Way too much potential for tubgirl/goatse abuse here. I can imagine the horrors as the morning commuters follow a "hyperlink" to a giant, stretched rectum to start their week.
AAC files on iTunes are higher-quality than CDs because they're often ripped directly from the original master tapes, before the dithering and mixdown process to CD format occurs.
iTunes has one of the most lax DRM schemes there is. You can just recreate your playlist infinite times for unlimited burning. Again, as I've said elsewhere, this is really no different than the kind of usage restrictions expected from someone following the GPL. What is the GPL other than a plain-text digital rights management license?
As for giving back, I was referring to P2P piracy. On iTunes, you're actually compensating them for the music they made. On P2P, they get nothing and you get everything.
It's not the artists music when they are RIAA backed. It's the RIAA's music and no matter how much the RIAA claims that they have nothing but the artists' best interests in mind they prove time and time again that they only have their own best intentions in mind.
Well, let's clarify this. It's not the RIAA's music. The RIAA is just a representative lobbying body for a group of record labels. The record labels are who, to some degree based on the contracts the artists sign, own the copyrights to this intellectual property.
Now, read that again. "Contracts the artists sign." I see a lot of people vaguely describing evil actions against artists on the part of the RIAA, like some big conspiracy. Yet, artists willingly sign their contracts. Obviously, there are specific cases of business deals gone sour between artists and record labels, JUST LIKE IN ANY INDUSTRY. And nobody's claiming the record labels are these innocent little businesses who are in it for the music (though there are some).
But to keep regurgitating this non-specific meme of the evil RIAA hurting artists doesn't actually SAY anything. It's a convenient justification made in Slashdot posts to end a discussion thread. "I copy music, but the RIAA is the evil one because they hurt artists!"
Now, when there is a GPL violation it is sometimes by a corporate company (i.e. a company that distribute SOHO routers) that is using GPL'd software to drive their product w/o giving credit where it is due. The Slashdot community gets pretty pissed off when the corporations shits on the little guys.
It's a double-standard. GPL code is regarded as intellectual property whose license should be followed. But copyright infringement of media content that someone doesn't feel like paying for is okay.
Now, the RIAA is a corporation (convicted of price fixing none-the-less) that is shitting on the little guys in two different arenas. Both the artists (their monetary share of the profits are nil) and the consumers who purchase the music distributed by them.
I've already somewhat addressed this before.
1.) Artists willingly sign their contracts. There are "entertainment lawyers" who make sure to go through and balance out contracts for both parties. Record labels do a lot of stuff to make an album successful, from manufacturing and advertising to booking appearances.
2.) Music sells now for as cheap as.99 per song and $9 an album. I've seen magazines on my newsstand more expensive than that. I just don't see a valid justification anymore now that iTunes is such a huge success. People should put their money where their mouth is and show the music industry that consumers want to spend their money on digital formats.
I think that's the personal justification most Slashdotters use. But then again I'm speaking for a large majority in general terms.
Permit me to generalize as well. You are right that it's a personal justification. Me, I'm a down-to-earth kind of guy. Yes, I've pirated music. I'm not going to sit here and claim it's some social movement against the evil corporate-controlled world. Slashdot makes itself look like such a ridiculous community with such opinions.
The vast majority of P2P piracy is nothing more than:
1.) People wanting stuff for free so they don't have to pay for it. 2.) People knowing what they do is ethically wrong, so they seek bad guys to shift blame to. "The RIAA made me do it!"
The ignorance of basic human nature and perception when it comes to the justification of copyright infringement on P2P networks is what kills me. It's so phony. People should just admit what they're doing. You're copying music so you don't have to pay for it. You don't want to shell out--not even $0.99 goddamn cents.
P2P distribution + web advertising = no more requirement for RIAA to promote and sell your album for you.
P2P distribution + web advertising = no more incentive to sell anything
You know, the Beatles stopped touring in their careers so they could put out a lot of classic albums. In that mindset, they wouldn't have been able to make a living recording that music.
