Yes, I meant that removing the apps don't free up user partition space meaning you gain no storage benefits by removing them.
On IOS, things are different... if you have an 8GB iPod Touch, all System/Apple apps take up some of that space. If you jailbreak the phone and remove some of the bundled stuff (say the stock market app), the space freed up is now available for your apps, music, pictures, whatever.
On the EVO, there is 1GB of internal storage. Less than half of it is available for our user installed apps, documents, pictures, music, etc. It is my understanding that those Shovelware apps (I love that term) are installed to that 512MB partition for the system to use. That's why you can't uninstall it on an unrooted phone.
On the plus side, the apps don't take up room allocated to us, on the downside, when removed, they don't give us any more room. We're still limited to a bit over 400MB out of that 1GB storage device.
For weeks I've now been reading about how to "root" the phone so I can uninstall these applications, but the root-tweaking programs I've installed have these "installer beware" disclaimers saying that it may turn the $400 phone into a brick. I'm left feeling foolish that I am not confident enough about phone rooting, and I curl up in a ball hugging my knees to my chest.
There is nothing to fear. I downloaded unrevoked3 on my Mac and had my EVO rooted in maybe 5 minutes with a couple of mouse clicks. I used the tutorial at http://preview.tinyurl.com/49bozuc (GoodandEVO.net), the tutorial is for doing it under Windows (a little more involved) but it went a long way to comfort my before attacking my $400 phone to get ownership and control.
I removed all the unwanted system apps and am now able to backup my entire phone to the SD card (which I then archive to my computer.)
Shouldn't the OS already allow users to uninstall programs? What exactly needs to be developed?
Yes, an OS SHOULD allow that. However, neither Android nor IOS allow end users to uninstall "system" applications.
However, if you root or jailbreak (respectively), then the end user IS able to remove those apps. On IOS devices, this also saves you room. On Android it doesn't since those unwanted apps are stored in the firmware. On the plus side, they don't take up valuable user app storage space on Android.
I've removed the unwanted apps on my HTC EVO, not to free up room, but because I didn't care to see them in my list of apps. For instance, it came with QuickOffice. That was nice of them. But I bought QuickOffice Pro and after installation had two QuickOffice icons leading to the two different versions. So the vendor installed version went away.
I doubt that any "reasonable" person would consider anything that I do on my rooted EVO to be illegal. I removed unwanted vendor supplied apps and can now back up my ENTIRE phone including all user settings and data. I don't run pirated software and don't care to try out any custom kernals or even user interfaces from newer phones.
I went through a similar thing here in Las Vegas about ten years ago when I was working a paper route. I was driving a '92 Buick, sitting in the left turn lane of a major intersection at about 4AM. I sat through three complete cycles of the traffic lights without ever getting a left turn green light.
I had four choices: 1. Wait until the intersection was clear and safe and then carefully make my left turn. 2. Go straight on the green light for straight, but doing so from the wrong lane. 3. Back up to where I could get in the proper lane, but breaking the laws regarding reversing more than 150 feet on a public roadway or breaking the law regarding changing lanes within 150 feet of an intersection. 4. Abandon my vehicle and find a pay phone to call 311 (non-emergency police number) for advice and to report the malfunctioning signal.
I chose option one. Cross traffic was stopped as my direction had a green light for straight ahead.
Of course, there was a police office sitting in traffic to my right, who promptly hit the lights and sirens as I turned and pulled me over.
"I can't believe that you did that in front of me!" he yelled. I explained what happened, he handed me a ticket for making an illegal turn and failing to obey a traffic control device, telling me to "Tell it to the judge."
It took me three appearances at the courthouse before I could see a judge just for the arraignment AND I had to pay bail BEFORE the arraignment because I was pleading not guilty.
When I gave the judge my plea, he called me to the bench and offered to convert it to a no point parking ticket. I refused and told him "I'm not guilty your honor, taking the deal would be admitting guilt."
He sighed and said "Ok, I'm not supposed to hear testimony at an arraignment but tell me your story". I did. He then said "And you want me to make a ruling regarding which was the proper choice? You're not getting from me. CASE DISMISSED!"
He then told me quietly, "I'd have done the same thing in your situation."
Yes, it cost me more in time off than the fine would have been, but it was the principle of the thing. Plus I really wanted a judge to rule on the situation.
