Oh come on, you can do better than that. I'm not saying these answers represent my view, just showing how they could be answered by Glaser.
Why is Real so intrusive into the average windows system when using the express installation method? [...]
The Realplayer installation is not intrusive. It is customary practice for many software packages aimed at a general public to install visible and easily discoverable ways to launch them. Experienced users can customize their installations to a large degree. Maybe you do not realize that many people accidentally delete shortcut and do not know how to recreate them.
Why is the free version the hardest version to find on your website?
I suspect you have not visited our website recently. In the past we received some complaint that the free player was difficult to find. We have listened to our customers and restructured the website. The free player is very easy to find.
Why must I choose a custom install and play a game of "catch-em-all" to avoid some of these issues?
We aim our software at a very large public, and many people would never discover a lot of what we have to offer if they were not turned on by default. Offering many choices for experienced users is exactly the purpose of a custom install.
Why does Real assume I'm interested in news, updates, libraries, or any of the nonsense that it is configured for by your company?
As you may be aware, complex software is never bug free and secure from the start. It is our duty to inform and encourage our customers to upgrade to newer versions where bugs are fixed and security holes are closed when discovered. The experienced user who can take responsibilty for their own installed software can always choose to turn off automatic updates.
In short, why does Real feel the need to be so Obnoxious? These are "real" questions posed by "real" users, like here and supported by your own employees!
These views represent a small minority of our customer base. For most people who complain about our software it is actually quite simple to turn off features that you describe as "obnoxious" in the Preferences.
Do we really want questions (and answers) like these? Please take some time to think of good questions that are acutally hard to answer. Don't waste questions and mod-points just to share your opinion about Real's software. You may have your replies ready for such answers, but Glaser does not need to answer those.
> 128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
A 134kbps (VBR) Lame-encoded MP3 sounds almost as good as a 128kbps iTunes AAC. (In the final analysis, they're statistically indistinguishable.)
I highly doubt a 192kbps MP3 can't beat a 128kbps AAC. But neither is as good as a well tuned Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV) encoding.
It should be noted that while AAC is "open", it is patent encumbered. If you want to write a software AAC encoder or player, you need to pay Dolby. Although there are open source decoders, their legal status is unclear. Of course, you also need to pay Microsoft for WMA, bit it is a little cheaper.
The same applies to Fraunhofer for MP3 if I believe, although I can't find pricing information right now. Unfortunately, the most free and open format lacks market penetration.
My first optical mouse was a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse. For some reason I decided to go with a brand name for my first optical mouse instead of the nobrand mice I used in the past.
It was awful. Just like the Amazon reviews say, the cursor jumps all over the place. (Too bad I discovered the reviews too late). OK, I know it was the cheapest MS mouse, but it still cost me 19 euros, twice as much as some noname Chinese optical mouse. How hard is it to screw up something as basic as, well, a Basic Optical Mouse? Anyway, my second one was a 22 euro Logitech, of which I have no complaints.
For the hordes of us who don't understand Japanese, here's a Chinese version. Seriously though, this version is much longer and somewhat easier to follow.
When I passed a newsstand yesterday, I noticed that Businessweek magazine charges money for their magazine. After thorough research (well, some introspection), I've come to the conclusion that Businessweek can significantly expand its market by giving away their magazine for free.
I will come to collect my consultancy fee next week.
That's just lame. I buy the damn thing from Apple, not from LG. You might as well say Apple (or Dell or HP) laptop failures are never their faults, it's the fault of Quanta or Compal or Alphatop who manufacture them.
A 40GB (0.04TB) iPod stores 10,000 songs. One of these discs has the capacity of 2,500 iPods, or 25 million songs. The entire iTunes Music Store catalogs has about 1 million songs, so you can store the entire iTMS 25 times on a $45 disc. I would guess that one or two of these discs can hold all recorded music ever published.
A good quality 2 hour MPEG4 movie can fit in 1GB, so one of these discs stores 100,000 movies. If you can spend 4 hours per day watching movies, it will take more than 140 years to watch them all.
Save your time, the "article" reads like a blatant piece of astroturfing with an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking. Unless the price of these "handtops" drop under $1000 fast, they'll be an even bigger flop than the Tablet-PC.
The key to getting useful answers is to formulate your question precisely. You're "hoping" to offer Web access and MS Office (with an Office license for every machine)? Of course it can be done. If money is not a significant constraint, anything can be done. As you can see from the posts, you have numerous options and solutions.
I'd suggest you first try to formulate your problem *precisely*. You're in charge. Don't ask what is possible, state what you WANT to be possible. What will be forbidden? Is it OK for people to play games all day? Chatting? Listen to radio? Download movies? Doing their homework? If you give a precise list of requirements, there's a much better chance of getting a small list of useful answers rather than hundreds of options that you still need to evaluate for yourself.
