Yep. Lately, Google reminds me of Network Television: wherein you invest your time and interest in a "new show" only to see it cancelled before the first season has elapsed. Like that Google Employeeplea/rant the other day emphasized: Google needs to stop doing things half-assedly.
So will Google+ be around in a year or two if it doesn't dominate it's market? If Google's behaviour with it's other partially successful forays are any indication - then no it wont be. So why should anyone bother investing their time and effort when Google can pull the rug at any time as it sees fit.
Instead of incorporating Wave and Buzz into Google+, they were axed, along with other Google Lab utilities. These actions, diminish Googles reputation, lessen the little trust I still had for the company and make it readily apparent what Google actually is: An Ad-Network that offers decent search as it's lure.
I recall the Google Glory days when they demolished AltaVista and Yahoo, Google was awesome. Now... not so much. It's not that hard to see through the veneer these days.
I think you should look at Balloon Payments. Many of the mortgages that were pushed and procured - that are now defaulting had pretty evil fine print. The people that pushed these mortgages went out of their way to promote the LOW monthly payment - and wouldn't mention the balloon payment that would be required in 2 or 3 years --- to make up for the fact of the low monthly payments.
Many were lead to believe that the initial 2-3 year payment structure was how the full term of the mortgage would play out.
The masses that are losing their houses, were preyed on - plain and simple. Most of the 99% dream of owning their own house. Now perhaps they should have been more wary of something that seemed too good to be true, unfortunately they didn't.
The real crime comes after the fact of all this though. The government bails out these companies that stole from the American People. The bail out comes from Tax payers. Wall Street, the banks, mortgage companies, etc effectively get to steal from the American People twice... and the ones that got screwed the worst - made at least some of their mortgage payments and now have nothing to show for it.
Then theres the other side of the coin, with the Housing collapse, housing values plummeted --- many, again, wound up with a mortgage that was far, far above the actual current value of the house. Even if they sell to try and rectify the situation, the mortgage might of been 400,000 --- they can only sell for 200,000... still owe 200,000. Bankruptcy is about the only option at that point.
I always wonder why people use things like FreeLaunchBar. Windows since 98 (and possibly 95) has had the feature of putting a Folder on the TaskBar. Win7 still has this feature. You can put any folder on the taskbar. Almost none of these taskbar launchers add anything above this featurewise except eyecandy usually.
You can enable copy/paste. Click on the Window icon left side, Properties. Select Options [x] Quick Edit Mode, [x] Insert Mode. The command window has had that for 15+ years or more.
Enabling color in the command window is pretty simple as well. It has had that for 15 or 20+ years.
Borders website was better for used books than Amazon. Borders had content indexed from Used Book Stores all over the US. Shipping was cheaper than Amazon. And the search feature easily allowed you to search for more books from the same seller/Bookstore - and once you had 2+ books, shipping was reduced to $1-$2 per book. When many of the books were only a couple bucks --- I've gotten 4+ books at a time for ~$12.
Amazon's shipping for books is $3.99 unless you are a prime-member - and even if you are a prime-member MOST of Amazon's used books are sold via resellers that don't support prime.
Used books on Amazon were usually at least twice as expensive and could be as much as 3 or 4 times as expensive as getting the same books from the Borders Marketplace online.
It shouldn't be necessary though. Unfortunately, documentation in Linux is extremely poor - if you don't know what you are looking for already. I don't think any of the line-command tools have examples in their appName* --help, nor their respective man pages.
Comparatively, when I need to do a quick batch cmd.exe script, almost every single command has the syntax detailed and examples of usage for most of the syntax. If I hadn't taken linux scripting in school back in the day, I doubt I would of ever had the time to parse through "tech-specs" to figure it out on my own. Whereas batch cmd.exe and AutoHotkey are fairly easy to self-teach.
After quite a few years, the Atlantic Provinces assumed a HST ("Homogenized Sales Tax"). Prior to the "HST" there was GST + Provincial Sales Tax. In Nova Scotia that was 7% + 10-11%. After HST, the total was dropped to ~15% --- but then it applied to more things. So whether there were savings is unlikely. Eventually, by 2007 (or earlier), it was reduced to 13%. Which by that point was not all that much higher than our original 10-11% sales tax. And one might consider it almost fair.
