You don't speak for me. I didn't remove Office 2000 from my Linux box until well after OOo 2.0 (well, beta 1.9.x builds at the time) became usable and stable (interestingly enough, I found Microsoft Office ran faster under wine than natively under Windows). If Microsoft were to release M$ Office for Linux, and not DRM it to death with Activation and not try to vendor-lock users to their formats, I would probably STILL buy it even though I like Open Office a LOT. I know VBA and the IDE for VBA is very similar to Visual Studio in terms of use and code completion. That right there is a major advantage M$ Office has over OOo. I've only done very small macros in OOo because I haven't had the time to RTFM and the lack of code completion and with OOo's site having been down when I wanted/Needed to create some macros for data manipulation I had to go to a Windows box and M$ Excel to do the work instead.
I dislike Microsoft's business practices, their embracing of DRM, and their current "every customer is a crook" philosophy, but I don't drink OSS-flavoured kool aid. When Microsoft does something right, or when they offer a good product, I'm quick to look into it as a solution for either my company or for clients. Linux/BSD/OOo.org/other OSS is not always the best solution for every person/business in every situation. Ideally at least the content|document|data will be open and not emcumbered by vendor lock or DRM but unfortunately that is not always avoidable.
It's more than that. It's (pick one or more of the following):
( ) Microsoft's meeting antitrust settlement requirements by not only providing mechanisms to change the defaults, but actually implementing the GUI to make it possible for non-geeks to do so
( ) Political spin/marketing bragging about how they're good guys when in reality they were forced to do this
( ) Unlike Google, known for making efforts to "do no evil" Microsoft is known primarily for doing evil and then not apologising afterward. Making their meeting DoJ requirements look like new value-added features is great marketing. "Hey we let you change small aspects of your desktop, new in Vista. Upgrade your PC today!"
( ) Microsoft's wanting to avoid further extensions of antitrust settlements
( ) Ballmer didn't feel like throwing any chairs yesterday (I kid, I kid)
Previously if you wanted to change some of these settings it was digging through the registry (a frightning prospect for Mr. Old School businessman who can barely master Hotmail or for Joe Sixpack) or knowing about and downloading xteq's xsetup (or for some settings, TweakUI from Microsoft Powertoys)
In reality, ATI does almost worse than nothing to support Gatos development.
Bite your tongue! If you check out the Gatos project web site, you'll note that ATI actually sent the Gatos folks a couple of video cards. How dare you say ATI doesn't care about supporting a growing market segment?;)
There are huge problems with Intel's video chipsets:
- Every Intel video solution I've seen uses solely 'shared memory' - e.g., your system's main memory rather than dedicated RAM
- Intel likes to offload everything to the CPU
- Performance is not up to par compared to Nvidia, ATI, or even S3.
The software support for Intel's solution is VERY good, but until the above drawbacks are addressed, I'll choose Nvidia's free/proprietary solution over Intel's Free/Free solution.
if they are not blocked from releasing their specs due to third party IP inside.
As far as that line from ATI is concerned (the "third party IP" claim) it is BULLSHIT. There is nothing proprietary about "to do foo, send value (n) to register fc70" that can reasonably violate any NDA, violate any copyright or patent, or give an edge to any competitor. ATI is just a bunch of megalomaniac pricks, a trait they inherited when they purchased the rotting carcass of Diamond Multimedia, which had a similar elitist attitude toward their customers, ESPECIALLY Linux users.
No, it's not. The only time I ever need to compile a kernel on SuSE is if I need a monolithic kernel with every possible optimization turned on, or if I want a bleeding-edge kernel.
How is documenting "register F7C0 does foo" going to reveal how the chip is actually architected?
How is not documenting the registers going to prevent NVidia from putting an ATI chip under an electron microscope to analyze their circuits?
Face it. If you're one chip fab competing against another one, documenting the externally-exposed registers for programmers is NOT going to deter your competitors in the slightest, nor is releasing binary-only drivers. Remember, decompiling code for reverse engineering IS legal (just don't copy & paste the code , recompile, and call it your own, that's copyright infringement) and decompilers are readily available, so there is NO advantage ATI has over Nvidia, or NVidia has over ATI by not open sourcing drivers.
The only thing that they are doing is alienating potential customers and slowing down the progression of open source. NVidia does have an advantage because while ATI's drivers totally suck, NVidia's drivers actually work so most of us accept NVidia's drivers. Of course, if I were wanting to upgrade from xorg 6.9 to 7.1 right now, I'd be pissing and moaning about binary-only releases right now (the fact that I am STILL running a piece of shit ATI card now is immaterial ATM).