Except that this isn't a virus or a worm, it's a trojan. Trojans are trivial to make for any OS that can execute applications. You can probably come up with your own OSX trojan in 30 seconds.
What's the big deal about this, trojans are easy to write for any OS. This particular one opens a listening TCP port, and emails out it's IP address. Since WinCE is a fairly complete OS with a TCP/IP stack and an email client, it's rather obvious that something like this can be written. If they'd discovered a hole that can be exploited without user intervention, that would be big news.
A possible security weakness of WinCE is that it has no real user and priviledge separation (like Win9x). But what many people who argue for security through priviledge seperation forget to mention is that a standard user (both on NT and Unix) usually has quite a lot of priviledges. You don't need to be root to open ports >1024 or silently send out thousands of emails. Remember, anything YOU can do under a normal user account, a trojan can do as well. So something like this could be easily written for Linux or MacOS. The only security that priviledge separation buys you is that you normally can't change system or other users' files. Since WinCE only supports one user, and the system is in ROM (a hard reset erases all virusses), there is nothing to be gained here.
Do you realize that the resolution of standard cinema film is much higer than even HDTV 1080p? The source material may have degraded a bit (which may or may not be restored), but resolution wise, celluloid is still hard to beat.
As always, those who defend Debian point to the availability of Unstable and Testing. Please get a clue, there is a reason that they are called Unstable and Testing and not Debian-New and Debian-Newer. They are not slightly-less stable versions of Stable. They do not always get security updates on time. They may leave major packages like KDE broken for weeks. When you install Unstable, it depends on your luck at the time what works and what doesn't. Near release time Unstable is often pretty OK, mid-release cycles major things may break. And you know why? Because Unstable and Testing are meant for DEVELOPERS, not end-users.
I have great admiration of the Debian project and philosophy, but frankly I think it's a little too ambitious. They basically want to get a huge number of packages all stable across a huge number of platforms for release. The fact that so many users recommend Unstable or even Testing to end-users points out flaws in the development model IMO.
Microsoft, Apple and Real are the major commercial players in the media player and streaming video market. Microsoft for obvious and Apple for less obvious reasons won't support Linux, so it's a good opportunity for Real to become the dominant player here. At the moment, Linux desktop use doesn't amount to very much. The hope for Real is that it will accellerate in the coming years, especially since they seem to be losing the Windows desktop. Maybe they will become the Mozilla of media players?
> I remember finding a registry tweak a LONG time ago which eliminated the short delay between displaying 'trees' in the start menu.
For anybody interested, it's [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay], the value is milliseconds delay (400 default). If you don't like mucking with the registry directly, get yourself X-Setup, it's like TweakUI, only ten times better.
They way they do it now (converting MP3 to ATRAC3 through SonicStage), they can still claim MP3 compatibility on the box, while the actual experience with ATRAC3 will be better than with MP3. This way, they hope not to lose initial sales (by not supporting MP3 alltogether), but push everyone to ATRAC3 from their on-line store after the sale. Sure, it's a brain dead strategy, but there are enough brain dead people working there.
It seems there is quite a lot of confusion about what Read exactly did. Some people are under the impression that Real is installing custom firmware on the iPod. According to a poster who claims to be an engineer from Real, they did not change anything on the iPod or in iTunes. All they did was maskerading the files from their own music store (which are 192kbps AAC with their own DRM) as Fairplay AAC files.
Everybody who's willing to defend Apple in this case, ask yourself, were you also willing to defend Lexmark when they sued an after-market toner maker? This case doesn't seem all that dissimilar to me.
I don't know what the situation is in South Korea, but in Europe cable/dsl is much more attractive than dial-up, because dial-up is almost always paid by the second. In many parts of Europe, broadband is the only way to get flat-rate internet. In the US flat-rate is the norm for dial-up, so broadband is not such a big upgrade as it is in Europe.
I'm sure everybody remembers the Cube, which flopped in the market, but still enjoys a cult following (much like the Newton). They were one of the pioneers of the SFF PC but have completely withdrawn from this market. They were also one of the pioneers of the one spindle ultra-portable, but have since left the market for true ultra-portables to PC manufacturers. The 12" PB is nice, but at 4.6lb it's one of the heaviest 12" laptops on the market today. For people who never use the optical drive on the road, lighter is nicer.
Pitty that Apple currently does not offer products in the catagories I'm most interested in, the SSF PC and the ultra-portable laptop.
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Oh come on, you can do better than that. I'm not saying these answers represent my view, just showing how they could be answered by Glaser.
Why is Real so intrusive into the average windows system when using the express installation method? [...]
