20 million AOL users clearly discovered something OTHER than Internet Explorer, and managed to somehow install software on their computer despite their overwhelming ignorance.
Blame it on marketing if you'd like, but don't pretend that people don't know about ways to get on the internet that aren't IE.
Since Real provided a "real" email address at the Car Talk page, I decided to install Real 10 and see what happened. This is my reply to Erika Shaffer, PR director at Real.com.
Erika,
I'm disappointed that CarTalk chose to return to RealPlayer for its streaming audio. I'm even more disappointed that Real had to deceive CarTalk's web managers in order to get them to do it.
Specifically: "Complaint #4: Real was trying to sell me stuff. RealPlayer 10 lets you turn off all content and sales messages -- those little windows with messages from us that show up in the player or a message window while you are using your computer. You can very easily do this during the initial setup of the player, or later by changing your preferences. If you want to receive some kinds of messages, but not others, you can say so. You can even turn off the message that notifies you that an upgrade of the player is available, though we think you should leave at least that one on."
While it's accurate that I can now turn off the sales messages from the Real Message center, Real is still trying to sell me stuff every time I start up the player.
You neglected to mention that there's a big honkin' ad at the top of the RealPlayer window! *Above* the Play/Pause/Stop controls! Once it's there, there's no obvious way to make it go away. While I realize that ads inside the web content pane may be necessary to pay the bills, it's incredibly obnoxious to move the UI around to make room for ads that sometimes show up and sometimes don't. It's not quite a popup ad, but it's darn close, and it's disingenuous of Real to claim that simply because you can turn off the ads in Message Center, Real isn't trying to sell me stuff or annoy me.
Furthermore, I didn't see anything during the initial setup of the player that let me turn off ads in the Message center. You still have to find an entry point that's buried from most users (Tools > Preferences > Automatic Services > Message Center > Configure Message Center) to make the ads stop. And even if you turn off every single message (including software updates), realsched.exe is still running all the time on my computer.
Real took an industry-leading media product, and instead of continuing to innovate technically, chose to become a marketing and litigation company. In the process, it annoyed millions of users. While Real can claim this upgrade is better for users, it's obvious that upper management still doesn't "get it."
Please pass this on to the decision-makers at Real: Intrusive ads are annoying, regardless of whether they pop up in a new window, or move around the UI in hopes of catching mis-clicks.
I hope that some day soon, Real has an epiphany that users don't like being pandered to. When that happens, I'll come back. In the meantime, I'll be telling all my friends about Real Alternative.
Thanks for your time, Aaron Weiss Portland, Oregon
This "folly" has been used by road companies in the US for years and isn't going away.
Mackintosh absolutely wants automation to rigidly reproduce his vision. Have you seen Les Miserable or Phantom of the Opera? It's all about automation!
Mackintosh wants (and his audiences expect) a slick, uniform, standardized performance that's the same whether it's in the West End, Broadway, or Lubbock, Texas.
No one goes to see a production of Les Miz after all these years hoping it might be some bold new interpretation tonight. They go because they want to see the same production they saw 15 years ago. This technology delivers that.
As soon as you add a synth playing six parts at once, then your tempos can't vary...
RTFA. In fact, the tempos and dynamics can vary. The conductor can skip or repeat verses, add ritards or rallantandos, and the system follows along. This thing is NOT a dumb MIDI sequencer that plays to a click-track.
You can argue over the morals of replacing half a pit orchestra with computers, but 99% of the audience won't be able to separate the live instruments from the synthesized/sampled ones.
As for whether it will feel more or less "human" to the audience, this is Les Miserables we're talking about. The people going to see it don't want a nuanced human performance from night to night. They want a slick Cameron Mackintosh production that is uniform, standardized, and reliably the same whether you see it in London, New York, or Kalamazoo. This technology delivers that product.
Has anyone tried ATT's GoPhone plan? You pay for the phone upfront ($80 online), but the minutes are competitive ($40/mo for 400 min + free nights/weekends), and there's NO CONTRACT! If you go over your 400, your next month just starts early, instead of being charged through the nose for overage minutes.
