Am I hopelessly paranoid, or will the next move be "Sorry, you can't download our trailer/demo/free song/sample chapter PDF unless your OS is DRM-compliant" (read: Windows with new BIOS)?
I'm afraid that it can only go that way.
Microsoft need to keep making money to survive but what happens now that every OS and application they make probably has just about every feature users need?
It's obvious that MS have to start inventing new features and make Joe Public think that he needs those features. At the same time, MS can bring in a "rental model" which means they get guaranteed income from all their licensees.
Just as an aside, any thoughts on how I should go about making a permanent move to Linux?
There's no point "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Don't listen to all the hype - give Linux a try as a dual boot system and migrate across gradually if that's what you want to do. Far too many new Linux users get frustrated because everything doesn't run right from the start with a new install - 90% of hardware will be okay, about 5% will be made to work after a little fiddling and the final 5% may not work if its brand new hardware and doesn't have a driver yet.
Make some unpartitioned space on your Windows machine and get a good starter distro like Mandrake, let it install itself and you'll have a dual-booting system. Go from there and get acquainted with some of the Linux support forums on the Internet - people on those are usually pretty helpful.
Not that I think this is a particularly useful feature but why is this any different to booting up in single user mode on Linux (within seconds) and issuing "mail" at the command-line? Or add another second to mount home directories and do a "mail" under a user account?
I really get the feeling they're trying any old tactics to sell Joe Public the idea of DRM.
There are far far far more Europeans in New York than there are Americans in London or Paris or anywhere else in Europe
Because Americans are so insular, anyway, most of them have problems working out where people are from by their accents - English become Australians to the Americans, etc.
Meanwhile we have literally milions of Europeans literally begging to come and live in America every year.
Yes, you have Eastern European migrants wanting entry to the US, exactly the same as you do in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, etc. It's just economics, the less wealthy seeking "the land of opportunity".
In a recent raid of a few Wall Mart stores, over 500 illegal Europeans were arrested for working here illegally.
It just shows how little you know about affairs outside of the USA, exactly confirming my point about Americans being very "insular".
For your information, there is a huge emphasis on illegal immigrants in Western Europe currently, particularly in places like hotels, restaurants & other businesses that exploit cheap labour.
America takes in more immigrants than the whole of Europe , Asia, and South America combined.
America has a huge Mexican/South American migrant workforce because Americans won't work for the low salaries paid by the likes of Macdonalds, etc.
This is the same as in Western Europe and I don't see a problem with it - as long as people come into the country legally and have human/employment rights, I don't have an issue with them coming to do the jobs that cannot be filled locally.
If you Europeans clowns hate America so much, how come millions of you keep trying every trick in the book to come live here then?
Again, I think you're confusing the millions of European migrants with the Western Europeans that spend two weeks a year in Disney World in Florida!
I've spent time on the East Coast, Florida and Colorado, there's good things and bad things about all of them but I wouldn't want to live in any of them.
Unfortunately, the US only has a single strategy when dealing with other nations - either trample all over them militarily or trample all over them economically. Now the US doesn't like it when the EU stands up and says "No".
Yes I do run legitimately licensed Microsoft products at home. The fact that your expected to pay for a product is nothing new.
Then I applaud you but suggest that you are in a minority. None of my personal friends or work colleagues have ever, to my knowledge, bought a licensed copy of Windows or MS Office but use them all at home.
I do not consider using commercial software as a problem, by the way, I just don't want people being hypocrites about it. If those people support MS and their products then fine, but they should then have the guts to admit they've paid for it, like you have.
You think that Microsoft won't take the opertunity (if presented) to charge more for having to make a special EU version of Windows? If so you're naive at best.
No, I'm simply not interested - I've got a legitimate Windows 2000 box that runs all the Windows software I need to and I won't be upgrading it with any MS products. MS can charge what they like for their products in Europe.
However, I care about this decision because I do not want DRM forced down my throat.
Here in the states we call it a socialist nightmare. A "level playing field" isn't always in the best interest of consumers or the economy. If business can't develope anything new for fear of being seen as having unfair advantage and punished for it, it will no doubt stiffle creativity and harm innovation.
It is totally wrong that a corporation can use its success and profits in one arena to finance huge losses in another arena purely to drive out competition. It's monopolistic behaviour that the US government is renowned for doing nothing about until it has to by public opinion - AT&T was a classic example of the US government stepping in only when it was forced to.
I'm happy that there's a military alliance between the US and most of Europe but I'm more happy that, from a business perspective, that the EU is making a stand against a US global monopolist.
buying software is a completely voluntary transaction.
Not when it comes to operating systems it isn't! What about if I want to go to a PC vendor and buy an empty PC because I want to run Linux or FreeBSD on it. How many vendors will sell me a blank PC and refund me the cost of the pre-installed Windows XP?
The answer is very few because of the way in which they have been "bullied" by Microsoft to sell pre-installed PCs. If they don't do that, MS comes down hard on them and charges them more per Windows XP license, thus cutting their profit margins which are already lean.
I agree that Joe Average probably doesn't give a damn about Linux or other alternative OSes but Windows is being turned into a platform to generate more income for Microsoft from every user's pocket and he should be made aware of that and protected from it.