You're being sarcastic now, but what happens if/when you dump (OS X|Windows) for Linux or BSD? Or, when the day arrives when you come to realize (much like Philip J. Fry did) that the Dave Matthews Band doesn't rock, and decide to exercise your right of first sale and sell (as in transfer ownership) your property (the music you bought) to another person? Oops, guess what? You don't actually own anything to transfer now.
Or, what happens if/when Apple goes belly-up or is forced by the music mafia (RIAA) to shut down iTunes and quit the music business? Good-bye music collection, so sad, too bad. You'll be pissing and moaning over DRM then.
Granted those are hypothetical scenarios, but much like Divx, it can definitely happen, only this time around everyone with a clue will be continually saying "told ya so" like a bunch of nine-year-olds.
(I love how both numbers are exagerated in opposite directions)
Actually although the $20 figure is a work of fiction (exluding double albums) the $.10 figure all too often very close to reality - some artists don't even get that much.
Look at it this way: if your garage band hits it big with a hit or two, and you grab the first offer from one of the big labels (or affiliate so-called independent labels) you'll get a standard contract. You will get an "advance" which is really written up as a loan against future earnings, a loan on which you pay interest. Accounting and administrative fees for that advance are charged against your future "profits." The cost of studio time, session musicians, backing singers, engineering and producing your album, mastering, artwork, production, promotion, payola (which is still very much the norm), and of course the now-not-applicable "breakage loss" are all charged back against your future profits.
Your band's cut is maybe $.60, but your agent/manager is going to get 10% or more right off the top. The rest of it gets split four ways among your band's members. Do you see that $.60? Hold on, the album is running a loss and they haven't profited on your record yet! Everyone who has their hands in the pot is taking a cut well before the band ever gets that $.60/unit so thanks to inflated fees for studio time, engineering, artwork, production costs, etc. AND creative accounting, you net maybe ten thousand on your hit single. But guess what? Your band is now running a loss due to breakage, etc. that your standard record contract charges against your band's profits, so now it's gruelling tour time. Play anywhere from one to three gigs a night in two different towns, working off your debt to the record company.
There are plenty of accounts on this, some online, some in books you can pick up at Borders or Barnes & Noble, and some anecdotal accounts from acts who were absolutely HUGE in the '60s, '70s, and '80s who are struggling today as house painters, real estate agents, and so forth, and as you're listening to their albums and looking over billboard charts over the years, you'd be absolutely shocked to learn how badly some of those acts are doing, and that doesn't even take into account the acts who didn't get totally fucked over by the labels and blew their money on coke and booze.
There's no way it uses 7,000 laptop batteries. More likely, it uses 7000 of the AA-or-so size lithium cells that most laptop battery packs are comprised of.
OH lord even $35K sportscars will do 165mph or so, and even pedestrian cars like the R^HMustang will do 0-60 in under 5 seconds now, and for some sub$100K cars, all that's needed to get 0-60 to 3.5 seconds or so is changing the gear ratio, and sacrificing a little on the top end but you'll still be going well above the 130mph that car will do.
I'm sure someone will argue that "you can't drive even 130mph legally in the US" but that's besides the point.
If the batteries are damaged, how does one shut them down? Once you short a lithium battery there is no stopping the reaction - no practical way, anyhow. Almost 7,000 of them in a confined space will lead to an interesting chain reaction if just one in that cluster gets damaged. It'd be a fun fire to watch at night though, especially if firefighters douse the burning vehicle with water.
As much as I dislike NiMH due to their rapid self-discharge rate, they look like a safer bet for automobiles.
Part of what is different about this is that they are using over 6,831 laptop type lithium-ion batteries. They are claiming the range is about 250 miles.
Now THAT's a car that'll hit the market with a bang! Not only do you have the instant response of electric motors and full torque from a dead stop, but you will also get rocket assist when you put a heavy load on the Li-ion batteries!
I did nothing of the sort. Sorry, but you're apparantly wearing Microsoft Fanboy-brand glasses if you don't see this as anything spin.
Sure, you could change it in the past via registry hacks or third-party utilities like xteq's xsetup (for the "? keyword" in the location bar feature) but to announce that they are going to "allow" system builders and users to set the search engine to their preference reeks of political anti-antitrust spin, because to not allow that would be leveraging a legal monopoly in one market to create or enforce one in another market.