I'm looking for the downside, and I haven't found it. Anyone on the plan right now?
From the release notes: The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you're using these binaries then popular plug-ins like RealPlayer, compiled with previous versions of GCC, will not work. See bug 213234 and 158385.
This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.
Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.
I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.
GDI and GDI+ are replaced by the new DCE (Desktop Composition Engine), which provides full 3D support to the desktop. Everything scales to high DPI. Video flies and flaps. It only does cool stuff on signed drivers.
I knew Marc Smith when I was at msft, and his response to the "but people post fake information!" line of thinking is basically, "That's fine. I learn a lot from your desire to remain anonymous. That may be more or less valuable to whatever it is I'm looking for."
Slashdot does exactly the same thing. Post as yourself (i.e. logged in, not necessarily you), and your comments are more prominent than posting as an AC.
This is basically taking/.'s moderation system and applying it to a completely uncontrolled environment. It's a fascinating exercise, but I still haven't seen any useful applications of the work outside of newsgroups.
What's the point of pointing at a movie theater and getting a list of showtimes?
If you're close enough for your PDA to see the theater line-of-sight, you're probably close enough to walk up to the ticket window and see showtimes for yourself!
The Open Group claims they have a trademark on the word Unix, which Apple is using to sell its product.
Brands like Kleenex and Rollerblade vigorously defend their trademarks to avoid having them fall into general use. Now a judge gets to decide whether 'Unix' has fallen into general use.
Um, no, actually, it's not crap. Not being a mac user, I don't know about the iMusic integration, but I do have a playlist of internet radio stations that the TiVo can tune in just fine.
You have to enter the stations manually into a M3U file, but it can be done. It's another one of TiVo's "hidden" features that TiVo includes to make power users feel like they're in on something special, while not having to actually support it for the unwashed masses.
I was a beta tester for 'HMO', as it's known at TiVo. I've been living with it for the last month--and I'm not going to shell out the $99 to purchase it. Why?
1. Lack of format support. TiVo plays MP3s. That's it. No OGG, no WMA. My collection is mostly in WMA. If I were to start again, it would be into OGG, not MP3.
2. No playlist control. You can create M3U playlists on your computer and play those, but if you don't create playlists ahead of time, you're stuck playing individual songs or folders (which in my case are sorted by artist). You can't switch songs without stopping the current song from playing. That makes it pretty much useless for parties where you'd like live control over what will play next.
3. No photos simultaneously with music. The feature is named "Music & Photos". But it's actually "Music OR Photos". So if you want to play music during your party, your guests get to see a box with song info onscreen, and that's it. If you want to put a slide show up on your TV, your music has to come from somewhere else. Similarly, there are no other visualization toys to play with.
As for the other features, I "only" have one TiVo, so multi-room viewing isn't useful to me.
And in the month I've been using it so far, I've never had the need to schedule programs for my TiVo remotely.
Even if I had, the conflict-resolution options are minimal: record this program if nothing conflicts, or or record it regardless. You don't get to see what may be conflicting, because TiVo connects to the mother ship every 15 minutes or so to check for new orders.
In short, it's a 1.0 feature set, competing against computers in a 3.0 world. If I want music & photos on my TV, I'll just plug my laptop into my AV system and be happy. So sad.
...if only our elected officials had the cojones to say it out loud.
The black market in software and pirated DVDs only exists because there is a profit to be made by selling those pirated items.
If you make it possible to obtain those items without paying for them (i.e. P2P networks), then there's no profit to be made by selling individual discs!
Thus: Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella are fighting the war on terror!
How small is this alumnus' dick that he feels the need to hold his alma mater hostage for a donation?
Yes, he's offering a lot of money, but colleges get far more than that from the alumni base as a whole.
The one thing a college doesn't want to do is piss off a group of graduating undergrads, because they won't give money in 5-10 years down the road when they're making bank.
What kind of a revolt would a college see if students couldn't run Word in the computer labs to write their papers?
