn't putting it's corporate support behind mp3, and will instead try to push their own medium (they did all along; they just put mp3 support in so people woudl hopefully stop using winamp, because winamp could have taken over the media player market... look how MS came out with skins as well). MS hates to lose any sort of mindshare, even on their little built-in utilities.
This is not a conspiracy to sabotage the OS into refusing to play mp3... or refusing to record it.
This is reporters just sensationalizing over nothing, just like the Linus -vs- OS-X fiasco.
Microsoft has limited the bitrate at which Windows' built-in recorder will record MP3s (who uses this anyway?).
Also, there are compatibility issues with some of the other 3rd party rippers right now (no word on which), but very likely these aren't by design, and will be worked around before long.
Any word on Ogg functionality on XP?
How could you listen to 20 mp3's at the same time? Are you talking about instances of the player? If you're talking about queuing mp3's, I do that with WMP and select around 50 at a time. What a freakin' nonsensical argument. I've run BeOS, and couldn't find anything useful to do with it, even with it's mythical "media OS" title. I understand the driver issues, and the application issues, but frankly, once you take those away, there ain't much left to BeOS.
Well, not exactly altering the conversion process, they will simply make other encoders crash, so you will be forced to use their encoder, which does exactly what it advertises to do to your content so smile :)
I'd hate to be a Windows Tech Support guy these days ;) -- I'm sure quite a lot of people will call their designated helpdesk about defective speakers and whatnot in the wake of this. Oh dear...
;)
Glad I'm in Linux Support now
Regards,
Consumers CLEARLY want Mp3. They have invested hundreds and thousands of dollars in MP3 players, for home, office, car, and to stick in their pockets. They have lots of skins and plugins for PC-based players, and hundreds or thousands of files.
And Microsoft comes along and decides that consumers dont really want MP3; instead, they will want whatever MS decides.
Can anyone else see how twisted and fucked up that is? IT runs completely counter to the idea of a market - consumer demand isn't driving the market with Microsoft at the helm. Rather, corporate greed is.
Frankly, I'm not not surprised something like this happened. MS wants to control our digital media, and this is one way to do it. I just hope something comes along to displace this sad announcement.
I thought that was just a system of cooperative poor-man's sonar primarily used in a recreational aquatic environment. You mean I gotta pay to play?
...Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Hey, Dave - I got something for you to eat, right here, pal.
let's look at the facts:
- M$ wants to cripple mp3 in favor of its own format
- this format sounds better in 64k than mp3 in 64k. big deal. i only listen to 192k and better music. at this bitrate, WMA is on par or lower quality than mp3 (depending on which review you trust).
- the format is copy protected, so i am in for a hassle whenever i want to make a copy for the car, windows crashes or has bugs, i want to listen to something before i buy...
- it is also owned by microsoft, whereas mp3 is owned by no-one and guaranteed to be there even if microsoft, IBM and Intel all simultaneously die.
- microsoft's sole and single purpose for this new format is to cash in on music purchased over the internet. M$ doesn't deny that, or even attempt to.
considering the history of the company and it's limitless megalomania - they even tried to _own_ the net, remember? - the only possible response is to bash the hell out of them. ignoring their silly schemes is not enough, as DPUs (dumbest possible user) will eat what they are fed.
oh, one more thing. the latest WMP supposedly has a pretty bad mp3 decoder. whoops... all of a sudden, all these mp3's sound very bad... >>so sorry. why not use our tasty format?
Did any body notice this little fact? - apparently they will break the CD-ROM interface somehow to prevent all CD-burning software running on XP to choke.
This smacks of the war between MS and Lotus eg "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"Personlly I'm amazed at how much we are becoming a victim that we ignore this over and over. Maybe P.T.Barnum was right 'A sucker is born every minute'
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Nah, it won't be a flop. Why? Because it will come pre-installed on every PC sold. Maybe people won't go out and buy an upgrade to it, but the next PC they buy *will* have it on it for sure.
do the divx ;-) codecs still work? I figure they would since they were RE'ed from the gorilla itself, but uh, do you know?
--
+&x
Yesterday's interview with Mr. Young. People don't want to run an operating system. They want applications. Keep it up M$. Linux, BSD, et.al. continues to grow daily.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If this will keep the average guy from unauthorized copying of music maybe the hard drive copy right protection system will take a rest. A problem with enforcing copy right is of course that it makes legal use very inconvienient. (What nerds do isn't that relevant given their relative numbers.) I wish them all the luck in this, and they will sure as hell need it.
... by the lack of short term recall most posters (at elast when browsing +3) seem to be exhibiting. Is this the same group that now regularly has to be reminded that the majority of slashdot visitors are using Windows and IE as their browsing plaform? Did I somehow miss the meeting where we all sat down to debate the technical merits of Windows Web browsers and decided that IE won out? No, I suspect that most here are like myself and simply changed to IE when the features and stability began to outstrip Netscape / Mozilla. It was simply a matter of convenience, since a "better" alternative (that is, IE) was readily available because of that oh-so-handy-but-not-evidence-of-monopoly bundling of browser and OS.
/. readership) will make the "informed" choice and ditch WMP in favor of some other ripper when they upgrade to XP is sheer lunacy.
That said, posters' naive assumptions that the majority of users out there (not limited to
Farber's got it right (maybe I shouldn't be deleting all his IP messages after all) when he says consumers will eat what's in front of them. Like it or not, for most consumers computers are an inconvenient appliance that they only use when they have to. It crashes too much, it responds to slowly, and software costs too much. People would feel the same way about TV if it took 10 seconds to change the channel, the way it does to load a graphics heavy Web site over dial-up.
My 2 cents.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
wookin' pa nub in all the wrong pwaces
It makes sense not to pay the fee and promote a technology you own to avoid having to pay ever again.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
This is obvious bait, Michael, so I'll take it. A statement, such as the one above, is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from a monopoly. The customer is going to have to settle with whatever we want? What kind of business practice is that in a normal market?
The correct answer, Microsoft, is that the consumer will get whatever he demands. This, and the active registration, is further proof that what the consumer wants does not matter to Microsoft. It is what THEY want.
I read about this before. In Windows 2000 it's only for drivers, and you have the *option* of using what Windows says is not guaranteed to work, etc., but in Windows XP, it most likely will require official signing for any app to actually work. Hence MS will be able to review apps, etc., and of course native ones like WMP 8.0 will be pushed.
However, what about whether Windows XP will *play* my 320kbit/sec MP3 backups of my albums? I don't use my original CD, etc., but make copies for the car, and MP3 for the computer. It could all go to shit really quickly for them if word gets around within months after XP shipping in the main consumer sites that XP stops you d/l songs, etc., .
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
The article does NOT say that the rent-a-center version of Windows will not play MP3 files. Neither does it say that it will be fundamentally crippled when it comes to the creation of MP3 files.
.DOC format is any indication, I wouldn't touch WMA with a ten foot pole. Why give M$ yet another way to create incompatibilities and headaches when you try to use someone else's products?
What it does say is that Microsoft will limit the ability of the built-in media creation tools to create MP3 files in favor of their own MWA format.
In other words it doesn't matter. Anyone wanting to create MP3s will simply use something else.
But to read the responses that people post, you'd think that XP had an anti-MP3 layer built in to the OS itself preventing both the playback of existing MP3's, as well as causing applications that can create them to crash.
A conclusion is a foolish thing to jump to.
If the word
In the big picture open standards are best, even if the standards are not as good as other standards that are proprietary.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This won't be a problem on Macs or Linux. Move to a better OS and you won't be restricted. Macs have always been the superior platform for multimedia including music production and playback. This just widens the gap.
Can you say...
Netscape!
Windows included IE. People were free to download and install Netscape Navigator. As time went on, fewer and fewer people used Navigator. People will use what is there UNTIL there is a VERY COMPELLING reason to upgrade and maybe not even then.
Funny, I had mine up over two months with little problms. I only recycled because I kicked the damned plug out! It's not what I use at home (the woman does though) but for business kinds of things it's pretty solid. I seldom log off, seldom shut down, and can go for months without recycle. I open as many as 60 apps at once too but that's with a gig of RAM and 2 CPUs :-)
WIN2K IS a decent OS and I'd take it over NT4 anyday of the week - just don't turn on that damned Active Directory crap! I slapped it on the woman's machine on top of WIN98 and she's quite happy. I'll do the same to my system when I'm satisfied it'll run my games well. It's on some of my servers now and while I'd love to run Linux on more than just a test system I won't until it's as easy to secure and setup as WIN2K is. Yes, that means GUI and not needing to wade through zillions of MAN files and text files. urse the Registry if you must but for the most part it's not so bad IMO. (shrug) WIN2K is much better than some of their previous OS, but ME is crap from what I can tell.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yeah, no chance that MSFT will allow you to know what their APIs are right? Who's stupid?! MSFT may have som hidden APIs (okay, yes they do have hidden function calls) but they do NOT hide all of their APIs or do things to prevent someone from writing code for their platforms or require them to buy a license from them. You're talking out of your ass! "Optimized for XXX" is no big deal - it will still most run older code and it will NOT "require" signed applications. Get a clue.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Kripes, you read the first few paras in a couple of those articles and it's damned obvious that nohting has changed. BooHoo I can't use Media Player to RECORD san MP3 - hell I didn't even know it would NOW!! Between MusicMatch, the RealPlayer crap Jukebox thing, and a zillion other apps who the heck would think to use the MSFT applet anyway? Don't use it now, won't use it then, they AREN'T crippling other applicaitons. Where's the story here? Oh, they want to push their format? Fine, figure out what makes it "better" if that's the case and put it into Vorbis. What's the big deal?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Informative?! Oh boy... The certificate stuff is only if the ADMINISTRATOR chooses to use it. You going to do that on your on box smart boy? Yeah right. I suppose you think MSFT won't "sign" an application just because it does something they might not "like"? I have this bridge, you interested in buying it? MSFT might not be the brightest bulb onthe porch where this stuff is concerned but they aren't quite 100% stupid...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
so the average aol idiot wont be able to partake in the art of pirating because windows ownz them... boofarkinhoo
whatever idiot idea the RIAA comes up with for this little encryption scheme of theirs... they're wasting their time and money and i cant believe dvd didnt teach them that
have you hugged a software/hardware creator today? to all of you with vision, values, mad skills, independent attitudes and maybe lots of money... you are my vision of the future of technology getting better, not worse.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
I thought the best quote was fom the Wall St Journal, where the use of an existing open standard is called "a big mess to clean up" that has to "attacked on many fronts".
Exactly! The music distribution industry is aligning istelf with the software distribution king in hopes that they will profit from MS goal of "rent an app" or "pay as you play". That is the new business model where anything is availlable to anyone anyplace anytime as long as your credit is good. "To see todays weather prediction please insert your credit card" only to be spammed by banner ads and 19 levels of click through to get your weather prediction that will undoubtedly be wrong anyway.
Isn't technology great?
Rick B.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
Is this a quote from Steve Jobs in 1984? The original 128 Mac and the Fat Mac were exactly like this. Totally non-upgradable, it wasn't until the Mac plus that there was anything you could upgrade (increase the memory only), and the Mac SE before there was an expansion slot.
Those that forget history are condemmed to repeat it.
I hate to say it but someone here has to:
People WILL NOT switch to linux to encode mp3s.
Mp3's aren't important enough to most people for them to care about the format they can and can't use. Don't even try thinking it. It's not going to happen. Most people won't even care if they can't encode high-quality mp3s. Average person with a computer has such crappy speakers they probably can't hear the difference between a 56kbps and 128kbps anyways, and they won't have to because they'll encode higher quality WMA files instead and suddenly, they have a nice sounding song.
Yes, I realize this is coming through as a troll, and rightfully so, but someone has to admit it. People aren't willing to re-learn everything (yes I realize they don't have to relearn everything, especially with KDE2 et al these days, but they don't know that) for a music format.
Fraunhofer is a huge research institute with massive economic and political power, but more importantly their licencing of MP3 is handled by Thomson/RCA which is huge in the USA. MS could not rip Thomson off and get away with it.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
I think you're stating the issue a little too simply. Sales may be slower of Windows 2000 than expected, but a LOT of companies are rolling off an older, less stable, and less secure OS like '95 and in the planning stages for 2000. Will everyone do XP? Not at first, but Microsoft is making some nice additions to Group Policies and the degree to which administrators can control their environment down to the desktop level.
Me, I use Win2K at home and love it. I know this is heresy on Slashdot anymore, but I remember in the earlier days when any post that had the word Microsoft in it didn't draw 500 people who commented about how evil MS is before they even read the story. Win2K (even at home!) is more stable and runs every game that I want to play. People will eventually go to XP. You can't expect the entire user base of Windows to stop at '98 and not go any higher. By the way, Windows ME does suck. Hard. 98SE is a much better version of the OS....
This isn't about some inherent switch in the OS that makes mp3's sound crappy. It's only if you use Microsoft's crappy media player to rip and encode your files. Those of us with any other jukebox program will do just fine at 192 and 256. :)
How did they do that? Has anyone reverse compiled their software? Is some sort of arithmetic encoding? Why can't we be as cool, or is this just FUD? I want smaller audio files too, but GPL tools to build, and play them.
this sig is deprecated
... is that he will embrace MP3s and then extend them with subliminal "BUY MICROSOFT SOFTWARE" messages when you play them back.
Call me paranoid but I don't want the soft voice of Bill Gates in my ear however close to the edge of perception.
Bob.
Everyone knows this except the people on the wrong side of the digital divide - which, increasingly, is no longer made of people too poor to have access to computers, but increasingly refers to those type of person who will say, after using XP, "Gee, I tried recording MP3 and it sounded really bad!!" In other words, the gullible, the old, and the stupid.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
It's not unbelievable, either. What applications need lots of fast, raw, error-corrected access to CD-ROMs? CD rippers, and that's about it. The games market, Real Media, etc, can be coerced into "optimizing" for XP.
And despite the "gee, whiz, this shoar will help lee-nux" posts, the only people who can rejoice over this are 1) Fraunhofer and 2) Real Media. I bet that 50% of the CDs out there are Real-Jukebox-ripped. Although proprietary and enshitted formats are the default, most people seem to figger it out and get mp3s (which goes to show how much computer illiteracy goes out the window when "free stuff" is the reward).
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Did anyone else have an obnoxious Compaq ad drift across their browser window while reading the WSJ story?
If most of the music out there is in MP3 format or if the P2P servers only accept MP3s then the windows user will want to rip MP3s or listen to MP3s.
The solution is simple. Anybody who runs a gnutella or napster like server simply rejects any files that are not MP3s. Joe Shmoe will end up being a leech sucking up MP3s but never uploading anything because like most windows users he is too stupid to learn anything. Eventually Jow Smoe can only swap with the other brittany spears fans.
That's all good because it suits the MPAA just fine.
War is necrophilia.
except, they will stop selling everything else, and stop assisting anyoner trying to devlop for any OS before Win2k.
Juln
So fundamentally, MS might be screwing themselves here, by breaking the software (more than likely, WMP) that people use. People use winamp because it's simple, gets the job done, and has a consistent interface. Many people use the DivX;) player or winamp as opposed to WMP for most of their media (in windows), since MS has already cripled their codecs and various other things fairly severely.
If MS makes it so other programs can't associate to .mp3's and such other than WMP, then I fear MS is going to have some further problems down the road. So much for the "we give the customers what they want", which was so lividly portrayed in the recent interview here on Slashdot. That was nothing more than a PR ploy, and contained nothing of factual ordinance.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Take a look at your own quote. "Under Microsoft's new restrictions... MP3 music 'sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater'..." . Your point-and-click newbie user will not know that the reason they can't get their music to sound good using "MP3" is because Microsoft's default software is hobbled to specifically generate a poor recording. This is not support for a format, but a bait-and-switch. And you know it.
The sad part here is not the low quality of this troll, but the fact that there are people who will honestly believe this garbage. David Farber was right.
You're right. nobody will use their software to encode MP3's. And the article states that it won't be able to prevent users from using 3rd party software to encode MP3's. This is no big deal, right? Musicmatch encodes MP3s natively!
If anything, we should be rejoicing, because once people figure out that they can't encode mp3's on Windows, but they CAN encode mp3's on Linux, guess which OS becomes more mainstream?
can anyone say imac? itunes? or i want my mp3s?
haledon....
i want to live life, not just go through the motions
Impressive.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
>Think about it, what keeps users coming back to Windows? Two things: 1. They already have the software, 2. They know how to use that software.
Linux is an OS. People are not going to reinstall/delete their harddrive over this. What about their games? What about compatiblility with what they use at work?
What about Apple?
Its not as simple as this.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Excitable person aren't you.
>Your nice, small, perfectly sounding *.wma files are totally useless to me for the following reasons.
This is your sentence. And this is where I was putting in the the Japanese/Anime reference to.
Its _just_ a file format, just like Amime is a comic. Yet you get all out of shape because of it. There are lot of Mac applications which are nice, small and perfect but totally useless to me, but you don't see many people going off on it.
Remember no one is forcing you to use this format.
>Market forces
Widen your definition to everyone in the market and not just MS and the consumers. The content providers want this protection. MS is going to provide it to them. Everyone, IBM, RealPlayer etc are trying to get their standards out there. Thats the market, thats the race, thats the market. Its about money, thats the market forces. Open your eyes. If it was only what the consumer wanted then everything would be of the highest quality and free.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
File and application sizes have never been a concern to Microsoft. Look at the size of downloads for a) a web browser, b) Real Player and c) a messaging client.
I'd never consider shifting to a proprietary format that is owned and controlled by an entity that can be sued by the RIAA.
Scenario:
1. People say boo about XP because they can just not use the approved player and wma works fine anyway.
2. MP3 declines into disuse since it sounds like crap comapred to wma.
3. Some distant release of Windows locks down the audio drivers so that only authenticated applications can use them at anything above 78 rpm.
4. MP3 players that do not conform to RIAA desires are locked out.
5. Someone is sued under DCMA for publishing a registry hack that circumvents these safeguards.
6. The next release of Windows "repairs" itself or finks to MS if anyone tampers with it. "I'm sorry, your driver checksum has failed, formatting drive c:"
The argument "this is not too bad" just doesn't wash in the longer term.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
"Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file..." Does this mean they'll only allow Tiffany and Backstreet Boys to be converted? What about good music? Looks more and more like it'll be a Linux world after all!!
