So how does wmp11 have a tighter grip on windows users?
Well, you must remember that there are plenty of non technical windows users out there, these are not the users who struggle to browse the internet or send an email but rather the the ones who will install anything new and shiny that microsoft shoves in their direction, the ones who have ripped their entire music collection from CD into DRM infected windows media, the ones who will buy DRM music downloads and quite possibly a handheld MS DRM compatible media player. These people find the UI of WMP appealing and would never consider using anything else, especially to rip CDs.
Microsoft own their DRM system, they license it to hardware manufacturers, the more users who DRM their music without initially realising it the more valuable microsoft's system becomes. Users are lazy, if they've already ripped all that music they aren't about to re-rip it, they'll just stick to programs and devices which work with it.
I don't know whether this would directly affect the stock price.
I like the idea of a small dongle to aid me in the recording of Radio 4, the device you've outlined sounds like its utterly over the top and useless for just about everyone besides you, what are Web 2.0 protocols anyway, just out of interest?
Setting up said charity for the pain misery and cost of running and upgrading windows server 2003 is probably not a terribly charitable thing when you think about it, I know Microsoft would be very pleased though.
Re:The problem with wireless devices...
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Indeed, the idea of replacing a device which has one small cable running to a PC or hub with a device which produces increased interference and still has a cable, only this time it's attached to a chunky transformer plugged into the mains, is just plain silly.
To suggest that there are no 'Marketing Rats', especially where KDE/Qt vs. GNOME/GTK+ or 'insert name of project' vs. The GIMP are involved, is maybe just a little naive.
As the AC said, NTL and Telewest cable operators already provide this, and have done for some time, cable broadband internet, cable digital TV with VoD and cable telephone, they tend to wrap them up together in, relatively, low cost bundles.
There was one windows FOSS installer, can't remember which app it belonged to, which replaced the 'I Agree' button with a 'Great!' or 'Cool!' button, to make it clearer that you don't actually need to agree to the license terms in order to use GPL'd software. In reality it didn't make things any clearer but it was a nice idea.
That's exactly what my first thought was upon reading this, Microsoft are looking for new and interesting ways to lock users into the windows platform, providing loads of "free" services which will only work with the MS browser on MS platforms is just one such technique. The sad thing is that if microsoft produce an online office suite, even if it's vastly less functional than OpenOffice.org or any of the existing browser based systems, with the MS Office brand behind it people will probably use the thing!
Ok, i don't have the Adobe reader installed but rather Evince and gPDF, since these lack support for a lot of the additional features of PDF am i any safer?
So are all the iTMS downloaded files you currently posses in a non lossy format or would you be burning lossy compressed tracks to CD and then ripping them and encoding with another slightly different lossy compression method? It doesn't sound like a good option to me. Imagine if you purchased a CD containing those tracks, maybe at a local independent record shop, you would have a lot more control over the music you paid, not to mention a nice hard copy with all the tracks in the intended order(album structures are often an important part of the listening experience) , some cover art, sleeve notes, lyrics, etc.
If i were to buy music files online it would have to be from a service such as http://magnatune.com/, i'd love to see this idea explored by other record labels but there's just no need for them to consider it if everyone owns an iPod and is happy to swallow their DRM.
Well i'm looking forward to seeing how things pan out with Xara Xtreme, there's an example of open sourece software which isn't actually given away free, for the windows platform at least. X-chat takes a similar approach and is despised for it, i should imagine it also reduces its adoption considerably among windows users. QCad started charging for win32 builds quite some time ago and i suppose it must be working out for them.
The one thing that a company can always sell even if they give the product away for free is commercial support, that's the kind of thing that keeps redhat and novell in business.
I hope you created lossless backups as well, otherwise you'll need to rerecord the whole lot when MP3 falls into obsolescence. It's true though, DRM and the kids who don't seem to care about it as long as their iPods work are a big problem, they don't appear to have the slightest idea how little control they have over the music they're "buying". I guess enough of them are listening to such completely forgettable rubbish that the desire to return to those tracks in several years time is going to be, at best, minimal.
I've given it a quick prod and i'm reasonably impressed, though the lack of a usable SVG filter makes it fairly useless to me at the moment. The thing that intrigues me most is what, if anything, other FOSS graphics project are going to make of all this newly opened code.