Now, if Microsoft were to allow EASY changing of themes or even changing of desktop environments (my dream personal desktop platform would be (Windows + KDE/kwin + bash) (minus annoying activation crap)) or Microsoft were to drop the "genuine advantage (re-activate Windows every time you download an update or utility)" crap then THAT would be groundbreaking news.
Most of us are begging MPAA members to combat "piracy" by embracing technology. By embracing bittorrent, abandoning DRM and pricing products fairly. If they were to do this, they would be doing exactly that. You don't like this sort of compromise WHY, exectly?
"If a manufacturer wants to set competing search services... by default, they can do so," Smith said in a speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington public policy institute.
They're allowing OEM builders and end users to change some basic settings on their own computers? Oh my, how thoughtful of Microsoft! What's next, "allowing" system builders and users to install competitors' web browsers and office suites? "Allowing" system builders and users to change their wallpaper?
I'm sorry, I just don't see anything groundbreaking in this "news." I read it more as spin on the fact that if they don't allow such settings to be changed, they'll find themselves in the antitrust hot seat again.
The credits tell you to share bootlegs. They are explicitly granting permission. If there is a legal problem with that, let the holders of the copyright to This Island Earth and other lampooned works duke it out with the MSTK producers, THEY'RE the ones who explicitly granted the license in the credits.:D
WalMart offers many movies at $4.50 each (I just picked up Lethal Weapon 2 and 4 for $4.50 each last week). The studios need to do at least that well and post them as ISO images in order to make this worthwhile (Hello. MPAA? BitTorrent is the ideal mechanism to make distribution cheap, just charge for the "subscription" to the password for the tracker).
There are a LOT of old movies (and even freely-available stuff we're encouraged by the producers to bootleg, e.g., all the MST3K episodes) I'd buy from a service such as this. Lots of the old sci-fi movies from the '50s I've never seen, stuff that WLVI 56 in Boston used to air in their saturday "Creature double feature" run in the late 70s/early 80s (you know, stuff like Godzilla, Gamera, etc.), lots of dead TV shows that aren't in sydnication (I'd pay a few dollars for all the episodes of, say, Good Grief, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Alf, Tracy Ullman, ALL the muppet show episodes, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, etc. - dig up a LOT of stuff that Generation X caught the tail end of or missed out completely on). If you want to plug commercials in to subsidize the "cost" of distribution (e.g., to offer it at such a cheap price) then go right ahead- it's a fair tradeoff and I'll sit through the commercials to get legal downloads of stuff which isn't "legally" otherwise available. In other words, make it cheap enough, I'll buy lots of shows that aren't worth paying full price on a DVD on, but would be fun to watch if for no other reason to figure out exactly why I liked the show when I was 10 yrs old to begin with.:D
Will this stuff get pirated? Inevitably, yes, however if you sell, say, 1,000 units of each season of, say, the Ed Sullivan show, and the content would otherwise be rotting away in a vault somewhere, what's the harm? Hell, you'll get a viral marketing effect. Today's Jr. High kids might download Ed Sullivan and rediscover the Beatles, the Doors, Elvis, and a bunch of other old acts that have a cult following but doesn't otherwise attract new customers. Heck, I'd pay $15 for the Top of the Pops episode where Pink Floyd made an appearance. You're a lot better off selling SOME content, even knowing it's going to be pirated, than to make zero sales on it.
In other words, it's a great idea and not only should you jump on it, but take the maximum advantage you can by not being so closed-fisted and short-sighted. You may be surprised at what opening up your vaults to what the customers want may lead to increased revenues, rather than being so closed-fisted that if you can't lock it down with DRM every step of the way, you kill off any customer interest. HD-DVD is stillborn, don't do the same with this idea.
XBox? CE.
Smartphone? CE.
ECM/BCM units in cars? CE.
GPS in your automotive navigation system? CE.
Windows Mobile? CE.
Your uber-shiny computerized (for the love of god, WHY?) refrigerator? CE.
CE is far from dead, it's just renamed depending on the application. WinCE is very much alive.
Brian: (points at the panic room) Peter, what is that? Peter: Well, I got the idea to build a panic room after I saw that movie The Butterfly Effect. I thought, wow, this is terrible. I wish I could escape to a place where this movie couldn't find me.
(Sorry, it had to be posted, and FWIW I actually like that movie)
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Funny, the search engine setting isn't there on the Windows 2000 I've seen. Is it on yours?