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
For what? For people sharing MP3s? Or for Microsoft's dominance of the home desktop?
Either someone will hack around this limitation and the patch will be as hard to quash as DeCSS, or you'll see this:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Agreed, but part of what makes digital audio "magic" is that copy/move/share ability, which is exactly what's being targeted here. Digital audio that's locked in place on your harddrive and can only be accessed by certain "blessed" software isn't magic; it's either an almost useless pain in the ass, or a challenge to the Information Liberation Front.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Makes me think of a future Linux advert:
Linux - because you are innocent until proven guilty. (with imagery os happy families watching their holiday videos or whatever)
Windows - because you are a low life cheating thieving scumball. (with images of business people not being able to copy essential data, "I need this movie NOW! Why won't this machine let me have it?", then images of families not being able to see the home movies with a requestor saying "You are not allowed to copy digital content" "But its OUR content!")
MP3 is already out of date. The MPEG 4 AAC audio codec is (or should be) the successor. I think it's been time for a while now to throw out MP3s...it was already old technology when it hit big.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Ahhhh... thanks! I'll change it.
If anyone would care to take a look at the last few paragraphs of the WSJ article, they'd see that this only applies to the MS software. Any other software, while still needing to be optimized for Windows XP, still has the ability to record at whatever bitrate it wants to.
They are simply trying to make WMA the standard by bundling in recording software that won't record MP3's over a 56K sampling rate.
Think about it. If 1/3 of all the slashdotters here became programmers, and damn GOOD programmers (not that hard. The key is DISCIPLINE), would Microsoft stand a chance?
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Somebody said that users don't know to install non-pre-installed software on their computers. Almost everyone using Windows XP will be getting an internet connection. Everyone getting an internet connection talks to an ISP. ISPs can give people CDs whose install process says "such-and-such a program gives you this-and-that benefit(s). Do you wish to install it?" People will install the software and use that instead.
The solution to OEM bundling could be more bundling. Fight fire with fire.
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
I guess they feel like everyone MUST be using Windows Media Player... BFD.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
It says
"plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system , Windows XP, according to the report. "
That means that Windows Media Player that is built into Windows XP will only record MP3 at a lower quality bitrate. It DOES NOT mean that you can't use another tool to rip your 192bps MP3s
The Windows Media Player in Win2K/98/ME wont even record MP3s at all.
dont underestimate the power of large groups of lusers...
MHh.. i was thinking about possible ways to scrable all other programs except mircosofts mediaplayer from reading data of the cdrom.. but as you say, this probably wouldnt be a very good idea in the united states of imaginable freedome..
:)
besides, how many hours would it take to be cracked?
As you mentioned, you're also listening to the file while encoding, not just encoding.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
If they release the music online in a liscensed system, then they are not destroying 'fair-use' per se. Fair Use applies to creating a back-up copy of destrucible media for personal usage (make one copy only, in case the original is damaged beyond repair to avoid loss). You can still copy the music (to zip disk or a second HD or another computer) and listen to it there. However, if by 'Fair Use' you mean you want to copy it and send it to your friends, then by all means they want to stop you. Of course, that isn't Fair Use, either. I've yet to see something actually stop the act of copying. If it won't play elsewhere, that's different, but also makes perfect sense in the twisted software liscense world we live in. You can copy it all you want, but you can only listen to it on one machine (the same way most EULAs for commercial software read). Point is, it isn't breaking Fair Use. And I'm surprised so many people here care, considering MP3 isn't an 'open' format either now that Frauenhofer is charging for encoders. I'd expect people to just take this as a chance to tout Ogg Vorbis... Oh well.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Ok, a few notes here...
MS is actually improving backwards compatibility with Windows XP. Things that worked in Win95 or Win98 or WinNT or Win2000 should work in WinXP. In fact, DOS programs that Win95 broke have a chance at working in WinXP. Backwards compatibility was one of the top priorities of WinXP. Second, MP3 is doomed of its own volition (well, the Frauenhofer's volition, anyways). MS is avoiding putting in a decent MP3 encoder because it'd cost them a bundle to do so. They may say it was done for other reasons, but I've little doubt that they did it because they didn't want to pay Frauenhofer's fees. It would be bad PR to say that, however, so they put a spin on it, although it'd probably be easier to simply not include the MP3-encode system in the first place. Linux won't get anythign big out of this. The only Free-Software likely to get a boost here is Ogg Vorbis, which is already comparable to MP3 and is also already free and available for use in commercial products (BSD liscense now, I think).
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Where'd you get your misinformation? Windows XP will be the most backwards compatible version of Windows ever (including Win9x in terms of DOS backwards compatibility). If it worked in any previous WinXX OS (95, 98, NT, 2000, ME) it should work without a hassle in WinXP. Last I checked the progress on their site, they were around 80% compatible and climbing rapidly. Pieces remaining seemed to be mostly DOS legacy products that worked with glitches in Win95 that they want to work perfectly in WinXP. The previews I've seen posted seem to indicate about the same. If it was designed for Windows, it works. If it was designed for DOS, it probably works, with a few weird exceptions.
To wit: "For software compatibility, Windows XP lets you run an older program under a Compatibility mode that emulates Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0 or Windows 2000. If a program runs under one of these modes, Windows XP saves the settings so you can easily run the application in the future. Windows XP integrates the Microsoft AppCompat database of compatibility problems, which contains fixes and workarounds that are automatically applied to programs running on the OS. The database is updated automatically through Microsoft's Windows Update feature." from ZDnet article on WinXP
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
I thought Ogg was getting adopted by some hardware places? Of course, that might've been the flash-ROM / RAM-style players rather than the MP3CD players...
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
"I think I saw this story before... when it was called bluetooth."
hehe.. extra special for all you Saturday Night Live Fans.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Presumably Windows Media Player or equivalent will continue to play Mp3s recorded at any bitrate, it will just not be able to *record* at a higher bitrate. This is pretty stupid for MS to do, because people will just choose to use another piece of software to do the recording, ie. not Windows Media Player. So in the end... people will not use MS software anyway, and the MS proprietary format will die quickly.
Spyky
If MS really manages to "unsupport" MP3 into oblivion it may turn out to be not a good thing at all since the Media Industry will happily go along with this scheme (they want content protection at all costs, even if it means to depend on Microsofts proprietary standard, anyone remember the GIF story?). At first everything will be fine and dandy, until most windows people forgot about MP3 players. So: less/crappy MP3-players -> less MP3 -> less music under Linux (you don't think MS will release a player for Linux, do you?). Then the Media Industry will happily screw the consumers until "fair use" is a fairy tale. Next Microsoft will screw Media Industry and Consumers by demanding license fees for their proprietary standard (see Marcovision) Or just make recording software expensive to rent (why sell it at all ...). Maybe they even sell the players (yeah, they come for free ... you only need to purchase Windows).
The obvious way to thwart this plan is reverse engineering the Microsoft codec. Then it will be DeCSS all over again. The other way is not to use that new standard. But microsoft doing everything to make it look bad and just stopping short of having it's new OS erase them off the HD on sight is really making it hard to convince Joe User to go on with MP3.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
- "early testers of beta versions of Windows XP already complain that the most popular MP3 recording applications -- which compete with Microsoft's format -- don't seem to function properly"
Surely the phrases "MP3 recording" and "which compete with Microsoft's format" are redundant.I think you meant to say:
Look at it people, it's not as if MS was going to make sure that no MP3 are going to be able to play on the Windows XP.
All they're doing is give a low-quality MP3 encoder with it (as compared to none), and have it be able to encode in their own proprietary format with high quality.
The current encoders might not work all that well right now with it, but they'll be updated so that they can run with it pretty quickly I think.
Lazy people who just want to use what is built-in might want to start using the Windows Audio format, but there's not much preventing you from keeping your MP3 around.
Sure MS wants to push against MP3s, but so far they haven't planned anything drastic with it like banning them from their new OS. Yes, they're using their clout to encourage people not to use it and they'll be pretty successful I think, but people will still have a choice.
Microsoft has already responded to this. In fact, they were only testing their MP3 plugin in a beta of Windows XP. RC1 will not have any MP3 encoding support at all. It sounds like the few quotes from MS were taken completely out of context. Obviously they want to push their own standards, but it doesn't sound like they're actually doing anything to stop people from using MP3.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Micro$oft usually just adds such features into the OS and leaves many companies in a difficult position of having to sell something which comes standard in the OS.
So in a way this could be a good thing, leaving a whole market open for real MP3 applications.
This page was generated with the help of DOC++.
A registry setting allowing one to go over 56k doesn't exactly comfort me. Once content controls are built and integrated into Microsoft products, the controls are no longer in my hands but in Microsoft's.
Microsoft can easily, once the basic mechanism is coded and in place, at any time and with any "Windows Update" patch (now automated?) change the underlying DLLs or OS code to reject registry settings above, say, 56k if its in their interest to do so.
--LP
Please don't throw us in that briar patch!!
This is nuts. Microsoft is practically giving away the home market. Linux is getting easier and more flexible and Windows is getting more anal and restrictive.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Bill, you 31337 mother f|_|cker, If I ever come out of hiding up here in Canada and visit your country, beware. You are a c0cksuck1ng faggot. A pie won't be the only thing I will throw in your face. Watch out. -p!
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
I remember seeing an article on The Register a while back describing a mechanism in Windows XP to prevent "unauthorized music" from being played AT THE DRIVER LEVEL. That was the most frightening thing I had read about Microsoft's monopoly control yet. If the OS controls the device, then you CANNOT read/write to it without the OS's, and therefore Microsoft's, permission! Remember, in Linux you can write directly to and from audio devices (/dev/audio) because the OS provides this for you. I imagine that music will be digitally signed, remote servers will be paged for permission, and then it will play if approved. The bonus is that Microsoft has never, and probably WILL never, understand security, so this will be trivial to circumvent. But trivial for the 0.1% of computer users who realize that there are alternatives to Microsoft. For the 99.9% who use the default config, it will be WMA or bust. :(
Does anyone have any ideas how we can get around this?
"Certainly, when Microsoft decides to put something in their operating-system support, it becomes the standard," says Mr. Farber, who testified for the government during the Microsoft antitrust trial. "The average consumer will use what comes on the disc when he buys the machine. They're very effective in that way."
But, of course, they don't have a monopoly, nor nuthin'...
My question is, if something like the MP3 format came about w/out Microsoft, How can Microsoft kill it? I mean, I do understand the digital rights thing, and I don't totally disagree with it... but when MS's WMV format isn't available for platforms other than the ones that Micro$oft wants to support, then it's not a valid replacement for MP3. (At least REAL Audio can be played under Linux.)
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
If they push the format to WMV, then they are DEFINATELY NOT weakening their monopoly. MS has no investment in MP3. They can't control the format, they don't get any revenue from it, and they don't don't own a patent on it.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
With RealJukebox, you can only rip CDs to CD quality files using Real Audio's file format. MP3s are limited to 96kbps.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
However if people are already used to the MP3 scene and have invested lots of time creating a collection (and buying portable mp3 players) then this tactic may not work as expected. If Microsoft did start messing with third party software then I would expect that antitrust lawyers would have a field day.
Microsoft doesn't need to mess with third party porducts! All they need to do is make it extremely easy (one click of the mouse) to convert the user's mp3 collection into a windows format. If the media player, can rip songs into the windows media format AND convert high quality MP3s into that same format, without loss of quality, then Microsoft will get their format adopted by the masses without having to mess with any of the third party apps.
Read carefully, only Microsoft's own software will be limited with MP3. You can still go to mp3.com and download mp3 software for windows and use it on windows. The apps may have to be upgraded to work with the new os if some of the system calls have changed, but this will happen.
But before bitching, give the windows media format a chance. It actually doesn't sound bad. Also in some cases (actually many) it and the Real format sounds just as good as MP3 and stores in less space. I hate to admit this, but it's true.
I don't know if MS will let us rip our own cd's to windows media files, if they do I see no problems here (for the way I use this stuff anyway). But what about all those RIO players out there? Will they upgrade to MS format? Keep a copy of Bladeenc (http://bladeenc.mp3.no/) around just in case.
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crazy dynamite monkey
There is a size limit.. It's like 5M of text, but I deal with files that size constantly, and am constantly prompted to use Wordpad..
.sig: Now legally binding!
*sigh*... no. Windows XP will be adopted for the same reason Windows ME is being adopted: OEM bundling. No one buys OSs on purpose, they buy a computer, and it needs an OS. What they get will be whatever Microsoft wants to give them.
And, given that XP is NT-based and ME is still basically a DOS patch, maybe old windows users will be essentially forced to upgrade -- if all the new programs come out "WinXP/2000 compatible," then you are stuck if you don't have an NT-based windows.
I think they've got this one in the bag. D'oh.
Great way to sell your product. Give it less functionality than the competition (i.e Linux, BSD, etc).
Here's the obvious Linux plug of the future...
It's free, and it will play your mp3's! Linux...world domination!
<p>Is this a joke? I didnt get the cheek in tongue... if there is.
<p><i>What do you want to hear tomorrow?</i>
Dennis Onstenk
You can also set a HighRate value that gives you two choices on the rate. I haven't figured out the key names that will give you a list of choices yet.
SQLTeam.com - For SQL Server developers and Administrators
Every time I hear about some new "feature" of Windows XP or Office XP I juat smile and say "NOW you know why I run linux" :-). Seriously, what's up with this OS? First they release specs saying that OEM vendors can't allow the PC to be opened to add hardware. Then they start talking about this revolutionary new system of using a "hardware checksum" I guess you'd call it, requiring you to call in and get a registration code. Autodesk used to do this, they don't anymore. Why? IT DIDN'T WORK. People didn't like it. Now this crap about trying to take out MP3s. Sorry Microsoft, there's a reason I run linux.
chown us *your_base
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Um, I'm running the Windows XP Beta here. No problems with using the Fraunhaufler advanced codec here. How exactly does microsoft change NTFS (the filesystem) to 'break' software codecs? Wouldn't it be easier to change the multimedia subsystem?
God some slashdot readers are just a bit delulded.
You can play the files just fine, it's just that the recorders have problems ripping the mp3s from cds.
Um, i said the Fraunhaufler CODEC (notice the code part) - used to encode.
if the rippers are having problems with reading from cds, that still has nothing to do with NTFS (and would affect more than mp3). I know for a fact many rippers work with XP (including WMP).
In any case. Windows XP does nothing to limit MP3 encoding. Windows media player infact now supports encoding of MP3 (limited to 56k), WMP7 never did - so this is a step up from win2000.
In order for people to start using this format, there need to be at least 2 easy to use free apps (or both in one)
Aside from fans, I don't see anyone tightly tied to any mp3 players, as it's the content that really matters. If a player can handle both, then people will more freely be able to make the switch.
- passion
Well this managed to piss me off this morning. It will never work of course.
Is this really that big a deal? Download or buy your own mp3 encoding software. How many people use Media Player to encode mp3s anyway?
Sure, "joe average computer user" might, and would use WMA if it comes out sounding the best, but again, so what?
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The following sentence is true.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
And this brings us to Ogg Vorbis ! It's here today. Plugins are available for Winamp and Sonique, on Windows. On Linux, I use freeamp to play .ogg files. I don't rip my CDs to MP3 any more; I make oggs.
Ogg Vorbis, although it comes from the Gnu camp, is not under GPL; it's more like a BSD style license. (RMS even agreed with this decision!) Furthermore it's patent and royalty free. If Winamp wants to implement a super-high-performance encoder/decoder for Ogg, they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone.
And this is the attitude that raises the hackles of the free software developers! (Not mine, of course, I'm gracious and caring and I welcome all criticism!)When you say a system that Joe Average would be willing/able to use, do you mean the whole O/S+software bundle? Ordinary users should not have to deal with installing operating systems. Joe Average should be able to buy a computer with everything already installed. And today we have a system that Joe Average can use (if not install). For example, Mandrake 7.2 with KDE2 is such a system.
The problem is not ease of use (or installation) any more; it's advertising and marketing. Joe Average needs to be told during the Super Bowl and Friends and Survivor and ... that Mandrake/KDE2 or whatever is a viable alternative for him. Slowly the word will percolate to vendors like Gateway2K or whoever Joe A. buys machines from. Vendors like Quicken will naturally release all their products for Linux also. It will be just another aspect of the whole computer thing: which kind of system do you run, Linux or Windows or Mac or... (And that's the day that monkeys will fly out of my butt, I guess.)
But who will pay for the ad/marketing campaigns?
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
" 'The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed, and Microsoft and RealNetworks don't want it pushed. The consumer is going to eat what he's given' says David Farber"
" 'Let them eat cake' said Marie Antoinette"
Windows deveopers are used to it. Almost any piece of software that does anything slightly complex (MP3 playing is definitly complex) has to be re-written to work correctly with the newest version of windows. The guys at WinAmp, and other developers, will have a new version out that is compatible within 2 weeks of XP being released, if not sooner.
In the old days, the funny quote often passed around (supposedly said within MS) was "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run!"
In later years, it mutated in to "Windows ain't done 'till Netscape won't run!"
I guess now it will be "XP ain't done 'till Winamp won't run!"
- Greg
How does this crap get moderated up?
Those specs are for the "Easy PC" - a version of PCs sold to people who don't want to deal with a lot of the stuff a lot of PCs make you deal with today - you know, those same people who like buying fruit-colored cars and computers? There was an article about this on Slashdot a few days ago too. I won't go into the details of why anyone would want to buy a computer like that - this crowd is obviously too narrow-minded to get it - but rest assured that that won't be the only kind of XP Box sold.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Microsoft is slowly but surely turning your computer into a set top box. A box with "no serviceable parts inside" and which has full control over any and all things that you do to it.
Windows XP is a nice proof of this. More control to Microsoft and no control to you. You just might be as well off buying a real set top box from the start, right? Or a real computer with a real OS...
RE: ...5 to 10 years...