Yes, Amazon charges me Nevada sales tax when I order from them. They have a large warehouse/shipping depot here. Just another case where a summary (and perhaps fine article) on/. is inaccurate.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My late boss and I did an internal study for our company on the total cost of ownership difference between Macs and Windows pcs several years ago. He and I both happily used OS X, Linux and Windows for various functions.
At the time we were (and still are) building our own pcs for desktops and servers and installing Windows XP Pro on the desktops and Windows Server 2003 on the servers.
As far as hardware went, buying Macs were considerably more expensive than our build-it-ourselves machines.
Software though was almost the same between the two and either platform would serve our needs just fine.
Where the difference came in was when we added in the cost of additional software required for Windows like anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. and the cost in downtime/manhours spent rebooting Windows, reinstalling to get the network working again, etc. i.e., the day to day maintenance of a Windows machine in a business environment.
Our final decision was that at least for our purposes, Windows vs Mac was Leasing vs Buying. Windows + our home brew machines gave us a much lower initial cost than buying Macs. However, the cost in downtime and maintenance over the life of the computer was much higher than that of our Macs. Total cost was about the same whether we went OS X or Windows. OS X would just keep us more stable over the life of the computer which is a very good thing when it comes to servers.
But not long after deciding that we were going to start moving to an all Mac house, he died from liver cancer. I'm just the system admin and his partner detests Macs. So we're still running Windows for everything.
Funny though, he gets bent because his computers are constantly getting infected, run slow, etc. while my two computers never have any problems. Of course my two machines run OS X and Linux and he seems to spend a lot of time on pr0n sites (even though he denies it.:wink:). So I have NO idea why his machines hate him. Strangely enough, other than the normal "Why is this happening (or not happening) from the other Windows users in the company, their computers don't suffer from 1/10th of the problems of his.
So as far as I'm concerned, neither is more expensive than the other. When I can, I use whatever will do the job the best. When it comes to servers, I tend to use Linux and build-it-yourself server hardware. At home, we're almost completely OX X now.
n the online world, there are even special terms for it, like 'wardriving' and 'Wi-Fi mooching'.
TFA is wrong. Wardriving has nothing to do with hijacking a wireless network or gaining free access to it. It is only detecting the wireless network and logging the status (secure/insecure), location (provided by a GPS), channel used, speed, name, etc. all of which (except for the location) is broadcast in the clear to anyone who cares to listen.
I sometimes wardrive just for fun and map the results. My software doesn't even ACCESS the networks, it's like your car radio receiving local FM broadcasts, the radio station has no way of knowing you are there because you are doing nothing to their transmission other than receiving it.
To say that wardriving is mooching off of a network shows a total lack of knowledge about how things work.
That said, if I wanted to hijack an open wireless network, I don't need wardriving software, I just need to fire up my laptop and see what networks are available. It'll show me the ones with a strong enough signal to use. Wardriving software shows ALL signals, no matter how weak. IF I choose to connect to the network and use it, THEN it's mooching, but not until then.
This is a tough job, with a lot of high stress. I'm not surprised at all that there are hundreds of instances where an officer may have overstepped justified force.
By itself I'd agree with you.
However, many times does this happen vs how many times does it occur when a 3rd party just HAPPENS to be pointing a video camera that way? One out of ten times? One out of one hundred times? One out of ten thousand times?
The fact that there are hundreds of incidents caught on tape tells me that there are at least thousands that weren't caught on tape and perhaps tens of thousands of incidents like this.
And no, I'm not surprised, about fifteen years ago I saw video taken of a class at the police academy for the LAPD. In that class they are told "You are not the law, you are above the law."
Why were the mp3s not working? No sound or some cryptic problem?
Fedora is one of the Linux distros that disables MP3 support due to patents. It isn't just MP3s... anything that has a patent in place (in theory) is not supported as it isn't considered free software.
At the risk of getting further off topic of this story;-)...
With that said - I am curious how you deal/cope with people who verbally attack, etc - BASIC programmers and users, the language and such? For myself, I defend when needed, and ignore when absurd.
Actually, I haven't run into anti-BASIC sentiments in a long time. Guess either I'm lucky, or most programmers of other languages realize that today's BASIC languages are very capable.