No they don't. They collect GST. Provincial sales tax is not added if you are out of province.
I used to buy from NCIX (British Columbia) all the time, as their prices even after counting shipping costs + GST always beat ALL of the local computer stores in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Even if they did add Provincial sales tax, the prices would still be better than the local shops in almost all cases, and usually by a significant amount, 10-25% or more. And when you are talking about 500 to 1000 dollars at a pop, the only advantage of local is being able to drive across town to return a defective item. Thankfully, I rarely had to return anything at all.
Sounds about right. I got a $50 gift Certificate for Best Buy. Narrowed it down to one or two games, and then took a good look at one of them: Settlers 7 by Ubisoft --- Requires constant internet connection on the back of the box. Put all of them back.
Maybe I'll play CIV4, or tweak some of my old DungeonSiege mods --- I never did play through that a second time with the expansion's extras.
At my age, DRM is not "driving me to piracy", but I will vote with my wallet for sure. Games just aren't that important. I'll find a cheap old game, or something I already own that I want to mod or play again.
Honestly, I don't find drag & drop from:
---> X:\_M_\S2_A_AUDIO_\_ARTIST_\
to be frustrating, e.g.
X:\_M_\S2_A_AUDIO_\_ARTIST_\Guns N' Roses\1987_Appetite For Destruction\
X:\_M_\S2_A_AUDIO_\_ARTIST_\Guns N' Roses\2008_Chinese Democracy\
Sometimes I'll use a media/music manager, but more often than not, I'll just browse to the _ARTIST_ folder via Total Commander, set a custom-column view, possibly even subdir-branch view to flatten all the folders.
Nor do I fiind ripping CDs with Exact Audio Copy + LAME to be all that bothersome. Nor do I find any of the software that I do use "clunky". What I definitely find clunky is iTunes under Windows.
And while I cited "anythingbutipod.com" as a reference, we have owned a Sony S638, iPod Nano, Sansa E280, Sansa Fuze, one of the cheap Creative LCD models and a few others. Using the exact same MP3 loaded on all 4 of the above, and the same pair of $75 headphones, subjectively, the iPod has the weakest, tinniest sound. The Sony and Sansa's have a robust bass.
Apple has the market due to advertising, and the general (non-tech oriented) public associates "MP3 player" as iPod. The name has become synonymous. Much like "google" or "kleenex".
I should have compared to the Nano, true, but I "googled" iPod, and Sandisk Sansa. I did also state that what I want in a music player is decent sounding music and battery life. My MP3's are ripped as VBR quality 4 - which is almost indistinguishable from quality 2 - which is equivalent to CD wav files.
All of the Sansa line are expandable with micro-sdhc cards, even the lowest end Sansa Clip. Micro-sdhc cards are pretty cheap these days, 8GB : ~$7.00 and 16GB: $25-$35.
As well the iPods are well known to have the worst sound of pretty much any available mp3 player. Sansa, Cowon, Samsung, and Zune are among the editor choices at anythingbutipod.com : for features, sound quality, etc. Rokbox is loadable on many of the sansa models.
I got my 8GB Fuze (refurbished) on eBay for $40, and a 16GB micro SDHC (class 4) card for $30.
The iPod line outprices nearly every other manufacturer of mp3 players, includes the cheapest headphones, has poor sound and is not expandable. The only thing it has going for it is chic-factor, name-recognition and the app store. Perhaps that has weight with some, for myself, I want my music player to have a long battery life, and play music well.
Whether the machines in question will support linux is an entirely different discussion. The fact remains it is entirely feasible to purchase no-OS laptops and PCs.
Yet, you still need an i7 + intel integrated graphics and an i7 compatible motherboard to get the performance of a $~50 dedicated GPU. Pricewise, you could go with an AMD solution and a dedicated GPU in the $75-$100 range from Nvidia or AMD and still pay half as much for better 3D performance.
The numbers look even worse for Intel if you grab an "off-the-shelf" dedicated GPU thats one generation older, e.g. a 1GB Radeon 4670 for ~$65.
AMD also has Hybrid graphics, first introduced with the Puma or Spider platform:
Hybrid Graphics
The 780 chipset is the first product to use a "hybrid" multi-GPU set up, aptly named, Hybrid Crossfire. Hybrid Crossfire operates a discrete GPU (HD 34xx) in tandem with the IGP to boost performance above what either could achieve separately.