More than enough time for world domination. NOT YET will fail MORE miserably than Win2K and M$ will slowly die. They're aiming it at 'the corporate user' who will run screaming from it like it was the crapola it is, right into the arms of Linux/BSD. CIOs and CTOs in CorpAmerika are especially wary after the debacle of the 'clean and easy' upgrades to Win2K and the requirements of the licenses. Oracle's bad enough in CorpAmerika, now you're gonna do that to the desktop OS, too?
We're already seeing the push-back against the bloat required of SOAP and the W3C is moving towards the 'semantic net,' whose infrastructure will invalidate all that M$ is working towards. Thin clients are in. Even IE is losing share.
Most importantly, M$ has been trying, and failing, for 13 years to move to a 'spoken' UI. Mac is there, LINUX/BSD almost (thanx IBM!).
Finally, Java/Python/Perl have a 5 - 7 year headstart on NOT YET and even M$ admits that it's 2 years out until they even have the groundwork laid.
We've already won. Soon, we can tell Bill, Steve, Jim & Company: "Screw you guys, I'm going home."
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Okaaaay...
Mr. beta 2 buyer/tester and M$ apologist, how do you suggest I play those files on my Rio or PJukeBox? Or my new MP3-playing stereo system? How about streaming from something other than a WinTel monopoly-approved microprocessor or other platform? Keep in mind that the really big surprise of the past Christmas retail season here in the states was the sales of CD/RW drives, proving most people not only rip from CD's, they rip TO them (BTW, also rendering your lame 'album-cover art' comment moot...THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT IT!!! IT'S ANOTHER POINTLESS FEATURE, LIKE THE M$ FLIGHT SIMULATOR IN EXCEL, THAT REDMOND FORCES DOWN OUR NECKS!!!!)
Also, given the requirements for connectivity in NOT YET and eXPee, how are you gonna run that laptop you seem so proud of?
BTW, now I know why the OZ SAGE groups in IRC have suddenly seemed so brain dead....because you're their President!!!! In my uniformed days, we'd call a guy like you a 'Judas Goat,' you can't have it both ways, boyo. You can't be 'Open Source' and support the enemy...and they are the enemy. What use will there be for Systems Administrators if M$'s visions of NOT YET and eXPee come true? How can you support OSS and software on the one hand and stick up for someone so obviously inimical to your own enlightened self-interest on the other?
Oh, and change the picture on your home page. It scared my dog.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Yes, Microsoft is implementing some kind of scheme for programs to isolate their output to properly signed drivers only, to avoid letting those precious Britney Spears recordings be fed to those omnivorous disk writer drivers. But I really doubt that they'd try anything more than that, as even this limited measure qualifies as a conspiracy in restraint of trade against driver manufacturers, and they're currently in danger of being stomped by the DOJ. (Although, apparently not if Q -- fnord -- W has anything to say about it.)
Now, how do they plan to prevent the cracking community from swapping their own signing certificates for the ones being used in the signature checks, and then continuing as usual? Another layer of signing certificates? =)
Some ineffectual encryption scheme? (More Xing software, anyone?) Some new undocumented processor feature that Intel and AMD have been conspiring about? (That will be the day I buy my first Mac)
They talked about it last week, and all they are going to do is not ship Windows Media Player 8 with an MP3 encoding codec. HOWEVER, it is entirely possible to both play MP3s and install someone else's codec.
.NETish database that brings cover art and lyrics down for the CDs you rip (into wma, of course) and the new wma codec sounds v.good indeed at 56k.
Actually I have a copy of WMP8 and it rocks. Built in CD burning, nice interface, a link to a
Now, I have a nice mp3 player that supports wma, and by ripping with WMP8 at 56k I can get twice the music in my pocket and it sounds better.
that's such an evil ploy.
This is too little too late. How many folks are really going to leap to XP from Win95/98/Me to begin with? Microsoft has worn people out. People won't stand for this. Until Microsoft or somebody out there has a hot, affordable, and portable .wma file player, this too shall pass.
"The consumer is going to eat what he is given" ?
Let's also hope that "Microsoft is going to choke on it's own arrogance."
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Moderator's essentials
I'm pretty sure, while they lower the quality of their encoders, will *advertise* about it. Simply because even Joe 6-packs are NOT using WMP to record MP3 nowadays. They download other softwares to encode.
To effectively limit the quality of MP3's recorded, MS has to get everyone using its encoder. But as of now, not many people even KNOW that WMP can encode.
You'll hear a lot about "Now we have MPe encoders built in!!".
Do these "locks" turn off after copyright has expired? If not then I would call them "more-than-your-rights management". Assuming fair use counts for nothing with these proprietary software formats.
As you may have noticed new Sony audio CD players refuse to play home made CDs. This is the software equivalent of Windoze refusing to play MP3s.
Copyright is clearly not working as intended when artist have no chance of owning their own creative work and corporations who are unable to create own everything. The protection should be to the creator and should be lessened when the rights to a work passes to a second party. I don't think Sony and M$ were intended to be included in "We the People..."
...but, if they add a feature that is hostile to users some people may choose not to buy XP, decreasing their market share for the benefit of the record companies.
In reality, I don't think this is in any way a losing proposition. If MS can get users on the WMA bandwagon and make the record companies happy, it has the potential to pay off big time down the road--when everyone is committed to the architecture.
MS isn't doing this because they see mp3 sharing as an injustice, their doing it because it's a popular format. There's lots of money to be made in digital music (if they can get rid of the mp3 and move people to proprietary formats), and MS wants a piece of the action.
It'll work, too, since the Windows Audio format will probably be good quality, and people won't even notice the subtle effort to move them from mp3s.
hoser: Slashdot reader since 1987.
"Uhh, I'm trying not to be a troll but who cares if you can't use a certain format?"
Duh, that speaks for itself.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Using dominance in the OS market to push products in another market (ie web browsers or multimedia devices/formats/applications) is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Please read Cornell Law School's Antitrust Primer. It will explain that it is illegal to use dominance in one market, like the PC OS dominance of Microsoft, inorder to influence another market, like the recording and distribution of music. Start posting the *DAMAGES* to consumer choice so we can talk about the monetary value of what they are taking away. Then we can sue them.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
128kbps mp3s still dont sound that great. Most of my collection is 196kbs or higher. I use high quality varriable bit rate encoding when I rip my own music and the sound is excellent.
We have the best government that money can buy.
I don't know anything about xmms, but WMP7 uses 50% of sys resources (WinAmp uses ~10%) and WMP7 has horible support for variable bit mp3's (ie: it skips anything over what it thinks the bit rate is).
___
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
This is a great thing to know, but it doesn't change the fact that Microsoft is deliberately weakening MP3 in order to promote their own proprietary format. I can't expect my younger music-pirate brother to figure this out (or find it on the internet).
WMA may be a better sounding format, but it's dirty ball to do what they are doing to consumers with this move.
MP3 is effectively an open standard. It is not truly free in the sense of Ogg Vorbis, but in practice people make encoders and decoders without paying a cent to Fraunhaufer. It is, or will become, the GIF of music.
If in fact MP3 is under fire from The Man, we don't need more fragmentation in the scene. Concentrate on strengthening the MP3 format. IMO, the risk of (effectively) losing freedom regarding the distribution of music is not worth the small gain in freedom from using a free format.
Where are my moderator points when I need them!! Having tested XP this is exactly how it works, mod the parent up!!
But by killing MP3, you create a new "killer app" around the Windows Media Format. Look for the new Rio WMF Player! I really hate to sounds like an MS basher, but how can judges look at this type of activity and not conclude that MS is abusing their (near?) monopoly power? I just can't figure this out. This is definetly a case where if the OS company and the applications company were seperate, there would be less incentive for the OS to limit MP3 functionality.
AGGGHHH!
Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Ummm, did anyone consider that perhaps MSFT may cut off direct hardware access thereby not allowing any rippers direct access to the CDROM drive. Perhaps not possible with 9x, but it would be with an NT kernel. After all, why does the end user need raw access to the CDROM?
You would then be forced to go through an API to access a CD. The API itself will do the encoding and then pass on the result. The API would only support those codecs that MSFT allows to be plugged into the architecture. No MP3, no OGG.
This would fit in very nicely with the plans to have end-to-end encryption in all media devices. It would probably be enough to stop the average end user.
Of course it may be possible to hack, but I wouldn't want to be doing that in MSFT's house of cards. I'm sure they could set it up so that your system becomes very unstable if you install a hacked API. Oh wait, perhaps they are already doing that ... :)
I believe that this is another of the occasions where the majority of slashdotters are close, but not quite on the mark.
/IS/ something to worry about, not because It will limit functionality in any way but (and this may be the difficult thing to grasp) it gives you /MORE/ functionality, i.e. The functionality to have access (however severly limited) to a new kind of secure media, whatever it is.
/NOT/ a new kind of interactive TV, it is a versatile programmable device used to solve mankinds problems (and make new ones at the same time). Microsoft's direction is incompatable with this.
This new operating system
This extra functionallity becomes something to worry about is when the winXP has once again reached market saturation point. Then all new "content" will be released in this wonderful new secure format, because most people will be able to access it and it fits in with the Content providers capitalistic control freak ideals. Then where will the choice be?
And to these people who say "It's OK it'll get hacked sooner or later", I say NO, don't accept that argument, not discussing all the anti-tampering safeguards built into the XP kernel, the Sound drivers, and (it will happern) the speakers (scared yet?), it will be extremely difficult, and when Microsoft releases a "service pack" for XP, all new media will be made for this service pack and the hackers will have to start all over again.
To summarise, don't encourage them, the PC is
skiy. www.Smokedot.org Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
apparently because of changes Microsoft made to how data are written on CD-ROMs under Windows XP
So what their saying is that M$ is beginning to make the move to microsoft only cd-roms. Again flaunting standards in order to limit the end-user from using products effectively. It won't be long before cd's have to be formatted especially for MS. It's allready happening. I was seriously irritated when I found that the HP CD_RW came with software that had no capability to image an iso to a disk. I shouldn't have to go get new software to do that. However, the software was capaple of burning cd's that could only be read by Windows. Indeed it's the primary option. It just gets more and more frustrating over the years and companies try to force their standards on the consumer.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Is the real reason that no one would buy such cars? If nothing else could be called monopoly abuse, this surely is. No other company may afford to limit features and introduce new bugs "to drive users away from something". Thats simply arrogant.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I have nothing against Ogg Vorbis--except maybe its silly name--but it's not going to have any impact at all outside the geek community. Why? Everyone who's ever used music on his PC knows what an mp3 is. Most people know about the new Windows format, and when the new Windows XP hits the streets with built-in Windows Media creation at high quality, it will gain even more penetration--already some digital players support it. But no one outside of the people who read Slashdot or other geek sites has ever heard of Ogg Vorbis. And they probably never will.
First of all, the name is just dumb and totally non-descriptive. MP3 could get away with being non-descriptive because it was the first, and for a long while the only popular choice. But every new format has the words "Audio" or at least "Media" in it. Because people need to know what a product is quickly and easily, not scratch their heads wondering what it does. Plus, the name can't be taken seriously. No mainstream news site will cover Ogg Vorbis much based on that fact alone. If the name sounds like a joke, the product will be treated like a joke. I know there's a long tradition of interesting naming in the Linux community, but average non-Linux-geeks don't like products with stupid names. It may be shallow, but it is a fact. If Ogg had just been called something like "Free Audio Format" or "Open Sound System" or some such, it would have actually had a chance at the mainstream. As it is, I don't picture Kurt Loder saying "Ogg Vorbis" any time soon, although he's said "mp3" and even "Windows Media" before.
Good luck, but between MP3 files--which will still remain common, since 3rd party software always finds a way around MS incompatibilities--, the newer Windows format, and RealAudio (which I hate, hate, hate, hate), Ogg Vorbis stands littel chance of making it outside of geekdom.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Maybe this is how M$ finally dies. I can't think of a better reason for the average joe schmoe to want to abandon the "safety" of windoze and go to Linux or OS X.
Besides, the headline ("YOU CAN'T RECORD MP3S UNDER WINXP! MICROSOFT ARE EVIL! EVIL, I TELL YOU!") was certainly misleading. If slashdot aren't careful, they'll get a reputation for bias. :)
All an mp3 ripper does is convert one set of data (uncompressed audio) to another kind of data (compressed audio). I can't see how they can detect this.
The answer is that Microsoft are saying that they'll limit the quality of recordings made using the built in software, not those made on Windows XP. Use something else to encode / your mp3s, and you're fine.
I'd mention the fact that this story could have been written more carefully, but that's getting cliched. ;)
Using Project Mayo as an example, we see that we don't need to rely on big corporations to feed us what the new multimedia format is going to be. Microsoft, in their actions, are just going to get more developers into working on new, open, and hopefully free multimedia formats which will have a better compression than current technology. It's not a step back, it's Microsoft unwittingly pushing us, as developers, forward.
;)
Also, Microsoft's limitation is only in their own MP3 codec which will come bundled with XP. Using other mp3 codecs will allow users to continue creating MP3s in higher-quality format.
On a side note, the world of Windows XP is getting more and more darker, in my own eyes. With subscription-based license and now active attempts to stop MP3 files from being produced on XP, I can't help but ask when will Microsoft's attempt to control what I do with my own computer end?
Ultimately, it's going to make me move to alternative OSes as the solution rather than continuing my use of any Microsoft product.
If only we could get the *NIX world to pick a defacto GUI standard, then 9/10ths of my reasons for not moving to Linux or one of the BSDs already would be eliminated.
The other 1/10th taken care of already with the announcement of Tribes 2 for Linux shipping.
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"There is no off position on the genius switch." --Dave Letterman
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What you say only applies to commercial products that include content encoded with DivX.
If you're making money off a product encoded with DivX then I wouldn't consider such terms ridicuous at all.
If you're making encodings for private or non-commercial use, there's absolutely no requirement to provide such markings or notices.
The full license may be viewed here.
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"There is no off position on the genius switch." --Dave Letterman
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The article states you will not be able to use the *built in Microsoft Utility* to record higher than 56k. When was the last time you used any of MS's built in utilities past dialup connection and solitaire?
They mention many third party apps don't seem to work properly on the current betas/RC's. Again, I expect this to be remedied once XP hits the shelves and a little bit of time passes.
I think the article is right in that many mainstream users *don't* care which format or utility they use, but I don't think its mainstream users who are going to be ripping/encoding CD's.
So, basically this article says Microsoft will, in their own applications, favor their own format over a third party format. Wow, I know that surprises the hell out of *me*.
-- if(game-theory) moderate++;
Just like the Internet, software users route around obstacles.
--
There were two compelling reasons to upgrade to 98 for me. One was USB support. The other is the newer taskbar, with the small single-click icons. I know that sounds silly, but I find them to be very useful for my commonly used programs -- much better than stepping through the start menu.
I agree that's there's really no reason to buy ME, though. And I haven't bothered with 2000 on my home machine yet because I like playing games and don't want to have to screw around with any incompatibilities.
Nader tried to inflict as much damage as he could to Gore by focusing on campaigning in swing states. Contrast this to Pat Buchanan, who spent his money in Democrat states because he didn't want to derail the larger conservative effort. Tell me, do you Naderites still believe there's no difference between Gore and Bush? Or has reality started to intrude on your world view?
...I'll start using it. Untill then, I'll stick with mp3. Does anyone have a projected release date? I've been waiting for this for years now, so I'm not holding my breath.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I do not use use windows, I use linux, I will always have grip and the like, I can rip my CD's and I will have xmms. So I can rip my CD's and play the mp3's I make. Who cares if the windows users lose more of their rights? I also have my out and in lines, i.e. every audio player will need a out line to play the music and I have an inline and failling that I have the mic line, I can just use sox to record to a wave and then lame to encode it. I will always have mp3's for my rio. So who cares if windows users lose more rights, is that not why many of us switched to linux to regain the rights in the computer that microsoft tried to remove from us, is that not what the whole OSS movement is about, heck this could be good for the OSS community, people who want mp3's and have knowlage about computers and dont use linux/bsd/hurd/et al might find now is a good time to come on over to OSS.
Michael P. O'Connor
This looks like the software built into XP (Windows Media Player) will suck for ripping MP3s, but will rock for recording Windows Media Format files. This does NOT affect third party programs like MusicMatch, etc. except for the fact that people may not want to buy or download another music program if XP already has one (think I.E. vs Netscape).
However if people are already used to the MP3 scene and have invested lots of time creating a collection (and buying portable mp3 players) then this tactic may not work as expected. If Microsoft did start messing with third party software then I would expect that antitrust lawyers would have a field day.
apparently because of changes Microsoft made to how data are written on CD-ROMs under Windows XP. Microsoft says that while
other software vendors' products may not be "optimized" to run with Windows XP, those products should run acceptably with the operating system.
Tell me, how exactly is data WRITTEN TO A CD-ROM? What does the ROM in CD-ROM stand for again?
The article also fails to tell us what the "changes" are. Sheesh.
Personally, I don't care about Windoze XP. I use Win98 if I need to run Win32 apps, and Linux on the other partition. Doesn't matter what M$ does, we'll always have encoders for other platforms, and mp3's too. Right now I'm cranking out mp3's on an UltraSparc at the office.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Do you honestly think consumers want old formats to be "updated" as often as possible so people with new computers have more trouble sending files to people with older computers?
Do you honestly think consumers want to pay for food? Do you honestly think consumers want stores to lock their doors at night?
Not really, but business have to protect their investments. Why does everyone want to make everything "free"? Stuff costs money. That's how the world works. If you copy an MP3 that you haven't bought, you are committing a crime.
Copy protection doesn't "suck" any more than steel grates over shop windows suck... they're there to prevent hooligans from stealing stuff they don't have a right to.
-Erik
The security in windows media player never stopped me from listening to the songs I ripped, just stopped the person I sent the songs to from listening to them.
The only thing that sux about the security is that when I wipe out the directory that contains all the certificates for playing the songs I have to rip them all over again to listen to them.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
This isn't big news its just that MS has stated thier goals at this point and thier goals make total sense from thier business perspective.
The mp3 recording tools that MS provided pretty much sucked anyways, They were just a bunch of codec dll's with no provided interface and they were limited at a low bitrate as it is. Windows media player (as far as I ever found) never supported recording of mp3's anyway.
I love how slashdot looks for every opportunity to bash MS and when they can't find one they make something out of nothing.