But BASIC calls me - I haven't played with RealBasic, yet
If you decide to try it, Real Software offers a free license for the Linux version of REALBasic Standard, when you first use it, you just choose the Standard option, no information goes to Real Software. The Standard version doesn't do cross-platform compiles and the only database support is an internal single-user implementation of SQL Lite.
From what I can gather, the agreement between Microsoft and Novell would only cover software developed between them that uses a Microsoft or Novell patent.
After all, you can't license out something you don't own, that's called fraud. If I release one of my programs under an OSS license, NOTHING gives Microsoft the right to issue a different license for it.
So this agreement has no effect on open source software covered by most open source licenses.
My wife is a nurse and she can't set a VCR clock either.
But she can install Fedora Core 5 from scratch with no problems. And no, she's not a computer guru. Boot off of DVD, select install, workstation and a few other clicks and come back later.
The only difficult part for her was trying to figure out why her MP3s and DVDs wouldn't play.
Having run into CA's products off and on over the years I've always wondered how the hell they stayed in business...
I've only used one CA product that I know of, CA Realizer. Realizer was a BASIC IDE/Compiler for Win16 and OS/2 that in my opinion blew the doors off of MS Visual Basic for Windows.
Part of this was probably due to the fact that I'm an old school BASIC programmer (TRS-80 Model I Level II, Commodore 64/128, AmigaBASIC, GWBasic, QuickBasic, MS Professional Development System 7, etc.) About the time that Realizer hit the market, VisualBASIC offered a programming paradigm where you designed the interface first, then stuck in little bits of code after the fact. This approach was totally foreign and counter intuitive to me. It made it especially hard to review code.
CA Realizer on the other hand, offered you a blank editor for programming. Oh, you want to design the GUI portion? Run the window editor, design to your heart's content and when you save it, Realizer inserted the BASIC programming code for the window and widgets into your code. So now a window was just another function.
Realizer ran quicker and provided smaller executables than Visual Basic plus it worked cross-platform. However, Microsoft marketing and lack of a desire on CA's part to move Realizer into the 32 bit world killed it. So I pretty much had to switch to Visual Basic at least until Version 6 came out.
Today, I use REALBasic... the IDE offers me blank code codes or the GUI design screens, is much more object oriented than Visual BASIC and is cross-platform (Win32, Apple OS9, Apple OS X (Universal Binary, PowerPC, Intel), Win98 and later and Linux) all from the same source code. The only real downside to it is that it doesn't have an optimizing compiler and includes all the normal runtimes in the executable. So a "Hello World" console application is 364K while a single window with static text displaying "Hello World" is 3.7M.
I hope that Real Software doesn't go the way of Computer Associates.
Here's another more fitting example... Remember the Sybase partnership? Wasn't too many years before MS released MS SQL which "just happens" to be totally Sybase compatible and then didn't need Sybase. How about Foxpro?
I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your competition and that might be the one time that the partnership works for the competition."
Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?
If your HD DVR is anything like the ones my cable company (Cox) offers for $10 a month (+ a surcharge for the "digital" outlet and a rental fee for the remote)your HD DVR won't record everything your company provides.
Seems that in Cox's case, their DVR knows what channels it isn't supposed to record. I found that out the hard way. Want to record a pay per view? Can't do it. My Series 1 TiVOs record anything I throw at it.
Now that you've tried the lesser machine, go for a review of one from Alienware next. http://www.alienware.com/ A friend of mine got his alienware notebook last month for only a few hundred more than you quote. It came with 3GB of ram and two 120GB sata hard drives with a similar speed CPU. Certainly a lot more computer for just a few dollars more.
I guess it'd be ok for lan parties but otherwise I really don't see the need for a notebook with 5 minutes of battery life and that requires a group of native bearers to haul it around for you.
>but the attempts I've seen thus far at competing with iTunes has been almost funny to watch>
I too own Macs (and use Windows, Linux, et al) but I have some news that just may shock you. MusicMatch was out and in use before Jobs ever got sucked back into Apple, much less Apple thinking up iTunes.
I was running MusicMatch back when it didn't support ID3 tags, Windows NT4, etc. (Windows 2000 was still coming "real soon now") So that was probably about 7 years ago. I registered/paid for it back then as well.
MusicMatch is probably still one of the best all-in-one music programs for the average Windows user and it certainly has the best streaming "radio" available.