Not to mention all the other software packages that are mandatory learning in many disciplines, but are only available (or affordable) on Windows. (I'm thinking stats packages like SPSS, I'm sure there are more.)
When alumni make my-way-or-the-highway offers like this, it makes the donors look like jerks, and makes presidents who accept them look like spineless beggars.
If you aren't using the tilde key, you're short on imagination. Not only does it provide the backtick character (which most non-Unix types will admittedly never use) but the tilde is used to designate an approximate figure.
OK, but why is the tilde still a Shift-key combination? Why not switch it to the unshifted function of the backtick key?
More keys that shouldn't require 2-key presses: Angle brackets. With HTML being coded so often, should they switch with the square brackets next to 'P'?
Also: Colon vs. semi-colon. I'm willing to bet colons are used 2-3 times (maybe 5-10) times as often as semi-colons. Yet the semi-colon is the unshifted key. Silly!
The Office Keyboard is a godsend for spreadsheet jockeys. Tab, Backspace, =, (, ), and 4 math operations all in the 10-key area! I don't know why it took keyboard makers so long to decide the old way wasn't necessarily the best.
I personally don't use the remapped F-keys, but I can see the use for people who didn't ever learn Ctrl-* combinations.
So why the excitement over a device that costs more and does less than the 6035?
Well, because the 6035 is still too big too stick in your pocket without, as some other review recently said, "looking like you have a third knee."
I love my 6035, but it's too large. The 7135 looks to be an improvement on this, but it's still nowhere near the Nokia form factor, which was clearly a priority for Danger.
If they can make desktop sync work with the HipTop, they'll make serious inroads against Palm and PocketPC... both of which have forgotten the KISS philosophy that made the original Pilot so successful in the first place.
Yep, I've stopped file sharing. Not because it's any harder, but because using Rhapsody is that much easier.
I don't have to search through a bunch of random hits on FastTrack or Gnutella. I don't have to wait for a download to complete. I don't have to check the file to see if it's good, then manually file it in a folder.
I just pick the song I want to play, and it plays. I don't really care about downloads, because I don't want all the albums in my library taking up space. My cable modem works great and is always on.
So I've bought in. $8.33 a month is a bargain for a jukebox in the sky. Could it be better? Sure. There are a few artists I wish would make their songs available. And as soon as a competitor comes along that includes that music, I'll switch.
This is healthy competition, and we should encourage companies like Listen.com who are providing a valuable service and (gasp) able to make a profit on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Date of internetnews.com article: September 10.
Date of slashdot post: September 14.
Date of Microsoft bulletin: September 14.
Apparently you have to be a slashot premium subscriber to get early warnings, too.
Your argument contradicts itself.
20 million AOL users clearly discovered something OTHER than Internet Explorer, and managed to somehow install software on their computer despite their overwhelming ignorance.
Blame it on marketing if you'd like, but don't pretend that people don't know about ways to get on the internet that aren't IE.
This "folly" has been used by road companies in the US for years and isn't going away.
Mackintosh absolutely wants automation to rigidly reproduce his vision. Have you seen Les Miserable or Phantom of the Opera? It's all about automation!
Mackintosh wants (and his audiences expect) a slick, uniform, standardized performance that's the same whether it's in the West End, Broadway, or Lubbock, Texas.
No one goes to see a production of Les Miz after all these years hoping it might be some bold new interpretation tonight. They go because they want to see the same production they saw 15 years ago. This technology delivers that.
As soon as you add a synth playing six parts at once, then your tempos can't vary...
RTFA. In fact, the tempos and dynamics can vary. The conductor can skip or repeat verses, add ritards or rallantandos, and the system follows along. This thing is NOT a dumb MIDI sequencer that plays to a click-track.
You can argue over the morals of replacing half a pit orchestra with computers, but 99% of the audience won't be able to separate the live instruments from the synthesized/sampled ones.
As for whether it will feel more or less "human" to the audience, this is Les Miserables we're talking about. The people going to see it don't want a nuanced human performance from night to night. They want a slick Cameron Mackintosh production that is uniform, standardized, and reliably the same whether you see it in London, New York, or Kalamazoo. This technology delivers that product.