Besides, you don't need P2P piracy for distributing free music. iTunes offers free downloads all the time. Encouraging the use of networks that we all know is 95+% illegal piracy--as in, distribution of content without permission--is just ensuring that valid legal alternatives like iTunes never succeed. You people wanted the record labels to embrace legal online downloading. I've been here for years, and have read post after post, editorial after editorial. Well, it's here in several forms, and now they're still not good enough.
ProTools = no more requirement for RIAA to supply you with a "professional" recording studio
Hardly! There's more to recording a good album than just having Pro Tools...jesus, that's part of the problem of why so many albums sound like crap. Amateur recording engineers thinking they can just click through Pro Tools and get it done. You need, mics, gear, room ambience, a mixer, a masterer, and so on.
Yes, the problem is that the current economic-political structure doesn't want anything but 'mediocre, conservative music.'
Funny, I just thought today's mainstream artists were lazy. And record labels are afraid to take chances on riskier artists, because they're afraid of piracy eating into their return investment.
Every generation thinks the youth's new music is "mediocre, conservative music." A lot of people don't realize how much they sound like old fogies complaining about their grandkids' music. A lot of people love today's music.
But hey, at least you got to use the phrase "agenda of the power elite" in a Slashdot post...no melodrama here!
Yes, and now that we have legal music services like iTunes and Napster, what's the point of P2P piracy again?
Even indie artists like those mentioned in the article could easily offer their music for free on iTunes. In fact, iTunes offers free downloads weekly, which is the same "free advertising" Slashdotters love to reference in these discussions.
At.99 a song, how can anyone justify P2P piracy anymore? If nine bucks for an entire album is still too much, then clearly your incentive for piracy is not a "communications movement" to "empower the individual," but is basic human nature--wanting something for free so you don't have to pay for it. Even chimpanzees in social experiments will try to swipe a banana if they learn they don't have to give something back in return.
Sorry to be so harsh. I guess I just tired of the whole "we're so noble" act. Just admit what's going on. We're pirating music so we don't have to pay people for it. Because we're lazy and don't feel like stepping foot in a store and paying money. And we're too cheap to go to iTunes and pay.99 for a song that we know has been provided (illegally) to us for free on a P2P network. Just admit it, you know?
Following your logic, have P2P copyright infringers asked permission from every single artist from whom they copy music?
Or do you really mean, "If only we all listened to the indie artists without contracts who are giving permission for P2P distribution because they need the publicity...and ignored the rest."
Why do people think they're entitled to anything that can be pirated? It's like people argue from a position of inherent "right" to pirate music. Can I pirate Doom 3 just because I can? If John Carmack tells me not to, does that make him a greedy person? Can I infringe the copyright of the GPL too?
I personally own about $500/250GBP worth of music CDs, none of which I would have bought without P2P being there. It does help the record industry make money.
Please. Do you really think the majority of people who have 250GB worth of MP3s are doing it to go out and buy the CD afterwards? Have you been to a college campus lately or talked to other young people with high-speed connections?
It's admirable that you use P2P in that way, but don't pretend your personal experience suddenly signifies that P2P piracy is a good thing for the music industry.
One may as well argue that stealing GPL code is good for the software industry. If I like CherryOS, I may check out PearPC! Retarded arguments all around.
Yes, it's great that some artists want people to distribute their music in this way. They have given permission for people do that.
Most artists have not given that permission. Yet, most pirates don't respect that. Slashdot posts things like this to make it seem as though there's some supportive movement among artists for P2P piracy, but there is not. And in between all the "stolen GPL code" articles, arguing in favor of P2P copyright infringement is all the more silly and hypocritical.
Just my opinion. Nobody's ever validly justified infringing on artists' rights without their permission. It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free. That's all P2P piracy boils down to. It's not a cultural communications movement. It's human beings wanting stuff for free because people have made it easy to get. Basic human nature here.