Opera Link is a free service that enables data sharing between all your computers and devices. It can synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial, notes and other useful browser information, so they are available to you wherever you go.
As well Opera's bookmarks include:
Name: Yahoo! Says Delicious To Get the Boot, Not the Axe - Slashdot Nickname: aWord Address: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/18/1342250 Folder: what folder you have saved it to Description: Yahoo! Says Delicious To Get the Boot, Not the Axe -- article related to Index, Businesses, Technology, News, Social Networks, Software, and Yahoo!.
1) Typing in the addressbar searches your bookmarks by any of the words/text above.
2) Typing in the QuickFind bookmark panel similarly filters your bookmarks as you type.
3) Typing the "Nickname" in the addressbar will launch that particular bookmark.
If you don't want to sort your bookmarks into folders, the search function would work fine, so long as you "tagged" words into the description.
Ability to:
1) Export your bookmarks to plain HTML file.
2) Import bookmarks from most other browsers: Opera, FF, IE, Safari, Konqueror.
CAR Analogy: Car Insurance, required by law.
Unless you don't own a vehicle.
Most citizens in the States also recognize the Govt's authority to tell them what Drugs are allowed or not. And which ones they'll wind up in jail for partaking of. As well as what other laws are... well actually laws.
The fact that groups are pulling the "Constitution Card" on the Health Insurance bill is pretty amusing. Either the govt is allowed to create laws for the benefit of it's populace or it's not.
Maybe the Health-Care bill should state, you buy Health insurance and you get a free gun.
Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”
A 10 page article in the New Yorker, which is likely tldr; for most -- considering that a single "New Yorker" page is about the equivalent of a 10 page expose on PCMag/ZiffDavis et al;)
I'll complain too, try searching for something that has a non-alphanumeric character in it. Or put something specific in "quotes" only to have google completely ignore the quotes, strip out numbers or characters you are trying to find and return that result instead.
Or all the times it ignores what I typed completely, "Hey we think you are an idiot, so we searched for FOO instead of BAR, if you really want to search for BAR click here. But we think you want FOO.
I had a few Rush tapes back in the day. I can't really comment on whether they (in particular) have released too many Compilation albums, but I do know they have fairly regularly released actual new Albums (that generally is met favorably by their fans) - like some other Canadian bands that I keep up with.
Maybe it's the 3-man-band thing, I don't know. But I do know for whatever reason almost all the "Rock/Metal/Alt/or Pop" et al that I listen to are 5+ "man" bands with less than a handful of exceptions [ and almost all the exceptions are 4 "man" bands;) ]
Off the top of my head: Ministry and NIN at one point were ONE-Man bands, Skinny Puppy fluctuated back in the day, yet Live all of them had 4+ members. Similarily, 30 Seconds to Mars first album was created by two people (not counting production), yet they acquired 2 more to actually tour.
If you've ever heard Police Radio or any TV-show featuring Police Radio dispatch, then, APB is a pretty well-known acronym for many people (in North America at least).
$150 for 40 year old music as degraded-format MP3's is totally worth it. (Abbey Road was released in 1970). Soon it will be super-classic (50 years old) and the Distributors will want $300.00
The fact that the laws allow corporate renumeration still for 40-year-old tunes is almost warrant enough to disregard copyright. We'll likely see it on blueray and the next format and the next. As is it's already seen 7 format releases: Album (78/45/33), 8-Track, Tape, CD, Album (vinyl-again), Rock-Band, MP3s
There are many bands who have excessive catalogs of music - that I just can't be bothered to wade thru. Any band that's survived 20 years has had their label push numerous "Best of" compilations. The same songs will appear again and again, yet each time there will be one or two new tracks.
Perhaps it's just me but considering all that, older CDs/Music are valued (by the owners/distributors) far too highly. If there were offers of "Buy this (new) Album get 1/2/3 previous albums for free, I would think many people including myself would purchase a lot more music.
I certainly can't afford to buy all the music I would want, so instead I buy a handful of albums a year.
