I feel so used, his username is "Zune-Online.com". I should have noticed that.
Damn this site.
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
Certainly. I wouldn't buy a Zune. I find them mediocre.
Yet, you don't see mass hate directed towards some other random player with one or two new features. Nobody seems to be able to give a rational explanation why this is the case. It is the technology whipping boy of the Internet, currently. And I am simply asking why this is the case. Seems like it is just so easy to go along with the crowd on this that people do.
I agreed with you until you wrote that they have a right to "spread the word." We are not talking about life-changing matters, we are discussing ways to waste our personal income on things to appease our own sensory desires.
I'm not advocating some asinine political correctness where we don't say bad things about anything for fearing of offending someone. I am advocating an end to this childish "us vs. them" mentality that seems to pervade this site. I really can't understand why people can't tolerate others using technology that they wouldn't use. It is a sort of technological arrogance to presume that your choice in the matter is always suitable for every need. And then, in an attempt to make it more important than it really is, the matter is turned into a moral issue and made far too important. This juvenile notion of "use what I use" demands to be mocked at every turn.
Technology doesn't need advocates. Good technology speaks for itself. Don't become a tool just because you like your toolset. (Sorry, had to.)
Re:Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1
I hate the iTunes DRM. I hate the Sony CD's rootkit. I hate the DRM files in Rhapsody/Napster. Why is it that we never hear about those much anymore? Don't we all HATE them with every fiber of our being?
* If we like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share is major news which is accepted without further questioning of the facts as presented. Comments on article consist of lots of pats on the back and generally positive. * If we don't like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share involves questioning the facts as presented. Insert long diatribes about unfairness of past behavior. You can even make statements that conditionally apply, i.e. "monopolies are bad. Except for the iPod, they earned it!"
The funny part is you have a bunch of posts nitpicking over the 10% mark: "there's no way the Zune has 10%!" Yes, way to miss the entire point of the post.
Great to hear everyone's personal experiences
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I hate to interrupt this lovely Zune hate-fest (since it became cool to hate on it for no apparent reason) but since when have people considered their own personal experience when dealing with a product to somehow scale up to the reality of it? Every second post says, "I have never seen anyone with them!" Well, of course not, look at what site you're on! It is practically a religion to hate on Microsoft here. I reckon the Zune's market is people who think the iPod is too cool so they buy the Microsoft alternative. Do you think it is surprising that there are Zune booths inside of GameStop?
And I write this as an iPod user. It is my job to make fun of your groupthink, so carry on.
Programs like Exact Audio Copy are able to painstakingly rip even the most scratched CDs very well when in secure mode. A friend of mine left a CD behind his computer desk for several years. Over time, the wheels on the desk would run over the CD and grind parts of it away. He found the CD while cleaning one day, and decided to see whether EAC could recover it. The CD was badly scratched and had dust all over it. After cleaning the dust off, and leaving EAC to run overnight, he was able to extract all of the music! So give it a try.
I call it backwards because if your hard disk dies, you don't have a hard copy of the music. I insist on having a lossless copy of the music I buy so I can format shift it without degrading quality. I rip to 256kbps VBR MP3 - it works on everything, sounds great, but is a bit large. For right now, that means I continue to buy overpriced CDs.
Nobody is dying or being raped. They are downloading music for free. The two are very different things. Nobody is being oppressed here. They're merely suffering consequences for breaking [mostly unfair] laws.
First, you argue that the university is supposed to "protect their students from the dangers of the net." How much protection do they have to offer? If a student gets phished, should they refund their money? Should the university police networked computers and remove malware for them? Can you show me where in the Ohio University's computer policy they promise to do this? And since when does "protecting" students involve spending thousands of dollars in legal fees for something that the student is directly responsible for?
But then you try to argue that college students should be able to do all the things that adults do, but still be treated like minors. And THAT is the sort of harmful thinking I was advocating against in my original post. If we want to advance as a society we need to realize that everything we do has consequences. I'm sick of people assigning blame to everyone and everything but themselves. Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of crap, and the amount of damages the RIAA seeks are asinine. The whole point of them seeking absurd damages is to scare off people! If the student is unlucky enough to be the target of this, they knew it was possible. It was entirely preventable - they are not 'victims.' We don't want the kids to think, "oh, poor me! All I was doing was breaking the law, and the evil RIAA actually sued me like a bunch of other people! It just isn't fair!"