One other thing, I see that Xara Xtreme will only be available for free on Linux, OSX and Windows users will have to continue to pay a, albeit small, fee to use it. What's going to happen when someone takes this app, designed from the start to be cross platform, and compiles GPL versions for Windows and OSX under a new name? Surely that's going to seriously upset the company.
The cheapest screens which just do nearest neighbour scaling are truly horrible but i'm afraid i find the ones which do some blended interpolation to be similarly objectionable, none that i've seen produce a result that's quite as natural and, to my eyes, acceptable as CRT always has, large screen CRT televisions are similarly gifted over their fixed matrix brethren.
The problem i notice more than anything at the moment is the massive drop in picture quality moving from our old Analogue PAL to DVB in the UK, it's often entirely acceptable but noticable how choppy motion can become and i fidn the compression aftefacts very distracting, even on small televisions. NTL's digital cable TV service is probably the worst offender, they seem to compress the picture so far on certain channels that it's preferable to watch traditional terrestrial with a little analogue snow.
Well, it looks like banshee is getting one http://i-nz.net/2006/07/16/the-banshee-equalizer/ but it does seem stupid that this kind of feature hasn't appeared yet until now. I'd personally like to see some very simplistic bass and treble controls, preferably in the style of twidly knobs, introduced to a GNOME music player in addition to the option of a graphic equalizer.
The one thing i find truly unbearable about LCD is its inability to run at any resolution besides the actual pixel count of the screen, watching enormous LCD screens take a low res and heavily compressed Sky TV stream and scale it up to fill the available space produces one of the worst television experiences i've ever encountered. Is this kind of problem purely an issue with older LCD flatscreens or would the same issue plague a brand new HDTV ready LCD until all content is available in HD format?
This is also the reason i don't have an LCD monitor attached to my PC as i don't have the graphics hardware to comfortably drive 3D games at the same resolution i'm likely to want my desktop to run at.
Now, i, on the rare occasions that i even boot the VM, do it the other way around, Windows inside a VM on Linux, is running your game at full speed more important than having a Linux system installed on actual hardware?
Just out of interest, what's the expensive game in question, why not name and shame them?
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Microsoft own their DRM system, they license it to hardware manufacturers, the more users who DRM their music without initially realising it the more valuable microsoft's system becomes. Users are lazy, if they've already ripped all that music they aren't about to re-rip it, they'll just stick to programs and devices which work with it.
I don't know whether this would directly affect the stock price.
I like the idea of a small dongle to aid me in the recording of Radio 4, the device you've outlined sounds like its utterly over the top and useless for just about everyone besides you, what are Web 2.0 protocols anyway, just out of interest?
Setting up said charity for the pain misery and cost of running and upgrading windows server 2003 is probably not a terribly charitable thing when you think about it, I know Microsoft would be very pleased though.
Indeed, the idea of replacing a device which has one small cable running to a PC or hub with a device which produces increased interference and still has a cable, only this time it's attached to a chunky transformer plugged into the mains, is just plain silly.
To suggest that there are no 'Marketing Rats', especially where KDE/Qt vs. GNOME/GTK+ or 'insert name of project' vs. The GIMP are involved, is maybe just a little naive.
As the AC said, NTL and Telewest cable operators already provide this, and have done for some time, cable broadband internet, cable digital TV with VoD and cable telephone, they tend to wrap them up together in, relatively, low cost bundles.
There was one windows FOSS installer, can't remember which app it belonged to, which replaced the 'I Agree' button with a 'Great!' or 'Cool!' button, to make it clearer that you don't actually need to agree to the license terms in order to use GPL'd software. In reality it didn't make things any clearer but it was a nice idea.
$179 vs. $140 if you're going for the basic version of RHELWS, is it possible that this comes with more support than an OEM windows XP license?
It takes a whole 4 clicks from the front page, and you do need to know what OS you're running, maybe it confused the poor boy.
Even if copyright expired after 5 years would they be required to re-release that music to you in a non DRM infected form?
Kayne west? sorry, that one missed me completely, care to explain?
