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WinAmp's Death Greatly Exaggerated
robyannetta writes "In a previous story, we heard that WinAmp was
down for the count. Apparently, this is not the case.
Here is a note by Eric Caoili that says "No we weren't axed. We haven't even seen anyone with an axe. There was this one guy who came up to us to axe us a question, but that's about it.""
Why didn't you guys plan an exit event when AOL bought you? Why stick around in a new corporate culture anyway?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...who of the original lineup of Nullsoft/Winamp coders are still there.... and how many people are working on it now vs. when it was in the Winamp 1.0/2.0 stages...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
What, an "early demise" article, and no mention of netcraft?
What's not a joke is that any news is good news.
For one brief instant we all figured winamp was dead. The internet news sites picked it up, people were downloading every version known to man for archive, and we were all focused on winamp once again.
Welcome to the world of the rumor-feeding news cycle.
We have been played.
It is great to hear that Winamp isn't dead. I have been using it for 5 years now and haven't found a better media player yet. It is both small and quick, Windows Media Player is neither. Not to mention that I have yet to find a sound file that I couldn't get it to play, where many of my files just refuse to play in iTunes or WMP.
Java has no friends.
There was this one guy who came up to us to axe us a question...
Ah, nothing like computer nerds using slang..... It's so cute yet so disturbing.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Winamp stopped adding useful features / improvements (for me) after version 3.0... iTunes and WMP10 are much better, with song rating / automatic playlists (song I didn't heard in the past week I like, yes thank you).
Why anyone would pay for Winamp is beyond me. The free version does the job... like a bunch of programs out there. Of course, brand recognition, nostalgy and all...
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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Eric's site, Winamp Unlimited, expands a little on the Winamp situation, and also has comments on most of the news articles that've been published regarding the topic.
If you missed it in the last discussion, he also has written a past article on what some of the ex-Nullsoft kids have been up to.
It's weird talking about myself in the third person.
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I've been using winamp since .92 and ever since Justin left, maybe even when he sold out to AOL, it started to go downhill. Winamp is still the best player out there, but the passion, attention to detail and overall quality seems to have declined.
You are correct that it's a media player, and that there are lots of media players out there. But IMO, WinAMP is the ideal choice for music. WMP doesn't have the functionality and extendability that WinAMP has, and many other free media players are clogged up with overly fancy interfaces and/or just don't perform as well.
WinAMP always was free. There's a "pro" version with extended capabilities, but at no point was there NOT a free version that did everything any other media player did (and often more).
And I do not recall WinAMP ever being open source. There is an extensive SDK available, but the program itself is not available in source form... at least not through any legit channels that I could find.
=Smidge=
to everyone who came out to show their support for us and who defended us when everyone was calling us gay.
That is a nice little bit of homophobia from their press release. Real professional guys. Sheesh.
Perhaps you didn't notice because 3 scared you away, but 5 is far more closely related to 2 than 3. They realized how bad 3 sucked, and then skipped a whole digit just to tell you how cool 5 was. And it really is pretty nice. Better than what else is out there, anyway.
:)
All of the major security holes for Winamp that I recall had to do with the fact that it has a component that embeds Internet Explorer. And I've never seen a case of winamp-related "spyware" that doesn't involve either use of IE or other blatant stupidity.
So back off
to everyone who came out to show their support for us and who defended us when everyone was calling us niggers.
Still think it is funny?
It is dead, it's just hasn't stopped moving yet.
Winamp is rapidly gaining the same level of "features" that Netscape did when it died - it's bloated and tries to sneakily add AOL icons to your desktop. Oh and let's not forget the spyware aspect to the commisions they get on sales - nice touch. The fact that the interface hasn't been made any easier to use, and only gets more fiddly and complicated confirms it. Winamp is the great golden flamingo God of bad user/interface design.
All they need to do now is package AOL instant messenger with it, and it will be truly dead for ever more.
Nobody knows how to fuck up a once perfectly good piece of software through bad decisions like AOL. You really know your software sucks with 100% full vacuum when your old version is actually better in every way over the latest release. Even Macromedia would be impressed with the sheer - "I wonder if the whole thing is running in some sort of emulator""-ness of it all.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
This is NOT the time or place for that joke--I'm still in mourning for the Lone Coder.
It's official; Netcraft confirms: Spelling is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Spelling Nazi community when IDC confirmed that proper spelling market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all Web users. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that proper spelling has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Proper spelling is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive writing test.
You don't don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the future of proper spelling. The misspelled hand writing is on the wall: Spelling faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for spelling because spell-checking is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Spelling Nazis. As many of us are already aware, spelling continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Microsoft Word spell checker is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Word developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Spell checking in Microsoft Word is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Oxford English Dictionary publishers Oxford University state that there are 7000 users of the OED. How many users of Merriam-Webster are there? Let's see. The number of OED versus Merriam-Webster posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Merriam-Webster users. Wiktionary posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Merriam-Webster posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of the Wiktionary. A recent article put Microsoft Word Spell Checker at about 80 percent of the electronic dictionary market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Word spell-check users. This is consistent with the number of poorly-spelled Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Microsoft, abysmal sales and so on, Word went out of business and was taken over by Microsoft Office who sell another troubled spell-checker. Now Microsoft Office is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that proper spelling has steadily declined in market share. Spelling is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If spelling is to survive at all it will be among linguist dilettante dabblers. Spelling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, spelling is dead.
Fact: Spelling is dying