The fact is that if you use recent MS software, be that Windows XP, WMP, MS Office, etc. you are, in effect, sanctioning and supporting closed proprietary data formats that you will have to end up paying to license from MS in the future - either because you are trapped in their planned "rental" model for their software or because media-related hardware you buy in the future will have an MS "tax" levied on it to use those licensed formats - and you will have no choice but to pay it.
Microsoft do not like open formats because it means they cannot make any money from incorporating those into their software. TCP/IP was forced upon them and, for the moment, they have to support formats like MP3, MPEG, TXT, JPG, etc. because of the widespread use of those. But you can see for yourself how DRM is now being pushed and you can be sure that formats like WMV, WMA, DOC, XLS, etc. are intrinsic to that push.
MS is not satisfied with just having its OS and apps on your desktop - it wants to control all of your data and charge you for the privelige.
You may want to hand over your personal freedoms to MS but I'd prefer it if you didn't hand over mine also.
..its akin to the government telling an artist what his painting should be.
No, its akin to the government telling an artist to keep painting but to stop bullying all other painters to use the same brands of paints, brushes and canvases that he uses.
It's not the bundling that I see as the issue, it's the integration of those products to the exclusion of all else.
The only way MS will relinquish control of WMP and IE integration into Windows is if they are forced to bundle the products separately - then MS either have to adopt more open media/file standards or open their proprietary standards out to third-party application developers to incorporate.
Intervideo's WinDVD and Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for example, have to compete with an equal footing on the Windows desktop as DVD player applications?
Why should Microsoft's applications have an advantage purely because they make the OS and can integrate their apps into into Windows so tightly you cannot remove them?
I agree that apps get bundled with KDE and Gnome in Linux (even as a Linux user I consider both desktop environments to be "bloaty" albeit that they're well designed) but you can deinstall them if you go deep enough into the installation program (usually with "Select individual packages") and there's nothing to stop you putting a bare window manager on like Fluxbox and installing only the apps you want.
Everything you say, I agree with but I don' think SuSE is aimed at the experienced Linux user anyway.
YAST does make configuration a doddle in most cases but since every configuration change is made to the central YAST config file and then read from there, SuSE is not easy to move around when you're used to working at the command line - I find it disconcerting in SuSE when I go to edit a config file I'm used to editing and the first line in it says "# Please use YAST to make all config changes, do not edit this file directly" or words to that effect.
I'd probably say that SuSE sits comfortably as a desktop Linux, alongside Mandrake but can also compete with Red Hat in the server space also.
My feeling on commercial Linux distros is that they're great if you're a company or user that needs to have a technical support backup also, but I doubt that many experienced Linux users buy distros for themselves these days.
I used to buy SuSE as a boxed set on every release up to 8.1 but found that the distro was being borrowed by other people more than I ever used it so I stopped buying it. These days, I just use Gentoo myself, Knoppix if I need something quick and bootable and hand out Fedora or Mandrake Download from a magazine coverdisk if I need to build a box quick or someone else wants to do an installation.
(Apologies to the Debian and Slackware fans! I've never really used either distro so can't comment on them, good or bad.)
Assuming that your place of work has some form of MS product license, can you honestly say that you run legitimately licensed Microsoft products at home or do you borrow CDs from work? It's just that in my experience, Windows users get so used to the notion of never having to openly buy any Microsoft products that they seem to forget that they would probably feel a lot differently if they had to pay the full cost of those products.
Remember, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are not free products. They are given away freely by Microsoft provided that you run Windows by which MS assume that you have paid for the development of those products within the cost of purchasing your Windows OS or other MS products. After all, the developers of WMP and MS need to paid somehow... It just means that MS have to do a bit of work separating out the "application" from the "operating system", exactly the same as every other developer of Windows products has to do - in the EU, we call that "a level playing field".
It seems that the best solution, with the EU ruling in place, is for MS to cut the price of each Windows OS and drop the "extra" products from Windows onto a separate purchased CD, similar to what the "Plus Pack" was but maybe call it the "Desktop Pack". After all, why would anyone running Windows in a server environment necessarily need to install IE or WMP on that machine? On the other hand, Joe Sixpack can go buy a CDs with IE and WMP on if he wants them or have the freedom of choice to go buy other products of even use Open Source ones. (Yes, dear Windows users, it may shock you to learn that there are a very large number of Open Source apps for Windows also!)
Microsoft need to be made to realise that they cannot "have their cake and eat it". On one hand, they encourage developers to create applications for Windows and hand out developer tools but, on the other hand, they integrate IE and WMP so tightly into Windows that they make it difficult for developers to create integrated media and browser apps of their own.
Finally, I'm pretty certain that most of the Windows users on here probably make and play MP3s and DivX/MPEG movies. So how do those same people feel about DRM being brought in with WMP to ultimately stop them doing that in the future. How are those people going to feel in 2-3 years time when they're forced to go with WMA & WMV formats that have to be licensed from MS first?
Maybe the EU has been hard on MS but, let's face it, MS have been pretty damn hard on a lot of other companies over the years so I personally am not going to feel sorry for them.