Has anyone tried ATT's GoPhone plan? You pay for the phone upfront ($80 online), but the minutes are competitive ($40/mo for 400 min + free nights/weekends), and there's NO CONTRACT! If you go over your 400, your next month just starts early, instead of being charged through the nose for overage minutes.
I'm looking for the downside, and I haven't found it. Anyone on the plan right now?
On your windows laptop, you can use ieSpell.
If you use IE, that is.
http://www.iespell.com/
From the release notes:
The Linux binaries distributed by mozilla.org are now compiled with GCC 3.2. If you're using these binaries then popular plug-ins like RealPlayer, compiled with previous versions of GCC, will not work. See bug 213234 and 158385.
This is a classic example of why Linux is still not quite ready for prime time on the desktop.
Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.
I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.
The screenshots are really just the tip of the iceberg. What's under the hood may blow OSX out of the water if they can get it stable.
v iew_2003.asp
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_pre
Basically:
GDI and GDI+ are replaced by the new DCE (Desktop Composition Engine), which provides full 3D support to the desktop. Everything scales to high DPI. Video flies and flaps. It only does cool stuff on signed drivers.
The XFree86 fork has some catching up to do.
I knew Marc Smith when I was at msft, and his response to the "but people post fake information!" line of thinking is basically, "That's fine. I learn a lot from your desire to remain anonymous. That may be more or less valuable to whatever it is I'm looking for."
/.'s moderation system and applying it to a completely uncontrolled environment. It's a fascinating exercise, but I still haven't seen any useful applications of the work outside of newsgroups.
Slashdot does exactly the same thing. Post as yourself (i.e. logged in, not necessarily you), and your comments are more prominent than posting as an AC.
This is basically taking
What are the odds China will release its modified GPL code to the rest of the world?
There's a lawsuit I'd love to see. Linus Torvalds/FSF vs. The People's Republic of China.
Your knowledge is lacking. Read the above posts. XP DOES report BSODs and spontaneous reboots. It frequently tells you the driver than caused it, too.
What's the point of pointing at a movie theater and getting a list of showtimes?
If you're close enough for your PDA to see the theater line-of-sight, you're probably close enough to walk up to the ticket window and see showtimes for yourself!
I don't see where this is inaccurate.
It's not a matter of accuracy.
The Open Group claims they have a trademark on the word Unix, which Apple is using to sell its product.
Brands like Kleenex and Rollerblade vigorously defend their trademarks to avoid having them fall into general use. Now a judge gets to decide whether 'Unix' has fallen into general use.
Um, no, actually, it's not crap. Not being a mac user, I don't know about the iMusic integration, but I do have a playlist of internet radio stations that the TiVo can tune in just fine.
You have to enter the stations manually into a M3U file, but it can be done. It's another one of TiVo's "hidden" features that TiVo includes to make power users feel like they're in on something special, while not having to actually support it for the unwashed masses.
I was a beta tester for 'HMO', as it's known at TiVo. I've been living with it for the last month--and I'm not going to shell out the $99 to purchase it. Why?
1. Lack of format support. TiVo plays MP3s. That's it. No OGG, no WMA. My collection is mostly in WMA. If I were to start again, it would be into OGG, not MP3.
2. No playlist control. You can create M3U playlists on your computer and play those, but if you don't create playlists ahead of time, you're stuck playing individual songs or folders (which in my case are sorted by artist). You can't switch songs without stopping the current song from playing. That makes it pretty much useless for parties where you'd like live control over what will play next.
3. No photos simultaneously with music. The feature is named "Music & Photos". But it's actually "Music OR Photos". So if you want to play music during your party, your guests get to see a box with song info onscreen, and that's it. If you want to put a slide show up on your TV, your music has to come from somewhere else. Similarly, there are no other visualization toys to play with.
As for the other features, I "only" have one TiVo, so multi-room viewing isn't useful to me.