If you play with fire, don't complain when you get burned.
But whatever happened to taking responsibility for what you do? Why would the university expose itself to lawsuits unnecessarily?
Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of bull, and yes, the RIAA is a bunch of thugs. But I have no doubt that the university told people that file sharing is a good way to get sued, and they went ahead and did it anyway. I have no sympathy for these people. As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit, but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the students did it because they wanted free music, not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
If you want to change the situation, downloading files and trying to get sued isn't going to fix anything. Donate to EFF, move near the RIAA headquarters and intimidate them directly, or some other more direct means would be more effective.
You are exactly right in a sense. I do not want to work so much at it in its current shape because: a. it is a computer game b. it has a relatively shallow learning curve (when you compare it to actual, non-computer game activities) c. it still needs skills that don't even apply much to other computer games.
Contrast this to an activity like learning the guitar, where there is more challenge, the skill is actually useful, and you have a chance of doing something with it. At the end of the day, the time spent on 'training' in a computer game feels utterly wasted to me. And I am someone who is relatively carefree about my time. Obviously, I'm not cut out to be a cyber-athlete or whatever they're calling them these days. Darn. The chicks really go for them, too!
That doesn't mean I should withhold suggestions about how to improve the UI, however.
Your argument is flawed. One doesn't start studying neuropsychology (which I'm considering) and expect it to come easily. Along the same line, I don't play a computer game and expect to spend lots time doing things that feel like work.
And I'm not arguing that these skills will make me a better player. There will be many people who can far outclass me, and that is fine. I just want to enjoy the actual game portion more when I decide to play. My suggestions are merely ways to reduce the mouse-intensive nature of the game.
I am inexperienced. I'd love to enjoy the game in all its technical details, but it is such a pain in the ass to play. You do not need to tell me what 'pro' players do. Of course they play at maximum efficiency. The thing is, I don't want to be 'good' at precision clicking on units, I want to be good at the actual game portion of it.
You point out the group limit isn't a hindrance because there is a workaround. Sounds more like a tacit admission that it is artificial. Alt-clicking does not completely solve the problem, you are still issuing multiple commands when one would suffice. In regard to load balancing, it'd be only among the buildings currently selected. You do not want to limit the options available to a player or force them to work in a certain way. Having it automatically work on all buildings of a certain type would be asinine. I am no stranger to hotkeying the buildings, or placing them properly. I just find the UI shortcuts provided by Blizzard to be incapable of handling the sheer number of disparate tasks that need to be done to play Starcraft at any sort of decent level.
I am not sure how this is making it a less competitive game. The more the UI aids the user in doing tedious things, the more fun it is to play. This has nothing to do with dumbing down the game. Like I said earlier, I won't weep at all if the excessive mouse skills are no longer mandatory to play. I already use the mouse too much during the day at my tech job.
This isn't some lame complaint about how it doesn't run on an OS that nobody runs.
I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. I don't mean to overstate this - the better player is going to win, usually. But it is very telling that pro SC1 players measure clicks per second. And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.
The most glaring aspect of this is in the limitation of units that can be selected at once. If you watch the gameplay videos, there are a huge number of zerglings that attack simultaneously. How backwards is it that although that is feasible in Starcraft (probably not to that scale) it is a huge pain in the ass? In order to do it you need to separate them out into groups of 12, and assign them to number keys along the top. To attack, you'd hit the 1 key, then hit a, and click behind the attack point. Now, you need to repeat that step for every group. The first group will get there slightly before the others because they have a head start, which is inefficient if you're trying to swarm the enemy. The natural thing would be to double click on the zerglings, and have them ALL be selected at once. I'm glad to see that Rob Pardo is working on SC2, but I know he has strong feelings on this sort of thing. I can't recall the exact reason, but I believe the cap is in SC1 for the purpose of 'encouraging smaller battles.' Sorry, but if they've played it at all, it just doesn't work that way. People get into bigass battles all the time, that is half the fun of SC1. And it is aggravating to know that the UI doesn't scale with the scope of battles. Oftentimes, you don't have control over how big the battle gets.
