Just take some dust-slaying Nano-shurikens of Doom with you (TG is owned by OSTG, the parent company of Slashdot, so activate all conspiracy theories now). They'll take care of it, whoop-ass style.
While you're there, you can also look into the new iPod accessory iCopulate which allows intimacy between mp3 players never before fantasized. And for the suit that has everything, Executve Pong. There's also Alarm Pills that help you wake up and fall asleep and a new USB-powered Fundue set available.
In that case they would have to use some other media-formats, instead of proprietary MS-formats. By doing that, they break the codec-player-OS hegemony that would result in reduced competition.
See, that's what the issue was. I don't recall if they said what format of video they were using, but the problem was a video embedded in a Word document wouldn't play with WMP gone. Assuming it uses some standard codec, not even an MS one, doesn't it seems silly not to use MS playback for something like this? It's a video clip embedded in an MS product, why not use native support?
Irrelevant. If MS bundles their Media Plyer to their monopoly-product they have a huge advantage their competitors do not have and they are breaking the law. MS can the proceed to tie Media Plyer to the function of the monopoly-product in such way that if you want to use the monopoly-product, you have to use their Media Player. Instant dominace in the market.
What advantage do they have here? I still think that they really aren't taking anything away from other media players. I don't see WMP as a standalone product - because it's not. It is part of Windows. One of the big things that people wanted in the upgrade from Win9x and 2000 was better native support for multimedia. WMP offers this through fluid integration with the user's shell. They don't limit you though. If you want to prevent WMP from ever starting, it's easy enough to change your preferences and use an alternative media player. I use Winamp (2.91) for audio playback because I think it does a better job.
Using an existing monopoly to gain dominance in another field is ILLEGAL. By bundling IE and Media Player to Windows MS is doing exactly that. They are "leveraging Windows".
I guess that's the problem with a monopoly based on software. In Windows XP I see IE and WMP as part of Windows. They provide functionality that any modern OS simply needs. If Windows shipped without an Internet browser and a media player, it would be unnecisarily hindered. Do you think Windows should contain no native browsing and media abilities? Should users be responsible for adding this to their systems? Remember Joe Sixpack and Grandma May when you consider this.
The support would still be there, Media Player would not be there. It has already been demonstrated that Windows without Media Player can play back embedded media with a third-party player. MS Media Player is not required.
This was debated in the last/. story about WMP's removal. If WMP is to be removed, that *includes* the back end, meaning all the MS codecs and DLLs that provide the functionality. The WMP front end is not WMP, just a GUI.
How does that help? It helps by making it more difficult for MS to become a monopoly in yet another field of technology.
A monopoly in media players? Huh? This is a non-issue. Right now, anyone who pays for a media player is as stupid as anyone who pays for a browser. Media players, both closed and open source, are free and easily attainable. Removing WMP's installation with Windows won't change this.
As far as your 2 points, I don't mean to say I think Microsoft should be able to do what they want without repercussion. The problem is that the EU is asking MS to do things that simply don't make sense. The fines are logical, but they need to come up with some demands that will really help the competition as you say, not just annoy MS.
As a side note, what if the consumer actually wants integrated browsing and media support? Should they be denied it?
Do the people of the EU need MS software? Will it really benefit them? Well, the government of the EU has decided that it will - as long as MS changes the terms it's attempting to force Europe's people to agree to before using it.
That's the thing. The EU isn't helping it's people by imposing these restrictions on Microsoft. In fact, I think you could say they are hurting them by forcing them to use an inferior version of MS software compared to the rest of the world. For example, MS was providing people with simple and native support for media. The EU says "no-no" and now EU versions of Windows don't have that native support. How is this helping?
The EU is doing what's best for its people. That is what it is supposed to do. If it did otherwise, why, it would risk being a farce.
I am just trying to find out exactly what the EU thinks they will accomplish due to these sanctions on MS. Right now it seems like the EU is really trying to see if they can push around a big US company and make it jump hoops. They want people to say, "Ooh, look. The EU made Microsoft do all this stuff and the US Gov't didn't. This new government really does have some authoritah. Oooh." That's why it's a farce.
It's my gun. I bought it. I cleaned it. I blew someone's head off with it. I shouldn't be forced to give it to the police.
