Except that when there is an erotic movie (which would probably also fall under porn, even though it is not as hardcore) on a regular channel, the channel is not going black for the duration of the movie even if you did not rent the (also available from your provider) extra porn channel. That is because nothing is blocked, it is just divided into several stream of which not all have to be rented.
A solution more akin to this would be e.g. a.xxx domain and automatically filtering that on ISP level.
...that is what I really think about Ubuntu as well, and I have both Debian (my machine) and Ubuntu (girlfriends machine) here in our flat. The packaga manager is just different than Debians, the installer is the same, and well, the preselection of apps was a little more thorough than in sid. But I also had to install a lot of extras (what is now done by Automatix), so I also do not see what the real fuzz is, especially compared to recent SuSE offerings for example (running on machine of my girlfriends mum).
Well, totally different story here. About a year ago, I began to get headaches in the evenings after staring on a CRT all day at work and then doing some gaming at home on a CRT as well. It all went away after I bought an LCD at home and also got one in the office. I would not ever buy a CRT, and since on March 1st I am beginning a new job, I thought to myself "damn, I hope they have LCDs", and was relieved when today I got the mail telling me when to be in the office for all the first-day-stuff, and it closed with "...and a notebook will be prepared for you". Bad keyboard, yes, but LCD.
One thing that always makes me go back to using Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements) or any other freeware/commercial image manipulation application is the bad image quality I get when saving as.jpg under Linux. I have that under Debian, my girlfriend has that under Ubuntu and had that under FC. Most recently my girlfriend had the same problem with Krita, so maybe it is a problem with the library for this (libjpeg? not that much of a Linux guru).
And the quality is so bad in that I can easily see this. My girlfriend is an internet erotic model (cue stupid/. jokes about people here not having a girlfriend or whatever), and whenever I see a pic on the internet on her site or Myspace profile and it just looks crappy, I ask who edited it, and then she already looks at me with this "I know, I know, don't fucking ask" look and says she did it, with Gimp, or lately, Krita. When she does the job on my Windows laptop with Photoshop, pics always look great. And no, she is using the best jpg quality (12 or 100% or whatever the setting is called).
Had anybody else problems with this? I mean, I seriously cannot recommend the Gimp for any photo editing tasks as long as it does not produce top quality images with so simple a task. Are there different versions of the library, because of patents or the like? Is there a hidden switch, like "don't garble the pic with random noise and artifacts"?
The Invision Power board (or whatever it is called, used on http://www.hlfallout.net/ ) uses AJAX for quick replies. We all have seen a button for quick replies at the bottom of a post that just javascripts a new text area there, but this one now does not reload the page on pressing "submit" but also just appends the new post to the thread on the fly.
Yeah, lots of stuff already works on Windows XP in this regard, but only because of the antitrust lawsuits. Microsoft would not have done it on its own. Plus: this is about not bundling a certain brand of Media Player because it will create a de facto monopoly in the media player business... What other media players does the average Joe jave installed? Maybe Real, if it came with some other stuff he wanted installed, and maybe Quicktime for a movie trailer or so. Additional codecs? Theora maybe? Nope. So, what are the big businesses to do who want you to be able to watch their stuff? Right, not put stuff up in Theora, but in.wmv (or Mpeg1). Great choice now. I know of a customer for an erotic website who revoked his payment because a site I worked on encoded its videos in DivX with a direct link to the installer next to the vids. He even told us that "using some weird shit" would not go well... Well, only this one quit because of this, but that is what it is about: users not knowing anything about what they do, and then bundling exactly one thing. If MS bundled all the codecs, it would be a whole different thing altogether (yeah, I know, Real wants you to use their own player, not just the codecs yadda yadda).
Hm but what will then happen to my coworkers who always refer to it as "the harddrive" (and in reality store all their stuff on a mapped network drive)?
You know how bad it is to be allergic to this and only have "white bread or wheat bread" as an option, unless you go to wholefood shops?
Re:Well, not to defend an evil empire or anything,
on
Mandriva Linux 2006 Review
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't really know myself, but turn this around: Linux installation often gets critizised for being hard to install, and for sometimes featuring a menu driven but text based installer. You even get asked for what kind of machine you are installing (server, workstation,...) and how much of your hard disks you wnat to use!
And the Windows XP is basically the same. You have to partition the harddrive yourself with a text based installer. You cannot go back to an earlier step throughout the whole installation, only during the second half. You get asked lots of questions, about the timezone, your network setup, and other hard to grasp concepts.