Those artists who have given permission are cool. But the copyright holders who don't give permission also have the right not to, and if people want to pretend they have a moral ground to stand on, they'd respect the wishes of those people. But they don't. We instead get more ranting about the RIAA going after individual infringers (just like Slashdot suggested they do in 2000 during the Napster lawsuit), in between articles about GPL violations where people go after individual GPL infringers.
Though I know there are people who don't fall into this mindset here, I'll never understand the majority Slashdot position on this. By majority, I'm referring to both the position of the editors based on the stories they post, and the position of the majority of posters based on the upmods received for certain opinions that support the piracy mindset of entitlement to everything without giving anything in return...what we call "freeloading."
OK, I admit that there's no absolute ban on 2D games on the North American Sony PlayStation 2 console.
Finally, progress is made. Thank you for admitting you were wrong.
There is a "heavy deprecation" of 2D games in the entire industry, because gamers don't want to live in 2D anymore. It's not some Sony conspiracy; it's market demand. Despite this, there are still plenty of 2D games released. Several examples have already been given by me and others.
Sony preferring 3D games is completely different from an official ban. There is no ban. Tepples was rightly called on that.
I don't care how "old" his other account was. Also, Sony has not been preventing 2D games since 1996. I already linked to one example, Evo2k, that uses a lot of 2D Playstation games in their tournaments.
You say I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm not the one who lied about an official Sony ban on 2D games, then backtracked and admitted there are, in fact, 2D games that have come out even recently. I am 100% right on this. There is no Sony "ban" on 2D games. Tepples was claiming there was. That makes him 100% wrong. Get over it.
What does the quantity of 2D games release in the past couple of years have to do with anything? You claimed there was an official ban on 2D games by Sony. Several people have already called you on it, and you've even resorted to giving examples of 2D games that disprove your own previous claim. Just admit you were wrong and move on.
As geeks, I know we love to apply patterns to everything. But you can't just take one situation, switch the names in another situation, and claim they're the same. There are way too many external factors that affect outcomes of things. We all know how Nintendo shot itself in the foot and has been limping since. That has nothing to do with now because this is a new situation.
Japanese game giant clarifies its new double-screen gaming system's marketplace role. By Hirohiko Niizumi
Posted Wednesday, January 21st 2004
TOKYO--In an interview conducted by Bloomberg Japan, Nintendo confirmed that the Nintendo DS, its newly announced portable dual-screen gaming system, is not being created to take over the Game Boy Advance's market. The company also confirmed that a separate machine is being developed as a next-generation successor for the GBA. According to Nintendo's public relations chief Yasuhiro Minagawa, "The development of succeeding machines for the GBA and Game Cube are in the works, separately from the Nintendo DS."
Nintendo's comments support their previous statements that they aim to release a new machine that is different from existing game devices. However, that doesn't completely rule out the possibility of the Nintendo DS having backwards compatibility to the GBA; the 32-bit ARM7 chip used as the CPU on the GBA is also used as the sub-processor on the Nintendo DS.
Weirdly, I feel kind of depressed that Nintendo may lose their handheld market successes because of the PSP. That would be a death knell for Nintendo unless it can pull itself out of its slump with the upcoming Revolution and Gameboy successor.
Nintendo is announced a new Gameboy later this year. That's right, the DS isn't the official successor to the Gameboy. It remains to be seen how it will actual be improved over the previous Gameboy and DS, though I have a feeling Nintendo has rejected using optical discs for their portable systems due to load times (and as a result, more wear on the batteries).
Plus, there's been a huge game library built up for the past Gameboy systems, and I'm sure backwards-compatibility will, again, be built in. It's hard to be the huge library available. We shall see. I think this will be as popular as Sega's color handheld was back in the day (that damn thing even had a TV tuner, remember?). I saw a few people with one here and there on the schoolbus back then, and it was the technically better system, but for some reason, Nintendo's ugly green-and-black just won out.