I can see where you're going with this, but there is a difference. If you continue the story, the police don't go and give your gun to somebody else, even another police officer. It will be locked away and perhaps destroyed. In the same way I don't think MS source should be given away to others even if their intentions are to do good with it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Microsoft fanboi. I'm just trying to look at this logically. If the EU wants to make requirements about the content of Microsoft software sold within their jurisdiction that's fine. If they want to levy fines against Microsoft, they have that right. In some ways I'm glad that they are doing what the US government hand-waved at. However, I think that a company should be allowed to protect their software and prevent others from using it to their own benefit. It's a hard thing, knowing where to draw the line, but just straight out giving away their code is wrong.
Microsoft certainly hasn't been ideal in their business practices, but there has got to be better ways to handle them than pulling rules out of the air like 'get rid of WMP' and 'hand over your source code'. What do these "solutions" really accomplish?
The EU courts could easily declare the copyrights and patents of MS to be the property of MS Europe within the EU. For that matter they could just declare them null and void and let anyone who wanted to make copies and sell them.
Madness. It would be the end of the Bern Convention and the start of a cataclysmic trade war - maybe worse. Sheer madness. I don't doubt they would do it though, in their spite, their greed, and their envy.
I've got to say, that's probably the most Insightful comment so far under this article. Well said.
All these problems are leading to a head I think. The EU is becoming a pain to just about everybody and isn't really helping anything at all. By forcing Microsoft to water down their products which retailers then have to stock, they will drive many customers away from local retailers to online markets where they can get the full versions of Windows and Office.
These problems with not making some of their code available to open source groups is just about as stupid as the problems they were having playing media natively with WMP removed. It's their source, they wrote it, they paid for it, they developed it, they should not have to share it with anyone they don't want to.
Simple vacuum-explosive warhead instead of nuclear, and launch one of our old missiles. Two birds with one stone, literally.
Bah. Let's do it the other way around. Instead of sending up a rocket to shoot it into the ocean, send up a couple rocket boosters and a nuclear warhead and turn it into an orbiting nuclear weapons platform!
Booyah! Take that Soviet Russia! We're going to win because we're efficient! And hey, we found #2.
1. Build weapons platform. 2. Blow up the world. 3. (Cockroaches) Profit!
Paint Shop Pro really came into it's own in version 9. It can do just about everything Photoshop can, and I think it has a better UI. One place it still could use some work on is it's vector graphics, but they got a huge boost from v8 to v9.
But hey, for 1/5th the cost of Photoshop (1/10th if you upgrade), it's an amazing deal.
Re:Only makes sense
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How can wiretaps even be remotely useful anymore?
Very simple. Phones are still very widely used and as others have pointed out, wiretaps often still provide evidence to be used in a trial. Preventing VoIP phones from being able to be tapped is just inhibiting our ability to prosecute criminals effectively.
Just because there are other, better ways to communicate secretly, it certainly doesn't mean your average theif, drug dealer, income tax evader, or whatever uses them. Phones are easily accessible, cheap, a very large majority of people have them. Obviously they are an ideal and often the first thought of way to communicate.
Grafedia.net has some serious bugs in it's code and I'd be surprised if it didn't go down after getting hit by Slashdot and have all the uploaded images get wiped. Some I've noticed:
Some words just don't work and images get shown as broken links; often the upload wouldn't take.
In process of uploading an image, if you hit your Back button at the Accept/Reject screen, it locks the word as if it were already used when it's not.
Random "division by zero" PHP errors.
More random PHP errors of just about every flavor.
Some email arrives with such mangled headers that Yahoo Mail can't even open the message, shows it as garbage.
Slashdot's entry is too small to read easily (it says: "Hrumph, Slashdot. How do they always know?" then on the screen: "-5 Troll").
Of course this could all be due to the server melting, but still:)
...I'd like to choose which Web Browser and media players are on my system.
I can understand that, but I stand by the idea that a MS media delivery system that is integrated with MS applications in an MS operating system is still good. If however, you choose to use other products, there's nothing stopping you. True the MS apps are still installed, but they don't come into play unless you activate them or use the integration such as a video file inside a Word document.
Even if you have a superior browser such as Firefox, IE still runs needlessly as the Finder equivalent, for example...