Yes, this might sound like a rant, but we are talking about OS installation mechanisms. They cannot magically determine what you want, only make it easy to prepare the questions for you. And quite frankly, Windows is not much better in that regard than an enduser friendly Linux distribution, but Linux often gets critizised for it by the "mainstream" IT press. Another thing the mainstream I press usually ignores is that one of these hard question installers ask is for the kind of machine, and then install all kinds of software that is appropriate, as in an office suite or SMB server. On Windows, you get asked all the difficult questions again upon each single application install (okay, meabe not for an SMB server, but you get my point).
This is a rather lengthy FA, and I doubt anyone outside the linux community understands and reads it in its entirety, but it is agood one nonetheless.
Don't know what it is called, but it is the level you walk through in its entirety without encountering a single enemy, and then switch some system on, and go back again.
The game never gave me any indication that this would now be a phase without enemies, and the further I went, the more my palms started to sweat (always play with dimmed lights and with good headphones) because "pretty soon something just has to happen", and I really began shadow hugging and turned around corners as if it was a stealth game.
Then after tunrning that switch, the lighting changes from some green-orange tint to eerie blue, all the doors close again (but they are transparent, so you can still see far), the machines begin to hum again and a faint fog is added. And then suddenly these scary flying monsters that detach themselves from the wall and can teleport around and make this otherworldy shrieks...
Definately the scariest game scene for me in the last months.
Sorry if I answer to your headline and not to the text you wrote...;)
Google should track how many users click one of their search results and do not come back, e.g., and then somehow work these numbers into the ranking. You know, people who searched for a term found thatz result #3 actuall ymatched better overall even though it has less links to it that #1 and #2, so promote it! Something along that line. Would probably require cookies, but what the hell...
I haven't really compared it myself my loading it up and checking the fps, but the consensus on teh boards and forumz seems to be that Quake 4 actually performs a little better than Doom 3, maybe they just had more time to optimize, known engine and such. Don't take my word on it, though. For me, it ran good on a GF 6600 GT.
I think I agree with you on most of your points, but WotC have more than Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Greyhawk out.
They updated the Dragonlance campaign setting to 3.0 or 3.5 (too lazy to go to my shelf and check it out) and they did some horrendous stuff like the Wheel of Time campaign setting - the rulebook is ok-ish, but they just bought the license to dominate the market and announced basically on the day it was published that there would be no further products except for one adventure (that was already used in marketing the campaign).
Hm, I don't know, but I honestly have to say that Half-Life 2 is about the only game ever about which I can say that all my friends (with the exception of non-gamers and Linux freaks without a Cedega subscription) bought. Really bought, via Steam or retail, as opposed to downloading? No one donwloaded the cracked version, even though many of them download every other game released on this planet "because". From my personal experience (this is not universal truth, remember) I would just say the Steam experiment worked out quite well.
As others have already said, it is personal preference. But as most comments so far were in favor of GW, I decided to post as well.
I like WoW much more, and I have played both since beta. Do not make the mistale now though to think I am a hardcore player. My main WoW char is level 43, not even 60. I casually play both, but I have played WoW a lot more. I am not playing on a PvP server, but RP, so I do not get griefed at all, and as such do not have that problem. But my main gripe is the quests. I play these kind of games for the setting, not for the PvP (couldn't care less about that, in fact), and GW's setting is, uh, maybe not horrible in itself, but presented very poorly. Quest texts are a joke compared to WoW, I have even see spelling mistakes (never had that in WoW), and generally appear much less polished.
In addition to that I never really got bored even with the blandest FedEx quests in WoW, because the surroundings (meaning setting, visuals, presentation of quest, quest arc if present) were well done. In GW, on the other hand, I often get bored after some minutes because of random monsters "spawning" (crawling out of the sand) with no way of avoiding them because of one of my main gripes with the game: the on-a-rail environment.
This means in plain english: No falling of cliffs, no jumping, no climbing of hills. The world of GW does not really feel like a world, there are seems everywhere, towns and the surrounding area do not flow into each other but are on separate "maps" with a loading screen in between. On the other hand in WoW you basically only ever get to see a loading screen if you change to the other of the 2 continents or enter an instance (of which there are not too many, and they have to be planned in advance, so not in normal game flow). You can walk from the very north of one continent to the south and enter cities and villages in between without ever noticing the loading. This as a whole feels much more alive.