The story really is: "MS to continue supporting WMA. People will continue to use other ripping/encoding software."
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Nah, it's a stupid, blind Cyclops.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
First of all, even if MS did that, not only would people find plenty of hacks and workarounds, but there are alternative formats to MP3 that will work just fine. Secondly, if MS ever tried to do the extreme thing, and eliminate the ability of Windows to play MP3s, Linux and Mac and alternative OSes would start to get a lot of attention - bad for MS.
I'm sorry, I just can't believe that they are that arrogant.
DOJ where are you?
It smells like a Divx DVD player....
You might want to add WMA file format. (How many reasons not to use XP - we already have the registration, the other protocol perversions...)
/dev/dsp redirected to a file (it takes a bit more, but netaudio shows the path). Or the various Linux binaries using Wine libraries to grab Window's codecs. To secure the path they have to secure every program and DLL and not allow any virtualized environment. They already have trouble keeping their DLLs straight.
Apple has been touting iTunes for MP3, and the capability to rip and move music to your portable player, etc.
for WMA to succeed, M$ will need to do an OSX port. OSX is based on Darwin which is OpenSource, and so will NEVER have a secure sound path. So as soon as there is a AIFF-file-output "sound" driver, people will be buying Macs to use iTunes and such.
Then there is VMWare with
Or are they going to demand EVERY pc user upgrade their already CD quality soundcard, or will it refuse to playback through a speaker device without doing the underwater phonebooth thing?
I think that Apple, and ultimately the OS community will be the big beneficiaries.
i run unix.
You have a small brain and a small penix don't you!!! I could care less about WMA and MS!! I will use mp3 until the pry my cold dead fingers from it!
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
You have a small brain and a small penix don't you!!! I could care less about WMA and MS!! I will use mp3 until the pry my cold dead fingers from it!
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
Microsoft, we understand that your revenues are hurting. We feel your pain.
Why do you continue to mutilate yourself? This Windows XP that you keep threating us with. Don't you realise that you're talking crazy? Please stop talking this way. You're scaring us.
Now, you start talking about directing consumers away from MP3's? I told you that hanging with those terrible RIAA and MPAA street gangs were no good for you! And I was right all along!
Look what happened to that Sony company! They were talking tough about their Betamax, being the biggest and the baddest. They got led down the wrong path, as everyone was using VHS instead. They really had to eat a lot of humble pie on that one.
Please, stop doing this! We're scared of what is going to happen to you! Plese, Microsoft, put the Codec down before it's too late!
As originally posted, WMA files at 64kbs sound better than MP3 files at 128kbs. For some people the increased quality/size ratio may make up for the loss of compatibility.
--
Does anyone know why all audio codecs seem to be using frequency domain representations? It seems to me that you would have problems representing certain waveforms (I understand there's something called wavelets to circumvent this, but I haven't looked through the math yet). Does anyone know if there are any methods based on something different, such as principal components/eigenspace projection?
4. What happens when someone cracks the "copy protection" in the WMA format? Is MS gonna change it without regard to compatibility?
All digital audio security right now is inherantly broken - you can break any of them by writing a mock sound card driver that dumps to disk, then play to that sound card.
The hardware restrictions. Watch out for the hardware restrictions...
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
My god, man. Have you ever heard of the paragraph tag?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Remember Netscape? Nice little browser, got eaten by IE? Remember RealAudio? They're still around, more or less, but Microsoft has their sights on them. Won't be long, kids. Also, the fact is that it is easier for market leaders across industries to gang up than it is for consumers to do the same. The record industry seems happy to hop in the sack with Microsoft for now, and there's little that the average consumer can do about it. Fair use? Hell, the record companies COUNT ON the revenue from the periodic need of consumers to upgrade the media on which their music is recorded. No upgrades, no gravy train of revenue. Just wait until Billy boy has his finger in the pie. Every computer with Windows XP will find a way to charge you for even humming a tune out loud. What's the solution? Wish I knew...
In a world without walls, there is no need for Windows.
Your argument doesn't make any sense. You are basically suggesting that Microsoft should be forced to use Fraunhofer's codec and if they don't they are using monopolistic powers. It's their OS, they have no obligation to include ANY mp3 ripping software. In fact by ripping at 56kbps they are actually encouraging competition... if the OS allowed you to rip at 192kbps built-in they would put companies that make mp3 encoding software in serious trouble, it would be Netscape all over again.
Replace all instances of ripping with encoding :P
If they follow through with this, Windows XP will be doomed. There is no way I would purchase this operating system. They have no right to tell me what I can and can't do on my system. There are plenty of legal and useful applications for mp3. For instance, many games are now using them for their sound files, becaust the compression is so great. I am not a Linux advocate and never have been, but I must say it is looking better and better every day.
I have to completely disagree. You don't get anything for free. If Windows and Office are bundled with your PC, you are paying a flat rate. The same PC may cost 1,000 without Windows and Office bundled. You don't think the manufacturer gave anything to Microsoft. It's like cars with different trim lines, just becuase the EX or LX model comes with a sunroof and air, does not mean you got it for free. Because if you bought the lower trim model, you would have paid significantly less.
I do have to agree with you on the point about trusting Freeware, for the same reason I just posted above, nothing is really free. Some companies make you pay someway, maybe by tracking you and selling your information, which I have caught various freeware programs trying to do.
MS finds a good thing that is cross platform and decides they cannot make a buck from it because people might actually use software NOT made by MS. So, what do they do? They change it so the only thing their systems will play well is a MS only based program.
Extend, embrace, destroy. Yet again.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Correct me if I am wrong but didn't the article say that MS was limiting the quality of mp3 recording "using software built into the next version"? Doesn't this imply that you cannot use some sort of MS based recording tool to rip high quality MP3s and share them. With the way litigations go these days if they left that capability in the OS they would eventually be held liable for assisting copyright violations. I didn't see anywhere in the article where it said they were preventing any program from recording at higher bit rates, just their built-in software.
OK, some quick facts.
They guys at M$ are not stupid, they may be megalomanical, greedy, and sell crap software for huge amounts of money. But their not stupid.
Personal opinion is that they are moving into a marketing technique of segregating coprorates from hackers. "Hackers use mp3 because its not proprietary, don't use hackers" stance, geared towards a more cubical based dystopia, where hackers are seen to be too open minded.
They are also helping people with money, and are probably going for a you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours scenario.
PLUR.
Please terminate paranioa() at favourite recursion level
The middle mind speaks!
The way MS will probably do it is to restrict audio output to applications that have been digitally "signed" by MS.......the ripping/burning app would need a signature, etc., .
I think you hit the nail on the head there. You might be able to do some registry hacking to bypass it, but you never know. At first I thought his was terrible, but in reality it's a blessing. Linux doesn't (nor will it likely ever) have such a hideous restricion over it's users. If MS does decied to impliment this then Linux will suddenly have a huge apeal to a lot of disgruntled people. "what's this you say? It's free, doesn't crash that often, AND allows me to keep my current MP3 collection AND make new ones?!?!" Mandrake and a few other distros are (for the most part) ready for windows converts. By the time the XP backlash happens I'm sure the distros will have stepped up to the plate.
This strategy can't possibly work, because it doesn't come up to the standard of _good enough_. Cassette tapes are, for many people, good enough -- sufficiently so that they'll eschew CDs because of cost. However, mp3s at 56k sound like shit, just like Microsoft intends.
Too bad this isn't _good enough_ for the average consumer, and given just a single piece of easy-to-use software that can encode high-quality mp3s (say, using either the ISO mp3 encoding spec or a modified one a la LAME or Blade), M$'s plan can fail.
Napster's shown the public how easy it is to trade files. I would not be surprised to see similar apps that not only allow trading, but also do high-quality ripping and encoding, into appropriately named files using CDDB or FreeDB, with one click of a button. Once those apps have been modified for XP, we should be home free again.
Linux.
I'm serious, as a Windows user I don't how I'd live without the simple tools that Linux provides.
Including Lame, Ogg Vorbis, CDparanoia, etc.
KFG
to replace .mp3 with .wma for the express purpose of controling, and taking a financial cut of, all digital media.
"Nothing to see here, move along."
KFG
They're not saying that you can't listen to mp3s still. They're saying the built in software won't rip and encode at higher than 56 kbps.
Relavent quote:
The new restrictions in Windows XP won't prevent other vendors' software applications from recording MP3 music at a higher fidelity
This doesn't mean that you can't encode your own using something else (I've been using Audiocatalyst for a couple of years). It simply means that you can't use Microsoft's to encode.
This is kinda like microsoft saying that IE6 isn't going to display the colour blue in their browser anymore. It really sounds like a bunch of FUD to me.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Not really.
So Microsoft changed the way that data is read from CD-ROMs. How long will it take for a company to realize that and release an updated version of their product? Software companies aren't going to let their products fall by the wayside because Microsoft changed something in their OS.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
OK, so by definition, is an OS supposed to regulate the type of files stored on the computer? No! The OS isn't supposed to KNOW anything about the file types that are on the system. The OS's job is to make sure that there is proper time sharing, no memory violations, etc...All this is done at the very root of a system, but here, XP isn't an OS anymore. It's just an extra "device" placed ontop of the OS that will somewhat act like a layer between all software that is not MS and the OS itself. I'm sure by the 7 technical standards, XP solves the problems of an OS, but this is something that an OS is not supposed to do. It is an unknowledgable device. This isn't an OS anymore. It's a regulator.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
I don't this really a big issue.
Right now not many people use Microsoft encoding tools to rip MP3s. Most people use other 3rd party programs.
MP3 encoding was never a big thing with Microsoft.
...I'm supposed to PAY for this?
---
Hey fools,
Windows Media player 7+ has ALWAYS limited the quality of MP3's that can be recorded! DUH! How in the hell is this news? BTW - Real Jukebox has always done the same thing as well.
You can still install any other codec and use that to rip a CD with - and 3rd party ripping programs will work. (Just because they dont work now doesnt mean a thing - a shitload of stuff - namely installshield installers dont run correctly in XP in Beta 2 - GET OVER IT)
What a load of FUD. You guys whine about how MS likes to spread all kinds of lies and mistruths about linux - but then you turn around and do the same thing!?!?!?! The free software movement has truly become the "lets do whatever the hell we want and never take responsibility for anything at all movement". If MS wants to distribute a built CD Ripper that perfers WMA to MP3 - who cares? Do you honestly think the average consumer will ever notice the difference? Probably not guys. As long as there is A file upon which they can DOUBLE CLICK and as a result hear music - they are happy.
I see this has also degraded into a Windows XP bashfest as well. Considering maybe more than 99% of the slashdotters that have commented so far probably have never even seen, much less used any Microsoft OS since Windows 95/NT - I dont want to hear it.
What a bunch of sore losers. You'll never understand that UNIX at home will never truly take place. All Mac OS X has done is given you UNIX on Television (unless you watched the half baked hacking that takes place on Lone Gunmen - lol) because god knows nobody wants to buy a MacinTrash.
Flame at will,
Gamorck
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
So the coders will change their software so it works well. No biggie
I'm sure M$ can stop my copy of CDEX from using lame to create my mp3s. Give me a break. All this will mean is that M$ won't be giving you any tools to record mp3s and will be plugging the hell out of WMA.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
That's exactly what they're doing! You can encode MP3s with XP, you just can't encode them at more than 56kbps. They're giving you all the tools, just making one suck and one shine to persuade you to switch.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I have never, ever, anywhere seen Ogg Vorbis content that I wanted to download. The only content so encoded that I even know about is Richard Stallman speaking, available at ftp.gnu.org.
There's some samples at the Vorbis website. But you could just rip some yourself. Help get the ball rolling. Upload them to Freenet or Gnutella.
Vorbis is up to Beta 4, but I'm not sure if there is any software that supports that standard yet.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Microsoft even pushed for full multimedia on PCs.
Correction - they pushed for full secure multimedia on PCs. Nobody at M$ ever said anything about fair use, etc.
---
The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
It will play MP3's, but it can only record MP3's at low quality. MS probably hopes consumers will think MP3 sucks after they've recorded it with Windowsmediaplayer.
(-% TwistedMind %-)
If the article is right, MS has changed the OS slightly so audio ripping software (from other vendors) doesn't work well anymore ('it is not optimized for XP').
(-% TwistedMind %-)
...could benefit from this sort of trick. What say we all switch to nice, simple XML-based documents, i.e., DocBook, and drop MS Word's DOC like a hot rock?
It just astounds me how such obviously inflammatory bullsh*t gets released to the press. How freaking obvious can Microsoft be when courting the entertainment industry?
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
As a Network Admin, I have been pretty happy with Windows 2000 overall.... but the more I hear about XP, the more I think I will just sit and wait for consumer outcry to kill it off.
Look at the &*$^% paperclip - it took 2 or 3 versions of Office, but they finally bought a clue...
Linux is lookin' better to me every day.
+++++++++++++++++++++
The Digital Sorceress
Of course, were I using Linux as my CD-R platform, I'm sure there would be some way to use these files to do a direct CD-Audio burn without the intermediary step, but under Windows, do I have any options?
It seems in retrospect, that my decision to convert everything into the open Vorbis format was a good one... but only if I can find applications that will play them properly. And can someone talk to Lionhead about adding Vorbis support into Black and White? :)
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
For a company such as Microsoft, that grew up out of the free-market capitilism of the United States to impose such freedom-crippling ideas is beyond me. I'm no basher of Microsoft. They have done some good things, and some silly things.
The pigs have turned into humans, friends.
Give me open file formats. You can have your proprietary software.
thelocust[dot]org
I just bought a CD-Receiver for my truck that will play MP3's. How does Windows factor into that equation? I'll tell you. If Windows XP impedes my enjoyment of my CD-Receiver (or my DVD player or any other MP3 device I own) by trying to ween me off MP3's, then I will actively ween myself off Windows XP. Microsoft, and perhaps the entire industry, is being very short-sighted. They seemed locked into the view of an MP3 as something people only listen to on their PC. In fact, I am a person who rarely listens to MP3's on my PC anymore because of the convenience of other devices that allow me to listen to MP3's EVERYWHERE ELSE! The ONLY thing I need Windows (or any OS) to do for me is to allow me to rip a good sounding MP3. If the operating system is not up to that, then I will be switching entirely to BeOS or MacOS or Linux. I, and I suspect many others, have accumulated a nice collection of devices that will play MP3 files, and if Microsoft or any other company, for that matter, believes I will simply abandon my investment in those devices for the convenience of Windows, then they are sadly mistaken. I don't think anyone really has a grasp yet on all of the paradigms the MP3 format will shift over the next few years.
mod this up. It's funny.. :)
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
Doesn't this sound a little like Microsoft is doing community service because of the antitrust lawsuit? "Hmm. Maybe if we make MP3's the new bad guy, we won't seem so evil..."
I didn't even know that WMP recorded MP3's. Actually, I would expect that anything recorded with WMP would be poor quality...
The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.
The posters who argue that Microsoft's monopoly is so strong that no one can damage it, so strong that there is in effect no choice for the poor dumb schmuck consumer, are completely neglecting Apple.
Apple began to suffer when most of the PCs being purchased were for use in the business environment. There was a certain amount of fashion involved, a certain amount of price sensitivity, a certain amount of incompatibility with Microsoft Flight Simulator (which was hot in executive's offices at the time), and a definite requirement to support the same file formats as the office productive tools used by one's coworkers.
Now, the business market is saturated, most every American home has a PC, but where is the growth going to come from? Second computers. Computers for the kids. And do the kids give a flying window about Powerpoint? I think not. The kids care about pop culture. This is a growth market, and Microsoft will lose it if they drive the kids to Apple. Jobs knows it, that's what "Rip...Burn" is all about.
How does this make money for Microsoft? I'm not a direct shareholder anymore, but if I were, I would definitely want to hear from the honchos an answer as to why they are weakening their monopoly to fight somone else's war.
I dont use any MS tools currently for playing/ripping and compressing my MP3's. I do use a Microsoft OS. I dont intend on altering the tools that i use. I fail to see how it will effect anybody who currently rips/compresses MP3s.
People like you and I who know what we are doing and dont use tools/programmes/&tc that are force fed to us are going to tell our friends what tools and programs to use, they will tell their friends too.
Unless MS break something so that alternative compression programs/algorithms fail i do not see how such a scheme will gain wide spread success. If people can not share they will hate it, if they hate it they will not use it, if no one uses it, no problem. Give it 10 years and who knows...
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
I'm not so sure. In the last year or so there's been even more 'wait and see' attitude @ upgrading MS OS's. Many large corps still have win95 as the standard desktop. Although, there seems to be a slightly swifter adaptation of W2k as an up to NT4.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
When people don't instantly adopt XP and MICROS~1 winds up with a non-saleable OS, they will be down the crapper. Remember (Unhappy)DIVX? That took about a year to die.
If MICROS~1 takes the weasel way out and suddenly finds ways to break DOS-based Windows and/or NT-based Windows with the Latest And Greatest software or hardware, there will be third-party fixes popping up like a hundred flowers blooming. And if it gets REALLY bad it will drive people right into the arms of Linux, particularly if emulation significantly improves under Linux.
So really, don't see this as a bad thing. This will anger third-party developers like Sonic Foundry because the new OS may break their audio apps. (fine way to treat the guy who wrote the multimedia code for Windows9x!) This will make these companies advise their customers NOT to "upgrade" to XP.
Fearless Prediction: XP will last just about as long as Microsoft BOB did.
----
http://www.msgeek.org/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm sorry but this situation must be corrected. So far, no one has enlightened this poor troll. I know for nearly everyone else this is review, but it appears that it is indeed necessary.
Red Hat did not invent Linux, Linus Torvalds (sp?) and a whole bunch of developers from all over the world did, and they did it mostly in their free time. They are not 'hackers' in the sense that that they are not some evil hoard conspiring to steal your credit card number and publish which porn sites you visit.
Red Hat sells a prepackaged version of linux which they have worked hard to form into a viable and competative consumer product complete with support and continued development. Debian, is a completely free, open source project. It includes nothing that you would have to pay money for. Debian, by definition makes no money. Read their social contract for a little more insight.
