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MS To Offer Windows Sans WMP, If EU So Orders
PSwim writes "Microsoft has said it will remove Media Player from Window, if ordered by the EU this week. The 'Windows-Lite'
version will only be available in Europe. Best quote from the article involves its refusal to release networking documentation: '"The Commission says Linux would disappear" if Microsoft did not grant access to its documentation, Smith claimed. "But Linux is alive and well and I don't know any person at Linux or any Linux programmers who share the Commission's view."'"
"If you won't play with my toys the way I want you to..."
Seems to sum up the Microsoft business strategy rather well.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
because WMP doesn't play quicktime or realvideo stuff, at least not the newest generation stuff..
so with a user base of several hundred million, microsoft has a better base to sell streaming servers than its competition - and why? not because WMP is superior, but because microsoft used its desktop monopoly to push into another sector, which is illegal (unlike having a monopoly without abusing it)
as for mplayer, only few distros actually distribute it due to legal trouble, and it's not used in a monopoly environment - also, there are ogle, xine, vlc which are all pretty competitive.
so a) there's no monopoly whatsoever being used to push mplayer, b) there are more things than just mplayer, c) even if mplayer were pushed, it wouldn't slant the server side towards a certain streaming server software (by the same vendor)
Methinks I have located the problem.
"if decently programmed"
We're talking about Microsoft here.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
i thought winamp could legally play wma, as long as it respected the DRM infection?
My other OS is also FreeBSD
I believe that Red Hat is the most common distro
In America maybe, but not the rest of the world which includes Europe, Asia, and Africa.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Even if the documentation is written as well as their sw :)
Think about samba.
M.
You could always remove what you don't want manually: http://nuhi.msfn.org/ (including IE,WMP,COM,DCOM, MSN...)
Nothing costs nothing
"Media player" is a generic term, the real name for this product is "Windows Media Player". In this case, something like "Microsoft has said it will remove its media player" would make more sense.
What, Microsoft will refuse to remove WMP if ordered next week?
There's no such thing as "Windows-lite". This term has been used previously to mean Windows XP Starter Edition, which is a whole different product than simply "Windows XP without WMP".
Was it the article that refused to release networking documentation? Don't you mean Microsoft refused?
Smith? Smith who?
"at Linux"? Linux isn't a company, a place, or an organization. You can't be "at Linux". Though this is an error of the person quoted and not the submittor, it's silly to let such a stupid error into the submission, and pointless, except for the purpose of ridiculing "Smith".
I wish Slashdot's editors would do some actual editing of submissions before they let them onto the front page.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
SMB has actually been documented by MS.
From The future of CIFS by Jelmer Vernooij of the Samba team:
2.2 The NFS/CIFS marketing war
During the internet hype in the nineties, Sun and Microsoft got in a fight about which remote file system API was going to make it. Sun was promoting NFS, Microsoft was promoting SMB.
In order to get SMB supported by other vendors, Microsoft did a couple of things:
Samba even got donations from Microsoft during this period, including funding for trips to conferences and MSDN donations. Microsoft developers were encouraged to work with Samba developers to get a working implementation of a SMB server and client on Unix.
Microsoft won the war. CIFS became the standard (for LANs, at least). After this, they lost interest in having other vendors support CIFS. Rather, they tried to get everybody to use their products.
I have the general notion that (A) Samba has been implemented without any documentation from MS
Wrong! See other comment in this story
Windoz is more like an ancient rustbucket of a car that stops running if you remove that plastic figurine of the Virgin Mary on the dash.
Sounds accurate. And my NT4 Domain Controller/File Server has been up and running continuously for the last 2+ years.
That's not stability. That's just not rocking the boat.
No patches. No updates. No upgrades.
Original IE which is never used.
No gateway. Intentionally. Can only talk to the LAN.
cd-rom? Um no. Just because you have no browser doesn't mean you have no internet connection. You can use any of the thousands of other internet protocols capable of transferring files to get the firefox setup program. *gasp*
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It would be extremely difficult for them to claim that removing Windows Media Player means removing DirectShow...
Anyway, I don't see why anyone would want it gone.. there is nothing proprietary about it; anyone can write a media player applications that uses it.
As the original writer of the submission you so eloquently call "shitty," I felt the need to respond a bit.
You did read the article, didn't you?
I wish people would read the article and think about it before posting (flaming). Then again, I'm starting to be kind of old around here.
Quick tip to get rid of that nagging "Upgrade to Quicktime Pro" message (works on Macs, not sure about Windows):
Set the computer's date to some time in the distant future (say 5 years ahead), start Quicktime player, get the message and respond as usual. Go back and reset the date correctly.
The "Upgrade to Quicktime Pro" prompt will disappear until that future date you used.