Since I play on a RP server and not a PvP world, I actually welcome meeting people in the wilderness, it just adds to the world. Only rarely have random encounters been with idiots. Most of you ignore each other, sometimes you talk, or even team up. But generally it helps strengthen the illusion of a world, since there are not only monsters outside of town.
Graphically, I think both have their strengths and weaknesses, but are generally equal and really nice to look at. I think GW overdid with the bloom (which can be disabled, I know), and I can imagine people disliking WoWs cartoony look. I also miss bump mapping and more shaders in WoW, but then, it fits with the cartoon style and works as a whole.
In retrospect I kinda regret buying GW, but I really enjoyed the beta. It is just that there was not much more for me after beta, whereas after the WoW beta I could just discover more of the nice world. I also think that the monthly fee is well spent, meaning both that I think my fun is worth the amount of money, and that I think Blizzard is adding more to the game, content and polish, and it really is noticable.
You know, and if you had paid some attention, you would have learned that UE4 is indeed in existence, they have already talked about that. Currently only Tim Sweeney doing stuff with it, but it is obviously being worked on for 2 years. And that with UE3 not yet powering any title on the shelves (that I know of). Weird, but true.
You really like to post this comment, don't you? At least the 2nd time I read it, word for word, maybe the third.
You are kinda right, though, even though I guess some of those probs come from Suse, never had those with other distros (Fedora and Debian lately), but I always had trouble and instabilities with Suse...
Thank god this was petented in the US and you and your parent clearly talked about patents in the US, because I acutally had a discussion about this aspect of patent law in Germany with my dad who holds (and defended) more than one patent, albeit in electronics and appliance design. Anyway, what I learned from that is that at least in Germany you patent a specific implementation, and not the broad claims. One pet patent of his is a special drawer for silverware in dishwashers (Miele brand btw.) at the top of the machine instead of a box in the bottom (easier to handle yadda yadda), and the point he aways makes about it is that competitors cold just have done the same, if the had configured the thing slightly different than in the description. The claim about doing a drawer at the top were basically void, and the point was about how it was designed and attached to the rest of the machine. Cleverly worded it was still no easy feat to find the holes to wriggle thru as competitor, but possible.
Ok, tried that. Went to OSDN, then to the first, then to the second bad page. Pressed Back, then again. Was on the OSDN homepage, as I expected. What was supposed to happen in your opinion?
And since you already mentioned it: adding Guarana also makes this beer not adhere to the Deitsche Reinheitsgebot (German Purity Law) for beer, which AFAIK is a requirement for selling a beverage under that name in Germany (the law limits the ingedients to hops, malt, yeast and water). So, they probably could distribute their source under some open source license, but I do not think any commercial verndor will pick this up anytime soon and sell it pre-compiled in Germany...
And for the same reasons I predict neither wins. Joe Sixpack is just not interested in either since he already can pay all the movies on his DVD player and would probably rather boycott studios who discontinued the DVD in favor of either HD-DVD or Blu Ray.
What native english speakers always seem to forget in this special case is that non-native english speakers (like me) usually have to reread the whole sentence if "should of" occured in it. If just does not make any sense to use these two words there, when you'd actually expect a verb or a verb and an auxiliary...
Well, except Google Desktop Search. And Google Picasa. And Google Toolbar. And Google Earth. And Google Hello. All of which require Windows and help support Ballmer's monopoly.
Except that all those you listed are not what defines Google. The web search engine with the vast database and the page rank algorithm tied together with its ease of use defines Google in the customers and/.ers view, maybe Google Ads as well. The rest is just gaining an audience due to the attached name, because people now think it will be as easy and transparent to use as all that stuff they already know under that brand. It Just Works(tm). Apart from the idea that a lot of these Google tools could probably be ported to Linux with not too much of a hassle, or that ports are already underway...
That sounds even worse then the GEMA in Germany. IIRC from my days as a guitar player in a hardcore band (read: not many sales, not doing it professionaly) I rememeber that you could choose not to become a member of the GEMA if you saw no gain from it. But then, you either had to make your recordings public domain (since else no club had the right to play them) or negotiate with every club/DJ yourself.
This insecure position led to weird situations where we had to fill out forms with the names of all songs we were going to perform on a night for sending them in to the GEMA, because the club wanted to be on the safe side, but we had some checkbox there on the paper that said that all songs were non-GEMA-controlled...