Could you please name any product which offers better online help than Microsoft's?
Let's ignore the annoying clippy/office assistant, he doesn't count.
You don't speak for me. I didn't remove Office 2000 from my Linux box until well after OOo 2.0 (well, beta 1.9.x builds at the time) became usable and stable (interestingly enough, I found Microsoft Office ran faster under wine than natively under Windows). If Microsoft were to release M$ Office for Linux, and not DRM it to death with Activation and not try to vendor-lock users to their formats, I would probably STILL buy it even though I like Open Office a LOT. I know VBA and the IDE for VBA is very similar to Visual Studio in terms of use and code completion. That right there is a major advantage M$ Office has over OOo. I've only done very small macros in OOo because I haven't had the time to RTFM and the lack of code completion and with OOo's site having been down when I wanted/Needed to create some macros for data manipulation I had to go to a Windows box and M$ Excel to do the work instead.
I dislike Microsoft's business practices, their embracing of DRM, and their current "every customer is a crook" philosophy, but I don't drink OSS-flavoured kool aid. When Microsoft does something right, or when they offer a good product, I'm quick to look into it as a solution for either my company or for clients. Linux/BSD/OOo.org/other OSS is not always the best solution for every person/business in every situation. Ideally at least the content|document|data will be open and not emcumbered by vendor lock or DRM but unfortunately that is not always avoidable.
It's more than that. It's (pick one or more of the following):
( ) Microsoft's meeting antitrust settlement requirements by not only providing mechanisms to change the defaults, but actually implementing the GUI to make it possible for non-geeks to do so
( ) Political spin/marketing bragging about how they're good guys when in reality they were forced to do this
( ) Unlike Google, known for making efforts to "do no evil" Microsoft is known primarily for doing evil and then not apologising afterward. Making their meeting DoJ requirements look like new value-added features is great marketing. "Hey we let you change small aspects of your desktop, new in Vista. Upgrade your PC today!"
( ) Microsoft's wanting to avoid further extensions of antitrust settlements
( ) Ballmer didn't feel like throwing any chairs yesterday (I kid, I kid)
Previously if you wanted to change some of these settings it was digging through the registry (a frightning prospect for Mr. Old School businessman who can barely master Hotmail or for Joe Sixpack) or knowing about and downloading xteq's xsetup (or for some settings, TweakUI from Microsoft Powertoys)
The hobbiest and the artist would love to get their hands on quad-core processors for things like 3D rendering, video transcoding, and so forth.
Bite your tongue! If you check out the Gatos project web site, you'll note that ATI actually sent the Gatos folks a couple of video cards. How dare you say ATI doesn't care about supporting a growing market segment?
There are huge problems with Intel's video chipsets:
- Every Intel video solution I've seen uses solely 'shared memory' - e.g., your system's main memory rather than dedicated RAM
- Intel likes to offload everything to the CPU
- Performance is not up to par compared to Nvidia, ATI, or even S3.
The software support for Intel's solution is VERY good, but until the above drawbacks are addressed, I'll choose Nvidia's free/proprietary solution over Intel's Free/Free solution.
As far as that line from ATI is concerned (the "third party IP" claim) it is BULLSHIT. There is nothing proprietary about "to do foo, send value (n) to register fc70" that can reasonably violate any NDA, violate any copyright or patent, or give an edge to any competitor. ATI is just a bunch of megalomaniac pricks, a trait they inherited when they purchased the rotting carcass of Diamond Multimedia, which had a similar elitist attitude toward their customers, ESPECIALLY Linux users.
No, it's not. The only time I ever need to compile a kernel on SuSE is if I need a monolithic kernel with every possible optimization turned on, or if I want a bleeding-edge kernel.
How is documenting "register F7C0 does foo" going to reveal how the chip is actually architected?
How is not documenting the registers going to prevent NVidia from putting an ATI chip under an electron microscope to analyze their circuits?
Face it. If you're one chip fab competing against another one, documenting the externally-exposed registers for programmers is NOT going to deter your competitors in the slightest, nor is releasing binary-only drivers. Remember, decompiling code for reverse engineering IS legal (just don't copy & paste the code , recompile, and call it your own, that's copyright infringement) and decompilers are readily available, so there is NO advantage ATI has over Nvidia, or NVidia has over ATI by not open sourcing drivers.