There are others from Winsupersite, including a dialog that pops up totally ripped from OS X asking you for the admin password when you install a program, and shots of Windows paint with translucent borders and titlebars, blurring the image behind it like glass.
I'd like to know what real did to get office to play media files (I will admit right now I did not read the article). If they loaded the codecs and related media playing dlls and registered them then what they did was 99% of installing windows media player which is what Microsoft was asked not to do.
I'm sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I'm not quite sure what you're point is, here. What does it matter what Real did and if it is close to what Microsoft was ordered not to do? Real isn't the monopoly who is selling Windows with a bundled player that you can't remove.
1.) Microsoft unbundles Media Player as ordered. 2.) Turns out, Microsoft left the registry screwed up in a way that prevents Office from playing media files unless you have Media Player installed. 3.) Real demonstrates a Media Player-less Windows with no problems just to further illustrate the sabotage. 4.) And somehow, people like me are wanting our cake and eating it too? No. We're just wanting to know why Microsoft, ordered to remove Media Player, made it so competing players couldn't play media files in certain situations due to leaving the registry a mess in the shipping product. I mean, it's rather convenient that competitors are suddenly unable to play media files, don't you think?
Anyone remember that clip where Bill Gates was answering questions and denied ever seeing certain memos before, and the lawyer explained that they were memos he had just been shown, and Bill Gates nervously demanded to see the memos? The lawyer exclaimed "What a waste of time!" and the judge agreed. The guy's not even a good liar. This all goes to pattern of behavior.
Manager: Take that media player out of your operating system. Me: ok Manager: Now, install RealPlayer. Why don't these media clips play anymore now that we have a competing media player installed? What I'd happily say: Because Microsoft left the registry in a way that makes it difficult for competing media players to run those clips. Slap me silly with surprise. RealNetworks already demonstrated a functioning Media Player-less Windows, so this is more shenanigans from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
Way too much potential for tubgirl/goatse abuse here. I can imagine the horrors as the morning commuters follow a "hyperlink" to a giant, stretched rectum to start their week.
Or use any of the various disk defragmenters out there that support defragmentation of system files like the page file, such as Diskeeper.
Kicks the crap out of Windows' built-in defragger, and is much faster too.
A dollar?
A dollar is too much for one single song?
*blinks eyes*
AAC files on iTunes are higher-quality than CDs because they're often ripped directly from the original master tapes, before the dithering and mixdown process to CD format occurs.
iTunes has one of the most lax DRM schemes there is. You can just recreate your playlist infinite times for unlimited burning. Again, as I've said elsewhere, this is really no different than the kind of usage restrictions expected from someone following the GPL. What is the GPL other than a plain-text digital rights management license?
As for giving back, I was referring to P2P piracy. On iTunes, you're actually compensating them for the music they made. On P2P, they get nothing and you get everything.
Well, let's clarify this. It's not the RIAA's music. The RIAA is just a representative lobbying body for a group of record labels. The record labels are who, to some degree based on the contracts the artists sign, own the copyrights to this intellectual property.
Now, read that again. "Contracts the artists sign." I see a lot of people vaguely describing evil actions against artists on the part of the RIAA, like some big conspiracy. Yet, artists willingly sign their contracts. Obviously, there are specific cases of business deals gone sour between artists and record labels, JUST LIKE IN ANY INDUSTRY. And nobody's claiming the record labels are these innocent little businesses who are in it for the music (though there are some).
But to keep regurgitating this non-specific meme of the evil RIAA hurting artists doesn't actually SAY anything. It's a convenient justification made in Slashdot posts to end a discussion thread. "I copy music, but the RIAA is the evil one because they hurt artists!"
It's a double-standard. GPL code is regarded as intellectual property whose license should be followed. But copyright infringement of media content that someone doesn't feel like paying for is okay.
I've already somewhat addressed this before.