...and if the EU decision means I stand a better chance of keeping my rights to "fair usage" then even better.
Is there actually anything wrong with DNS the way it is?
Correct me if I'm wrong but a few years ago a few intelligent computer geek-types came up with a pretty neat way of ensuring that nobody has to remember computers by their IP addresses but by much easier to remember names. It works pretty well and they called it the Domain Name System.
But as usual, because it's a good idea, someone's got to make money from it so in walk the regiment of marketing types with their buzzwords like "product branding", "innovation" and "customer" and try to hijack it.
"Windows - an operating system designed by marketeers" - enough said.
Here in the UK, a proportion of the profits from the National Lottery are used to finance public projects in The Arts and sports.
It strikes me that Project Gutenberg, as a valuable educational tool, should be a prime project to receive lottery grants (not just from the UK) to ensure that it remains entirely free to use and publishes documents in formats suitable for all to use - both proprietary and open formats.
I recognise that you have a choice of either using or not using Bittorrents and I really have no problem with using it for sharing free software.
However, I'm slightly uncomfortable with the fact that commercial software companies now seem to have this expectation that the general public will be used to distribute demos of their software - the very same people that have to pay for their Internet access and bandwidth - yet it's the games companies that reap the profits of that distribution method themselves.
I will certainly start getting very annoyed if contention rates get higher on my own ISP to the point where my connection slows down - it'll be interesting to see what happens when the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 demos get released.
Perhaps I'd feel more comfortable with this if I actually felt that the games companies were acting more with the interests of the general public rather than simply filling the company coffers. Unfortunately, as things stand today, games are overpriced, the majority of PC games are very poor quality but sell because of pretty boxes and advertising and it's now the accepted norm for a PC user to download endless patches and updates to games because they are released far too early and have not been fully tested.
I therefore see no reason why I personally should do the games companies any favours - particularly bearing in mind that as a primarily Linux user, they do no favours for me.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that Linux is built around the UNIX philosophy of having a large number of small, simple tools, each of which is capable of doing a single job but doing it very well.
When you look at commercial software that is made for Windows, for example, most of it is packed with a large number of features that are invariably never used by most users - MS Office, Norton Utilities & Paintshop Pro, for example, are all feature-rich applications but I guarantee that probably only around 5% to 10% of the user base of each one uses the majority of the features that are provided in the software.
The mentality of many UNIX & Linux users is to streamline & optimise their systems as much as possible - therefore, there is perhaps a tendency to veer towards shell-scripting to combine simple tools into powerful programs, rather than using complex packages with features that will never be used.
Add to this that many of us in the UNIX & Linux community (myself included) get very "anal" about optimised code compilation and don't like installing tools that don't give us the source code to play around with.
In summary, it all boils down to the "chicken and egg" situation. Until you get to a stage where you have a large Linux userbase that is reliant on (invariably) GUI-driven commercial applications, no software company will port those applications across - likewise, why port applications to Linux if there is no great demand?
Some of the damn fine things the Amiga and its community bought to the world:
Great games: Speedball 2, Alien Breed, Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Xenon 2, Chaos Engine
Great animations: Eric Schwartz's Aerotoons & Amy The Squirrel, Tobias Richter's Star Trek animations
Great demo groups: RSI, Kefrens, Fairlight, Rebels
Great apps: Lightwave, Directory Opus, CygnusEd
Great multi-tasking hardware: e.g. opening four CLI windows, typing "format df0:" in each one and watching the Amiga simultaneously format the same floppy disk four times over! (Try that on a PC!)
Well-written OS: e.g. Workbench took the trouble of reading file-header information and using datatypes to decide whether a file was a JPEG, GIF, ANIM, etc. and didn't care what the file extension was. (Try that in Windows!)
Good memories that I'd be happy to return to...
...but for everything else, there's Linux.
I've Not Understood The Amiga Strategy For Years
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Firstly, in answer to all the "Amiga dead" comments that have been posted so far, what's wrong with playing around with old software and hardware?
I left the Amiga scene about ten years ago but it was the fact that it was a fun machine to "tweak" and play with that got me fully into UNIX/Linux & made me realise what a "boring" OS that Windows is from the point of view of customisation/optimisation.
I even picked up a couple of Amigas on Ebay a couple of years ago and still have fun with Workbench and some of the classic games like Speedball.
Sure, AmigaOS is never going to mainstream again and I'm never going to use it in preference to Linux but Amiga users were a fun community to be in, just like the Linux one is now - unlike the non-existent Windows community.
Before people criticise the Amiga, they should be reminded of a couple of things:
1. "Home computers" like the Amiga, Atari ST, etc were platforms that were costly to upgrade and, as a result, not upgraded by most users. This meant that software developers for those platforms had to push the limits of those machines as far as possible - in turn, this lead to some great feats of programming. These days, hardware is cheap so it's easier to upgrade but programming today can be done sloppily because of endless APIs and languages that weren't so available or widespread then.