From my understanding, IE doesn't actually run all the time. Windows Explorer has the ability to instantiate the IE engine (just like any other Windows app can using MFC) and display web pages. IE also has browsing abilities and can act somewhat like Explorer showing files (FTP for example). Again, I think it's nice to have two applications that run well together, hand in hand, instead of relying on two separate programs. But... if you like using other products, then by all means do so and IE will sit dormant unless called upon.
...and it is the whole point of the EU's current complaint is that Office won't accept third-party media players.
This defines the asinine nature of this issue. Why in the world can't a proprietary MS product like Office depend on another proprietary MS product like WMP? That's the nature of closed software design! It would be the same as if they simply wrote the media playing engine into the Office install.
Because the *whole point* of Microsoft doing this is not to "help the user" (as if MS cared) but to make the lives of third party media player developers difficult.
Maybe, but I can say from experience that given the choice between WMP, Quicktime, and Real for general media use, I'd use WMP. For music I use Winamp, but they provide it for free, so MS isn't really hurting them. You can say "what if WMP wasn't around, it would be a lot different!" but that works for a lot of things. What if IBM hadn't released the x86 system? Then poor Apple might have more than a 5% market share. On and on.
This strategy worked for killing off Netscape...
It probably helped, but I think Netscape was doomed anyway. They were giving away their product for free, something that MS can do easily. Netscape fell apart after 4.75 and that's when I stopped using it.
and its obvious that MS won't be happy until they are the sole software producer on Earth.
Maybe, though that would obviously be a bad thing, let alone an impossible task. I think the mindset of most companies is to become the biggest (and maybe the best, or at least mediocre). While I don't agree with many of MS's tactics, I do think this issue is a waste of time.
That is one of the main differences between Linux and Windows. If I bought or downloaded a good desktop Linux distribution, I'd get a few CDs or a DVD packed with a variety of software from a multitude of distributors, with many different choices. I can choose between KDE and GNOME; between Konqueror, Firefox, Epiphany, and Galeon; between mplayer and Xine; between OpenOffice, KOffice and AbiWord/Gnumeric, etc.
Ah, but I get enough calls from my parents, grandparents, and siblings as it is.:)
When you control about 90% of the market, you can't really give your users the best desktop experience without stepping on the toes of competitors.
This is one thing that Linux and Apple can do that Microsoft can't really do. . . If Microsoft added, say, a replacement for Notepad that was comparable to Kate or BBEdit, then we'd hear from the top selling editor corporations that Microsoft is cutting into their profits.
Manager: Take that media player out of your operating system.
Me: ok
Manager: Now, install RealPlayer. Why don't these media clips play anymore now that we have a competing media player installed?
What I'd honestly say: Because RealPlayer screwed your computer to high heaven and you're never going to be able to remove it. I think I've got an old copy of WMP 6.4 around here someplace, do you want to run that off a floppy, or reinstall Windows?
Microsoft has been ordered to remove Media Player, and it seems they've removed a bit more than they should have, that is all.
That sir, is crap.
They were ordered to remove Media Player. It should be obvious that this means the program in it's entirety, including both the front and back ends. Anything less would not be conforming to the great EU's vision of a worthless^H^H^H^Hwhile operating system.
"Get WMP out of Windows! Now! Oh, but leave in all the DLLs which do the real work so we can still benefit from your impressive integration."
Ah, it's too bad we don't get special +5 insightful moderation points to give away now and again. You've summed up my (and many of my coworkers) feelings about Real perfectly.
(Though I might setup an isolated system someplace and get a few Franklins before I shut it off and incinerate it:)
Slashdot Mirror
Just take some dust-slaying Nano-shurikens of Doom with you (TG is owned by OSTG, the parent company of Slashdot, so activate all conspiracy theories now). They'll take care of it, whoop-ass style.
While you're there, you can also look into the new iPod accessory iCopulate which allows intimacy between mp3 players never before fantasized. And for the suit that has everything, Executve Pong. There's also Alarm Pills that help you wake up and fall asleep and a new USB-powered Fundue set available.
In that case they would have to use some other media-formats, instead of proprietary MS-formats. By doing that, they break the codec-player-OS hegemony that would result in reduced competition.