.99 per song and $9 an album. I've seen magazines on my newsstand more expensive than that. I just don't see a valid justification anymore now that iTunes is such a huge success. People should put their money where their mouth is and show the music industry that consumers want to spend their money on digital formats.
1.) Artists willingly sign their contracts. There are "entertainment lawyers" who make sure to go through and balance out contracts for both parties. Record labels do a lot of stuff to make an album successful, from manufacturing and advertising to booking appearances.
2.) Music sells now for as cheap as
Permit me to generalize as well. You are right that it's a personal justification. Me, I'm a down-to-earth kind of guy. Yes, I've pirated music. I'm not going to sit here and claim it's some social movement against the evil corporate-controlled world. Slashdot makes itself look like such a ridiculous community with such opinions.
The vast majority of P2P piracy is nothing more than:
1.) People wanting stuff for free so they don't have to pay for it.
2.) People knowing what they do is ethically wrong, so they seek bad guys to shift blame to. "The RIAA made me do it!"
The ignorance of basic human nature and perception when it comes to the justification of copyright infringement on P2P networks is what kills me. It's so phony. People should just admit what they're doing. You're copying music so you don't have to pay for it. You don't want to shell out--not even $0.99 goddamn cents.
It's like this guy I saw during lunch in hi
P2P distribution + web advertising = no more incentive to sell anything
You know, the Beatles stopped touring in their careers so they could put out a lot of classic albums. In that mindset, they wouldn't have been able to make a living recording that music.
Besides, you don't need P2P piracy for distributing free music. iTunes offers free downloads all the time. Encouraging the use of networks that we all know is 95+% illegal piracy--as in, distribution of content without permission--is just ensuring that valid legal alternatives like iTunes never succeed. You people wanted the record labels to embrace legal online downloading. I've been here for years, and have read post after post, editorial after editorial. Well, it's here in several forms, and now they're still not good enough.
Hardly! There's more to recording a good album than just having Pro Tools...jesus, that's part of the problem of why so many albums sound like crap. Amateur recording engineers thinking they can just click through Pro Tools and get it done. You need, mics, gear, room ambience, a mixer, a masterer, and so on.
Funny, I just thought today's mainstream artists were lazy. And record labels are afraid to take chances on riskier artists, because they're afraid of piracy eating into their return investment.
Every generation thinks the youth's new music is "mediocre, conservative music." A lot of people don't realize how much they sound like old fogies complaining about their grandkids' music. A lot of people love today's music.
But hey, at least you got to use the phrase "agenda of the power elite" in a Slashdot post...no melodrama here!
Yes, and now that we have legal music services like iTunes and Napster, what's the point of P2P piracy again?
.99 a song, how can anyone justify P2P piracy anymore? If nine bucks for an entire album is still too much, then clearly your incentive for piracy is not a "communications movement" to "empower the individual," but is basic human nature--wanting something for free so you don't have to pay for it. Even chimpanzees in social experiments will try to swipe a banana if they learn they don't have to give something back in return.
.99 for a song that we know has been provided (illegally) to us for free on a P2P network. Just admit it, you know?
Even indie artists like those mentioned in the article could easily offer their music for free on iTunes. In fact, iTunes offers free downloads weekly, which is the same "free advertising" Slashdotters love to reference in these discussions.
At
Sorry to be so harsh. I guess I just tired of the whole "we're so noble" act. Just admit what's going on. We're pirating music so we don't have to pay people for it. Because we're lazy and don't feel like stepping foot in a store and paying money. And we're too cheap to go to iTunes and pay
Following your logic, have P2P copyright infringers asked permission from every single artist from whom they copy music?
Or do you really mean, "If only we all listened to the indie artists without contracts who are giving permission for P2P distribution because they need the publicity...and ignored the rest."
Why do people think they're entitled to anything that can be pirated? It's like people argue from a position of inherent "right" to pirate music. Can I pirate Doom 3 just because I can? If John Carmack tells me not to, does that make him a greedy person? Can I infringe the copyright of the GPL too?