2. The Amiga was a superior hardware platform to the IBM PC for many years - it had better graphics, sound and multitasking. The fact it did not take off was due to inactivity on the part of Commodore to match Amiga development to the IBM PC as well as clever marketing on the part of Microsoft to get Windows onto every desktop. Please remember that while most IBM PCs were working in a single MS-DOS shell, Amiga users were working in multiple CLIs in a text or GUI environment.
It seems to be very easy for certain readers on Slashdot to label anyone who is not part of the deemed mainstream as a "zealot" without realising that software is not just about Windows and what runs on it - it's actually about what's
usable
by a particularly person and, more importantly, what's fun to use .
I'm sorry but Linux continues to grow despite Windows simply by just "getting on and doing it".
If Michael Robertson & Lindows wants to make it political between them and Microsoft then so be it...
But if you keep telling a kid to stop poking a dog with a stick but the kid keeps on poking the dog and gets bitten by it, then you're probably not going to have much sympathy for the kid.
Advocates of free software claim to be advocates of freedom.
Yes, the freedom to choose what software is most suitable for the job it needs to do and maintaining that choice. If it's a commercial piece of software or even an MS package, so be it as long as the end-user had chosen to use it.
If this were the case, they would only attack Microsoft on those terms.
Oh, so we have no right to attack Microsoft on issues of security, instability and price then?
The WMP is not a freedom issue.
It's a transport for DRM which means you get to do less with the stuff you rightfully own than you did before. It also means you get to pay an MS "tax" to keep using your stuff. Of course it's about freedom.
If a customer doesn't like Windows prepackaged with WMP, there's nothing stopping that person from acquiring another OS.
What about somebody that uses Windows but doesn't like WMP? Are you saying that not liking a single package on an OS justifies reformatting your hard disk and putting a new OS on? What about simply having the choice of slotting in the player you want to use without the fact the concern that WMP is still installed somewhere doing its stuff in the background? If WMP is not that easy to remove then just what is it doing in the background then?
I'm no Microsoft fan but I personally don't see any reason to stop Microsoft bundling WMP with Windows, purely from a player perspective.
After all, lots of people seem to use it and if there are better (commercial or OSS) alternatives, then it's up to Windows users themselves to go find them and decide.
However, this is good from a perspective of slowing down DRM. No matter what anyone says, DRM is creeping "in through the back door" and WMP is one of those "Trojan Horses" transporting DRM to the desktop. By the time Longhorn comes out, DRM'ed codecs will be the norm (if MS has their way) and we can say goodbye to MP3s on our portable players and PCs.
I would hope the EU goes a stage further and makes MS publish clear disclaimers and warnings that on downloading WMP, you will be subject to DRM restrictions on all the media that you play with it.
In the meantime, it's a good opportunity for makers of "free" (="non-DRM") players to get ready to push their software in the hope that this sanction goes through.
I don't believe this is just about a Nintendo emulator, it has a lot more to do with the games scene and emulation in general.
Firstly, the whole issue of old games ROMs and Abandonware is very grey anyway. The games companies and authors that own the rights to older games do not accept or approve of the free distribution of ROMs or Abandonware - it's more of a case that there is simply no point from a financial perspective in them taking up legal litigation against ROM/Abandonware sites. If they did, they would need to prove some financial loss as a result and how can any of them prove financial loss from the free distribution of a game that is no longer sold anyway?
Secondly, the interest in emulation is growing globally. To the games manufacturers, this purely means that more and more people are now playing more and more older games free of charge rather than spending money on new games. Sure, the volume of sales of each game is much more than it was, say, 15 years ago in the days of the Commodore Amiga, but then development costs of each game have skyrocketed also so the overall profits are much tighter. The console and games manufacturers definitely do not like free emulation, no matter how much emulation sites claim to be doing it to "preserve games historically", etc. etc.!
From my perspective, the state of computer games is similar to that of the state of music sales today. People are buying more games and music than they ever were but the market for both is now totally saturated - in the case of music, most sales result from people buying older music, possibly through replacing of old vinyl LPs with CDs.
With older games, a few companies have made commercially emulated games available on some platforms (e.g. "Atari Arcade Hits") but these have not sold particularly well because anybody who has an Internet connection can go get hold of MAME (or another free emulator) and a few ROMs and get them for free.
It's going to be interesting to see how the games companies react to this in future.
The music companies are already seeing that they cannot simply continue fleecing the customer for more and more money without putting out truly innovative product unless (in their minds) they start bringing in DRM and copy-protected CDs. In actuality, it's simply about adaption to a change in customer demand, all of whom want the ability to put music on portable players, download individual songs at a fair price, etc.
In the same way, emulation reflects a change in customer demand to the games market. There's a lot of older people, myself included, who spend more money buying CDs of albums released 20 years ago and more time playing games released on platforms that are anything up to 20 years old rather than buying the new products.
In the cases of both music and games, the vendors in both markets need to realise that the markets are now totally saturated and that not everybody wants the latest CD by the latest boy band or the latest state of the art graphics in a game.
It's time for both markets to adapt to customer demand and rather than spending billions of Dollars/Pounds/Euros forcing sub-standard new product down our throats with advertising, they need to simply listen to the customers.
Most emulation fans will have no problem paying for commercial emulators or old ROMs provided that the price is fair to reflect the age of the products, in a similar way that we expect back-catalogue CDs to be cheaper than current releases.