This is horrible news, how exactly is Microsoft DRM a better option than cross platform Real formats? At least Real provide a linux compatible player.
That's exactly what my first thought was upon reading this, Microsoft are looking for new and interesting ways to lock users into the windows platform, providing loads of "free" services which will only work with the MS browser on MS platforms is just one such technique. The sad thing is that if microsoft produce an online office suite, even if it's vastly less functional than OpenOffice.org or any of the existing browser based systems, with the MS Office brand behind it people will probably use the thing!
Gas turbine, surely this can't replace laptop batteries, it sounds dangerous, what if it explo.... oh, never mind.
Ok, i don't have the Adobe reader installed but rather Evince and gPDF, since these lack support for a lot of the additional features of PDF am i any safer?
Why's there never a {+1 Groan} moderation entry when you need it?
If i were to buy music files online it would have to be from a service such as http://magnatune.com/, i'd love to see this idea explored by other record labels but there's just no need for them to consider it if everyone owns an iPod and is happy to swallow their DRM.
The one thing that a company can always sell even if they give the product away for free is commercial support, that's the kind of thing that keeps redhat and novell in business.
I hope you created lossless backups as well, otherwise you'll need to rerecord the whole lot when MP3 falls into obsolescence. It's true though, DRM and the kids who don't seem to care about it as long as their iPods work are a big problem, they don't appear to have the slightest idea how little control they have over the music they're "buying". I guess enough of them are listening to such completely forgettable rubbish that the desire to return to those tracks in several years time is going to be, at best, minimal.
I've given it a quick prod and i'm reasonably impressed, though the lack of a usable SVG filter makes it fairly useless to me at the moment. The thing that intrigues me most is what, if anything, other FOSS graphics project are going to make of all this newly opened code.
One other thing, I see that Xara Xtreme will only be available for free on Linux, OSX and Windows users will have to continue to pay a, albeit small, fee to use it. What's going to happen when someone takes this app, designed from the start to be cross platform, and compiles GPL versions for Windows and OSX under a new name? Surely that's going to seriously upset the company.
The cheapest screens which just do nearest neighbour scaling are truly horrible but i'm afraid i find the ones which do some blended interpolation to be similarly objectionable, none that i've seen produce a result that's quite as natural and, to my eyes, acceptable as CRT always has, large screen CRT televisions are similarly gifted over their fixed matrix brethren.
The problem i notice more than anything at the moment is the massive drop in picture quality moving from our old Analogue PAL to DVB in the UK, it's often entirely acceptable but noticable how choppy motion can become and i fidn the compression aftefacts very distracting, even on small televisions. NTL's digital cable TV service is probably the worst offender, they seem to compress the picture so far on certain channels that it's preferable to watch traditional terrestrial with a little analogue snow.
Well, it looks like banshee is getting one http://i-nz.net/2006/07/16/the-banshee-equalizer/
but it does seem stupid that this kind of feature hasn't appeared yet until now. I'd personally like to see some very simplistic bass and treble controls, preferably in the style of twidly knobs, introduced to a GNOME music player in addition to the option of a graphic equalizer.
The one thing i find truly unbearable about LCD is its inability to run at any resolution besides the actual pixel count of the screen, watching enormous LCD screens take a low res and heavily compressed Sky TV stream and scale it up to fill the available space produces one of the worst television experiences i've ever encountered. Is this kind of problem purely an issue with older LCD flatscreens or would the same issue plague a brand new HDTV ready LCD until all content is available in HD format?
This is also the reason i don't have an LCD monitor attached to my PC as i don't have the graphics hardware to comfortably drive 3D games at the same resolution i'm likely to want my desktop to run at.
In addition to that a quick search for ipod on Gnome Files turns up Banshee , Rhythmbox , Listen and Yamipod>{not open source} , all of these look like nice options for iPod and music library management under linux but Banshee and Listen really stand out. No DRM of course but there is an entry on codeweavers' site for iTunes though i've no idea how compatible it is at this stage.http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/bro wse/name?app_id=134
Now, i, on the rare occasions that i even boot the VM, do it the other way around, Windows inside a VM on Linux, is running your game at full speed more important than having a Linux system installed on actual hardware?
Just out of interest, what's the expensive game in question, why not name and shame them?