And in the month I've been using it so far, I've never had the need to schedule programs for my TiVo remotely.
Even if I had, the conflict-resolution options are minimal: record this program if nothing conflicts, or or record it regardless. You don't get to see what may be conflicting, because TiVo connects to the mother ship every 15 minutes or so to check for new orders.
In short, it's a 1.0 feature set, competing against computers in a 3.0 world. If I want music & photos on my TV, I'll just plug my laptop into my AV system and be happy. So sad.
Even on my Notebook computer, I don't need this much connectivity.
Is this the same notebook computer that has 640k of RAM? Because that's enough for anybody.
...if only our elected officials had the cojones to say it out loud.
The black market in software and pirated DVDs only exists because there is a profit to be made by selling those pirated items.
If you make it possible to obtain those items without paying for them (i.e. P2P networks), then there's no profit to be made by selling individual discs!
Thus: Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella are fighting the war on terror!
How small is this alumnus' dick that he feels the need to hold his alma mater hostage for a donation?
Yes, he's offering a lot of money, but colleges get far more than that from the alumni base as a whole.
The one thing a college doesn't want to do is piss off a group of graduating undergrads, because they won't give money in 5-10 years down the road when they're making bank.
What kind of a revolt would a college see if students couldn't run Word in the computer labs to write their papers?
Not to mention all the other software packages that are mandatory learning in many disciplines, but are only available (or affordable) on Windows. (I'm thinking stats packages like SPSS, I'm sure there are more.)
When alumni make my-way-or-the-highway offers like this, it makes the donors look like jerks, and makes presidents who accept them look like spineless beggars.
If you aren't using the tilde key, you're short on imagination. Not only does it provide the backtick character (which most non-Unix types will admittedly never use) but the tilde is used to designate an approximate figure.
OK, but why is the tilde still a Shift-key combination? Why not switch it to the unshifted function of the backtick key?
More keys that shouldn't require 2-key presses: Angle brackets. With HTML being coded so often, should they switch with the square brackets next to 'P'?
Also: Colon vs. semi-colon. I'm willing to bet colons are used 2-3 times (maybe 5-10) times as often as semi-colons. Yet the semi-colon is the unshifted key. Silly!
The Office Keyboard is a godsend for spreadsheet jockeys. Tab, Backspace, =, (, ), and 4 math operations all in the 10-key area! I don't know why it took keyboard makers so long to decide the old way wasn't necessarily the best.
I personally don't use the remapped F-keys, but I can see the use for people who didn't ever learn Ctrl-* combinations.
The extra scroll wheel is wonderful, as well.
So why the excitement over a device that costs more and does less than the 6035?
Well, because the 6035 is still too big too stick in your pocket without, as some other review recently said, "looking like you have a third knee."
I love my 6035, but it's too large. The 7135 looks to be an improvement on this, but it's still nowhere near the Nokia form factor, which was clearly a priority for Danger.
If they can make desktop sync work with the HipTop, they'll make serious inroads against Palm and PocketPC... both of which have forgotten the KISS philosophy that made the original Pilot so successful in the first place.
Yep, I've stopped file sharing. Not because it's any harder, but because using Rhapsody is that much easier.
I don't have to search through a bunch of random hits on FastTrack or Gnutella.
I don't have to wait for a download to complete.
I don't have to check the file to see if it's good, then manually file it in a folder.
I just pick the song I want to play, and it plays. I don't really care about downloads, because I don't want all the albums in my library taking up space. My cable modem works great and is always on.
So I've bought in. $8.33 a month is a bargain for a jukebox in the sky. Could it be better? Sure. There are a few artists I wish would make their songs available. And as soon as a competitor comes along that includes that music, I'll switch.
This is healthy competition, and we should encourage companies like Listen.com who are providing a valuable service and (gasp) able to make a profit on it.
So does this have anything to do with Apple's uber-secret (except when it's posted on /.) project that has OS X simultaneously running on Intel boxes?
By forcing the migration away from OS 9, Apple moves closer to a processor-independent world where they could drop Motorola in 2-3 years.