HOUSTON, TX:- Bill Gates, CEO Microsoft, today flew into Johnson Space Center in order to seek assistance from NASA scientists following the failure of MOGAP (Microsoft Orbital Geostationary Advertisement Platform) this morning.
The 2000m high LCD projection screen, powered by Microsoft's Windows 2020 operating system and launched only last year, suffered a catastrophic outage this morning. Up until 10:06am Pacific time, the screen had been displaying "Microsoft - We're Taking You Here Today" when observers on the ground noticed a flickering of the screen for a few seconds before the screen totally failed.
A NASA spokesperson today stated that scientists are still trying to understand the causes behind the failure and expect some progress within the next 48 hours.
In the interim, contributors to the venerable Internet discussion forum "Slashdot" declared this event as "Microsoft's Blue Skies Of Death".
Slashdot Mirror
Given the choice between waiting a couple of seconds or having to use Outlook...
I'm afraid that it can only go that way.
Microsoft need to keep making money to survive but what happens now that every OS and application they make probably has just about every feature users need?
It's obvious that MS have to start inventing new features and make Joe Public think that he needs those features. At the same time, MS can bring in a "rental model" which means they get guaranteed income from all their licensees.
Just as an aside, any thoughts on how I should go about making a permanent move to Linux?
There's no point "cutting off your nose to spite your face". Don't listen to all the hype - give Linux a try as a dual boot system and migrate across gradually if that's what you want to do. Far too many new Linux users get frustrated because everything doesn't run right from the start with a new install - 90% of hardware will be okay, about 5% will be made to work after a little fiddling and the final 5% may not work if its brand new hardware and doesn't have a driver yet.
Make some unpartitioned space on your Windows machine and get a good starter distro like Mandrake, let it install itself and you'll have a dual-booting system. Go from there and get acquainted with some of the Linux support forums on the Internet - people on those are usually pretty helpful.
Good luck with it also.
I really get the feeling they're trying any old tactics to sell Joe Public the idea of DRM.
Because Americans are so insular, anyway, most of them have problems working out where people are from by their accents - English become Australians to the Americans, etc.
Meanwhile we have literally milions of Europeans literally begging to come and live in America every year.
Yes, you have Eastern European migrants wanting entry to the US, exactly the same as you do in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, etc. It's just economics, the less wealthy seeking "the land of opportunity".
In a recent raid of a few Wall Mart stores, over 500 illegal Europeans were arrested for working here illegally.
It just shows how little you know about affairs outside of the USA, exactly confirming my point about Americans being very "insular".
For your information, there is a huge emphasis on illegal immigrants in Western Europe currently, particularly in places like hotels, restaurants & other businesses that exploit cheap labour.
America takes in more immigrants than the whole of Europe , Asia, and South America combined.
America has a huge Mexican/South American migrant workforce because Americans won't work for the low salaries paid by the likes of Macdonalds, etc.
This is the same as in Western Europe and I don't see a problem with it - as long as people come into the country legally and have human/employment rights, I don't have an issue with them coming to do the jobs that cannot be filled locally.
If you Europeans clowns hate America so much, how come millions of you keep trying every trick in the book to come live here then?
Again, I think you're confusing the millions of European migrants with the Western Europeans that spend two weeks a year in Disney World in Florida!
I've spent time on the East Coast, Florida and Colorado, there's good things and bad things about all of them but I wouldn't want to live in any of them.
Unfortunately, the US only has a single strategy when dealing with other nations - either trample all over them militarily or trample all over them economically. Now the US doesn't like it when the EU stands up and says "No".
So how come when I go to London it's full of Americans???
Then I applaud you but suggest that you are in a minority. None of my personal friends or work colleagues have ever, to my knowledge, bought a licensed copy of Windows or MS Office but use them all at home.
I do not consider using commercial software as a problem, by the way, I just don't want people being hypocrites about it. If those people support MS and their products then fine, but they should then have the guts to admit they've paid for it, like you have.
You think that Microsoft won't take the opertunity (if presented) to charge more for having to make a special EU version of Windows? If so you're naive at best.
No, I'm simply not interested - I've got a legitimate Windows 2000 box that runs all the Windows software I need to and I won't be upgrading it with any MS products. MS can charge what they like for their products in Europe.
However, I care about this decision because I do not want DRM forced down my throat.
Here in the states we call it a socialist nightmare. A "level playing field" isn't always in the best interest of consumers or the economy. If business can't develope anything new for fear of being seen as having unfair advantage and punished for it, it will no doubt stiffle creativity and harm innovation.
It is totally wrong that a corporation can use its success and profits in one arena to finance huge losses in another arena purely to drive out competition. It's monopolistic behaviour that the US government is renowned for doing nothing about until it has to by public opinion - AT&T was a classic example of the US government stepping in only when it was forced to.
I'm happy that there's a military alliance between the US and most of Europe but I'm more happy that, from a business perspective, that the EU is making a stand against a US global monopolist.
Not when it comes to operating systems it isn't! What about if I want to go to a PC vendor and buy an empty PC because I want to run Linux or FreeBSD on it. How many vendors will sell me a blank PC and refund me the cost of the pre-installed Windows XP?