The Realplayer installation is not intrusive. It is customary practice for many software packages aimed at a general public to install visible and easily discoverable ways to launch them. Experienced users can customize their installations to a large degree. Maybe you do not realize that many people accidentally delete shortcut and do not know how to recreate them.
Why is the free version the hardest version to find on your website?
I suspect you have not visited our website recently. In the past we received some complaint that the free player was difficult to find. We have listened to our customers and restructured the website. The free player is very easy to find.
Why must I choose a custom install and play a game of "catch-em-all" to avoid some of these issues?
We aim our software at a very large public, and many people would never discover a lot of what we have to offer if they were not turned on by default. Offering many choices for experienced users is exactly the purpose of a custom install.
Why does Real assume I'm interested in news, updates, libraries, or any of the nonsense that it is configured for by your company?
As you may be aware, complex software is never bug free and secure from the start. It is our duty to inform and encourage our customers to upgrade to newer versions where bugs are fixed and security holes are closed when discovered. The experienced user who can take responsibilty for their own installed software can always choose to turn off automatic updates.
In short, why does Real feel the need to be so Obnoxious? These are "real" questions posed by "real" users, like here and supported by your own employees!
These views represent a small minority of our customer base. For most people who complain about our software it is actually quite simple to turn off features that you describe as "obnoxious" in the Preferences.
Do we really want questions (and answers) like these? Please take some time to think of good questions that are acutally hard to answer. Don't waste questions and mod-points just to share your opinion about Real's software. You may have your replies ready for such answers, but Glaser does not need to answer those.
> 128kbps AAC is at least as good as 192 kbps mp3's. That's not just what I think.
A 134kbps (VBR) Lame-encoded MP3 sounds almost as good as a 128kbps iTunes AAC. (In the final analysis, they're statistically indistinguishable.) I highly doubt a 192kbps MP3 can't beat a 128kbps AAC. But neither is as good as a well tuned Ogg Vorbis (aoTuV) encoding.
It should be noted that while AAC is "open", it is patent encumbered. If you want to write a software AAC encoder or player, you need to pay Dolby. Although there are open source decoders, their legal status is unclear. Of course, you also need to pay Microsoft for WMA, bit it is a little cheaper.
The same applies to Fraunhofer for MP3 if I believe, although I can't find pricing information right now. Unfortunately, the most free and open format lacks market penetration.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters!
My first optical mouse was a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse. For some reason I decided to go with a brand name for my first optical mouse instead of the nobrand mice I used in the past. It was awful. Just like the Amazon reviews say, the cursor jumps all over the place. (Too bad I discovered the reviews too late). OK, I know it was the cheapest MS mouse, but it still cost me 19 euros, twice as much as some noname Chinese optical mouse. How hard is it to screw up something as basic as, well, a Basic Optical Mouse? Anyway, my second one was a 22 euro Logitech, of which I have no complaints.
For the hordes of us who don't understand Japanese, here's a Chinese version. Seriously though, this version is much longer and somewhat easier to follow.
When I passed a newsstand yesterday, I noticed that Businessweek magazine charges money for their magazine. After thorough research (well, some introspection), I've come to the conclusion that Businessweek can significantly expand its market by giving away their magazine for free.
I will come to collect my consultancy fee next week.
That's just lame. I buy the damn thing from Apple, not from LG. You might as well say Apple (or Dell or HP) laptop failures are never their faults, it's the fault of Quanta or Compal or Alphatop who manufacture them.
In other words, you're not buying it, you renting.
A 40GB (0.04TB) iPod stores 10,000 songs. One of these discs has the capacity of 2,500 iPods, or 25 million songs. The entire iTunes Music Store catalogs has about 1 million songs, so you can store the entire iTMS 25 times on a $45 disc. I would guess that one or two of these discs can hold all recorded music ever published.
A good quality 2 hour MPEG4 movie can fit in 1GB, so one of these discs stores 100,000 movies. If you can spend 4 hours per day watching movies, it will take more than 140 years to watch them all.
Save your time, the "article" reads like a blatant piece of astroturfing with an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking. Unless the price of these "handtops" drop under $1000 fast, they'll be an even bigger flop than the Tablet-PC.
The key to getting useful answers is to formulate your question precisely. You're "hoping" to offer Web access and MS Office (with an Office license for every machine)? Of course it can be done. If money is not a significant constraint, anything can be done. As you can see from the posts, you have numerous options and solutions.
I'd suggest you first try to formulate your problem *precisely*. You're in charge. Don't ask what is possible, state what you WANT to be possible. What will be forbidden? Is it OK for people to play games all day? Chatting? Listen to radio? Download movies? Doing their homework? If you give a precise list of requirements, there's a much better chance of getting a small list of useful answers rather than hundreds of options that you still need to evaluate for yourself.