I want to focus on the action, not the fifty inane things needed to sustain the action. I understand and appreciate that some of it has to happen, but it can be rather unpleasant sometimes. One example of this is building units. In particular, you should be able to build multiple unit production buildings, issuing build requests and they are load-balanced between the two, i.e. if I want two marines, and I have two barracks, I should be able to select both barracks, and ask for two marines. Both barracks would build one simultaneously. Currently, the Blizzard games allow you to queue, but do not load-balance in this way. If you wanted to do what I just described, you need to select each building individually. More clicks, more thought needed to accomplish a common goal. Another example is unit queuing. This is fairly common among RTS games now, but it is a shame that the Blizzard games effectively penalize you for using it. I say this because they deduct the unit cost when you queue the unit - not when the unit starts being built. For the period of time between the queue and the unit being built, you have fewer resources available to expend in the event of an emergency. (The interesting thing is you are not charged for upkeep of the queued unit until it starts production.) The hyperactive player who can remember to build units right when they come out does not suffer from having less available resources. In the event of a financial emergency, they can divert resources without needing to stop the queue of units.
Nevertheless, I have high hopes for this game, and will probably upgrade my PC to play.
Re-read what you just wrote. Step back a little, if you have to. You're a CS student, and you don't see anything wrong with generalizing results for 40 million copies based upon how it was received by 200 computer science students? What sort of logic is that? Just because it matches up with your perception doesn't make it sound.
Just because you can think of something worse doesn't invalidate the original complaint. Too bad people like to think they're somehow sticking it to the man when they really just want free movies.
What should they have played? Doom? Quake? Your favorite FPS game? But what difference would it have made? What happened is gaming went mainstream, and Halo is one of the titles that did it. It was lucky, but it is a solid title on its own. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out, but somehow, this discussion comes up every time Halo is discussed here. I don't think people really want to discuss it, but rather complain to an audience that is likely to identify with their gaming angst. It is as if there is this unspoken dislike of something that hit the mainstream that you personally didn't approve of.
Me, I haven't found a FPS game that I like as much as Tribes 1, which is quite old. I can still have some fun in other FPS games, though. Video games are so meaningless, however, that I find it hard to be engrossed in them, and really have to wonder why people get so worked up over how good they are, or which game is popular.
You seem to imply that people *would* care if they knew what Microsoft does. So, why don't you back up what you say with the following experiment? It is inexpensive, and relatively quick. Most anyone can pull it off.
1. Go to bar on a Friday night. 2. Find a mate that looks attractive. Buy them a drink, and start talking. 3. Once it is your turn to speak, shift the conversation towards Microsoft. Be sure to talk about everything bad they've done. I'm sure you know all of it: antitrust, poor design, Ignore subconscious cues they give, as they should be suspected to be a cult member ("normal people...[are] practitioners of the M$ cult"), and is still under the influence. But, I have already accounted for that. The drink should loosen the Evil Empire's Force Grip on them momentarily, at which point, you swoop in, like Luke Skywalker, for the saving of their technological soul! 4. Let us know how it goes. And be sure to pack a LiveCD!
I'll be looking forward to the results. I hope you realize the seriousness of this matter. By your own admission, M$ is alongside communism in terms of damage it has done. Shirking this moral obligation in the name of social norms or your own fear of rejection is gravely irresponsible, and tantamount to heresy. YOU alone must put a stop to this threat through a grassroots movement.
Take off your blinders buddy, there are no friendly companies so long as DRM is out and about. You want it totally gone. Not half-ass solutions that RoughlyDrafted insists are acceptable.
I look at the 'solutions' that people use, and most of them look like an engineer's pet project that got a bit out of hand and needs to be frozen two versions back. It is always the same nonsense: six XML config files controlling some overly generic engine that uses reflection to automagically do something that only took a couple of lines of code. And don't forget you need to distribute four megs of JAR files with your app to save you those ten lines of code!
Unfortunately the Java community is enamored with this sort of thing, citing it as 'elegant.' There's nothing elegant about something that doesn't Just Work.
Slashdot Mirror
I like your response. I'm just joking. Well, only halfway.
...I'm sure someone around here will chime in with why Google isn't evil. ;)
Gotta love corporate tools.
Hey, twitter's one of my favorite people to see post on here!
:)
Except some days it seems like he's being serious.
I feel so used, his username is "Zune-Online.com". I should have noticed that.