The answer is very few because of the way in which they have been "bullied" by Microsoft to sell pre-installed PCs. If they don't do that, MS comes down hard on them and charges them more per Windows XP license, thus cutting their profit margins which are already lean.
I agree that Joe Average probably doesn't give a damn about Linux or other alternative OSes but Windows is being turned into a platform to generate more income for Microsoft from every user's pocket and he should be made aware of that and protected from it.
The fact is that if you use recent MS software, be that Windows XP, WMP, MS Office, etc. you are, in effect, sanctioning and supporting closed proprietary data formats that you will have to end up paying to license from MS in the future - either because you are trapped in their planned "rental" model for their software or because media-related hardware you buy in the future will have an MS "tax" levied on it to use those licensed formats - and you will have no choice but to pay it.
Microsoft do not like open formats because it means they cannot make any money from incorporating those into their software. TCP/IP was forced upon them and, for the moment, they have to support formats like MP3, MPEG, TXT, JPG, etc. because of the widespread use of those. But you can see for yourself how DRM is now being pushed and you can be sure that formats like WMV, WMA, DOC, XLS, etc. are intrinsic to that push.
MS is not satisfied with just having its OS and apps on your desktop - it wants to control all of your data and charge you for the privelige.
You may want to hand over your personal freedoms to MS but I'd prefer it if you didn't hand over mine also.
No, its akin to the government telling an artist to keep painting but to stop bullying all other painters to use the same brands of paints, brushes and canvases that he uses.
The only way MS will relinquish control of WMP and IE integration into Windows is if they are forced to bundle the products separately - then MS either have to adopt more open media/file standards or open their proprietary standards out to third-party application developers to incorporate.
Intervideo's WinDVD and Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for example, have to compete with an equal footing on the Windows desktop as DVD player applications?
Why should Microsoft's applications have an advantage purely because they make the OS and can integrate their apps into into Windows so tightly you cannot remove them?
I agree that apps get bundled with KDE and Gnome in Linux (even as a Linux user I consider both desktop environments to be "bloaty" albeit that they're well designed) but you can deinstall them if you go deep enough into the installation program (usually with "Select individual packages") and there's nothing to stop you putting a bare window manager on like Fluxbox and installing only the apps you want.
YAST does make configuration a doddle in most cases but since every configuration change is made to the central YAST config file and then read from there, SuSE is not easy to move around when you're used to working at the command line - I find it disconcerting in SuSE when I go to edit a config file I'm used to editing and the first line in it says "# Please use YAST to make all config changes, do not edit this file directly" or words to that effect.
I'd probably say that SuSE sits comfortably as a desktop Linux, alongside Mandrake but can also compete with Red Hat in the server space also.
My feeling on commercial Linux distros is that they're great if you're a company or user that needs to have a technical support backup also, but I doubt that many experienced Linux users buy distros for themselves these days.
I used to buy SuSE as a boxed set on every release up to 8.1 but found that the distro was being borrowed by other people more than I ever used it so I stopped buying it. These days, I just use Gentoo myself, Knoppix if I need something quick and bootable and hand out Fedora or Mandrake Download from a magazine coverdisk if I need to build a box quick or someone else wants to do an installation.
(Apologies to the Debian and Slackware fans! I've never really used either distro so can't comment on them, good or bad.)
Remember, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player are not free products. They are given away freely by Microsoft provided that you run Windows by which MS assume that you have paid for the development of those products within the cost of purchasing your Windows OS or other MS products. After all, the developers of WMP and MS need to paid somehow... It just means that MS have to do a bit of work separating out the "application" from the "operating system", exactly the same as every other developer of Windows products has to do - in the EU, we call that "a level playing field".
It seems that the best solution, with the EU ruling in place, is for MS to cut the price of each Windows OS and drop the "extra" products from Windows onto a separate purchased CD, similar to what the "Plus Pack" was but maybe call it the "Desktop Pack". After all, why would anyone running Windows in a server environment necessarily need to install IE or WMP on that machine? On the other hand, Joe Sixpack can go buy a CDs with IE and WMP on if he wants them or have the freedom of choice to go buy other products of even use Open Source ones. (Yes, dear Windows users, it may shock you to learn that there are a very large number of Open Source apps for Windows also!)
Microsoft need to be made to realise that they cannot "have their cake and eat it". On one hand, they encourage developers to create applications for Windows and hand out developer tools but, on the other hand, they integrate IE and WMP so tightly into Windows that they make it difficult for developers to create integrated media and browser apps of their own.
Finally, I'm pretty certain that most of the Windows users on here probably make and play MP3s and DivX/MPEG movies. So how do those same people feel about DRM being brought in with WMP to ultimately stop them doing that in the future. How are those people going to feel in 2-3 years time when they're forced to go with WMA & WMV formats that have to be licensed from MS first?
Maybe the EU has been hard on MS but, let's face it, MS have been pretty damn hard on a lot of other companies over the years so I personally am not going to feel sorry for them.