IE Collection contains the following versions of IE:
Internet Explorer 1.0 (4.40.308)
Internet Explorer 1.5 (0.1.0.10)
Internet Explorer 2.01 (2.01.046)
Internet Explorer 3.0 (3.0.1152)
Internet Explorer 3.01 (3.01.2723)
Internet Explorer 3.03 (3.03.2925)
Internet Explorer 4.01 (4.72.3110.0)
Internet Explorer 5.01 (5.00.3314.2100)
Internet Explorer 5.5 (5.51.4807.2300)
Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2800.1106)
Internet Explorer 6.0 (6.00.2900.2180)
Internet Explorer 7.0 (7.00.5730.13)
Internet Explorer 8.0 (8.00.6001.18702)
I've installed it on Win2K (doesn't run 7 or 8 without DLL masking/wrappers), Vista, and Win7.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Lately, Google reminds me of Network Television: wherein you invest your time and interest in a "new show" only to see it cancelled before the first season has elapsed.
Like that Google Employee plea/rant the other day emphasized: Google needs to stop doing things half-assedly.
So will Google+ be around in a year or two if it doesn't dominate it's market? If Google's behaviour with it's other partially successful forays are any indication - then no it wont be. So why should anyone bother investing their time and effort when Google can pull the rug at any time as it sees fit.
Instead of incorporating Wave and Buzz into Google+, they were axed, along with other Google Lab utilities. These actions, diminish Googles reputation, lessen the little trust I still had for the company and make it readily apparent what Google actually is: An Ad-Network that offers decent search as it's lure.
I recall the Google Glory days when they demolished AltaVista and Yahoo, Google was awesome. Now... not so much. It's not that hard to see through the veneer these days.
I think you should look at Balloon Payments. Many of the mortgages that were pushed and procured - that are now defaulting had pretty evil fine print. The people that pushed these mortgages went out of their way to promote the LOW monthly payment - and wouldn't mention the balloon payment that would be required in 2 or 3 years --- to make up for the fact of the low monthly payments.
... and the ones that got screwed the worst - made at least some of their mortgage payments and now have nothing to show for it.
... still owe 200,000. Bankruptcy is about the only option at that point.
Many were lead to believe that the initial 2-3 year payment structure was how the full term of the mortgage would play out.
The masses that are losing their houses, were preyed on - plain and simple. Most of the 99% dream of owning their own house. Now perhaps they should have been more wary of something that seemed too good to be true, unfortunately they didn't.
The real crime comes after the fact of all this though. The government bails out these companies that stole from the American People. The bail out comes from Tax payers. Wall Street, the banks, mortgage companies, etc effectively get to steal from the American People twice
Then theres the other side of the coin, with the Housing collapse, housing values plummeted --- many, again, wound up with a mortgage that was far, far above the actual current value of the house. Even if they sell to try and rectify the situation, the mortgage might of been 400,000 --- they can only sell for 200,000
I always wonder why people use things like FreeLaunchBar. Windows since 98 (and possibly 95) has had the feature of putting a Folder on the TaskBar. Win7 still has this feature. You can put any folder on the taskbar. Almost none of these taskbar launchers add anything above this featurewise except eyecandy usually.
There's an updated UnxUtils on googlecode.
You can add more monospaced TrueType fonts to the Command window.
You can enable copy/paste. Click on the Window icon left side, Properties. Select Options [x] Quick Edit Mode, [x] Insert Mode. The command window has had that for 15+ years or more.
Enabling color in the command window is pretty simple as well. It has had that for 15 or 20+ years.
Tabs require a non-MS add-on.
Groovy...
Borders website was better for used books than Amazon. Borders had content indexed from Used Book Stores all over the US. Shipping was cheaper than Amazon. And the search feature easily allowed you to search for more books from the same seller/Bookstore - and once you had 2+ books, shipping was reduced to $1-$2 per book. When many of the books were only a couple bucks --- I've gotten 4+ books at a time for ~$12.
Amazon's shipping for books is $3.99 unless you are a prime-member - and even if you are a prime-member MOST of Amazon's used books are sold via resellers that don't support prime.
Used books on Amazon were usually at least twice as expensive and could be as much as 3 or 4 times as expensive as getting the same books from the Borders Marketplace online.
WindowsLand Too. It's distributed with UnxUtils.zip -- no cygwin.dll's needed.