Please. Do you really think the majority of people who have 250GB worth of MP3s are doing it to go out and buy the CD afterwards? Have you been to a college campus lately or talked to other young people with high-speed connections?
It's admirable that you use P2P in that way, but don't pretend your personal experience suddenly signifies that P2P piracy is a good thing for the music industry.
One may as well argue that stealing GPL code is good for the software industry. If I like CherryOS, I may check out PearPC! Retarded arguments all around.
Yes, it's great that some artists want people to distribute their music in this way. They have given permission for people do that.
Most artists have not given that permission. Yet, most pirates don't respect that. Slashdot posts things like this to make it seem as though there's some supportive movement among artists for P2P piracy, but there is not. And in between all the "stolen GPL code" articles, arguing in favor of P2P copyright infringement is all the more silly and hypocritical.
Just my opinion. Nobody's ever validly justified infringing on artists' rights without their permission. It's always "the evil RIAA" with no mention of the human beings whose music you're actually taking and depriving revenue for because you want it for free. That's all P2P piracy boils down to. It's not a cultural communications movement. It's human beings wanting stuff for free because people have made it easy to get. Basic human nature here.
Those artists who have given permission are cool. But the copyright holders who don't give permission also have the right not to, and if people want to pretend they have a moral ground to stand on, they'd respect the wishes of those people. But they don't. We instead get more ranting about the RIAA going after individual infringers (just like Slashdot suggested they do in 2000 during the Napster lawsuit), in between articles about GPL violations where people go after individual GPL infringers.
Though I know there are people who don't fall into this mindset here, I'll never understand the majority Slashdot position on this. By majority, I'm referring to both the position of the editors based on the stories they post, and the position of the majority of posters based on the upmods received for certain opinions that support the piracy mindset of entitlement to everything without giving anything in return...what we call "freeloading."
Rule of Slashdot humor #587:
Any immediate explanation of the humor behind a joke cancels out whatever humor the joke initially had.
Also:
Rule of Slashdot humor #741:
Randomly mention Microsoft Bob or Clippy for automatic +5 Funny!
Finally, progress is made. Thank you for admitting you were wrong.
There is a "heavy deprecation" of 2D games in the entire industry, because gamers don't want to live in 2D anymore. It's not some Sony conspiracy; it's market demand. Despite this, there are still plenty of 2D games released. Several examples have already been given by me and others.
Sony preferring 3D games is completely different from an official ban. There is no ban. Tepples was rightly called on that.
I don't care how "old" his other account was. Also, Sony has not been preventing 2D games since 1996. I already linked to one example, Evo2k, that uses a lot of 2D Playstation games in their tournaments.
You say I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm not the one who lied about an official Sony ban on 2D games, then backtracked and admitted there are, in fact, 2D games that have come out even recently. I am 100% right on this. There is no Sony "ban" on 2D games. Tepples was claiming there was. That makes him 100% wrong. Get over it.
Next.
What part of this aren't you getting?
1.) You say Sony has banned 2D games.
2.) Several people point out 2D games for the Sony Playstation.
It doesn't matter if you think there should be more 2D shooters. The fact that several 2D games exist means there's no ban on 2D games.
Got it?
What does the quantity of 2D games release in the past couple of years have to do with anything? You claimed there was an official ban on 2D games by Sony. Several people have already called you on it, and you've even resorted to giving examples of 2D games that disprove your own previous claim. Just admit you were wrong and move on.
As geeks, I know we love to apply patterns to everything. But you can't just take one situation, switch the names in another situation, and claim they're the same. There are way too many external factors that affect outcomes of things. We all know how Nintendo shot itself in the foot and has been limping since. That has nothing to do with now because this is a new situation.
Better go tell Evo2k they've been holding fighting tournaments for a 2D PS2 game that doesn't exist...
I never said they announced it (I made a typo, but it's easy to see what I meant).