Now, just because it is free does not mean it is unsafe. No safe is uncrackable and no network is perfectly secure. As such, criminals often have a better knowledge of proprietary software such as windows NT, etc. than the network administrator running the system simply because the knowledge base is not public and the net admin can only learn what information is provided him. At best, the network admin and the criminal or on level ground. Open source makes that knowledge base public and you don't have to trust someone with your security you can secure things yourself. The burden is not on Microsoft to protect your credit card or porn habits, it's on you.
Hopefully, armed with this new knowledge, an enlightened debate can ensue.
I am willing to pay for quality products and to support musicians, but I am not willing to let my choices be made for me simply under the guise that some mega corporation has my best interests in mind. People will use microsofts preinstalled software because by and large, the computer consumer is a sheep and if it's at all difficult, they curl up into a fetal position and cry for bill gates to powder their ass and make everything smell better. Napster did not create MP3's but it made it simple for even the most ignorant user to download anything he or she wanted. It just happened to be free.
Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system.
Um... this is only talking about Windows Media Player, which no one uses anyhow. How about using a third party tool? You honestly expect me to believe they're going to prevent high-bitrate mp3s at the file level? Please.
Making MS look bad must be more important than accuracy. That's right, this is Slashdot.
--
The fact is, while WMA is good, it isn't open or free, and and the Windows player isn't as strong as WinAmp or XMMS.
--
I find playback quality noticeably better in WMP 7(win98) than XMMS. Yamaha ymf744 chipset too, which I think is one of the better ones supported in linux.
I'm pretty clueless as to how you think xmms is better in any way than WMP7.
The technology companies, which have the music industry's blessing, are encouraging those who download music to use new proprietary software formats that make the audio sound significantly better but also make it harder to share copyright-protected songs
For me, it is hard to discern the difference between an audio CD and a MP3 compressed with at least 128Kbits. I dont see any company "weaning" the massive MP3 community into switching formats, especially since many people have already imported some/most/all their audio collection into MP3. This will be yet another reason for me to stick with Win98/ME. I predict that the launch of XP will be a bit dissapointing for MS, and this is one of the many reasons why. Of course that is assuming that the average consumer who goes into the store will have heard of the drawbacks that XP will bring them...
I understand that MS et all are just trying to lend a helping hand with copy protection technologies, but i dont see it MP3 going away anytime soon...
just my $.02
-fohat
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
I don't find this piece surprising at all - it fits perfectly with MSCorps entire "freedom from choice" approach. The more proprietary the better. This is the kind of gestapo behaviour that has turned folks against Microsoft from the very beginning and will continue to in the future (apparently). To acquire and imitate (or steal) technology and then make the original obsolete is one of Microsoft's signature business practices and one of the reasons we love to hate them.
I'd really like to see how they plan to prevent third party codecs from being distributed and run on xp boxes - the fact is, they probably can't. So this "announcement" will one day amount to no more than a bluster of corporate flatulence serving to validate further what we already know about how Microsoft operates.-= jester =-
Right on.
-= jester =-
"The new restrictions in Windows XP won't prevent other vendors' software applications from recording MP3 music at a higher fidelity"
Is anybody seriously using a Microsoft product now to record or listen to their MP3 collection?
I imagine folks will just install MusicMatch on the new system and all will be fine with the world.
Of course they were able to find folks with a vested interest in seeing MP3s die who would predict that this is the "death of MP3s."
-30-
sigh*... no. Windows XP will be adopted for the same reason Windows ME is being adopted: OEM bundling. No one buys OSs on purpose, they buy a computer, and it needs an OS. What they get will be whatever Microsoft wants to give them.
Mainstream users do. I would assume that most of the Slashdot crew as well has hardcore gamers build their own machines.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
The new restrictions in Windows XP won't prevent other vendors' software applications from recording MP3 music at a higher fidelity...
...but early testers of beta versions of Windows XP already complain that the most popular MP3 recording applications -- which compete with Microsoft's format -- don't seem to function properly, apparently because of changes Microsoft made to how data are written on CD-ROMs under Windows XP.
Yes, the article says that. However in the same sentence there is this:
Learn to read.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Really... what's next? Are they going to come into our homes and make sure that we don't use MP3's? Wonder if Microsoft is getting a kickback from the "we're better than legal" RIAA...
He's saying that having WinXP to replace WinME is a good thing. He's not saying that WinME is good...
WinXP > WinME.
"Microsoft and RealNetworks plan to "limit the quality" of MP3 files that can be recorded on a computer running Windows XP"
Here is what the article says:
"The new restrictions in Windows XP won't prevent other vendors' software applications from recording MP3 music at a higher fidelity..."
Why the deceit Slashdot? It can't just be journalistic stupidity can it?
You want me to learn to read? Why don't you read the dozens of posts here on Slashdot from people who are having zero problems with their third-party MP3 encoders.
How is this a troll post? It's a completely legitmate point.
I don't like this any more than you do, but I have to be pedantic about one thing:
Market forces are about the consumer.
Market forces actually come in two types, forces from the suppliers and forces from the consumers. The market culminates in a deal when both parties think that the forces are either fair, or in their favour.
The problem with todays markets is that there are a small number of extremely powerful suppliers and a vast number of very weak consumers. This gives the suppliers a whole swathe of advantages over the consumer. One of the biggest ones is that the consumers do not have the time nor inclination to ensure they are as well informed as they could be. Therefore they supplier is constantly hoodwinking the consumer. In this, I believe, we agree.
This is why our markets need reformed. I am not sure which way; although I think the 'libertarian' idea of a free market (no controls, no checks, no measures) would be destined to degrade into some form of 'controlled' market, because suppliers will always form alliances, whereas consumers have 'better things to do with their time'.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
...In other news, enterprising hackers alter the encoding of MP3 standard slightly and change the extention to MP4, thereby thwarting the attempts of Microsoft and its evil minions to subvert music quality on a user's HOME PC.
Seriously, who do they think they're kidding here? With broadband around the corner, a much better music format can easily be introduced and distributed if Microsoft wants to screw around this way. At best this action buys them only 6 months of control. People WILL find a way around this EASILY.
The article also doesn't mention all the makers of MP3 players who will suddenly be threatened by this action. Some of them are very big and have LOTS of resources.
Ultimately, Microsoft's efforts this will probably go nowhere. MS became successful by LISTENING to individuals. When you stop listening, others who do listen better will take your place. IBM learned this lesson the hard way when Microsoft upstaged them. I'm sure there's someone waiting in the wings to do the same to Microsoft since THEY have lost the ability to listen.
Some good points here. Most People (non-nerds) could care less about the OS as long as it is easy to use and it does what what they want it to. As soon as one or both of these criteria are not met, most will start looking for alternatives. IQ's sisters are a good case in point.
The more that M$ makes Windows not do what the consumer wants, the better for the alternatives. The more crap that gets added to Windows (excessive copyright "protection", etc.), the less usable it becomes for the average Joe or Jane, the more they will resist it and find alternative solutions.
Beware of Sleestak
Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality
Precisely! Right now nobody uses M$'s Media Player for MP3 encoding, do they? They use third-party apps like MusicMatch Jukebox etc. So the lack of support in Windows XP is a shame, but it won't change anything. People will just carry on using their third-party apps for anything MP3 related. Hell, I don't even use Media Player to listen to my MP3s...
Usually I shrug at watever the boys in Redmond do. But this one scares me. In case you have not noticed -- most new portable audio players are shipping with support for .wma's in addition to the "old" .mp3 standard. This in itself is not a big deal -- but (I hate to admit) I installed Windows 98 the other day after purchasing one of these new devices -- and began to experiment with .wma encoding. -- I have to admit that the quality VS. size factor that they claim walks all over .mp3's. So now I can hold twice the amount of .wma files on my 64 meg portable as I can comparable .mp3 files. And as an added bonus I don't lose any sount quality.
.wma's by simply checking a box in the proprietory .dll's at any given moment and releasing a "critical patch"-- (looks very possitive in the eyes of the mp3 opponents if you read the Wall Street Journle article linked in this post)....Are enough to make me think that Microsoft is putting themselves into a pretty good position to gain control of the market and then please the powers that be at the expense of the users.
These 2 factors along with the fact that Micro$oft can "lock down"
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
If it doesn't come with Vorbis encoder, then we'll know that the fee wasn't the reason.
Hah.. thats almost funny.. they wont include a vorbis encoder because almost no one uses vorbis and its not really even completed anyway.
One Thing that is very interesing is that "The system does not allow end-user access to expansion bus cards. This means users will no longer routinely open their PCs to add peripherals."
Essentially, this spec is an attempt to give the person everything that they need, and therefore will never want for anything else. The ultimate all in one solution.
I get the picture that MS wants to somehow do for the hardware market what they have done for the software market, in the sense of for example, the software bloat in Word. "Give them all of the features they could possibly want".
Somehow I do not think that many of the folks around here are going to buy this solution. The XP Box is essentially a non-upgradable consumer box, like a VCR.
I don't know how this is going to play in the bigger market.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's how long my W2K Server has been running without a reboot. Just goes to show that everyone's experiences are different.
Hey, if they want to pay for bandwidth, that's fine... but if not (which is given) fsck'em!
Eveything is fine, with the exception of the hardware part (which was going on for a long time till Linux came along). I don't have to use Windows at home, at work on the other hand... maybe I can oneday write a good Novel Netware 5 Client... and I then I wouldn't have to use it here! Blech!
I give up on Microsoft operating systems to do any real work. I'll stick with Linux and ABCDE to record my Mp3s thank you, simple quick, quality and painless. Why can't MS just realize that the people who truely want to do these things(the whole world should realize this in general) will find a way to do it. No matter what imposed limits, or protection they try to impliment we will get around it. Its a geeks, right, and Mission to do so.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Obviously you don't actually have the balls to face up to you opinions since you Posted as an AC. Next time at least have the presence of mind to face up to your opinion you sackless wonder. I might take it more seriously. And by the way its not an attitude that everything should be free, I am willing to pay for quality. But it turns out the best stuff is free, companies should make their money on the real commodity, support. And as far as MP3's musicians should make their money doing their job touring!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Amen Brother!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Humm, last count, I saw there are more holes, and bugs in the "trusted" MS software than any other OS/Application out there.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Yes, I have infact and the people I worked with in everycase were very helpful. In onecase they offered their software for free, but did charge for support. Therefore the calls they got for support were actually worthwhile calls, things that were really broke, and not dumb stuff. The other was a vendor of a high scale app that carged a high fee for support, I also had to pay for the app, bt again because it was their main revenue stream to get paid for support they were very helpful.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Your comment isn't necessarily true. People like buzzwords. I'm 90% certain that my parents (who are your average users, pretty much) would be asking for the mp3 capability. They don't know about ASF, WMP, etc, etc. They know "mp3". The buzzword's been accepted into popular society, and even Microsnot would have problems going against that.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Goddamit people! The ability to circumvent a default does not render the default harmless! Why oh why would a software company intentionally set a default option to a non-optimal setting? A: To discourage its use!!! This kind of strategy is called "leveraging". It happens when you have so much marketshare in one area which enables you to bulldoze any competitive products or standards that don't benefit you.
That's the key here and the reason this MS bashing is going on. This does nothing for the consumer, it benefits only MS and there ought to be loud voices raised up in response.
Keep trying,
czep
Dictionaries are for loosers.
Folks, calm down please. MS is only limiting MP3 recording in the Windows Media Player software. You can get any MP3 recording software like MusicMatch or something else and still record good quality MP3's. Besides, by changing a registry key in WinXP you will be able to record MP3's at higher rate than 56kpbs. Also Windows Media Player will play all the MP3 music you record, no matter what their quality is. So, their's nothing to it. I too was mad, but after reading a few articles I realised that WinXP will not block access to MP3's, they're just removing the MP3 recording feature from their Window Media Player. So what? We've got tons of MP3 making software on the net.
And if you used mp3 files like a good little citizen, then Microsoft wouldn't be able to screw you out of all that time that you spent reripping songs 4-5 times.
Especially when someone steals your 300cd collection.. No need to go buy all your cd's back.
That's just as bad as buying the exact same cd's that you already had and giving them to someone else.
Oh yes, XP must die.
because of the retarded corp's, alot of history will be lost so that 500 years down the line noone will know what went on here.
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
This dog doesn't like the dog food.
:wq
ROFL, ok yeah, my post was really "off topic". I just -LOVE- the mods here at slashdot.
Give up the anti-Nader nonsense will you? Here we have a country that out of millions of people can barely decide which of the royal families' sons they want to have as president. I mean the margin was what, 1%? The guy who got the most votes loses the election because a state like Florida has a margin of a few thousand votes for the other guy? The potential statistical error involved was greater than the difference in the votes!
Either this points up that America is a very conflicted country divided sharply into two very separate camps, or maybe its indicative that there are a few key issues which have been made into false dichotomies, when-- in fact-- most Americans are a little fuzzy on their stance, sitting on the fence, in the grey area, you know... centrist. They really don't know about the fundamental differences, because there aren't any.
We had a Democrat president for 8 years and he brought us Chinese spy scandals, sexual harrassment in the Oval Office, delivered on almost none of his promises to gays, racial profiling by police forces is the hot topic at the END of his term, pollution really hasn't changed, AIDS is on the rise again, the WTO, COPA, then CIPA, the DMCA, whose FTC allowed the AOL-Time merger, and I know we all got the sense that when his lawsuit situation wasn't looking so good he used a military action to divert our attention. Then his right-hand man runs for president and says nothing new. This guy who is married to one of the founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, is a born-again Christian, chooses an extremely conservative Jew as a running mate, and mouths mostly the same platitudes as his opponent does. And you really want to pretend there's a difference?
With the exception of rescinding some overseas funding for abortions (a move a lot of Americans support) and maybe this Kyoto treaty thing (and recall it's not like we're breaking the treaty, the Democrat never agreed to it anyway) what has GW done that's so terribly conservative? How about appointing a halfway progressive gay man to head the AIDS office?
No, the two parties are not that different. They mostly say a whole lot of nothing and bow to public pressure (which is fairly unanimous... Americans, for all the diversity the culture could have, have basically settled for a land that is basically one big strip mall of the same ten stores) by finding fairly bland compromises on most divisive issues. So please, the reason Nader had to focus on swing states was precisely because that's where Gore went to try and sway people away from Nader. If Gore had focused his anti-Nader rhetoric in states where he had the election sewed up, then Nader probably wouldn't have been in places like FL asking for votes either. Instead Nader has to be there convincing people that they are not handing the election to Bush if they vote for Nader, he has to be there convincing them that two parties are not enough and that the sooner they stop voting for the lesser of two evils the sooner one of the evils will stop winning the election.
Note: I didn't vote for Nader, Bush, or Gore.
I do not have a signature
But instead they'll just think Windows Media Player sucks. (So what else is new?!)
sulli
RTFJ.
Even after Napster's toast (and it's clearly toast) the adoption of MP3 as a standard won't slow down. Users will keep sharing via tools like Gnutella; people will keep rip-mix-burning onto CDs. WMA won't let you do this, so it won't be as useful, and people won't use it.
Well, at least I won't, and I would bet there are about 20 million others like me who are pretty damn satisfied with MP3 and, in the words of an old cigarette ad, would rather fight than switch.
sulli
RTFJ.
Also to play tunes in a jukebox fashion rather than one CD at a time. After I got Apple's iTunes, I quickly filled up >1G of my hard drive because of this feature. Now of course I share that folder on Napster, but even once Napster's dead and gone this will still be useful.
Having to jump through any hoops at all to move this to another computer, hardware device, etc. is simply unacceptable, so I won't switch!
sulli
RTFJ.
If I had MS stock, I'd sell it now.
sulli
RTFJ.
Read the WSJ article, emphasis and comments added:
Under Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second -- MP3 music "sounds like somebody in a phone booth underwater," says P.J. McNealy, an analyst who researches Internet audio issues for Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
(Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality.)
[And so nobody uses them!]
The new restrictions in Windows XP won't prevent other vendors' software applications from recording MP3 music at a higher fidelity, but early testers of beta versions of Windows XP already complain that the most popular MP3 recording applications -- which compete with Microsoft's format -- don't seem to function properly
[Maybe because MS is using its typical anticompetitive dirty tricks?]
apparently because of changes Microsoft made to how data are written on CD-ROMs under Windows XP. Microsoft says that while other software vendors' products may not be "optimized" to run with Windows XP, those products should run acceptably with the operating system.
Whoever at MS thinks Joe User will stick to 56kbp is smoking crack. Everyone will simply use Winamp or one of the hundreds of other MP3 tools. If MS wants to make sure nobody uses its software, this is a great way to do it!
(Compare Apple, whose excellent iTunes is user-friendly and MP3 only.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Consumers are still going to want to play their bought copies of The Sims and Quake 2/3 and Hoyles, several versions of Windows into the future. These games use DirectSound. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that DirectSound will not be crippled
Therefore, full quality playback of MP3s without digital signing will still be acceptable, and all naysaying is, well, pretty much pointless.
I mean, grow some brains people!
Go Kathryn Thurber!
subject says it all
You stated that, "The period should appear within the quotation".
This was done originally because the metal blocks that typesetters used were expensive. Furthermore, a small period was easily damaged by scraping or denting. Since putting a . outside of the quotes would leave it exposed and more likely to be damaged, it was placed within the quotes.
Since, virtually NO media is typeset these days (using conventional methods), we no longer need to protect the . within the ".
Furthermore, it is clearer to put the punctuation that has nothing to do with the quotation, outside of the quotation.
Keeping
If Fraunhofer were a US National company, then I'm sure that the anti-trust laws would prevent this type of behavior. Especially if MS somehow disabled or crippled the ability of other MP3 encoders to work under XP.
Keeping
When will Microsoft ever learn. This will help get more Linux desktop users (a good thing). Also a hack would be developed to solve this problem. If the hack breaks XP then most users will stay with 98/NT/2000. I prefer Linux. The mpeg standard will be here for a long time. And I am not going to dump my Neo 35 MPEG player (13 GB HD, I built a Linux based docking station for it). I've got my entire CD collection in this pupppy sampled at 320k/sec. The player slides out of my truck and into my home stereo unit when I am not on the road. No Microsloth I am not going to give up high fidelity MPEGS because you say so!
I think the article meant to say "Windows Media Player will limit the quality of ripped mp3".