Correct me if I'm wrong but a few years ago a few intelligent computer geek-types came up with a pretty neat way of ensuring that nobody has to remember computers by their IP addresses but by much easier to remember names. It works pretty well and they called it the Domain Name System.
But as usual, because it's a good idea, someone's got to make money from it so in walk the regiment of marketing types with their buzzwords like "product branding", "innovation" and "customer" and try to hijack it.
"Windows - an operating system designed by marketeers" - enough said.
It strikes me that Project Gutenberg, as a valuable educational tool, should be a prime project to receive lottery grants (not just from the UK) to ensure that it remains entirely free to use and publishes documents in formats suitable for all to use - both proprietary and open formats.
However, I'm slightly uncomfortable with the fact that commercial software companies now seem to have this expectation that the general public will be used to distribute demos of their software - the very same people that have to pay for their Internet access and bandwidth - yet it's the games companies that reap the profits of that distribution method themselves.
I will certainly start getting very annoyed if contention rates get higher on my own ISP to the point where my connection slows down - it'll be interesting to see what happens when the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 demos get released.
Perhaps I'd feel more comfortable with this if I actually felt that the games companies were acting more with the interests of the general public rather than simply filling the company coffers. Unfortunately, as things stand today, games are overpriced, the majority of PC games are very poor quality but sell because of pretty boxes and advertising and it's now the accepted norm for a PC user to download endless patches and updates to games because they are released far too early and have not been fully tested.
I therefore see no reason why I personally should do the games companies any favours - particularly bearing in mind that as a primarily Linux user, they do no favours for me.
When you look at commercial software that is made for Windows, for example, most of it is packed with a large number of features that are invariably never used by most users - MS Office, Norton Utilities & Paintshop Pro, for example, are all feature-rich applications but I guarantee that probably only around 5% to 10% of the user base of each one uses the majority of the features that are provided in the software.
The mentality of many UNIX & Linux users is to streamline & optimise their systems as much as possible - therefore, there is perhaps a tendency to veer towards shell-scripting to combine simple tools into powerful programs, rather than using complex packages with features that will never be used.
Add to this that many of us in the UNIX & Linux community (myself included) get very "anal" about optimised code compilation and don't like installing tools that don't give us the source code to play around with.
In summary, it all boils down to the "chicken and egg" situation. Until you get to a stage where you have a large Linux userbase that is reliant on (invariably) GUI-driven commercial applications, no software company will port those applications across - likewise, why port applications to Linux if there is no great demand?
Only one thing matters... I trust Linux.
Great games: Speedball 2, Alien Breed, Stunt Car Racer, Lemmings, Xenon 2, Chaos Engine
Great animations: Eric Schwartz's Aerotoons & Amy The Squirrel, Tobias Richter's Star Trek animations
Great demo groups: RSI, Kefrens, Fairlight, Rebels
Great apps: Lightwave, Directory Opus, CygnusEd
Great multi-tasking hardware: e.g. opening four CLI windows, typing "format df0:" in each one and watching the Amiga simultaneously format the same floppy disk four times over! (Try that on a PC!)
Well-written OS: e.g. Workbench took the trouble of reading file-header information and using datatypes to decide whether a file was a JPEG, GIF, ANIM, etc. and didn't care what the file extension was. (Try that in Windows!)
Good memories that I'd be happy to return to...
...but for everything else, there's Linux.
I left the Amiga scene about ten years ago but it was the fact that it was a fun machine to "tweak" and play with that got me fully into UNIX/Linux & made me realise what a "boring" OS that Windows is from the point of view of customisation/optimisation.
I even picked up a couple of Amigas on Ebay a couple of years ago and still have fun with Workbench and some of the classic games like Speedball.
Sure, AmigaOS is never going to mainstream again and I'm never going to use it in preference to Linux but Amiga users were a fun community to be in, just like the Linux one is now - unlike the non-existent Windows community.
Before people criticise the Amiga, they should be reminded of a couple of things:
1. "Home computers" like the Amiga, Atari ST, etc were platforms that were costly to upgrade and, as a result, not upgraded by most users. This meant that software developers for those platforms had to push the limits of those machines as far as possible - in turn, this lead to some great feats of programming. These days, hardware is cheap so it's easier to upgrade but programming today can be done sloppily because of endless APIs and languages that weren't so available or widespread then.
2. The Amiga was a superior hardware platform to the IBM PC for many years - it had better graphics, sound and multitasking. The fact it did not take off was due to inactivity on the part of Commodore to match Amiga development to the IBM PC as well as clever marketing on the part of Microsoft to get Windows onto every desktop. Please remember that while most IBM PCs were working in a single MS-DOS shell, Amiga users were working in multiple CLIs in a text or GUI environment.
It seems to be very easy for certain readers on Slashdot to label anyone who is not part of the deemed mainstream as a "zealot" without realising that software is not just about Windows and what runs on it - it's actually about what's
usable
by a particularly person and, more importantly, what's fun to use .If so, how does this impact the manufacturers of copy protected audio and data CDs?
If a copy-protected audio or data CD goes faulty, is the manufacturer liable to provide a new copy free of charge? If so, in what time-frame?
I'm sorry but Linux continues to grow despite Windows simply by just "getting on and doing it".