See, that's what the issue was. I don't recall if they said what format of video they were using, but the problem was a video embedded in a Word document wouldn't play with WMP gone. Assuming it uses some standard codec, not even an MS one, doesn't it seems silly not to use MS playback for something like this? It's a video clip embedded in an MS product, why not use native support?
Irrelevant. If MS bundles their Media Plyer to their monopoly-product they have a huge advantage their competitors do not have and they are breaking the law. MS can the proceed to tie Media Plyer to the function of the monopoly-product in such way that if you want to use the monopoly-product, you have to use their Media Player. Instant dominace in the market.
What advantage do they have here? I still think that they really aren't taking anything away from other media players. I don't see WMP as a standalone product - because it's not. It is part of Windows. One of the big things that people wanted in the upgrade from Win9x and 2000 was better native support for multimedia. WMP offers this through fluid integration with the user's shell. They don't limit you though. If you want to prevent WMP from ever starting, it's easy enough to change your preferences and use an alternative media player. I use Winamp (2.91) for audio playback because I think it does a better job.
Using an existing monopoly to gain dominance in another field is ILLEGAL. By bundling IE and Media Player to Windows MS is doing exactly that. They are "leveraging Windows".
I guess that's the problem with a monopoly based on software. In Windows XP I see IE and WMP as part of Windows. They provide functionality that any modern OS simply needs. If Windows shipped without an Internet browser and a media player, it would be unnecisarily hindered. Do you think Windows should contain no native browsing and media abilities? Should users be responsible for adding this to their systems? Remember Joe Sixpack and Grandma May when you consider this.
The support would still be there, Media Player would not be there. It has already been demonstrated that Windows without Media Player can play back embedded media with a third-party player. MS Media Player is not required.
/. story about WMP's removal. If WMP is to be removed, that *includes* the back end, meaning all the MS codecs and DLLs that provide the functionality. The WMP front end is not WMP, just a GUI.
This was debated in the last
How does that help? It helps by making it more difficult for MS to become a monopoly in yet another field of technology.
A monopoly in media players? Huh? This is a non-issue. Right now, anyone who pays for a media player is as stupid as anyone who pays for a browser. Media players, both closed and open source, are free and easily attainable. Removing WMP's installation with Windows won't change this.
As far as your 2 points, I don't mean to say I think Microsoft should be able to do what they want without repercussion. The problem is that the EU is asking MS to do things that simply don't make sense. The fines are logical, but they need to come up with some demands that will really help the competition as you say, not just annoy MS.
As a side note, what if the consumer actually wants integrated browsing and media support? Should they be denied it?
Do the people of the EU need MS software? Will it really benefit them? Well, the government of the EU has decided that it will - as long as MS changes the terms it's attempting to force Europe's people to agree to before using it.
That's the thing. The EU isn't helping it's people by imposing these restrictions on Microsoft. In fact, I think you could say they are hurting them by forcing them to use an inferior version of MS software compared to the rest of the world. For example, MS was providing people with simple and native support for media. The EU says "no-no" and now EU versions of Windows don't have that native support. How is this helping?
The EU is doing what's best for its people. That is what it is supposed to do. If it did otherwise, why, it would risk being a farce.
I am just trying to find out exactly what the EU thinks they will accomplish due to these sanctions on MS. Right now it seems like the EU is really trying to see if they can push around a big US company and make it jump hoops. They want people to say, "Ooh, look. The EU made Microsoft do all this stuff and the US Gov't didn't. This new government really does have some authoritah. Oooh." That's why it's a farce.
It's my gun. I bought it. I cleaned it. I blew someone's head off with it. I shouldn't be forced to give it to the police.
I can see where you're going with this, but there is a difference. If you continue the story, the police don't go and give your gun to somebody else, even another police officer. It will be locked away and perhaps destroyed. In the same way I don't think MS source should be given away to others even if their intentions are to do good with it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no Microsoft fanboi. I'm just trying to look at this logically. If the EU wants to make requirements about the content of Microsoft software sold within their jurisdiction that's fine. If they want to levy fines against Microsoft, they have that right. In some ways I'm glad that they are doing what the US government hand-waved at. However, I think that a company should be allowed to protect their software and prevent others from using it to their own benefit. It's a hard thing, knowing where to draw the line, but just straight out giving away their code is wrong.