Press release:
Microsoft Windows YQ to feature cup-and-string audio technology.
Listen to your songs as Edison or Bell intended!
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
Well, RealNetworks already makes that claim about their own RealJukebox software. Whether or not it's true, though, this doesn't mean that you can't record better-quality MP3's on Windows -- just not using Microsoft's software.
The upshot is probably that Napster and other MP3-sharing tools will probably have lower-quality MP3 files for you to steal, but you yourself can still record MP3 in high-quality just by changing the prefs or using another ripper.
Don't overreact, all. This is just Microsoft's way of saying once again: "You should use our format instead of an open standard."
It's a shame that Be won't open source BeOS. If they did it could take out Windows within 3-4 years (given enough time to get apps & games written for it). It's very easy to figure out how to use the OS (much easier than any flavor of Linux I've used). Oh yeah, and it has unbelievable multimedia support, right out of the box. Try opening 20 or so mp3s in any Win OS. You can't, BeOS can.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
this corp. won't touch it with a 10 ft pole
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB987029812303 668619.htm
I've got one example. Notepad. Notepad unequivocally sucks ass compared to any other text editor, but it has just enough features (searching/replacing, no size limit at least in NT, word wrap, that's about it) to make it useful.
If I'm using a machine for any serious coding, I'll install a better editor. But for simple editing of configuration files, it's just not worth the effort. Notepad gets the golden good enough award. It's always there, and always just barely good enough.
The only new information in this Reuter's article is that the audio recorder built in to XP will only allow the recording of low-quality MP3s. You can still use whatever you want to rip your CDs.
True, Microsoft is trying to guide users away from the MP3 format, which is despicable, but this isn't some heavy-handed move to ban MP3s from XP altogether.
By the way, here's another story from StreamingMedia.com that reports things very differently . . . according to this one, Microsoft has not yet decided (as of March 28) whether to include MP3 encoding abilities in Media Player.
It seems that what MS is doing is what they always do.
They offer just a little bit of functionality. Then, they leave the door open for other companies to improve upon on what they have offered.
For example...
--Windows Defrag is okay, but Norton is better.
--VB is okay, but the 3rd party add-ons are better
--Notepad is okay, but a whole bunch of freeware is better
--CD Player/mediaplayer is okay, but WinAmp is better
Alot of people have built entire companies around the idea of improving upon what MS has offered. (Go ahead-Insert your favorite Linux dist. here)
Think of all of the anti-virus companies that would go out of business if MS actually put a real modicum of effort into the area. For reference, think about how many office productivity suites Windows users *really* get to choose from. There is basically only one. And, that's because MS put real effort into it.
The fact that MS is putting minor MP3 ability into the software will not put much of a dent into the sales of third party software. If anything, I expect it will help increase the number of choices from new, and existing, companies.
Now... Before anybody flames me as Bill G - wannabe, I just want to mention that I think it is rather silly to add MP3 ripping to an OS. (Can you say Bloat?) Also, it is rather silly to expect the MP3 ripper tacked onto the OS to perform as well as a seperate program. Think about it - How many of you use the Windows CD Player or the Address Book?
Just my 2 cents worth of nonsense...
And some of you wonder why the many of us use Linux... Gee. I wonder why.
Quote:
Microsoft's new restrictions -- which prevent its built-in software from recording MP3 files at fidelity rates higher than 56 kilobits per second... (Existing versions of Microsoft's audio software don't allow consumers to record music as MP3 files of any quality.)
If consumers didn't use Microsoft Products to record mp3's then they've already gotten used to using alternative software. Non-tech-saavy people will keep using the alternative software because they won't know that Microsoft has a product that can sample mp3's. Whereas tech-saavy people will know the limitations of said software and use an alternative. If Microsoft are targeting individuals who are new to computing and are not computer literate, then M$ do not seem to realise that the next generation of computer users are very computer literate. (Just think of any kid age 12+) Most basic office workers can now talk comfortably about Gigs and Ethernet.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
My thought exactly! Who cares? Anyone can use any thirdparty software to do whatever they want. Unless some M$ "genius" finds that WindowsXP shouldn't run shareware, public domain, freeware etc. if it's not approved by M$ or RealSucks with a key? But unless that would be the case it's just a lot of bullshit and FUD!
Come on, seriously? What is there to rip from Gnome and Enlightenment? The heavy mem. and CPU footprint?
I tend to agree with you. I run Win2000 and I am extremely satisfied with it. It's very stable (dare I say it? - as stable as Linux), a lot faster than any earlier Win version, some nice UI adjustsments compared to the earlier versions. As long as driver-support, DirectX upgrades, dev. tools etc. keep up on Win2000, I have NO intention of upgrading to XP.
Why on Earth should I?
Couldn't agree with you more, I hate MS and everything that it stands for, in fact, if it weren't for CS my PC would be packed up in a closet and i'd just use my powerbook for everything, HOWEVER, I run Win2K @Work and I couldn't be happier with it, so far i'm running on 60 days of uptime and it's still as fast and stable as the minute it booted up. I think XP is going to be about as popular as WinME ever was. And the only people who will use it are those unfortunate enough to have it pre-loaded on their system.
-matt
Putting crappy encoding rates into Windows is a bad thing. It'll also probably work. Why? Because most users don't download alternatives. Whats the most used telnet client in the world? Windows Telnet. Its crap. Whats the most used web browser? Internet Explorer. It used to be crap. Why? Because they were in with the windows package from the beginning.
I remember when IE sucked, but people still used it over Netscape because downloading and installing Netscape was a hassle. People didn't want to do it. People didn't know they could do it.
Its all very well running around and saying "Well I'll just download a better program". Great, but the majority of people won't. They'll use what they have and if they are gently persuaded to use something else then they will.
So yes, this is going to be a problem. The savvy people will download and use something else. Those that aren't so savvy (of which there are a hell of a lot more) will use what they are given.
If what they are given encourages them to use something else that gives a better result, then they'll do that.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
>>Microsoft's days are being quickly numbered. Dumb fuckers like LordAnalrim have been predicting this for years. BTW Nice strawman. Windows 2000 is such a flop I wonder how I manage to make all mucho $$$ installing Active Directory.
Something similar is happening already. If you want to write application that reads/writes ASF files, you have to apply for a key. Check your DirectMedia/DirectX documentation.
This license is ridiculous.
Got friends?
Seriously, though, if you want a good sound & music compression software, chech out Ogg Vorbis, which is free software, cross platform, fast, and high quality. I recommend bitrates of 160 or higher.
Got friends?
So I read the article and, >Microsoft and Seattle-based RealNetworks are working to subtly wean consumers away from MP3
> technology, encouraging them to use proprietary software formats instead
I was saying to my self "Oh, go fsck yourself"
Yes let's all kill a good standard(well, good enough for me).
I would be really happy to use a standard from RealNetworks. argh. That always looks crappy it might be good for streaming, but why on earth would i use it for something thats on my harddisk. sigh
--------
WMP8 is a lot better than the one that shipped with WinMe. Version 7 was a rush job thrown into Me towards the end of the beta. It was a bad idea to include it. WMP8 on the otherhand is pretty good. It's stable and fast (well.. fast on a 733mhz) and it has lots of features. You can now resize the window in compact mode which was removed from WMP7. I still use Winamp for audio though. WMP is only for movie in my opinion!
3. They obviously encode very slowly ("PIII/700 laptop about 3x real time", geesh kinda slow, my 266 encodes mp3s (160) at 2.5X). ------- You know how divx takes a lot longer to encode than other video formats? Yeah, same concept. High quality + small file size = Lots of math :)
It's normal better compression to take longer. Don't diss it. Also, I think it actually encodes significantly faster than 3x (on a 733).
now.
XP won't play MP3? Even if they're MP3s that I ripped myself, from my own CDs?
Dang, Microsoft used to stuff their OS full of nifty little apps, heck, Microsoft even pushed for full multimedia on PCs.
I guess I won't be in a hurry to upgrade to XP anytime soon.
...but who cares?
MS is going against it's own policy. Does that mean that they are falling in to the same trap as IBM fell in it's glory days?
IBM tried to push clone-PCs out of market by introducing stupid "standards". Remember microchannels? Fortunatelly, market does not work this way...or do they?
AC is AC
Let's face it, the MP3 genie is out of the bottle. Not building a good MP3 encoder into Windows XP isn't going to put it back in.
Does anyone have any ideas on what it could be actually doing?
I don't go for the idea that they just aren't going to give you the tools to do so. I'm thinking that if this statement is literally true, they might try to look for the algorithm. Anyone know if this would even be possible?
A more M$ solution would be to just include an encoder with the OS and make it really suck.
This will be the next codec. The consumer will eat what he's given, but inventive and driven people will find a way past these "limitations".
This article is just plain WRONG!
Wrong! That's it. It's Wrong. They will print a correction soon, I bet. WMP8 currently tests with the ability to encode MP3's at the bit-rate of 56. This is only because MS has no intentions of including this in the final release(so far anyway). Instead, they just threw it in there so that people could test it. Third parties will be able to add Mp3 recording abilities... or whatever other file format they want.
All you MS bashers... SIT THE HELL DOWN. You're wrong on this one.
Since Win Media Player will be the default player installed, most will blindly go with it. M$ knows this and is counting on it. What's the problem? It's that their Media Player will intentionally screw up MP3s, so the con$umer will naturally gravitate to M$'s preferred format. And I don't think that M$ will allow anyone to make a player for that format. If they do, they're gonna charge them like sin, which a small company can't afford.
There you have it. MickySoft's Embrace and Extinquish technique in full detail. Which, in the end and for everyone, has Mickysoft not only doing everything, but doing everything badly.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Windows is bad enough the way it is. It's real nice to see that M$ is publically putting forth such great efforts to make their OS suck even more.
I'm sorry, but shouldn't companies try to improve their product?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Right.....
;)
My question is this, if I use Winamp, Xamp, and Sonique to play my mp3's (along with the other 90% of the mp3 listening population) then how is microsoft going to make their operating system affect the playback qualiy of a third-party application??? If MS drops mp3 from the Windows Media player, then good! That's more recovered HD space for me to fill with mp3s.
As far as the mp3 recording quality goes, it's the same story. You can't write an operating system that treats certain applications poorly. People will just start using other applications that perform the same function. If MS thinks they are going to do something stupid with the process's CPU slice to keep people from encoding above a certain quality, I know plenty of mp3 encoders that don't encode in real time. They run on wav files instead. So if it takes my computer 3 hours to encode a 256kbps mp3 because the cpu keeps taking away that processes timeshare, then I guess I'll just have to encode 50 mp3s at once. That should take my computer quite a while anyways.
The point is, an OS is supposed to let you run applications, and provide inferfaces to the system's hardware for those applications to utilize. (There's more technical requirements as well, but I'm not getting into those.) Nazi eskimo tactics do not fall into the list of OS requirements. (No offense to any nazi eskimos out there.
Picture it. It's 2020, computers are as cheap as TV's and with that CableTV access or Phone acess comes with it a faster internet connection. Every company in the RIAA decides to totally stop producing CDs, Tapes, Records, MusicDVDs, and whatever other hard copy medium exists and instead use a distant cousin of WMP and make everyone download it and share the profits with computer makers that put in hardware level copy protections in all computers(which they been preparing for the last 5 years). Now who is being forced?
It's not just a format. It's a baby step to the end of fair use. You get consumers to encode thier current albums with it, then when they share their music with other consumers (and they will), those people will want to get WMP too. Once there is %80 market share of WMP, RIAA members can sell you WMP files for CHEAP (this is called market dumping), making more people want computers with Windows so they can download music. Once people get used to buying music online, the RIAA members can all stop producing hard copies and totally destroy fair use.
It's not just a format. Copy protections stop Fair Use of copyright works. WinXP is the first step. MS wants to tie hardware and software so that when you replace your mobo, you will need a new copy of Windows. When you buy Music, you will need Windows. If you want to e-mail your mom, you will need Windows (as more poeple use Outlook, MS can have outlook by default use nonstandard HTML, making all other Mail readers allways play a game of catchup). I don't like Windows. I don't want Windows. I am damn glad some standards exists still that allow cross-platform sharing of files. If MS had its way, that wouldn't be the case and if the RIAA/MS had their way, fair-use would be a distant ruling by the Supreme Court that is no longer relevent.
Burn Hollywood Burn
So what you are saying is: If the company that controls 90% of the desktop computers wants to team up with the RIAA and make it impossible to copy songs the the comsumer buys, thereby making it impossible in the future to buy new albums that can't be copied for legimate fair uses, thats okay cause its "market forces".
Hogwash, utter hogwash. Market forces are about the consumer. That is the whole point of a free economy. That is why monolopies should NOT exist. When we allow one company to control 90% of home computers, it thinks bullshit like this is okay, and consumers just have to eat that dog food if they want to buy music (which eventually, they will if this goes unchecked). I'm sorry. I don't like monolopies. I especially don't like monolopies destroying fair-use in concert with record companies.
Burn Hollywood Burn
1. They don't work in MacOS X
2. They don't work in BeOS (x86)
3. They obviously encode very slowly ("PIII/700 laptop about 3x real time", geesh kinda slow, my 266 encodes mp3s (160) at 2.5X).
4. What happens when someone cracks the "copy protection" in the WMA format? Is MS gonna change it without regard to compatibility?
5. Even if I could use those files (meaning had Windows), I couldn't share them with anyone in my family, much less listen to them on any portable player.
6. Last but not least, from what I have seen of WMP (as limited as that is) in WinME, it blows nutz UI wise, is slow on anything other than a 400P2, and wastes LOTS of valueable screen space by default.
Burn Hollywood Burn
You are a troll, but thats okay. Trolling can be a fun experience. Let me give it a try. ;)
"I can't enjoy certain anime because I don't read nor understand Japanese.
You don't have a right to it.
Nor did I say I did. Don't read into a statement what is not there, makes you look like a reactionary fool.
"You post sounds like 'I want it all now! And I blame MS for it and not market forces or technology'."
"Market forces", I damn near cracked a rib reading this. Do you honestly think consumers WANT copy protections? Do you honestly think consumers want old formats to be "updated" as often as possible so people with new computers have more trouble sending files to people with older computers? You sound like the type of person who would say IE is more popular than Netscape because it is "better' (which, btw, runs totally against what MS planners thought). I really just don't understand how people can honest believe MS is where it is at because it is the "best". I really don't understand what "market forces" are at play other than "monolopistic bundling" when MS uses its ownership of Windows to try to kill a file format. People use what came with Windows. Most don't trust or even understand downloading enough to seek alternate players.
The ONLY reason MS wants to add copy protection to Windows is so they can get part of the theoritcal money people will pay to download music. The software industry has gone unchecked for too long. Most of the industry is consumer unfriendly, writes buggy code, and is trying to redifine what fair use is. I don't want to tell my children about the good ole days when we were actually able to buy music in a unencrypted form, make a copy for the car, a copy for the office, and loan it to friends to listen to. But, at this rate I will, because everything will be "encrypted" (even if its only ROT 26), the DCMA will stop people from breaking that encryption even if they want to merely want to play their files in their car. Not only that, if in the highly likely event that WindowsXPv12 (2010 release,build 5million) dies and you have to reinstall, your computer might suddenly think all those files you have backed up are pirated and refuse to use them (cause Windows is fucking STUPID and requires a FORMAT to reinstall). If the OS can identify your computer uniquely and .NET plays out, every time you visit goatse.cx, MS knows.
Sounds like a shitty idea, if you ask me. I'll stick to formats that don't have any level of prevention in them. XP might look harmless now, but don't think this is nothing more than a baby step towards destroying fair use.
Burn Hollywood Burn
It's fun to see that at the same time as Microsoft limit the use of mp3s, Apple releases iTunes for free, which allows you to create mp3s with a bitrate up to 320bps.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
The story had little in the way of explainations. How on earth could the OS hobble a CD-ripper like that? All the OS would see is an application writing a few million bits to a file.
For protecting big businesses. I mean we all know that Microsoft has the largest share of the OS and software community and that's becuase well.... Most people have to use them. The average person doesn't have much of a choice in what they use as an OS. They need to use software that is geared towards Microsoft so therefore they HAVE to buy it.
Since this is the case, why o' why would Microsoft even care about the individual any more? They don't. They're only out for big business and big profits!
Linux will one day rule and it will all be thanks to the hard working Linux programmers and Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot time and time again, just like this.
Linuxrunner
Reading my last few posts over again, I must not be in a good mood today.... Hey, It's almost Friday!
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
The name "Ogg Vorbis" has way too geeky a sound to catch on with most people who are actually going to buy Win XP. It will have to be repackaged/remarketed as something else. Xiph is a cool name. It even works with the X in XP and OSX.
.xip files anyone?
(x-tinguish intellectual property, heh heh)
or maybe
.xph
(x-scape proprietary hedging)
(strong enough for a man, ph balanced for a computer)
Or perhaps I'm drunk on cheese.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
The pot of yoghurt I got from Tesco yesterday has more culture in it than Microsoft could ever hope to find.
-- Soruk
I know :-) In line with the original poster... they're a big organisation and they were distributing culture ;)
-- Soruk
Some "Innovation". Unfortunately, most people will "eat it up", as this article on ZDNET suggests.
I don't know much about iTunes, but it's very existence confirms to me that at least Apple won't roll over and let the RIAA scratch its belly.
Innovative UI features ripped off from Xfreeee, Enlightenment, Gnome, etc.
Don't read this!
You're forgetting they got rid of Clippy for WinXP. Isn't that enough reason to get it???
Mod me Mad
The emphasis here is on the built-in audio recoders. Packages like Sound Forge and others that will allow you to legally record and save your music as mp3's can't be touched here. Even if there was a possbility of this working acrossed the board on all mp3's, we have a lot of young energetic programmers who would just love to lay claim to that hack. :)
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market.
Taken from the Halloween Documents. Scroll down to De-commoditize protocols & applications.
Maybe this isn't hijacking an open standard as much as subverting one through software crippling... Either way, it's hard to ignore the fact that a software company that relies on proprietary formats is looking for a way to do away with an open format. We should be fighting this on principle. I suppose that's preaching to the converted, though...
