The only reason they agreed to this is that they know users won't use Napster if they have to pay, not because they think the micro-payment business model is viable.
This model will kill Napster and there is no risk for them, Napster takes all the risk, pretty sweet deal. Any backward-thinking record exec would see this and get behind this agreement full tilt.
An open-source micro kernel that can load drivers written for WIN32 would no doubt be a wonderful thing and circumvent the main hassle running 'alternative' desktop OSes, hardware support. Leveraging the driver support for WIN32 is the only meaningful reason to pursue a project like this in my view. WIN32 drivers essentially the same as user mode Dlls but are given a.sys extension. This means you are talking about loading WIN32 PE files and executing them. Optimized GDI drivers, D3D/OpenGL, DirectSound etc... all tie into the OS differently, i.e DirectX is COM based and OpenGL uses a cleaner C interface with 2nd level Dll dependency. GDI drivers are geared to using the hardware blitter for the Windows desktop and apps like Word... Each driver model has its own development story and over time has invariably changed. This project (or hoax) stands no chance, I doubt MS could do this project as specified! I would be interested in a project to build a Linux desktop that could efficiently use WIN32 GDI/OpenGL drivers. That alone is a project so huge I cannot imagine where to begin.
I have had to do some research for work on digital audio and the best 16 channel (32 with a sister board) part I could find was at http://www.frontierdesign.com. The lack of Linux support with this kind of (very sweet) high-end hardware is frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
http://robots.cnn.com/ works fine, seems they have learned a thing or two about load balancing at CNN.
The only reason they agreed to this is that they know users won't use Napster if they have to pay, not because they think the micro-payment business model is viable. This model will kill Napster and there is no risk for them, Napster takes all the risk, pretty sweet deal. Any backward-thinking record exec would see this and get behind this agreement full tilt.
An open-source micro kernel that can load drivers written for WIN32 would no doubt be a wonderful thing and circumvent the main hassle running 'alternative' desktop OSes, hardware support. Leveraging the driver support for WIN32 is the only meaningful reason to pursue a project like this in my view. WIN32 drivers essentially the same as user mode Dlls but are given a .sys extension. This means you are talking about loading WIN32 PE files and executing them. Optimized GDI drivers, D3D/OpenGL, DirectSound etc... all tie into the OS differently, i.e DirectX is COM based and OpenGL uses a cleaner C interface with 2nd level Dll dependency. GDI drivers are geared to using the hardware blitter for the Windows desktop and apps like Word... Each driver model has its own development story and over time has invariably changed. This project (or hoax) stands no chance, I doubt MS could do this project as specified! I would be interested in a project to build a Linux desktop that could efficiently use WIN32 GDI/OpenGL drivers. That alone is a project so huge I cannot imagine where to begin.
I have had to do some research for work on digital audio and the best 16 channel (32 with a sister board) part I could find was at http://www.frontierdesign.com. The lack of Linux support with this kind of (very sweet) high-end hardware is frustrating.