Slashdot Mirror
Except that when there is an erotic movie (which would probably also fall under porn, even though it is not as hardcore) on a regular channel, the channel is not going black for the duration of the movie even if you did not rent the (also available from your provider) extra porn channel. That is because nothing is blocked, it is just divided into several stream of which not all have to be rented.
.xxx domain and automatically filtering that on ISP level.
A solution more akin to this would be e.g. a
...that is what I really think about Ubuntu as well, and I have both Debian (my machine) and Ubuntu (girlfriends machine) here in our flat. The packaga manager is just different than Debians, the installer is the same, and well, the preselection of apps was a little more thorough than in sid. But I also had to install a lot of extras (what is now done by Automatix), so I also do not see what the real fuzz is, especially compared to recent SuSE offerings for example (running on machine of my girlfriends mum).
Well, totally different story here. About a year ago, I began to get headaches in the evenings after staring on a CRT all day at work and then doing some gaming at home on a CRT as well. It all went away after I bought an LCD at home and also got one in the office. I would not ever buy a CRT, and since on March 1st I am beginning a new job, I thought to myself "damn, I hope they have LCDs", and was relieved when today I got the mail telling me when to be in the office for all the first-day-stuff, and it closed with "...and a notebook will be prepared for you". Bad keyboard, yes, but LCD.
One thing that always makes me go back to using Photoshop (or even Photoshop Elements) or any other freeware/commercial image manipulation application is the bad image quality I get when saving as .jpg under Linux. I have that under Debian, my girlfriend has that under Ubuntu and had that under FC. Most recently my girlfriend had the same problem with Krita, so maybe it is a problem with the library for this (libjpeg? not that much of a Linux guru).
And the quality is so bad in that I can easily see this. My girlfriend is an internet erotic model (cue stupid /. jokes about people here not having a girlfriend or whatever), and whenever I see a pic on the internet on her site or Myspace profile and it just looks crappy, I ask who edited it, and then she already looks at me with this "I know, I know, don't fucking ask" look and says she did it, with Gimp, or lately, Krita. When she does the job on my Windows laptop with Photoshop, pics always look great. And no, she is using the best jpg quality (12 or 100% or whatever the setting is called).
Had anybody else problems with this? I mean, I seriously cannot recommend the Gimp for any photo editing tasks as long as it does not produce top quality images with so simple a task. Are there different versions of the library, because of patents or the like? Is there a hidden switch, like "don't garble the pic with random noise and artifacts"?
The Invision Power board (or whatever it is called, used on http://www.hlfallout.net/ ) uses AJAX for quick replies. We all have seen a button for quick replies at the bottom of a post that just javascripts a new text area there, but this one now does not reload the page on pressing "submit" but also just appends the new post to the thread on the fly.
Yeah, lots of stuff already works on Windows XP in this regard, but only because of the antitrust lawsuits. Microsoft would not have done it on its own. Plus: this is about not bundling a certain brand of Media Player because it will create a de facto monopoly in the media player business... What other media players does the average Joe jave installed? Maybe Real, if it came with some other stuff he wanted installed, and maybe Quicktime for a movie trailer or so. Additional codecs? Theora maybe? Nope. So, what are the big businesses to do who want you to be able to watch their stuff? Right, not put stuff up in Theora, but in .wmv (or Mpeg1). Great choice now. I know of a customer for an erotic website who revoked his payment because a site I worked on encoded its videos in DivX with a direct link to the installer next to the vids. He even told us that "using some weird shit" would not go well... Well, only this one quit because of this, but that is what it is about: users not knowing anything about what they do, and then bundling exactly one thing. If MS bundled all the codecs, it would be a whole different thing altogether (yeah, I know, Real wants you to use their own player, not just the codecs yadda yadda).
The Order of the Stick
Hm but what will then happen to my coworkers who always refer to it as "the harddrive" (and in reality store all their stuff on a mapped network drive)?
I am allergic to rye, you insensitive clod!
You know how bad it is to be allergic to this and only have "white bread or wheat bread" as an option, unless you go to wholefood shops?
I don't really know myself, but turn this around: Linux installation often gets critizised for being hard to install, and for sometimes featuring a menu driven but text based installer. You even get asked for what kind of machine you are installing (server, workstation, ...) and how much of your hard disks you wnat to use!
And the Windows XP is basically the same. You have to partition the harddrive yourself with a text based installer. You cannot go back to an earlier step throughout the whole installation, only during the second half. You get asked lots of questions, about the timezone, your network setup, and other hard to grasp concepts.