Microsoft certainly hasn't been ideal in their business practices, but there has got to be better ways to handle them than pulling rules out of the air like 'get rid of WMP' and 'hand over your source code'. What do these "solutions" really accomplish?
All these problems are leading to a head I think. The EU is becoming a pain to just about everybody and isn't really helping anything at all. By forcing Microsoft to water down their products which retailers then have to stock, they will drive many customers away from local retailers to online markets where they can get the full versions of Windows and Office.
These problems with not making some of their code available to open source groups is just about as stupid as the problems they were having playing media natively with WMP removed. It's their source, they wrote it, they paid for it, they developed it, they should not have to share it with anyone they don't want to.
The EU is a farce.
And it was timothy no less!
The only way we'll know that Armageddon isn't really here is if he dupes it tomorrow (or better yet, later today).
*crosses fingers, then realizes it's more likely than the sun coming up in the morning*
Simple vacuum-explosive warhead instead of nuclear, and launch one of our old missiles. Two birds with one stone, literally.
Bah. Let's do it the other way around. Instead of sending up a rocket to shoot it into the ocean, send up a couple rocket boosters and a nuclear warhead and turn it into an orbiting nuclear weapons platform!
Booyah! Take that Soviet Russia! We're going to win because we're efficient! And hey, we found #2.
1. Build weapons platform.
2. Blow up the world.
3. (Cockroaches) Profit!
I wonder if anyone else who saw they were going after 117 phishers thought the same thing I did.
(Namely, something along the lines of: OMG WTF!?!? 117??? Freakin sweet!! Bungie r0x0rs & MS kicks teh butt MC style!).
Ahem, don't ask.
All this bullshit and they STILL are posting dupes.
It's nice to see some things don't change.
Seeing this post was modded Informative, I've lost all hope I had left for Slashdot moderation.
Honestly, it's too bad there's not a "No Shit You Dumbass" moderation.
Digressing is fun.
Paint Shop Pro really came into it's own in version 9. It can do just about everything Photoshop can, and I think it has a better UI. One place it still could use some work on is it's vector graphics, but they got a huge boost from v8 to v9.
But hey, for 1/5th the cost of Photoshop (1/10th if you upgrade), it's an amazing deal.
Ha!
Try copying and pasting that paragraph into Word (I used 2003). Guess what? No grammar errors!
That's what they get for using Office's grammar checker.
How can wiretaps even be remotely useful anymore?
Very simple. Phones are still very widely used and as others have pointed out, wiretaps often still provide evidence to be used in a trial. Preventing VoIP phones from being able to be tapped is just inhibiting our ability to prosecute criminals effectively.
Just because there are other, better ways to communicate secretly, it certainly doesn't mean your average theif, drug dealer, income tax evader, or whatever uses them. Phones are easily accessible, cheap, a very large majority of people have them. Obviously they are an ideal and often the first thought of way to communicate.
You're obviously new here.
They stopped even pretending a long time ago that they cared about melting a server.
One of the best I could recall, though not direct linked, it's close enough. Over 250MB, but hey, it was Microsoft. Slashdot fights back!
Shit.
Does anyone have an exploded view diagram of a Sony 19" Trinitron?
C'mon, Apple has got to have something better than this "easter egg". It's nothing compared to previous Excel eggs.
:)
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they (did) have some cool people working on Office
Grafedia.net has some serious bugs in it's code and I'd be surprised if it didn't go down after getting hit by Slashdot and have all the uploaded images get wiped. Some I've noticed:
:)
Some words just don't work and images get shown as broken links; often the upload wouldn't take.
In process of uploading an image, if you hit your Back button at the Accept/Reject screen, it locks the word as if it were already used when it's not.
Random "division by zero" PHP errors.
More random PHP errors of just about every flavor.
Some email arrives with such mangled headers that Yahoo Mail can't even open the message, shows it as garbage.
Slashdot's entry is too small to read easily (it says: "Hrumph, Slashdot. How do they always know?" then on the screen: "-5 Troll").