I did try MusicMatch for Linux, but it didn't support MusicMatch Radio and they did a very poor job of using wine to make the linux port. It was a blessing when the canceled the project.
Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No cheating necessary. I've been a supporter of them since they were founded back when BBS systems were king.
Yes, I meant that removing the apps don't free up user partition space meaning you gain no storage benefits by removing them.
On IOS, things are different... if you have an 8GB iPod Touch, all System/Apple apps take up some of that space. If you jailbreak the phone and remove some of the bundled stuff (say the stock market app), the space freed up is now available for your apps, music, pictures, whatever.
On the EVO, there is 1GB of internal storage. Less than half of it is available for our user installed apps, documents, pictures, music, etc. It is my understanding that those Shovelware apps (I love that term) are installed to that 512MB partition for the system to use. That's why you can't uninstall it on an unrooted phone.
On the plus side, the apps don't take up room allocated to us, on the downside, when removed, they don't give us any more room. We're still limited to a bit over 400MB out of that 1GB storage device.
For weeks I've now been reading about how to "root" the phone so I can uninstall these applications, but the root-tweaking programs I've installed have these "installer beware" disclaimers saying that it may turn the $400 phone into a brick. I'm left feeling foolish that I am not confident enough about phone rooting, and I curl up in a ball hugging my knees to my chest.
There is nothing to fear. I downloaded unrevoked3 on my Mac and had my EVO rooted in maybe 5 minutes with a couple of mouse clicks. I used the tutorial at http://preview.tinyurl.com/49bozuc (GoodandEVO.net), the tutorial is for doing it under Windows (a little more involved) but it went a long way to comfort my before attacking my $400 phone to get ownership and control.
I removed all the unwanted system apps and am now able to backup my entire phone to the SD card (which I then archive to my computer.)
Shouldn't the OS already allow users to uninstall programs? What exactly needs to be developed?
Yes, an OS SHOULD allow that. However, neither Android nor IOS allow end users to uninstall "system" applications.
However, if you root or jailbreak (respectively), then the end user IS able to remove those apps. On IOS devices, this also saves you room. On Android it doesn't since those unwanted apps are stored in the firmware. On the plus side, they don't take up valuable user app storage space on Android.
I've removed the unwanted apps on my HTC EVO, not to free up room, but because I didn't care to see them in my list of apps. For instance, it came with QuickOffice. That was nice of them. But I bought QuickOffice Pro and after installation had two QuickOffice icons leading to the two different versions. So the vendor installed version went away.
I doubt that any "reasonable" person would consider anything that I do on my rooted EVO to be illegal. I removed unwanted vendor supplied apps and can now back up my ENTIRE phone including all user settings and data. I don't run pirated software and don't care to try out any custom kernals or even user interfaces from newer phones.
You must be talking about Las Vegas, NV where the mafia weren't run out of town, they just put on uniforms and suits.
Now THAT is funny!
I went through a similar thing here in Las Vegas about ten years ago when I was working a paper route. I was driving a '92 Buick, sitting in the left turn lane of a major intersection at about 4AM. I sat through three complete cycles of the traffic lights without ever getting a left turn green light.
I had four choices:
1. Wait until the intersection was clear and safe and then carefully make my left turn.
2. Go straight on the green light for straight, but doing so from the wrong lane.
3. Back up to where I could get in the proper lane, but breaking the laws regarding reversing more than 150 feet on a public roadway or breaking the law regarding changing lanes within 150 feet of an intersection.
4. Abandon my vehicle and find a pay phone to call 311 (non-emergency police number) for advice and to report the malfunctioning signal.
I chose option one. Cross traffic was stopped as my direction had a green light for straight ahead.
Of course, there was a police office sitting in traffic to my right, who promptly hit the lights and sirens as I turned and pulled me over.
"I can't believe that you did that in front of me!" he yelled.
I explained what happened, he handed me a ticket for making an illegal turn and failing to obey a traffic control device, telling me to "Tell it to the judge."
It took me three appearances at the courthouse before I could see a judge just for the arraignment AND I had to pay bail BEFORE the arraignment because I was pleading not guilty.
When I gave the judge my plea, he called me to the bench and offered to convert it to a no point parking ticket. I refused and told him "I'm not guilty your honor, taking the deal would be admitting guilt."