If Michael Robertson & Lindows wants to make it political between them and Microsoft then so be it...
But if you keep telling a kid to stop poking a dog with a stick but the kid keeps on poking the dog and gets bitten by it, then you're probably not going to have much sympathy for the kid.
Ditto Lindows.
Yes, the freedom to choose what software is most suitable for the job it needs to do and maintaining that choice. If it's a commercial piece of software or even an MS package, so be it as long as the end-user had chosen to use it.
If this were the case, they would only attack Microsoft on those terms.
Oh, so we have no right to attack Microsoft on issues of security, instability and price then?
The WMP is not a freedom issue.
It's a transport for DRM which means you get to do less with the stuff you rightfully own than you did before. It also means you get to pay an MS "tax" to keep using your stuff. Of course it's about freedom.
If a customer doesn't like Windows prepackaged with WMP, there's nothing stopping that person from acquiring another OS.
What about somebody that uses Windows but doesn't like WMP? Are you saying that not liking a single package on an OS justifies reformatting your hard disk and putting a new OS on? What about simply having the choice of slotting in the player you want to use without the fact the concern that WMP is still installed somewhere doing its stuff in the background? If WMP is not that easy to remove then just what is it doing in the background then?
I see no hypocrisy here...
After all, lots of people seem to use it and if there are better (commercial or OSS) alternatives, then it's up to Windows users themselves to go find them and decide.
However, this is good from a perspective of slowing down DRM. No matter what anyone says, DRM is creeping "in through the back door" and WMP is one of those "Trojan Horses" transporting DRM to the desktop. By the time Longhorn comes out, DRM'ed codecs will be the norm (if MS has their way) and we can say goodbye to MP3s on our portable players and PCs.
I would hope the EU goes a stage further and makes MS publish clear disclaimers and warnings that on downloading WMP, you will be subject to DRM restrictions on all the media that you play with it.
In the meantime, it's a good opportunity for makers of "free" (="non-DRM") players to get ready to push their software in the hope that this sanction goes through.
As I said in my post, there is a much bigger issue around this than just Nintendo banning one emulator.
Firstly, the whole issue of old games ROMs and Abandonware is very grey anyway. The games companies and authors that own the rights to older games do not accept or approve of the free distribution of ROMs or Abandonware - it's more of a case that there is simply no point from a financial perspective in them taking up legal litigation against ROM/Abandonware sites. If they did, they would need to prove some financial loss as a result and how can any of them prove financial loss from the free distribution of a game that is no longer sold anyway?
Secondly, the interest in emulation is growing globally. To the games manufacturers, this purely means that more and more people are now playing more and more older games free of charge rather than spending money on new games. Sure, the volume of sales of each game is much more than it was, say, 15 years ago in the days of the Commodore Amiga, but then development costs of each game have skyrocketed also so the overall profits are much tighter. The console and games manufacturers definitely do not like free emulation, no matter how much emulation sites claim to be doing it to "preserve games historically", etc. etc.!
From my perspective, the state of computer games is similar to that of the state of music sales today. People are buying more games and music than they ever were but the market for both is now totally saturated - in the case of music, most sales result from people buying older music, possibly through replacing of old vinyl LPs with CDs.
With older games, a few companies have made commercially emulated games available on some platforms (e.g. "Atari Arcade Hits") but these have not sold particularly well because anybody who has an Internet connection can go get hold of MAME (or another free emulator) and a few ROMs and get them for free.
It's going to be interesting to see how the games companies react to this in future.
The music companies are already seeing that they cannot simply continue fleecing the customer for more and more money without putting out truly innovative product unless (in their minds) they start bringing in DRM and copy-protected CDs. In actuality, it's simply about adaption to a change in customer demand, all of whom want the ability to put music on portable players, download individual songs at a fair price, etc.
In the same way, emulation reflects a change in customer demand to the games market. There's a lot of older people, myself included, who spend more money buying CDs of albums released 20 years ago and more time playing games released on platforms that are anything up to 20 years old rather than buying the new products.
In the cases of both music and games, the vendors in both markets need to realise that the markets are now totally saturated and that not everybody wants the latest CD by the latest boy band or the latest state of the art graphics in a game.
It's time for both markets to adapt to customer demand and rather than spending billions of Dollars/Pounds/Euros forcing sub-standard new product down our throats with advertising, they need to simply listen to the customers.
Most emulation fans will have no problem paying for commercial emulators or old ROMs provided that the price is fair to reflect the age of the products, in a similar way that we expect back-catalogue CDs to be cheaper than current releases.
The 2000m high LCD projection screen, powered by Microsoft's Windows 2020 operating system and launched only last year, suffered a catastrophic outage this morning. Up until 10:06am Pacific time, the screen had been displaying "Microsoft - We're Taking You Here Today" when observers on the ground noticed a flickering of the screen for a few seconds before the screen totally failed.
A NASA spokesperson today stated that scientists are still trying to understand the causes behind the failure and expect some progress within the next 48 hours.
In the interim, contributors to the venerable Internet discussion forum "Slashdot" declared this event as "Microsoft's Blue Skies Of Death".