Damn this site.
Certainly. I wouldn't buy a Zune. I find them mediocre.
Yet, you don't see mass hate directed towards some other random player with one or two new features. Nobody seems to be able to give a rational explanation why this is the case. It is the technology whipping boy of the Internet, currently. And I am simply asking why this is the case. Seems like it is just so easy to go along with the crowd on this that people do.
I agreed with you until you wrote that they have a right to "spread the word." We are not talking about life-changing matters, we are discussing ways to waste our personal income on things to appease our own sensory desires.
I'm not advocating some asinine political correctness where we don't say bad things about anything for fearing of offending someone. I am advocating an end to this childish "us vs. them" mentality that seems to pervade this site. I really can't understand why people can't tolerate others using technology that they wouldn't use. It is a sort of technological arrogance to presume that your choice in the matter is always suitable for every need. And then, in an attempt to make it more important than it really is, the matter is turned into a moral issue and made far too important. This juvenile notion of "use what I use" demands to be mocked at every turn.
Technology doesn't need advocates. Good technology speaks for itself. Don't become a tool just because you like your toolset. (Sorry, had to.)
I hate the iTunes DRM. I hate the Sony CD's rootkit. I hate the DRM files in Rhapsody/Napster. Why is it that we never hear about those much anymore? Don't we all HATE them with every fiber of our being?
It can be simplified further:
* If we like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share is major news which is accepted without further questioning of the facts as presented. Comments on article consist of lots of pats on the back and generally positive.
* If we don't like said product/OS, then every tiny gain in market share involves questioning the facts as presented. Insert long diatribes about unfairness of past behavior. You can even make statements that conditionally apply, i.e. "monopolies are bad. Except for the iPod, they earned it!"
The funny part is you have a bunch of posts nitpicking over the 10% mark: "there's no way the Zune has 10%!" Yes, way to miss the entire point of the post.
I hate to interrupt this lovely Zune hate-fest (since it became cool to hate on it for no apparent reason) but since when have people considered their own personal experience when dealing with a product to somehow scale up to the reality of it? Every second post says, "I have never seen anyone with them!" Well, of course not, look at what site you're on! It is practically a religion to hate on Microsoft here. I reckon the Zune's market is people who think the iPod is too cool so they buy the Microsoft alternative. Do you think it is surprising that there are Zune booths inside of GameStop?
And I write this as an iPod user. It is my job to make fun of your groupthink, so carry on.
Programs like Exact Audio Copy are able to painstakingly rip even the most scratched CDs very well when in secure mode. A friend of mine left a CD behind his computer desk for several years. Over time, the wheels on the desk would run over the CD and grind parts of it away. He found the CD while cleaning one day, and decided to see whether EAC could recover it. The CD was badly scratched and had dust all over it. After cleaning the dust off, and leaving EAC to run overnight, he was able to extract all of the music! So give it a try.
I call it backwards because if your hard disk dies, you don't have a hard copy of the music. I insist on having a lossless copy of the music I buy so I can format shift it without degrading quality. I rip to 256kbps VBR MP3 - it works on everything, sounds great, but is a bit large. For right now, that means I continue to buy overpriced CDs.
Nobody is dying or being raped. They are downloading music for free. The two are very different things. Nobody is being oppressed here. They're merely suffering consequences for breaking [mostly unfair] laws.
Did you even read my post?
First, you argue that the university is supposed to "protect their students from the dangers of the net." How much protection do they have to offer? If a student gets phished, should they refund their money? Should the university police networked computers and remove malware for them? Can you show me where in the Ohio University's computer policy they promise to do this? And since when does "protecting" students involve spending thousands of dollars in legal fees for something that the student is directly responsible for?
But then you try to argue that college students should be able to do all the things that adults do, but still be treated like minors. And THAT is the sort of harmful thinking I was advocating against in my original post. If we want to advance as a society we need to realize that everything we do has consequences. I'm sick of people assigning blame to everyone and everything but themselves. Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of crap, and the amount of damages the RIAA seeks are asinine. The whole point of them seeking absurd damages is to scare off people! If the student is unlucky enough to be the target of this, they knew it was possible. It was entirely preventable - they are not 'victims.' We don't want the kids to think, "oh, poor me! All I was doing was breaking the law, and the evil RIAA actually sued me like a bunch of other people! It just isn't fair!"