The only thing that they are doing is alienating potential customers and slowing down the progression of open source. NVidia does have an advantage because while ATI's drivers totally suck, NVidia's drivers actually work so most of us accept NVidia's drivers. Of course, if I were wanting to upgrade from xorg 6.9 to 7.1 right now, I'd be pissing and moaning about binary-only releases right now (the fact that I am STILL running a piece of shit ATI card now is immaterial ATM).
You're being sarcastic now, but what happens if/when you dump (OS X|Windows) for Linux or BSD? Or, when the day arrives when you come to realize (much like Philip J. Fry did) that the Dave Matthews Band doesn't rock, and decide to exercise your right of first sale and sell (as in transfer ownership) your property (the music you bought) to another person? Oops, guess what? You don't actually own anything to transfer now.
Or, what happens if/when Apple goes belly-up or is forced by the music mafia (RIAA) to shut down iTunes and quit the music business? Good-bye music collection, so sad, too bad. You'll be pissing and moaning over DRM then.
Granted those are hypothetical scenarios, but much like Divx, it can definitely happen, only this time around everyone with a clue will be continually saying "told ya so" like a bunch of nine-year-olds.
Actually although the $20 figure is a work of fiction (exluding double albums) the $.10 figure all too often very close to reality - some artists don't even get that much.
Look at it this way: if your garage band hits it big with a hit or two, and you grab the first offer from one of the big labels (or affiliate so-called independent labels) you'll get a standard contract. You will get an "advance" which is really written up as a loan against future earnings, a loan on which you pay interest. Accounting and administrative fees for that advance are charged against your future "profits." The cost of studio time, session musicians, backing singers, engineering and producing your album, mastering, artwork, production, promotion, payola (which is still very much the norm), and of course the now-not-applicable "breakage loss" are all charged back against your future profits.
Your band's cut is maybe $.60, but your agent/manager is going to get 10% or more right off the top. The rest of it gets split four ways among your band's members. Do you see that $.60? Hold on, the album is running a loss and they haven't profited on your record yet! Everyone who has their hands in the pot is taking a cut well before the band ever gets that $.60/unit so thanks to inflated fees for studio time, engineering, artwork, production costs, etc. AND creative accounting, you net maybe ten thousand on your hit single. But guess what? Your band is now running a loss due to breakage, etc. that your standard record contract charges against your band's profits, so now it's gruelling tour time. Play anywhere from one to three gigs a night in two different towns, working off your debt to the record company.
There are plenty of accounts on this, some online, some in books you can pick up at Borders or Barnes & Noble, and some anecdotal accounts from acts who were absolutely HUGE in the '60s, '70s, and '80s who are struggling today as house painters, real estate agents, and so forth, and as you're listening to their albums and looking over billboard charts over the years, you'd be absolutely shocked to learn how badly some of those acts are doing, and that doesn't even take into account the acts who didn't get totally fucked over by the labels and blew their money on coke and booze.
There's no way it uses 7,000 laptop batteries. More likely, it uses 7000 of the AA-or-so size lithium cells that most laptop battery packs are comprised of.
OH lord even $35K sportscars will do 165mph or so, and even pedestrian cars like the R^HMustang will do 0-60 in under 5 seconds now, and for some sub$100K cars, all that's needed to get 0-60 to 3.5 seconds or so is changing the gear ratio, and sacrificing a little on the top end but you'll still be going well above the 130mph that car will do.
I'm sure someone will argue that "you can't drive even 130mph legally in the US" but that's besides the point.
If the batteries are damaged, how does one shut them down? Once you short a lithium battery there is no stopping the reaction - no practical way, anyhow. Almost 7,000 of them in a confined space will lead to an interesting chain reaction if just one in that cluster gets damaged. It'd be a fun fire to watch at night though, especially if firefighters douse the burning vehicle with water.
As much as I dislike NiMH due to their rapid self-discharge rate, they look like a safer bet for automobiles.
Now THAT's a car that'll hit the market with a bang! Not only do you have the instant response of electric motors and full torque from a dead stop, but you will also get rocket assist when you put a heavy load on the Li-ion batteries!
I did nothing of the sort. Sorry, but you're apparantly wearing Microsoft Fanboy-brand glasses if you don't see this as anything spin.
Sure, you could change it in the past via registry hacks or third-party utilities like xteq's xsetup (for the "? keyword" in the location bar feature) but to announce that they are going to "allow" system builders and users to set the search engine to their preference reeks of political anti-antitrust spin, because to not allow that would be leveraging a legal monopoly in one market to create or enforce one in another market.