Yes, this might sound like a rant, but we are talking about OS installation mechanisms. They cannot magically determine what you want, only make it easy to prepare the questions for you. And quite frankly, Windows is not much better in that regard than an enduser friendly Linux distribution, but Linux often gets critizised for it by the "mainstream" IT press. Another thing the mainstream I press usually ignores is that one of these hard question installers ask is for the kind of machine, and then install all kinds of software that is appropriate, as in an office suite or SMB server. On Windows, you get asked all the difficult questions again upon each single application install (okay, meabe not for an SMB server, but you get my point).
This is a rather lengthy FA, and I doubt anyone outside the linux community understands and reads it in its entirety, but it is agood one nonetheless.
Don't know what it is called, but it is the level you walk through in its entirety without encountering a single enemy, and then switch some system on, and go back again.
The game never gave me any indication that this would now be a phase without enemies, and the further I went, the more my palms started to sweat (always play with dimmed lights and with good headphones) because "pretty soon something just has to happen", and I really began shadow hugging and turned around corners as if it was a stealth game.
Then after tunrning that switch, the lighting changes from some green-orange tint to eerie blue, all the doors close again (but they are transparent, so you can still see far), the machines begin to hum again and a faint fog is added. And then suddenly these scary flying monsters that detach themselves from the wall and can teleport around and make this otherworldy shrieks...
Definately the scariest game scene for me in the last months.
Sorry if I answer to your headline and not to the text you wrote... ;)
Google should track how many users click one of their search results and do not come back, e.g., and then somehow work these numbers into the ranking. You know, people who searched for a term found thatz result #3 actuall ymatched better overall even though it has less links to it that #1 and #2, so promote it! Something along that line. Would probably require cookies, but what the hell...
I haven't really compared it myself my loading it up and checking the fps, but the consensus on teh boards and forumz seems to be that Quake 4 actually performs a little better than Doom 3, maybe they just had more time to optimize, known engine and such. Don't take my word on it, though. For me, it ran good on a GF 6600 GT.
I think I agree with you on most of your points, but WotC have more than Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Greyhawk out.
They updated the Dragonlance campaign setting to 3.0 or 3.5 (too lazy to go to my shelf and check it out) and they did some horrendous stuff like the Wheel of Time campaign setting - the rulebook is ok-ish, but they just bought the license to dominate the market and announced basically on the day it was published that there would be no further products except for one adventure (that was already used in marketing the campaign).
Hm, I don't know, but I honestly have to say that Half-Life 2 is about the only game ever about which I can say that all my friends (with the exception of non-gamers and Linux freaks without a Cedega subscription) bought. Really bought, via Steam or retail, as opposed to downloading? No one donwloaded the cracked version, even though many of them download every other game released on this planet "because". From my personal experience (this is not universal truth, remember) I would just say the Steam experiment worked out quite well.
As others have already said, it is personal preference. But as most comments so far were in favor of GW, I decided to post as well.
I like WoW much more, and I have played both since beta. Do not make the mistale now though to think I am a hardcore player. My main WoW char is level 43, not even 60. I casually play both, but I have played WoW a lot more. I am not playing on a PvP server, but RP, so I do not get griefed at all, and as such do not have that problem. But my main gripe is the quests. I play these kind of games for the setting, not for the PvP (couldn't care less about that, in fact), and GW's setting is, uh, maybe not horrible in itself, but presented very poorly. Quest texts are a joke compared to WoW, I have even see spelling mistakes (never had that in WoW), and generally appear much less polished.
In addition to that I never really got bored even with the blandest FedEx quests in WoW, because the surroundings (meaning setting, visuals, presentation of quest, quest arc if present) were well done. In GW, on the other hand, I often get bored after some minutes because of random monsters "spawning" (crawling out of the sand) with no way of avoiding them because of one of my main gripes with the game: the on-a-rail environment.
This means in plain english: No falling of cliffs, no jumping, no climbing of hills. The world of GW does not really feel like a world, there are seems everywhere, towns and the surrounding area do not flow into each other but are on separate "maps" with a loading screen in between. On the other hand in WoW you basically only ever get to see a loading screen if you change to the other of the 2 continents or enter an instance (of which there are not too many, and they have to be planned in advance, so not in normal game flow). You can walk from the very north of one continent to the south and enter cities and villages in between without ever noticing the loading. This as a whole feels much more alive.