It shouldn't be necessary though. Unfortunately, documentation in Linux is extremely poor - if you don't know what you are looking for already. I don't think any of the line-command tools have examples in their appName* --help, nor their respective man pages.
Comparatively, when I need to do a quick batch cmd.exe script, almost every single command has the syntax detailed and examples of usage for most of the syntax. If I hadn't taken linux scripting in school back in the day, I doubt I would of ever had the time to parse through "tech-specs" to figure it out on my own. Whereas batch cmd.exe and AutoHotkey are fairly easy to self-teach.
After quite a few years, the Atlantic Provinces assumed a HST ("Homogenized Sales Tax"). Prior to the "HST" there was GST + Provincial Sales Tax. In Nova Scotia that was 7% + 10-11%. After HST, the total was dropped to ~15% --- but then it applied to more things. So whether there were savings is unlikely. Eventually, by 2007 (or earlier), it was reduced to 13%. Which by that point was not all that much higher than our original 10-11% sales tax. And one might consider it almost fair.
No they don't. They collect GST. Provincial sales tax is not added if you are out of province.
I used to buy from NCIX (British Columbia) all the time, as their prices even after counting shipping costs + GST always beat ALL of the local computer stores in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Even if they did add Provincial sales tax, the prices would still be better than the local shops in almost all cases, and usually by a significant amount, 10-25% or more. And when you are talking about 500 to 1000 dollars at a pop, the only advantage of local is being able to drive across town to return a defective item. Thankfully, I rarely had to return anything at all.
Sounds about right. I got a $50 gift Certificate for Best Buy. Narrowed it down to one or two games, and then took a good look at one of them: Settlers 7 by Ubisoft --- Requires constant internet connection on the back of the box. Put all of them back.
Maybe I'll play CIV4, or tweak some of my old DungeonSiege mods --- I never did play through that a second time with the expansion's extras.
At my age, DRM is not "driving me to piracy", but I will vote with my wallet for sure. Games just aren't that important. I'll find a cheap old game, or something I already own that I want to mod or play again.
---> X:\_M_\S2_A_AUDIO_\_ARTIST_\
to be frustrating, e.g.
Sometimes I'll use a media/music manager, but more often than not, I'll just browse to the _ARTIST_ folder via Total Commander, set a custom-column view, possibly even subdir-branch view to flatten all the folders.
Nor do I fiind ripping CDs with Exact Audio Copy + LAME to be all that bothersome. Nor do I find any of the software that I do use "clunky". What I definitely find clunky is iTunes under Windows.
And while I cited "anythingbutipod.com" as a reference, we have owned a Sony S638, iPod Nano, Sansa E280, Sansa Fuze, one of the cheap Creative LCD models and a few others. Using the exact same MP3 loaded on all 4 of the above, and the same pair of $75 headphones, subjectively, the iPod has the weakest, tinniest sound. The Sony and Sansa's have a robust bass.
Apple has the market due to advertising, and the general (non-tech oriented) public associates "MP3 player" as iPod. The name has become synonymous. Much like "google" or "kleenex".
I should have compared to the Nano, true, but I "googled" iPod, and Sandisk Sansa. I did also state that what I want in a music player is decent sounding music and battery life. My MP3's are ripped as VBR quality 4 - which is almost indistinguishable from quality 2 - which is equivalent to CD wav files.
Commercials.
Really? Apple iPod touch 8 GB (4th Gen) : $204.99, Refurbished: $178.99
Sansa Fuze+ 8 GB MP3 Player (Black) : $69.00
SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB : $49.99
Sandisk Sansa Fuze 8GB : $97.68
All of the Sansa line are expandable with micro-sdhc cards, even the lowest end Sansa Clip. Micro-sdhc cards are pretty cheap these days, 8GB : ~$7.00 and 16GB: $25-$35.
As well the iPods are well known to have the worst sound of pretty much any available mp3 player. Sansa, Cowon, Samsung, and Zune are among the editor choices at anythingbutipod.com : for features, sound quality, etc. Rokbox is loadable on many of the sansa models.
I got my 8GB Fuze (refurbished) on eBay for $40, and a 16GB micro SDHC (class 4) card for $30.