If you play with fire, don't complain when you get burned.
But whatever happened to taking responsibility for what you do? Why would the university expose itself to lawsuits unnecessarily?
Yes, the lawsuits are a bunch of bull, and yes, the RIAA is a bunch of thugs. But I have no doubt that the university told people that file sharing is a good way to get sued, and they went ahead and did it anyway. I have no sympathy for these people. As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit, but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the students did it because they wanted free music, not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
If you want to change the situation, downloading files and trying to get sued isn't going to fix anything. Donate to EFF, move near the RIAA headquarters and intimidate them directly, or some other more direct means would be more effective.
You are exactly right in a sense. I do not want to work so much at it in its current shape because:
a. it is a computer game
b. it has a relatively shallow learning curve (when you compare it to actual, non-computer game activities)
c. it still needs skills that don't even apply much to other computer games.
Contrast this to an activity like learning the guitar, where there is more challenge, the skill is actually useful, and you have a chance of doing something with it. At the end of the day, the time spent on 'training' in a computer game feels utterly wasted to me. And I am someone who is relatively carefree about my time. Obviously, I'm not cut out to be a cyber-athlete or whatever they're calling them these days. Darn. The chicks really go for them, too!
That doesn't mean I should withhold suggestions about how to improve the UI, however.
Your argument is flawed. One doesn't start studying neuropsychology (which I'm considering) and expect it to come easily. Along the same line, I don't play a computer game and expect to spend lots time doing things that feel like work.
And I'm not arguing that these skills will make me a better player. There will be many people who can far outclass me, and that is fine. I just want to enjoy the actual game portion more when I decide to play. My suggestions are merely ways to reduce the mouse-intensive nature of the game.
I read the whole article, but missed that sentence...thanks for pointing it out!
I am inexperienced. I'd love to enjoy the game in all its technical details, but it is such a pain in the ass to play. You do not need to tell me what 'pro' players do. Of course they play at maximum efficiency. The thing is, I don't want to be 'good' at precision clicking on units, I want to be good at the actual game portion of it.
You point out the group limit isn't a hindrance because there is a workaround. Sounds more like a tacit admission that it is artificial. Alt-clicking does not completely solve the problem, you are still issuing multiple commands when one would suffice. In regard to load balancing, it'd be only among the buildings currently selected. You do not want to limit the options available to a player or force them to work in a certain way. Having it automatically work on all buildings of a certain type would be asinine. I am no stranger to hotkeying the buildings, or placing them properly. I just find the UI shortcuts provided by Blizzard to be incapable of handling the sheer number of disparate tasks that need to be done to play Starcraft at any sort of decent level.
I am not sure how this is making it a less competitive game. The more the UI aids the user in doing tedious things, the more fun it is to play. This has nothing to do with dumbing down the game. Like I said earlier, I won't weep at all if the excessive mouse skills are no longer mandatory to play. I already use the mouse too much during the day at my tech job.
This isn't some lame complaint about how it doesn't run on an OS that nobody runs.
I hope that Blizzard quits defining 'skill' as how fast a player can click, especially when we're using the mouse to play. I don't mean to overstate this - the better player is going to win, usually. But it is very telling that pro SC1 players measure clicks per second. And while it is 'athletic' in one sense, I am not fond of risking carpal tunnel syndrome just so I can be good at a computer game.
The most glaring aspect of this is in the limitation of units that can be selected at once. If you watch the gameplay videos, there are a huge number of zerglings that attack simultaneously. How backwards is it that although that is feasible in Starcraft (probably not to that scale) it is a huge pain in the ass? In order to do it you need to separate them out into groups of 12, and assign them to number keys along the top. To attack, you'd hit the 1 key, then hit a, and click behind the attack point. Now, you need to repeat that step for every group. The first group will get there slightly before the others because they have a head start, which is inefficient if you're trying to swarm the enemy. The natural thing would be to double click on the zerglings, and have them ALL be selected at once. I'm glad to see that Rob Pardo is working on SC2, but I know he has strong feelings on this sort of thing. I can't recall the exact reason, but I believe the cap is in SC1 for the purpose of 'encouraging smaller battles.' Sorry, but if they've played it at all, it just doesn't work that way. People get into bigass battles all the time, that is half the fun of SC1. And it is aggravating to know that the UI doesn't scale with the scope of battles. Oftentimes, you don't have control over how big the battle gets.