Since I play on a RP server and not a PvP world, I actually welcome meeting people in the wilderness, it just adds to the world. Only rarely have random encounters been with idiots. Most of you ignore each other, sometimes you talk, or even team up. But generally it helps strengthen the illusion of a world, since there are not only monsters outside of town.
Graphically, I think both have their strengths and weaknesses, but are generally equal and really nice to look at. I think GW overdid with the bloom (which can be disabled, I know), and I can imagine people disliking WoWs cartoony look. I also miss bump mapping and more shaders in WoW, but then, it fits with the cartoon style and works as a whole.
In retrospect I kinda regret buying GW, but I really enjoyed the beta. It is just that there was not much more for me after beta, whereas after the WoW beta I could just discover more of the nice world. I also think that the monthly fee is well spent, meaning both that I think my fun is worth the amount of money, and that I think Blizzard is adding more to the game, content and polish, and it really is noticable.
You know, and if you had paid some attention, you would have learned that UE4 is indeed in existence, they have already talked about that. Currently only Tim Sweeney doing stuff with it, but it is obviously being worked on for 2 years. And that with UE3 not yet powering any title on the shelves (that I know of). Weird, but true.
You really like to post this comment, don't you? At least the 2nd time I read it, word for word, maybe the third.
You are kinda right, though, even though I guess some of those probs come from Suse, never had those with other distros (Fedora and Debian lately), but I always had trouble and instabilities with Suse...
Thank god this was petented in the US and you and your parent clearly talked about patents in the US, because I acutally had a discussion about this aspect of patent law in Germany with my dad who holds (and defended) more than one patent, albeit in electronics and appliance design. Anyway, what I learned from that is that at least in Germany you patent a specific implementation, and not the broad claims. One pet patent of his is a special drawer for silverware in dishwashers (Miele brand btw.) at the top of the machine instead of a box in the bottom (easier to handle yadda yadda), and the point he aways makes about it is that competitors cold just have done the same, if the had configured the thing slightly different than in the description. The claim about doing a drawer at the top were basically void, and the point was about how it was designed and attached to the rest of the machine. Cleverly worded it was still no easy feat to find the holes to wriggle thru as competitor, but possible.
Just FYI though.
Ok, tried that. Went to OSDN, then to the first, then to the second bad page. Pressed Back, then again. Was on the OSDN homepage, as I expected. What was supposed to happen in your opinion?
And since you already mentioned it: adding Guarana also makes this beer not adhere to the Deitsche Reinheitsgebot (German Purity Law) for beer, which AFAIK is a requirement for selling a beverage under that name in Germany (the law limits the ingedients to hops, malt, yeast and water). So, they probably could distribute their source under some open source license, but I do not think any commercial verndor will pick this up anytime soon and sell it pre-compiled in Germany...
And for the same reasons I predict neither wins. Joe Sixpack is just not interested in either since he already can pay all the movies on his DVD player and would probably rather boycott studios who discontinued the DVD in favor of either HD-DVD or Blu Ray.
What native english speakers always seem to forget in this special case is that non-native english speakers (like me) usually have to reread the whole sentence if "should of" occured in it. If just does not make any sense to use these two words there, when you'd actually expect a verb or a verb and an auxiliary...
(Google will run on any OS)
Well, except Google Desktop Search. And Google Picasa. And Google Toolbar. And Google Earth. And Google Hello. All of which require Windows and help support Ballmer's monopoly.
Except that all those you listed are not what defines Google. The web search engine with the vast database and the page rank algorithm tied together with its ease of use defines Google in the customers and /.ers view, maybe Google Ads as well. The rest is just gaining an audience due to the attached name, because people now think it will be as easy and transparent to use as all that stuff they already know under that brand. It Just Works(tm). Apart from the idea that a lot of these Google tools could probably be ported to Linux with not too much of a hassle, or that ports are already underway...
That sounds even worse then the GEMA in Germany. IIRC from my days as a guitar player in a hardcore band (read: not many sales, not doing it professionaly) I rememeber that you could choose not to become a member of the GEMA if you saw no gain from it. But then, you either had to make your recordings public domain (since else no club had the right to play them) or negotiate with every club/DJ yourself.
This insecure position led to weird situations where we had to fill out forms with the names of all songs we were going to perform on a night for sending them in to the GEMA, because the club wanted to be on the safe side, but we had some checkbox there on the paper that said that all songs were non-GEMA-controlled...