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The free Fraunhofer MP3 encoder in Windows already limits you to 64 kbps or something. If you want more, get LAME or something.
> Software companies aren't going to let their
> products fall by the wayside because Microsoft
> changed something in their OS.
That's true. However, they will need to expend some not-insignificant effort playing "catch-up" so that they can again compete with Windows Media Player. Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't have the same lag in development. If you think that this is an insignificant effect, I respond by asking, when was the last time you ran Lotus 1-2-3?
Virg
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
Did ANYONE bother reading the article? PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE!
I am getting rather embarrased about the intelligence level my fellow nerds. 90% of the posters here have their facts all fucked up. Damn, you people make the *nix community look like a bunch of mad-cow infected sheep. If this were an Orwellian future, most of the posters here would not be able to see past the doublespeak.
Not that this helps, but here are some FACTS:
1. Windows Media Player never was able to encode MP3s until now.
2. Fact, most "free" MP3 encoders are limited due to the fact that they have pay Thomson Multimedia SA and the Fraunhofer Institut royalties for going over the line.
3. CD burning capability was limited in WMP7 and there wasn't the slightest bitch about that.
4. As a Systems Admin, I could care less what MS adds for entertainment purposes, I won't use it anyway. (Now if they took away DDK documentation I would be PISSED...oops digressing.)
...encouraging them to use proprietary software formats instead...
.mp3 WAS a proprietary format? Ogg Vorbis may sound funny, but at least it's not closed source.
I thought
why is m$ stepping into the mp3 situation in the first place? how is it their job to try and police the distribution of mp3s, ect? their job is to provide an operating system. not a "you can use this and that". somewhere m$ is profiting from this move. bastards...
And not you either, if you get some decent ad blocking software. =)
www.proxomitron.cjb.net
Have fun.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
This is the way Microsoft ends
;-)
This is the way Microsoft ends
This is the way Microsoft ends
Not with a bang but a penguin
Sorry, I just HAD to.
Apologies to the original author.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Friend, I'm with you, but you're mistaken here. People don't grab power for reasons. People grab power, to have power. Any reasons they give are merely excuses, every last damn time. Or, to quote Orwell (as if that's neccessary on /.), "Power is not a means; it is an end... The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
They're pushing for CPPRM because it gives them a kick in the pants to control and dominate others. Not because they give a crap about "music pirating". The CPRM plans will continue regardless of M$'s success in this attempt.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Where do you think Microsoft gets the money it uses to try to stamp out free software and innovation? From the joe schmoe end users over whose eyes it has successfully pulled the shorn hairs of a sheep! That's who.
As long as people on slashdot continue to be arrogant and flippant about letting the computer-illiterates suffer under Microfost, Microsoft will continue to be funded by those users. And will use that funding to continue to oppress free software.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
This sounds familiar. Hmm, wasnt it Netscape who lost out when M$ bundled IE as the primo browser in Wintendo? So whoever is getting the money for mp3s (I think it said Thompson Multimedia SA) is getting gipped for their format. This also sounds like they definately have too much of a hold on the O/S market. Oh well. The only people who benefit from this are the makers of linux. More power to them.
Uh...anyone heard of this little standard for audio?
.NET? All their data will be protected from loss, corruption and theft - Microsoft servers are very secure and reliable. Who doesn't have broadband access these days?"
I must say, I'm not surprised. Not at all. USB 2, MP3...what's next? Hard drives?
Mr. Gates: "Well, people will just have to learn to live without HD support in Windows 2010. Why don't they use
*chill running down spine*
Is this "functionality" going to be in windoze media player, or are they going to make a change to windows? What about all of the people buying MP3 players for their car? MP3 is basically the standard for exchanging music, and now M$ has to push some proprietary BS into the market....
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Geeks are going to be the ones compressing the files and setting up the distrobution system, so it follows that we will choose the format. Farber is partly right... the average user will take what their given, but they will go to whatever format offers the most content. The average user will go with whatever works, and right now that's mp3.
Don't forget how long Real and MS were trying to push their own formats before they gave in and supported mp3s. mp3s never got help from any of the large corps(until long after it was standard) and never needed it.
Real has always sucked because they bend over backwards (or maybe forwards) to make things appear secure, and to try to sell you real player plus. They ignore obvious improvements like caching a stream, which would be great for those of us that have fast but inconsistent connections. Then there's the fact that they limit the volume in their player, so you can't hear just how low quality the sound is.
Look at DivX ;-). If you don't have the codec, WMP won't download it for you. You have to search through various mirrors to find it. It has no corporate backing and encoding isn't exactly simple(I assume, I haven't tried it). By the logic of MS it should be dying, but it's not.
The piracy (and lets not get into any of that 'I only use it to back up my CDs' bullshit) community only needs to find an open format and the'll take it from there.
This isn't like MS beating Netscape, this is like MS trying to replace .JPEGs with Microsoft Image Files. And to encourage acceptance of the format, paintbrush will now only save jpegs at low quality. It's just not going to catch on.
It seems that the biggest concern (for me, at least) is that Microsoft is trying to switch the average consumer over to an audio format that is only supported in the latest, greatest, (and most bloated, slowest, etc.) version of Windows (and maybe an older version or two, but how long until they drop support for 98, for example? 95 support is already gone for a lot of things, especially Office XP).
Is it just me, or is it obvious that Microsoft has no intention of releasing anything capable of playing Windows Media Audio files (and other similar MS-controlled codecs) for Linux? While the integrated encoder for Windows XP will suck (and the fact that they're 'integrating' (read: bundling) an encoder with the OS seems suspiciously similar to the whole 'IE is a part of Windows. Really!' thing from a few years back), it bothers me more that those of us that use linux will be unable to use any of the media released in these Microsoft formats.
As usual, Microsoft seems to almost try to make it impossible for anyone to use anything other than Windows if they want to do virtually anything new.
I'm aware of the Ogg Vorbis codec, tools, players, etc, and while that format may be great for home use with ripped cds and the like, it's effectively worthless in terms of being able to purchase and/or download a song from a record label or artist web site.
However, it seems that there will be an impass if anyone ever tries to implement something even remotely similar to SAP in Linux, because no one is willing to accept that someone else will have more control over what we do with our computers than we do. RIAA wants things one way, while users want it another way. In the Linux world, what the RIAA wants doesn't mean a thing. Let's face it- a lot of Linux users are control freaks (at least as far as computers are concerned). Heck, I paid for it, I want it to work the way I say.
I really think that this limitation will move away more people from Microsoft platforms to "alternative" OSes than anything before.
Well done MS!!
You know the story about putting the frog in the cold water then turning the heat on and the frog boils to death due to the subtle transition. This is what MS is doing. kiss your computing freedom goodbye!
This isn't really worth comment. They aren't doing anything else. This is not a reason that will make anyone switch from windows. This is just microsoft saying I won't give you basic support for another open standard. They aren't trying to detect the running of the encoding algorithm or ANYTHING like that. Get your panties out of a wad /.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
The federal government badly needs to curtail MSFT's continual use of the OS as a crowbar to work its way into a market as it did with the browser, has done with the audio player, and continues to do. It's not MSFT that's bad. It's just a company acting as companies do - doing everything it can to extend market share. Until we have a government that takes antitrust seriously we're simply allowing them to walk all over us. As things get worse & worse (which they very well may) remember that it's you and I that are electing a government that tells them there's nothing wrong with doing it. It's our fault.
According to the WSJ article, XP manages to "kinda break" other player/encoders (like I assume MusicMatch, WinAmp, etc) yet provide a perfectly functional one of their own using their proprietary "secure" format. And then MSFT notes that they don't work because those apps "aren't optimized for XP". Of course they arent, because MSFT is controlling the competitive space.
It's as if you have a baseball game between, let's say the MSFT team and the MusicMatch team, only it's completely skewed. MSFT is the refs' employer and they have to answer to them for the calls. MSFT alone gets to make the rules as far as the dimensions of the field (after all, they built and retain ownership of all the stadia anyway), how many balls get you a walk to 1st base, and how many men are allowed on the field. The kicker is that they're not obligated by any means to inform the MusicMatch team what these rules are and how they'll be enforced. MSFT's response to this unfairness in the rules is that MusicMatch "should have known", even though there was no way to know until the game started.
This all plays into a larger and more important issue, that of the definition of the OS - a realm where MSFT has turned misrepresentation into an art form. To most of you computer literates I assume you feel that at its base an OS is the central piece of software that controls communication between software applications and a computer's hardware. Most would also add the software utilities that allow you to do hardware maintenance, disk defrag & formatting, a control panel-type system to do basic settings, and other basic programs. A GUI is also commonly considered (by non-*nix types) to be a portion of the OS, providing an intuitive environment in which to use programs.
There is, however, no stretch of the imagination that makes a media player part of the OS in other than an artificial way. This is also true for solitaire and other games, the internet browser, a video editor, and any number of other "improvements" coincidentally introduced to Windows soon after another company has popularized that same use for a computer. I fear for software makers, because MSFT seems to see no space in the software industry in which it doesn't want to be a player, and it can quickly rise to dominance because it's making the rules. Any corporation that writes software that isn't tied into the MSFT hegemony should be pushing for a consumer-accesible open source OS if only to level the playing field. For the software makers programming for the Windows OS is like drinking arsenic tainted water - sure it sates your thirst and makes you money for now, but it's certain not to be good for you in the end.
My hope is that between Hailstorm's co-opting of your personal info and the overt tendency of MSFT to seek dominance in every use of computers using its OS people would ignore XP upon release. The only thing short of government regulation that'd stop MSFT is a public humbling in the marketplace. I'd hope people would look before they buy. I'd hope they would be smart in thinking about how this OS might limit their right to do as they wish with their computers.
In the end however none of us can stop people from making the decision to buy an OS that limits their capabilities rather than extends them. Many people just want to do some desktop publishing, play games and email their friends and they don't care how they do it or what they're giving up to do it. It's certainly fine to feel that way and go & use an OS like XP if you do. We do need, however, to maintain a viable open alternative where MSFT and other companies as well as industry organizations (like RIAA) can't curtail our use of our own property. I really do think that as computers reach ubiquity in our lives people will see the democratic value of an open OS and a free information space, but it'll take time.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
hi all (george here)
you all may be WONDERING what window "XP" stands for.
here is what you do
1) write XP on a BLANK sheet of paper in LARGE letters
2) rotate that sheet of paper NINETY DEGREES to the RIGHT
3) it's an EMOTICON
it looks like CART MAN in SOUTHPARK
your buddy
-gbd
Oh man. Too bad just had to reset my win 2000 workstation. It had a record breaking 8 DAYS uptime. I was hoping to see how long it would last with good thourough use.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
I was running windows 2000 server. after like a week, it froze. I reset it and it would not boot. Just a error on load. No matter what I tried in safe mode it wouldnt work. It my first exp with 2000 and i had it just to see if it was any good, nope. sad. I switched to linux and i had about 3 months uptime until we lost power, i wasnt home and the ups ran out. 3 months lost b/c of crap california power. Oh well.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
It takes the same amount of skill to set up a Windows 2000 server as it does to wipe your own ass. I had Win2000 server set up in 4 hours with 4 different domains. It nicely died a few days later becuase it sucks as a server.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Absolutley. Windows XP is going to be an even bigger flop than 2000 was. Napster had some 70 Million plus users. The fact that these people had at least the know how to and understanding of MP3 files to realize how cool they are. Who is MS targetting with XP? Servers...No. Regular users who at least have a clue...No. Power users...No. The only people left are those who dont know a lot about computers and are just getting into them. I guess. But this group gets smaller and smaller daily. Soon, MS wont have anyone left to buy their OS's. I mean Gamers dont use ME, they use 98SE which came out more than 2 years ago. Linux and the BSD's are gaining the server market, and the power user market.
The best thing about computers is the freedom to do anything you please with them. Building copyrights into the OS will quickly make people turn to something else. Microsoft's days are being quickly numbered.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
That will leave us and our MP3 collections (which, BTW, I say fall under fair use) free at last! I don't know if this is what Microsoft intends to happen, but I fully support it!
BTW, for you folks who didn't bother to read the real article, you can find it here. Please read this one before you chime in with ill-informed comments! Don't bash Microsoft until you actually comprehend the facts. I know that's a lot to ask of /.ers, but I've yet to give up....
The upcoming revision to MP3 should answer these quality concerns and include backward and forward compatibility. Stuff encoded with the new methods will still play on older decoders, but won't sound terribly good. Stuff encoded with old encoders will sound just as good on the new decoder. And the real kicker is that stuff encoded with the new encoder and played with the new decoder sounds fabulous at very low bit-rates.
Another author could just have easily, and accurtely titled the article (and Slashdot post) as: "Microsoft ADDS MP3 creation support to Windows"
As for some existing apps having trouble running on XP, I don't doubt that, happens with every version change in Windows. But to say that ONLY old CD ripping and recording software will not work, as if it were being targeted, is a little misleading.
I used to use WinNT on my (primary) home machine. When Win2K was released, I switched. Now I run RH6.2 (Kernel 2.4.3) most of the time, except when I want to play a game that isn't released for Linux yet.
Granted, it's not because MS products don't fit my needs. Rather, I use Linux because it's a better ethical choice for me. I know I'll be able to do what I want with it for a long time to come.
Anyone looking for a burnt-out MS Admin with Linux Experience?
dam my new machine wont run mp3's , guess i will get a second hand p3 laptop with a 20 gig drive , and just plug it into my hi-fi . They cant stop anything , it will just make computer guys try harder to make it work , look at dvd it was uposed to be uncopyable
Thats a great way to move 8 billion people over to linux!
.kb
..Unfortunately, then we'll have 8 billion "me toos!" using linux...
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
That's right, only giant coporations are allowed to distribute culture.
Back off Napster, or Billy Gates will eat your children.
______
jeff13
If microsoft wants to do away with mp3's with a 'better quality' music format then let them. If they have found a better algorithm for music compression then maybe it's time for people to come up with a better format themselves.
The RIAA and software vendors are going to do whatever they please just as long as the public buys in to their nonsense. I don't really care if mp3's are going so sound like crap on my box. By the time xp is installed on everyones machine (if that even happens) there will be some other format or method for capturing music.
Maybe Microsoft should should consider the fact that people would rather have that dumb fscking paperclip on their machine then not be able to rip their own cds and play their own music.
I have yet to discover the real reason why farts linger longer in an office environment
i will never use windows XP
This looks like the software built into XP (Windows Media Player) will suck for ripping MP3s, but will rock for recording Windows Media Format files.
First MS tries to ween users off of MP3. Uneducated users buy systems with WinXP. They get a chance to compare MP3 recordings to WMA recordings and judge that the WMA recordings are superior because MS has crippled the MP3 recording functionality in their media player. Knowing full well that the uneducated users make up 85% or more of the PC market, Microsoft suddenly gets much more support for the WMA format and MP3 becomes extinct except among the "clued in" and a couple other niches.
Now that MS has control over the media formats, they release a new version of Windows called Windows XPSE, and suddenly the MP3 format isn't available at all out of the box. And content control/licensing is suddenly enabled on WMA files. Now all of your old WMA files no longer work because they aren't licensed properly (even if you ripped them from CD's that you own). You think to yourself, "This sucks, I'm going back to MP3s." Only because MP3s have become virtually extinct you cannot get an MP3 ripper anymore. Even if you could it wouldn't make a difference because in Windows XPSE they also implemented the Secure Audio Pathway technology that makes it impossible for you to rip MP3s anymore.
Remember SAP? The audio data is encrypted from the CD-ROM until it reaches the speaker, so you can't make a digital recording of it. You can only try to make an analogue recording of it (assuming that you have an analogue recorder available that records on media that is still available).
This is just one more step, and it's all part of the whole. None of the individual pieces look that sinister, but when you see the whole picture it becomes obvious who is in bed with the RIAA. It's Microsoft's wet dream to be running their software on every PC, set-top box, PDA or other digital appliance, and they know that the only way that they can do that is to put in the little bits of "security" that the content distributors mandate. I give them 5 years before it's finally complete.
So that's what they really think, huh? Well I have news for them: No consumer will choose to eat shit over cake.
Isn't it funny how your comment completely overlooked the title of your post? Of course no consumer would choose to eat shit over cake. So MS just won't give them any cake. Duh.
I have been recording everything from nice audio clips and old funny wav files to mp3 format and I have never used windows media player. Who the hell uses that? I also hate using media player cause it even causes my new p3 1000 to pause everytime I load it. There have been dozens of 3rd party encoders that have been around from the start. This will not slowdown mp3 creation. However other software venders like macromedia (now uses mp3 encodeing) will not be happy about this.
Last I heard, Microsoft was going to require that built in MP3 codecs have an upper limit of 56kbps. Externally installed codecs do not have any Microsoft imposed limits. Just download the hacked Fraunhoffer codec and viola! 192kbps! Seems to work on my XP beta.... -ted
It seems that Microsoft is taking every step they can to make their OS more user friendly. Friendlier interface, friendlier Windows Media Player, friendlier MSN (which is now a major component of Windows.) Microsoft wants to make you lazy and fat by making you sit at your computer and having everything you could possibly need and more. (Ability to print photos, buy furnature, feed your dogs in another state.) But then, they decide "let's take out what the consumers want! You know, USB, that thing we developed... er, and support for MP3 things. Wait! I have a REAL funny idea! Let's make it so... so... they can listen to them, but they sound like CRAP and you have to download a new one to listen to them right. And how about this -- make it like 50mb, filled with useless crap like Hotmail stuff. Great!." Microsoft is the anti-user.
blog & fiction: jd87
This isn't a technical limitation imposed by MS, 56kbps is simply all that the codec MS is licensed to distribute will encode at. If you have FhG's for-pay codec (which unlocks additional encoding capabilities), you can easily update the reg settings so that you have full encoding for that codec.
This is the weirdest spin I've ever seen on MS actually working with a competing format. WSJ needs to get technical fact checkers...
There's no attempt to stop MP3 files being produced on XP. This MP3 codec has been shipped with MS software since NetShow 2.0 almost 4 years ago. The only new thing in this article at all is that WMP8 may support ripping to MP3. Since the codec MS has licensed only goes to 56kbps... MS can only rip to 56kbps unless you upgrade codecs and set the new reg keys.