Nintendo will be announcing a new Gameboy. See for yourself.
Here's an old article on the matter:
Japanese game giant clarifies its new double-screen gaming system's marketplace role.
By Hirohiko Niizumi
Posted Wednesday, January 21st 2004
TOKYO--In an interview conducted by Bloomberg Japan, Nintendo confirmed that the Nintendo DS, its newly announced portable dual-screen gaming system, is not being created to take over the Game Boy Advance's market. The company also confirmed that a separate machine is being developed as a next-generation successor for the GBA. According to Nintendo's public relations chief Yasuhiro Minagawa, "The development of succeeding machines for the GBA and Game Cube are in the works, separately from the Nintendo DS."
Nintendo's comments support their previous statements that they aim to release a new machine that is different from existing game devices. However, that doesn't completely rule out the possibility of the Nintendo DS having backwards compatibility to the GBA; the 32-bit ARM7 chip used as the CPU on the GBA is also used as the sub-processor on the Nintendo DS.
Weirdly, I feel kind of depressed that Nintendo may lose their handheld market successes because of the PSP. That would be a death knell for Nintendo unless it can pull itself out of its slump with the upcoming Revolution and Gameboy successor.
Nintendo, it's time to knock one out of the park.
Nintendo is announced a new Gameboy later this year. That's right, the DS isn't the official successor to the Gameboy. It remains to be seen how it will actual be improved over the previous Gameboy and DS, though I have a feeling Nintendo has rejected using optical discs for their portable systems due to load times (and as a result, more wear on the batteries).
Plus, there's been a huge game library built up for the past Gameboy systems, and I'm sure backwards-compatibility will, again, be built in. It's hard to be the huge library available. We shall see. I think this will be as popular as Sega's color handheld was back in the day (that damn thing even had a TV tuner, remember?). I saw a few people with one here and there on the schoolbus back then, and it was the technically better system, but for some reason, Nintendo's ugly green-and-black just won out.
They bought Macs and are too busy actually getting things done to post here about the latest response from an IE developer.
This is only slightly off-topic (it is the future competition, after all), but submissions on this to Slashdot are being rejected.
Never-before-seen shots of Longhorn:
1
2
3
There are others from Winsupersite, including a dialog that pops up totally ripped from OS X asking you for the admin password when you install a program, and shots of Windows paint with translucent borders and titlebars, blurring the image behind it like glass.
I'm not quite sure what you're point is, here. What does it matter what Real did and if it is close to what Microsoft was ordered not to do? Real isn't the monopoly who is selling Windows with a bundled player that you can't remove.
1.) Microsoft unbundles Media Player as ordered.
2.) Turns out, Microsoft left the registry screwed up in a way that prevents Office from playing media files unless you have Media Player installed.
3.) Real demonstrates a Media Player-less Windows with no problems just to further illustrate the sabotage.
4.) And somehow, people like me are wanting our cake and eating it too? No. We're just wanting to know why Microsoft, ordered to remove Media Player, made it so competing players couldn't play media files in certain situations due to leaving the registry a mess in the shipping product. I mean, it's rather convenient that competitors are suddenly unable to play media files, don't you think?
Anyone remember that clip where Bill Gates was answering questions and denied ever seeing certain memos before, and the lawyer explained that they were memos he had just been shown, and Bill Gates nervously demanded to see the memos? The lawyer exclaimed "What a waste of time!" and the judge agreed. The guy's not even a good liar. This all goes to pattern of behavior.
Ah, I miss the go-go 90s.
It's more like
Manager: Take that media player out of your operating system.
Me: ok
Manager: Now, install RealPlayer. Why don't these media clips play anymore now that we have a competing media player installed?
What I'd happily say: Because Microsoft left the registry in a way that makes it difficult for competing media players to run those clips. Slap me silly with surprise. RealNetworks already demonstrated a functioning Media Player-less Windows, so this is more shenanigans from Microsoft.