People look at this as a bad thing, but the slashdot community is all about the open source community. This is our chance to attack and gain a good marketshare. People arent going to want to upgrade to Whistler because a)They're going to have to pay for it, and b)Emulating 98 inside of Win2k is going to be so incredible fast, people will have to update hardware to maintain the same speed they're used to. With IBM starting it's huge linux ad campaign, and Microsoft doing this, Linux is looking to gain a lot in the next year. All the script and warez kiddies with their pirated win98 disks are going to want to update, but not pay for it. Linux is becoming a viable game platform, so thats one group. Next, people with older hardware arent going to want to watch their machine slow down even more with this new bloated peice of crap, so Linux could be just what people are looking for. Microsoft making their system copy proof may seem like a bad thing, but really their only locking themselves out of a user base. (Even though it's the piracy base that they dont want anyway)
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Im sure within a couple weeks some renegade hacker will have the death penalty for submitting a patch for cdda2wav.