Now, if Microsoft were to allow EASY changing of themes or even changing of desktop environments (my dream personal desktop platform would be (Windows + KDE/kwin + bash) (minus annoying activation crap)) or Microsoft were to drop the "genuine advantage (re-activate Windows every time you download an update or utility)" crap then THAT would be groundbreaking news.
Now THAT's funny!
(wait a second, wasn't the source code "protected" by Windows security? Oops!)
Most of us are begging MPAA members to combat "piracy" by embracing technology. By embracing bittorrent, abandoning DRM and pricing products fairly. If they were to do this, they would be doing exactly that. You don't like this sort of compromise WHY, exectly?
They're allowing OEM builders and end users to change some basic settings on their own computers? Oh my, how thoughtful of Microsoft! What's next, "allowing" system builders and users to install competitors' web browsers and office suites? "Allowing" system builders and users to change their wallpaper?
I'm sorry, I just don't see anything groundbreaking in this "news." I read it more as spin on the fact that if they don't allow such settings to be changed, they'll find themselves in the antitrust hot seat again.
Download it, share it, etc.
:D
The credits tell you to share bootlegs. They are explicitly granting permission. If there is a legal problem with that, let the holders of the copyright to This Island Earth and other lampooned works duke it out with the MSTK producers, THEY'RE the ones who explicitly granted the license in the credits.
WalMart offers many movies at $4.50 each (I just picked up Lethal Weapon 2 and 4 for $4.50 each last week). The studios need to do at least that well and post them as ISO images in order to make this worthwhile (Hello. MPAA? BitTorrent is the ideal mechanism to make distribution cheap, just charge for the "subscription" to the password for the tracker).
:D
There are a LOT of old movies (and even freely-available stuff we're encouraged by the producers to bootleg, e.g., all the MST3K episodes) I'd buy from a service such as this. Lots of the old sci-fi movies from the '50s I've never seen, stuff that WLVI 56 in Boston used to air in their saturday "Creature double feature" run in the late 70s/early 80s (you know, stuff like Godzilla, Gamera, etc.), lots of dead TV shows that aren't in sydnication (I'd pay a few dollars for all the episodes of, say, Good Grief, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Alf, Tracy Ullman, ALL the muppet show episodes, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, etc. - dig up a LOT of stuff that Generation X caught the tail end of or missed out completely on). If you want to plug commercials in to subsidize the "cost" of distribution (e.g., to offer it at such a cheap price) then go right ahead- it's a fair tradeoff and I'll sit through the commercials to get legal downloads of stuff which isn't "legally" otherwise available. In other words, make it cheap enough, I'll buy lots of shows that aren't worth paying full price on a DVD on, but would be fun to watch if for no other reason to figure out exactly why I liked the show when I was 10 yrs old to begin with.
Will this stuff get pirated? Inevitably, yes, however if you sell, say, 1,000 units of each season of, say, the Ed Sullivan show, and the content would otherwise be rotting away in a vault somewhere, what's the harm? Hell, you'll get a viral marketing effect. Today's Jr. High kids might download Ed Sullivan and rediscover the Beatles, the Doors, Elvis, and a bunch of other old acts that have a cult following but doesn't otherwise attract new customers. Heck, I'd pay $15 for the Top of the Pops episode where Pink Floyd made an appearance. You're a lot better off selling SOME content, even knowing it's going to be pirated, than to make zero sales on it.
In other words, it's a great idea and not only should you jump on it, but take the maximum advantage you can by not being so closed-fisted and short-sighted. You may be surprised at what opening up your vaults to what the customers want may lead to increased revenues, rather than being so closed-fisted that if you can't lock it down with DRM every step of the way, you kill off any customer interest. HD-DVD is stillborn, don't do the same with this idea.
CE is dead?
XBox? CE.
Smartphone? CE.
ECM/BCM units in cars? CE.
GPS in your automotive navigation system? CE.
Windows Mobile? CE.
Your uber-shiny computerized (for the love of god, WHY?) refrigerator? CE.
CE is far from dead, it's just renamed depending on the application. WinCE is very much alive.
Opera 9 is not in beta, but isn't it bleeding-edge where Opera is concerned, or have they already released previews of 9.x or 10.0?
Brian: (points at the panic room) Peter, what is that?
Peter: Well, I got the idea to build a panic room after I saw that movie The Butterfly Effect. I thought, wow, this is terrible. I wish I could escape to a place where this movie couldn't find me.
(Sorry, it had to be posted, and FWIW I actually like that movie)