He sighed and said "Ok, I'm not supposed to hear testimony at an arraignment but tell me your story".
I did.
He then said "And you want me to make a ruling regarding which was the proper choice? You're not getting from me. CASE DISMISSED!"
He then told me quietly, "I'd have done the same thing in your situation."
Yes, it cost me more in time off than the fine would have been, but it was the principle of the thing. Plus I really wanted a judge to rule on the situation.
Yes, Amazon charges me Nevada sales tax when I order from them. They have a large warehouse/shipping depot here. Just another case where a summary (and perhaps fine article) on /. is inaccurate.
My late boss and I did an internal study for our company on the total cost of ownership difference between Macs and Windows pcs several years ago. He and I both happily used OS X, Linux and Windows for various functions.
:wink:). So I have NO idea why his machines hate him. Strangely enough, other than the normal "Why is this happening (or not happening) from the other Windows users in the company, their computers don't suffer from 1/10th of the problems of his.
At the time we were (and still are) building our own pcs for desktops and servers and installing Windows XP Pro on the desktops and Windows Server 2003 on the servers.
As far as hardware went, buying Macs were considerably more expensive than our build-it-ourselves machines.
Software though was almost the same between the two and either platform would serve our needs just fine.
Where the difference came in was when we added in the cost of additional software required for Windows like anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. and the cost in downtime/manhours spent rebooting Windows, reinstalling to get the network working again, etc. i.e., the day to day maintenance of a Windows machine in a business environment.
Our final decision was that at least for our purposes, Windows vs Mac was Leasing vs Buying. Windows + our home brew machines gave us a much lower initial cost than buying Macs. However, the cost in downtime and maintenance over the life of the computer was much higher than that of our Macs. Total cost was about the same whether we went OS X or Windows. OS X would just keep us more stable over the life of the computer which is a very good thing when it comes to servers.
But not long after deciding that we were going to start moving to an all Mac house, he died from liver cancer. I'm just the system admin and his partner detests Macs. So we're still running Windows for everything.
Funny though, he gets bent because his computers are constantly getting infected, run slow, etc. while my two computers never have any problems. Of course my two machines run OS X and Linux and he seems to spend a lot of time on pr0n sites (even though he denies it.
So as far as I'm concerned, neither is more expensive than the other. When I can, I use whatever will do the job the best. When it comes to servers, I tend to use Linux and build-it-yourself server hardware. At home, we're almost completely OX X now.
TFA is wrong. Wardriving has nothing to do with hijacking a wireless network or gaining free access to it. It is only detecting the wireless network and logging the status (secure/insecure), location (provided by a GPS), channel used, speed, name, etc. all of which (except for the location) is broadcast in the clear to anyone who cares to listen.
I sometimes wardrive just for fun and map the results. My software doesn't even ACCESS the networks, it's like your car radio receiving local FM broadcasts, the radio station has no way of knowing you are there because you are doing nothing to their transmission other than receiving it.
To say that wardriving is mooching off of a network shows a total lack of knowledge about how things work.
That said, if I wanted to hijack an open wireless network, I don't need wardriving software, I just need to fire up my laptop and see what networks are available. It'll show me the ones with a strong enough signal to use. Wardriving software shows ALL signals, no matter how weak. IF I choose to connect to the network and use it, THEN it's mooching, but not until then.
However, many times does this happen vs how many times does it occur when a 3rd party just HAPPENS to be pointing a video camera that way? One out of ten times? One out of one hundred times? One out of ten thousand times?
The fact that there are hundreds of incidents caught on tape tells me that there are at least thousands that weren't caught on tape and perhaps tens of thousands of incidents like this.
And no, I'm not surprised, about fifteen years ago I saw video taken of a class at the police academy for the LAPD. In that class they are told "You are not the law, you are above the law."
Fedora is one of the Linux distros that disables MP3 support due to patents. It isn't just MP3s... anything that has a patent in place (in theory) is not supported as it isn't considered free software.
Actually, I haven't run into anti-BASIC sentiments in a long time. Guess either I'm lucky, or most programmers of other languages realize that today's BASIC languages are very capable.
If you decide to try it, Real Software offers a free license for the Linux version of REALBasic Standard, when you first use it, you just choose the Standard option, no information goes to Real Software. The Standard version doesn't do cross-platform compiles and the only database support is an internal single-user implementation of SQL Lite.