I want to focus on the action, not the fifty inane things needed to sustain the action. I understand and appreciate that some of it has to happen, but it can be rather unpleasant sometimes. One example of this is building units. In particular, you should be able to build multiple unit production buildings, issuing build requests and they are load-balanced between the two, i.e. if I want two marines, and I have two barracks, I should be able to select both barracks, and ask for two marines. Both barracks would build one simultaneously. Currently, the Blizzard games allow you to queue, but do not load-balance in this way. If you wanted to do what I just described, you need to select each building individually. More clicks, more thought needed to accomplish a common goal. Another example is unit queuing. This is fairly common among RTS games now, but it is a shame that the Blizzard games effectively penalize you for using it. I say this because they deduct the unit cost when you queue the unit - not when the unit starts being built. For the period of time between the queue and the unit being built, you have fewer resources available to expend in the event of an emergency. (The interesting thing is you are not charged for upkeep of the queued unit until it starts production.) The hyperactive player who can remember to build units right when they come out does not suffer from having less available resources. In the event of a financial emergency, they can divert resources without needing to stop the queue of units.
Nevertheless, I have high hopes for this game, and will probably upgrade my PC to play.
Re-read what you just wrote. Step back a little, if you have to. You're a CS student, and you don't see anything wrong with generalizing results for 40 million copies based upon how it was received by 200 computer science students? What sort of logic is that? Just because it matches up with your perception doesn't make it sound.
Just because you can think of something worse doesn't invalidate the original complaint. Too bad people like to think they're somehow sticking it to the man when they really just want free movies.
OK, so what is the problem here?
What should they have played? Doom? Quake? Your favorite FPS game? But what difference would it have made? What happened is gaming went mainstream, and Halo is one of the titles that did it. It was lucky, but it is a solid title on its own. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out, but somehow, this discussion comes up every time Halo is discussed here. I don't think people really want to discuss it, but rather complain to an audience that is likely to identify with their gaming angst. It is as if there is this unspoken dislike of something that hit the mainstream that you personally didn't approve of.
Me, I haven't found a FPS game that I like as much as Tribes 1, which is quite old. I can still have some fun in other FPS games, though. Video games are so meaningless, however, that I find it hard to be engrossed in them, and really have to wonder why people get so worked up over how good they are, or which game is popular.
You seem to imply that people *would* care if they knew what Microsoft does. So, why don't you back up what you say with the following experiment? It is inexpensive, and relatively quick. Most anyone can pull it off.
1. Go to bar on a Friday night.
2. Find a mate that looks attractive. Buy them a drink, and start talking.
3. Once it is your turn to speak, shift the conversation towards Microsoft. Be sure to talk about everything bad they've done. I'm sure you know all of it: antitrust, poor design, Ignore subconscious cues they give, as they should be suspected to be a cult member ("normal people...[are] practitioners of the M$ cult"), and is still under the influence. But, I have already accounted for that. The drink should loosen the Evil Empire's Force Grip on them momentarily, at which point, you swoop in, like Luke Skywalker, for the saving of their technological soul!
4. Let us know how it goes. And be sure to pack a LiveCD!
I'll be looking forward to the results. I hope you realize the seriousness of this matter. By your own admission, M$ is alongside communism in terms of damage it has done. Shirking this moral obligation in the name of social norms or your own fear of rejection is gravely irresponsible, and tantamount to heresy. YOU alone must put a stop to this threat through a grassroots movement.
May the Force be with you.
Take off your blinders buddy, there are no friendly companies so long as DRM is out and about. You want it totally gone. Not half-ass solutions that RoughlyDrafted insists are acceptable.
I look at the 'solutions' that people use, and most of them look like an engineer's pet project that got a bit out of hand and needs to be frozen two versions back. It is always the same nonsense: six XML config files controlling some overly generic engine that uses reflection to automagically do something that only took a couple of lines of code. And don't forget you need to distribute four megs of JAR files with your app to save you those ten lines of code!
Unfortunately the Java community is enamored with this sort of thing, citing it as 'elegant.' There's nothing elegant about something that doesn't Just Work.