The iPod line outprices nearly every other manufacturer of mp3 players, includes the cheapest headphones, has poor sound and is not expandable. The only thing it has going for it is chic-factor, name-recognition and the app store. Perhaps that has weight with some, for myself, I want my music player to have a long battery life, and play music well.
Google: barebones pc
Google: barebones laptop
Some notable manufacturers of Barebones Laptops: ASUS, OCZ, MSI
The numbers look even worse for Intel if you grab an "off-the-shelf" dedicated GPU thats one generation older, e.g. a 1GB Radeon 4670 for ~$65.
AMD also has Hybrid graphics, first introduced with the Puma or Spider platform:
Opera Link
As well Opera's bookmarks include:
1) Typing in the addressbar searches your bookmarks by any of the words/text above.
2) Typing in the QuickFind bookmark panel similarly filters your bookmarks as you type.
3) Typing the "Nickname" in the addressbar will launch that particular bookmark.
If you don't want to sort your bookmarks into folders, the search function would work fine, so long as you "tagged" words into the description.
Ability to:
1) Export your bookmarks to plain HTML file.
2) Import bookmarks from most other browsers: Opera, FF, IE, Safari, Konqueror.
CAR Analogy: Car Insurance, required by law.
Unless you don't own a vehicle.
Most citizens in the States also recognize the Govt's authority to tell them what Drugs are allowed or not. And which ones they'll wind up in jail for partaking of. As well as what other laws are... well actually laws.
The fact that groups are pulling the "Constitution Card" on the Health Insurance bill is pretty amusing. Either the govt is allowed to create laws for the benefit of it's populace or it's not.
Maybe the Health-Care bill should state, you buy Health insurance and you get a free gun.
A 10 page article in the New Yorker, which is likely tldr; for most -- considering that a single "New Yorker" page is about the equivalent of a 10 page expose on PCMag/ZiffDavis et al ;)
I'll complain too, try searching for something that has a non-alphanumeric character in it. Or put something specific in "quotes" only to have google completely ignore the quotes, strip out numbers or characters you are trying to find and return that result instead.
Or all the times it ignores what I typed completely, "Hey we think you are an idiot, so we searched for FOO instead of BAR, if you really want to search for BAR click here. But we think you want FOO.
I had a few Rush tapes back in the day. I can't really comment on whether they (in particular) have released too many Compilation albums, but I do know they have fairly regularly released actual new Albums (that generally is met favorably by their fans) - like some other Canadian bands that I keep up with.
;) ]
Maybe it's the 3-man-band thing, I don't know. But I do know for whatever reason almost all the "Rock/Metal/Alt/or Pop" et al that I listen to are 5+ "man" bands with less than a handful of exceptions [ and almost all the exceptions are 4 "man" bands
Off the top of my head: Ministry and NIN at one point were ONE-Man bands, Skinny Puppy fluctuated back in the day, yet Live all of them had 4+ members. Similarily, 30 Seconds to Mars first album was created by two people (not counting production), yet they acquired 2 more to actually tour.
If you've ever heard Police Radio or any TV-show featuring Police Radio dispatch, then, APB is a pretty well-known acronym for many people (in North America at least).
$150 for 40 year old music as degraded-format MP3's is totally worth it. (Abbey Road was released in 1970). Soon it will be super-classic (50 years old) and the Distributors will want $300.00
The fact that the laws allow corporate renumeration still for 40-year-old tunes is almost warrant enough to disregard copyright. We'll likely see it on blueray and the next format and the next. As is it's already seen 7 format releases: Album (78/45/33), 8-Track, Tape, CD, Album (vinyl-again), Rock-Band, MP3s
There are many bands who have excessive catalogs of music - that I just can't be bothered to wade thru. Any band that's survived 20 years has had their label push numerous "Best of" compilations. The same songs will appear again and again, yet each time there will be one or two new tracks.
Perhaps it's just me but considering all that, older CDs/Music are valued (by the owners/distributors) far too highly. If there were offers of "Buy this (new) Album get 1/2/3 previous albums for free, I would think many people including myself would purchase a lot more music.
I certainly can't afford to buy all the music I would want, so instead I buy a handful of albums a year.
I've installed it on Win2K (doesn't run 7 or 8 without DLL masking/wrappers), Vista, and Win7.