From what I can gather, the agreement between Microsoft and Novell would only cover software developed between them that uses a Microsoft or Novell patent.
After all, you can't license out something you don't own, that's called fraud. If I release one of my programs under an OSS license, NOTHING gives Microsoft the right to issue a different license for it.
So this agreement has no effect on open source software covered by most open source licenses.
My wife is a nurse and she can't set a VCR clock either.
But she can install Fedora Core 5 from scratch with no problems. And no, she's not a computer guru. Boot off of DVD, select install, workstation and a few other clicks and come back later.
The only difficult part for her was trying to figure out why her MP3s and DVDs wouldn't play.
I've only used one CA product that I know of, CA Realizer. Realizer was a BASIC IDE/Compiler for Win16 and OS/2 that in my opinion blew the doors off of MS Visual Basic for Windows.
Part of this was probably due to the fact that I'm an old school BASIC programmer (TRS-80 Model I Level II, Commodore 64/128, AmigaBASIC, GWBasic, QuickBasic, MS Professional Development System 7, etc.) About the time that Realizer hit the market, VisualBASIC offered a programming paradigm where you designed the interface first, then stuck in little bits of code after the fact. This approach was totally foreign and counter intuitive to me. It made it especially hard to review code.
CA Realizer on the other hand, offered you a blank editor for programming. Oh, you want to design the GUI portion? Run the window editor, design to your heart's content and when you save it, Realizer inserted the BASIC programming code for the window and widgets into your code. So now a window was just another function.
Realizer ran quicker and provided smaller executables than Visual Basic plus it worked cross-platform. However, Microsoft marketing and lack of a desire on CA's part to move Realizer into the 32 bit world killed it. So I pretty much had to switch to Visual Basic at least until Version 6 came out.
Today, I use REALBasic... the IDE offers me blank code codes or the GUI design screens, is much more object oriented than Visual BASIC and is cross-platform (Win32, Apple OS9, Apple OS X (Universal Binary, PowerPC, Intel), Win98 and later and Linux) all from the same source code. The only real downside to it is that it doesn't have an optimizing compiler and includes all the normal runtimes in the executable. So a "Hello World" console application is 364K while a single window with static text displaying "Hello World" is 3.7M.
I hope that Real Software doesn't go the way of Computer Associates.
I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your competition and that might be the one time that the partnership works for the competition."
If your HD DVR is anything like the ones my cable company (Cox) offers for $10 a month (+ a surcharge for the "digital" outlet and a rental fee for the remote)your HD DVR won't record everything your company provides.
Seems that in Cox's case, their DVR knows what channels it isn't supposed to record. I found that out the hard way. Want to record a pay per view? Can't do it. My Series 1 TiVOs record anything I throw at it.
The other 60% were too busy playing WoW to answer the survey.
I think that it's very fair for ABC to disable fast forward on my DVR... after all, I've disabled ABC on the DVR already, along with NBC, CBS and Fox.
Now that you've tried the lesser machine, go for a review of one from Alienware next. http://www.alienware.com/ A friend of mine got his alienware notebook last month for only a few hundred more than you quote. It came with 3GB of ram and two 120GB sata hard drives with a similar speed CPU. Certainly a lot more computer for just a few dollars more.
I guess it'd be ok for lan parties but otherwise I really don't see the need for a notebook with 5 minutes of battery life and that requires a group of native bearers to haul it around for you.
Isn't it great to live in a free country?
I miss America.
>>
Sounds like my latest fresh install of Mandrake Linux 10.1 Official.
>but the attempts I've seen thus far at competing with iTunes has been almost funny to watch>
I too own Macs (and use Windows, Linux, et al) but I have some news that just may shock you. MusicMatch was out and in use before Jobs ever got sucked back into Apple, much less Apple thinking up iTunes.
I was running MusicMatch back when it didn't support ID3 tags, Windows NT4, etc. (Windows 2000 was still coming "real soon now") So that was probably about 7 years ago. I registered/paid for it back then as well.
MusicMatch is probably still one of the best all-in-one music programs for the average Windows user and it certainly has the best streaming "radio" available.
I did try MusicMatch for Linux, but it didn't support MusicMatch Radio and they did a very poor job of using wine to make the linux port. It was a blessing when the canceled the project.