I want to build my own TiVO like device. I want it to be able to record/playback TV shows and maybe even DVD playback. I'd also like to to use it as an mp3 server as well as anything else that I may think of in the future. Does anyone out there have any links of people working on this sort of thing? If possible I'd like to use LinuxPPC since I happen to have a spare PowerMac but I also have a K62 system collecting dust. Any help would be appreciated.
Mister Black
Tired of being told what to do by the man.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
In reading the article closer one might notice that they are really only restricting recording quality with the tools they provide with the OS. Any third party software will seemingly be unaffected
I don't think there's been more obvious and open challenge to the Open Source community. MP3 should disappear; it's proprietary. But if Microsoft is allowed to control the standard format for digital audio playback then that's it: the world of commercial music is going to end up looking like the world of commercial software and that's an ugly, ugly picture. Two words: Fair Use. Do you know what this means? Of course, but for those who just fell off the truck, you have a legal, constitutionally guarenteed, Supreme-Court approved right to make copies of copyrighted materials YOU ALREADY OWN for personal use. If I own the CD I have the right to tape it, burn it to a new CD, to rip it to my hard drive, to make MP3s from that, all for my personal convenience. I have the right to stream it on the intertnet so I can listen to it at work. I can't legally trade, distribute or sell it. But I can use that copyrighted information any way I want to, once I buy an original. The publishing community doesn't have the political juice to overturn fair use so they're joining forced with M$ to simply make it technologically impossible. The big lie is that we need any more laws due to the digital revolution. Napster proves that: the average consumer will always need some sort of easy, accessible method to get their product. As soon as any illegal distribution network becomes big enough to make a dent in the publishing/recording industry's massive coffers, they'll get shut down. Piracy and bootlegs will always exist: fighting those who illegally (and despicably, from my point of view as a writer and songwriter) make personal profit from piracy is part of maintaining intellectual property laws. What is really the issue is the desire of the publishing/recording industry to change the paradigm from a pay for rights (you buy copyrighted material and receive all attendant fair use rights - essentially unlimited personal playback rights) to a pay to play model where you end up paying EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU LISTEN/READ/VIEW. It's a shaft job on the consumer. A total greed power play. And this is the beginning. I've said it once, twice, I'll say it a thousand times if I have to: There is only one way out and that is by artists cooperating with the open source community to forge a new model of distribution. We don't NEED the publishing/recording industry any more: If you have what it takes you will get 10X as rich selling yourself even if you take no steps to avoid piracy. Yeah, Yeah, I'm crazy (and long winded too). Interested? Get in on the ground floor - write at the e-mail above or to PO 3171 Minneapolis MN 55403 and find out what the REAL score is.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
... that little project working its way through MS that would require every media player and audio component to be licensed and authorized by MS in order to function with Windows.
Now is simply not the time to talk DOJ. We had trust busting 100 years ago with TR in the Whitehouse because the president has more or less direct say in anything that DOJ investigates. Well, today we have GWB, a standard, special-interest politician (I'm sure Bill owns a share or two) fairly elected by a five to four majority.....I think the DOJ will be ignoring MS for a while.
-Zuchinis
Not if WMA is hampered by "intellectual property management" bits that make it difficult to copy, move, and share your information
I'm sure it'll be very easy. I dare say that it'll be transparent after you click through a new EULA as part of an update. After all, Microsoft probably already has your credit card number as part of Microsoft Passport. And the fee per copy will be very small. At first.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please mod this comment up, because it's important to remember that this issue effects more than just 1337 linux geeks. The people you're currently sharing mp3's with, guess what, all their box are belong to Microsoft. If Son of Napster (whatever it happens to be) supports wma out of the box (and it will) then what do you think you'll be sucking down in a couple of years time? Hint: it's an anagram of "awm".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In IE vs Netscape, the functionality was very, very similar and no other widget used the format. MP3 has become a standard above and beyond computers. My DVD player plays it as well as the Nomads, Rios, etc. of this world. Inferior quality is not of equal function for these products. In case folks have missed the obvious, this is part of the M$ plan to ingratiate themselves with RIAA and MPAA so that if you want to play audio or movies you have to buy windoze. Hopefully, the consumer will not be lead to the slaughter here and tell M$ to stick it.
Sex is heriditary, if your parents didn't have it chances are good you won't either.
MS has a win-win situation on their hands. They are once again embracing and extinguishing, pardon me, extending a file format. Naturally the danger here is the mighty hand of DOJ but hey, this time they have a "legitimate" reason for this since the MP3 format has no content protection. The ultimate argument for MS will be that they are replacing the inferior standard with a better one that honours the IP of the music industry. MS just can't lose here. They will be able to do this and still come out clean as a whistle. Do you really think that the DOJ will stand up against Microsoft's extermination of the "evil" MP3? I say MP3 is doomed as a format already. Fear the power of Redmond.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
First Bluetooth,then USB 2.0 and now MP3's!? Oh boy, oh boy. Microsoft has finally begun digging their own grave.
Am I the only one who thinks that "XP" looks like a grimacing smiley with it's toungue sticking out at the world?
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
So WMP8 won't be able to rip MP3 in high bitrate?
Who *cares*?
Who the hell uses it for MP3 ripping anyway?
And as for the problems with the applications, that is because they are designed for 9x, and not for NT.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
I'm sick of the industry complaining about MP3s being wide-open and unprotected and not mentioning the fact all this ripping is only possible because the CD Audio format is wide-open and unprotected. DUH.
So that's what they really think, huh? Well I have news for them: No consumer will choose to eat shit over cake.
I'm just glad we have other alternatives. The more they engage in cunning or predatory tactics, the more we are encouraged to move to the alternatives, or at the very least, Free Software.
For the most part thats true. However, IE simply became the better browser. It has better rendering, displaying and such, while IE was improving, Netscapae was just getting bigger. And the fact that it happened to come with the os made the whole deal sweeter. People usually use whatever works easiest, fastest best. People are going to realize the limitations of the intergated software and find something else.
Lame should run under XP because it is pretty much ANSI C. maybe a recomplie is needed(but probaly not)
Sure, MS can detect/defeat it. But they'll have to keep bloating their OS to do so. Everytime they do, we do an end run and change the format a little, until random users start complaining that their (legit) .DOC, .JPG, whatever files don't work because MS's hacks are too over-eager.
FUD galore!
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
First: My mother (and millions like her) are unable to click, Start, run, and type D:\SETUP on her own. Do you really expect her to be able to do: ./config
make
su
password
make install
And then what's she going to do if it doesn't work (which as you know, it often doesn't) I know that RPMs make installing easier, but this is an example of how little Linux appeals to the common man. Everybody here loves it, because we're all geeks. We understand how to use it. We are the only ones who can understand why Linux is better than Windows... to everyone else it will suck LARGELY!
SECOND: A very high percentage of computers in the world run Windows (duh). Imagine, suddenly, MS disappears. No more tech support for broken OS's, no more new updates for the OS, no more new versions of Windows. Nobody to release a patch for the next Outlook security bug. Can you fathom the effect that this would have on the world? Do you really think that suddenly, every Windows programmer in the world would just start writing for POSIX? Get a grip.
Honestly, I think that the only rational thing to do if MS did go out of business would be for them to release the source code. I wonder what would happen if Windows suddenly became Open Source.
What would we talk about on slashdot?
The good news is, a lot of those people are going to blame Microsoft for giving them shitty alternatives and turn to other codecs/software.
Precisely. Did you read the bit about XP shipping with support for MS's own proprietary format? People massively use Outlook Express, because "It's free and installed by default and looks good oh my". People may start using MS's codec for the same reason. They sure know their public... Let's just hope that Joe Averageuser acts a bit sensibly, for once. Not likely, but who knows... In the meanwhile, let's act sensibly, ourselves, and try to promote open formats such as Ogg Vorbis. If we can.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Now they know how we feel !
In other words, they don't want a taste of their own medicine...
They can dish it out but they can't take it. Oh well, at least they're not trying to buy the rights.
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
installing a different codec for encoding? wouldn't this circumvent it quite easily?
Does anybody remember the Halloween document? Specifically, does anyone remember this comment from ESR's annotation: "Linux can win if services are open and protocols are simple, transparent. Microsoft can only win if services are closed and protocols are complex, opaque. To put it even more bluntly: "commodity" services and protocols are good things for customers; they promote competition and choice. Therefore, for Microsoft to win, the customer must lose." Well, it looks like he was right. Now I'm supposed to PAY for a Windows upgrade which actually gives me LESS functionality than I had before! Yes, I can use third party products, of course. But that doesn't change the fact that they're releasing a commercial product upgrade which is specifically meant to REDUCE the features of the product! And the sad thing is that people will buy it.
So now when you get those stupid chirps and chimes and crap when you open and close windows, click on the desktop or move the mouse they will all sound like they are being run through a car muffler.
"Brrrrwaaruuuggg".. Hrm.. I have mail.. "Grrrruuuuuhhhhhuh".. ack! thats the GPF sound!
Remember that Microsoft will start to certify drivers for XP. Of course that means those hardware manufacturers of MP3 players are going to have a hard time getting their drivers certified. So the hardware manufacturers are going to have to bend over and take it up the ass. With these folks in their pocket, is there any good reason to encode in MP3?
that the consumer knows how to cook for himself!
How exactly can MS stop people ripping MP3s? Anyone can write a program to access the CD directly, or listen to the CD through the soundcard...
Will they just reduce the quality of audio in Windows XP, meaning any musicians out there who use it will have to buy a special 'Windows XP Entertainment Edition' or worse, will programs only run if they've been approved by Microsoft (ala 'Designed for Windows' logo programs).
"Faith is the last resort of a desperate man" - Me
Not kill necessarily, just make very weak. If you can't use it (or at least not use it with decent quality) most Windows users (and like-it-or-not that means most PC users) will look for something of better perceived quality. It doesn't mean the absolute end of the technology... there are still people using OS/2.... it just means that it will most likely be relegated to use by technofiles, people who either use alternative OS's or who continue to use the "old" versions of Windows. Lack of market acceptance, whether because of poor quality or a lack of support signifies, almost with exception, the death of the unaccepted. It may take a few years, but there isn't much hope if the "gods" have reached their decision.
A moment of silence for MP3, you were a friend.
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Bow before my sig, for it is good.
The good news is, a lot of those people are going to blame Microsoft for giving them shitty alternatives and turn to other codecs/software. The more people who realize that Microsoft is foisting crap onto them, the better.
--
spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I know most people are sheep, but if this isn't enough for at least corporates choose Linux and dump M$, it's time you get used to that flying thing at boot time...
Linux *is* user friendly. It's not idiot-friendly or fool-friendly!
I think that all Microsoft is going to do is put in less support for MP3 and more for WMA...which they already have started doing with their new versions of Windows Media Player. They all still work with MP3s, but try their hardest to make everything into WMAs. When it comes down to it, WMAs compress better and still sound the same to me. The only reason that MP3s are used more is because they are the standard now and since there are so much more of them out there compared to WMA, they will remain as the prime music format...until some radically different format comes out :-)
Get Ogg Vorbis here. Ogg Vorbis the file format and algorithms are fully documented and GPL. Ogg Vorbis the reference implementation is opensource and BSD license. _FREE_ opensource Ogg Vorbis players and encoders are available on that site for Linux, Windows, BeOS and Macintosh.
You seem to have missed what you also posted:
"early testers of beta versions of Windows XP already complain that the most popular MP3 recording applications -- which compete with Microsoft's format -- don't seem to function properly"
Even if the final releases of XP do have that problem... I suspect within a couple weeks, you'll see versions of Audiograbber and all the other tools people love gain WinXP support.
After all, there are still 9x packages which don't run on Win2000. That's not due to evilness... Microsoft actually did make a compatibility upgrade and apparently backwards compatibility and a better compatibility mode /is/ one of the major focus points of WinXP.
But it is hard to make major changes to an operating system (after all, the average consumer wants more than just a few tweaks or bugfixes if they plan to upgrade) and provide complete backwards compatibility support without a few hitches.
This isn't to say I think Microsoft is doing the right thing; I think they're being idiots. The existing third-party MP3 codecs will still work fine... I would imagine you can use the Fraunhoffer codec, get an MP3-encoded WAV file, and then use a RIFF stripper to pull the RIFF blocks out, creating a normal MP3 stream.
Voila. :)
--Rachel
People will pay for quality software. The issue here in particular is not whether or not people deserve to be compensated for their work, but rather why would you pay for an OS that prevents you from doing something. This is not a function that the OS needs to specifically provide, but for their own money grubbing monopolistic reasons they decide to restrict. I do pay for quality software myself. All the games I have unless they were freeware I payed for. Heck, I even payed for Winzip, 98SE and the 98 to ME upgrade. I will not pay for an OS that prevents me from doing something that has perfectly legal uses.
Trying again - the server lost my first post. Hope this doesn't appear twice.
Rueter's got it wrong. The limitation on Fraunhaufer's free version of their codec that keeps you from using it to encoded high quality MP3s HAS ALWAYS BEEN THERE. That's right, I remember using that codec in 1997 and it had that limitation back then. They are probably right that Window's XP comes with a crippled encoder, but then so did Windows 95! Got it?
You can pay hundreds of $$ for Fraunhaufer's uncrippled codec or you can get a much higher quality codec for free. Look up LAME. It's freeware and tests show it to be the highest quality MP3 encoder around.
By the way, Liquid Audio's implementation of MP2 AAC at 160k does sound better than MP3s at 160k, but it's the only thing I've heard that does. It's been a long time since I compared. LAMEs variable rate MP3s may be just as good, I've never tested that.
Also if you want to get the best sounding playback, get the MAD decoder for winamp. It does dithering which especially helps if you have to equalized the hell out of your speakers like I do (monsoon's little flat panel speakers are very clean but not flat).
Rocky J. Squirrel
hacker: The XP port of lame will be out shortly. Lame indeed.
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Actually, you'll be 'sucking down' WMA files
because the compression is tighter. Smaller
files, faster transfers, less use of storage.
I've already noticed the significant size
reduction in WMV files as opposed to MPEG2, but
that would be expected, as MPEG2 video is old
stuff.
Of course, I'll be sticking with MPEG because
that's what burns properly to Video CD. (over
200 Simpsons episodes saved to VCD so far in my
library of disks)
Have you ever spent a single dime on 'support'
for the software that you use?
It seems like a pretty meager revenue stream to
me.
And no, I'm not the poster of the parent comment,
that was clearly just a troll.
It's because instead of paying, you get a degree
in Computer Science. After you've taken the
Compiler and Advanced Operating System courses
you'll know enough to be able to read through all
the source code for the software you're running
and verify there are no nasties in the code.
That or you can rely on the words of random
people on Usenet who you've never met.
Oh wait! There's the famous essay about
'Trusting Trust' which proved that you can't
assume the compiler you start with is secure...
You'll have to key in the first version of your
assembler and compiler in machine code.
Could you direct us to this objective 'count' you
.advocacy newsgroups?
refer to?
Please don't just point us to the URL for
'bugtrack' or some other biased site. We need a
detailed analysis. What sorts of bugs? How is
the gravity of the various bugs weighed?
Or are you just talking about a survey of the
comments on
...she works at RealNetworks. Heh.
evil bastids. xp = gonna suck.
http://www.phatmax.net
the pr0n-o-matic
http://www.phatmax.net
the pr0n-o-matic
If Microshaft really thinks that this is going to stop people from digitally recording their CD's, they are more insane than I thought. Couldn't we just move to the VQF format? http://www.vqf.com
This article makes it sound like the operating system itself is going to somehow prevent us from ripping mp3s at 192k or whatever. I think what's really going on is Windows Media Player will do these things. I'm sure you'll still be free to install whatever ripping software you want and use it any way you want.
The party line is that MS/Real are doing this for increased protection of digital media from unscrupulous music pirates (they'd never push their own formats for *personal* gain, would they?). So what's being gained is increased protection for the owners of the material.
And I'm sure that'll last a good two minutes before someone writes a little util (or a one-line perl script) to blow the copy protection away, and we're right back where we started except for the fact that we're all using a closed format instead of a more open one.
I'm sure the MPEG group wants to reward their members with royalties up the wazoo for the hard work they've all put in, but pragmatics has to kick in sometime; how long can they compete with companies that have the monetary and programming resources to flood the market with their own goodies free of charge?
I WANT to give money to the musicians I enjoy, however, I don't want to pay $15 for a CD because I have no idea how much of that money makes it into the hands of the creative talent.
What I would like is an extension to the MP3 format that encodes an optional link in each file. My MP3 player would understand this link and allow me to pay (through PayPal or some other payment mechanism) 5c, 25c or more DIRECTLY to the account of the musician.
I can listen to all the crap I get off of napster for free, but when I find a song I play over and over and over, I might through a quarter in the virtual hat each time it makes me feel happy or horny or sad. Over my lifetime I'm sure the musician I life would make way more off of me than the small percent they get from a CD purchase.
All we need is the software and the adoption from our favorite musicians. Ha! The adoption problem has had me stumped for sometime, but I think it can be solved by a trusted authority(TA). This TA would setup an account for each artist and begin collecting money on their behalf. The TA would make its money on float and cut quarterly checks to the artists, 100% of the donations.
I like to get my music for free off the net, but I would like to reward those who actually give me something.
This mechanism could be extended to open source projects as well. Or websites like this one. Voluntary micropayments. This is how we cut out the music industry and M$ .NET.
So, M$ really thinks that they're going to single-handedly destroy MP3. Right. I also have a bridge to sell you. MP3 is a revolution. It changed the paradigm of how music is distributed. Now M$ decides to step in and say "oh, we don't support the evil MP3 format". Well guess what? This is going to sway so many users away from using XP. Between the MP3 issue, and the way that M$ is forcing users to register their XP installations, I see the install base of M$ Windows users dwindling. People like ease of use, they don't want to be forced to call M$ every time their hard drive goes down or they have to reinstall Windows. Also, even though there's a RUMOR going around that XP may limit MP3 encoding by the software, there are a lot of users out there that use and love MP3. There are so many hardware devices on the market that I don't see MP3 going away anytime soon, no matter what Bill sez. I love my Mac. Come to OS X, the water's nice. Mike