Of course this could all be due to the server melting, but still
It seems you can see all/some/? images without sending email by going to:
. jp g
http://www.grafedia.net/images/grafedias/[word]
For example, slashdot.
...I'd like to choose which Web Browser and media players are on my system.
...and it is the whole point of the EU's current complaint is that Office won't accept third-party media players.
I can understand that, but I stand by the idea that a MS media delivery system that is integrated with MS applications in an MS operating system is still good. If however, you choose to use other products, there's nothing stopping you. True the MS apps are still installed, but they don't come into play unless you activate them or use the integration such as a video file inside a Word document.
Even if you have a superior browser such as Firefox, IE still runs needlessly as the Finder equivalent, for example...
From my understanding, IE doesn't actually run all the time. Windows Explorer has the ability to instantiate the IE engine (just like any other Windows app can using MFC) and display web pages. IE also has browsing abilities and can act somewhat like Explorer showing files (FTP for example). Again, I think it's nice to have two applications that run well together, hand in hand, instead of relying on two separate programs. But... if you like using other products, then by all means do so and IE will sit dormant unless called upon.
This defines the asinine nature of this issue. Why in the world can't a proprietary MS product like Office depend on another proprietary MS product like WMP? That's the nature of closed software design! It would be the same as if they simply wrote the media playing engine into the Office install.
Because the *whole point* of Microsoft doing this is not to "help the user" (as if MS cared) but to make the lives of third party media player developers difficult.
Maybe, but I can say from experience that given the choice between WMP, Quicktime, and Real for general media use, I'd use WMP. For music I use Winamp, but they provide it for free, so MS isn't really hurting them. You can say "what if WMP wasn't around, it would be a lot different!" but that works for a lot of things. What if IBM hadn't released the x86 system? Then poor Apple might have more than a 5% market share. On and on.
This strategy worked for killing off Netscape...
It probably helped, but I think Netscape was doomed anyway. They were giving away their product for free, something that MS can do easily. Netscape fell apart after 4.75 and that's when I stopped using it.
and its obvious that MS won't be happy until they are the sole software producer on Earth.
Maybe, though that would obviously be a bad thing, let alone an impossible task. I think the mindset of most companies is to become the biggest (and maybe the best, or at least mediocre). While I don't agree with many of MS's tactics, I do think this issue is a waste of time.
That is one of the main differences between Linux and Windows. If I bought or downloaded a good desktop Linux distribution, I'd get a few CDs or a DVD packed with a variety of software from a multitude of distributors, with many different choices. I can choose between KDE and GNOME; between Konqueror, Firefox, Epiphany, and Galeon; between mplayer and Xine; between OpenOffice, KOffice and AbiWord/Gnumeric, etc.
:)
Ah, but I get enough calls from my parents, grandparents, and siblings as it is.
When you control about 90% of the market, you can't really give your users the best desktop experience without stepping on the toes of competitors.
This is one thing that Linux and Apple can do that Microsoft can't really do. . . If Microsoft added, say, a replacement for Notepad that was comparable to Kate or BBEdit, then we'd hear from the top selling editor corporations that Microsoft is cutting into their profits.
Nicely said. That is exactly the case.
Based on that, I'd say it's even more like:
Manager: Take that media player out of your operating system.
Me: ok
Manager: Now, install RealPlayer. Why don't these media clips play anymore now that we have a competing media player installed?
What I'd honestly say: Because RealPlayer screwed your computer to high heaven and you're never going to be able to remove it. I think I've got an old copy of WMP 6.4 around here someplace, do you want to run that off a floppy, or reinstall Windows?
Microsoft has been ordered to remove Media Player, and it seems they've removed a bit more than they should have, that is all.
That sir, is crap.
They were ordered to remove Media Player. It should be obvious that this means the program in it's entirety, including both the front and back ends. Anything less would not be conforming to the great EU's vision of a worthless^H^H^H^Hwhile operating system.
"Get WMP out of Windows! Now! Oh, but leave in all the DLLs which do the real work so we can still benefit from your impressive integration."
Yeah, right.
Ah, it's too bad we don't get special +5 insightful moderation points to give away now and again. You've summed up my (and many of my coworkers) feelings about Real perfectly.
:)
(Though I might setup an isolated system someplace and get a few Franklins before I shut it off and incinerate it