Except that this isn't a virus or a worm, it's a trojan. Trojans are trivial to make for any OS that can execute applications. You can probably come up with your own OSX trojan in 30 seconds.
What's the big deal about this, trojans are easy to write for any OS. This particular one opens a listening TCP port, and emails out it's IP address. Since WinCE is a fairly complete OS with a TCP/IP stack and an email client, it's rather obvious that something like this can be written. If they'd discovered a hole that can be exploited without user intervention, that would be big news.
A possible security weakness of WinCE is that it has no real user and priviledge separation (like Win9x). But what many people who argue for security through priviledge seperation forget to mention is that a standard user (both on NT and Unix) usually has quite a lot of priviledges. You don't need to be root to open ports >1024 or silently send out thousands of emails. Remember, anything YOU can do under a normal user account, a trojan can do as well. So something like this could be easily written for Linux or MacOS. The only security that priviledge separation buys you is that you normally can't change system or other users' files. Since WinCE only supports one user, and the system is in ROM (a hard reset erases all virusses), there is nothing to be gained here.
Do you realize that the resolution of standard cinema film is much higer than even HDTV 1080p? The source material may have degraded a bit (which may or may not be restored), but resolution wise, celluloid is still hard to beat.
As always, those who defend Debian point to the availability of Unstable and Testing. Please get a clue, there is a reason that they are called Unstable and Testing and not Debian-New and Debian-Newer. They are not slightly-less stable versions of Stable. They do not always get security updates on time. They may leave major packages like KDE broken for weeks. When you install Unstable, it depends on your luck at the time what works and what doesn't. Near release time Unstable is often pretty OK, mid-release cycles major things may break. And you know why? Because Unstable and Testing are meant for DEVELOPERS, not end-users.
I have great admiration of the Debian project and philosophy, but frankly I think it's a little too ambitious. They basically want to get a huge number of packages all stable across a huge number of platforms for release. The fact that so many users recommend Unstable or even Testing to end-users points out flaws in the development model IMO.
Microsoft, Apple and Real are the major commercial players in the media player and streaming video market. Microsoft for obvious and Apple for less obvious reasons won't support Linux, so it's a good opportunity for Real to become the dominant player here. At the moment, Linux desktop use doesn't amount to very much. The hope for Real is that it will accellerate in the coming years, especially since they seem to be losing the Windows desktop. Maybe they will become the Mozilla of media players?
> I remember finding a registry tweak a LONG time ago which eliminated the short delay between displaying 'trees' in the start menu.
For anybody interested, it's [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\MenuShowDelay], the value is milliseconds delay (400 default). If you don't like mucking with the registry directly, get yourself X-Setup, it's like TweakUI, only ten times better.
They way they do it now (converting MP3 to ATRAC3 through SonicStage), they can still claim MP3 compatibility on the box, while the actual experience with ATRAC3 will be better than with MP3. This way, they hope not to lose initial sales (by not supporting MP3 alltogether), but push everyone to ATRAC3 from their on-line store after the sale. Sure, it's a brain dead strategy, but there are enough brain dead people working there.
Interesting tidbit: the very first Powerbook was designed by Sony. Nonetheless, they're going to lose this round to the iPod badly.
You'd be pretty close, if the trailers were in WMV HD format.
It seems there is quite a lot of confusion about what Read exactly did. Some people are under the impression that Real is installing custom firmware on the iPod. According to a poster who claims to be an engineer from Real, they did not change anything on the iPod or in iTunes. All they did was maskerading the files from their own music store (which are 192kbps AAC with their own DRM) as Fairplay AAC files.
Everybody who's willing to defend Apple in this case, ask yourself, were you also willing to defend Lexmark when they sued an after-market toner maker? This case doesn't seem all that dissimilar to me.
I don't know what the situation is in South Korea, but in Europe cable/dsl is much more attractive than dial-up, because dial-up is almost always paid by the second. In many parts of Europe, broadband is the only way to get flat-rate internet. In the US flat-rate is the norm for dial-up, so broadband is not such a big upgrade as it is in Europe.
I'm sure everybody remembers the Cube, which flopped in the market, but still enjoys a cult following (much like the Newton). They were one of the pioneers of the SFF PC but have completely withdrawn from this market. They were also one of the pioneers of the one spindle ultra-portable, but have since left the market for true ultra-portables to PC manufacturers. The 12" PB is nice, but at 4.6lb it's one of the heaviest 12" laptops on the market today. For people who never use the optical drive on the road, lighter is nicer.
Pitty that Apple currently does not offer products in the catagories I'm most interested in, the SSF PC and the ultra-portable laptop.