Was it worth it?

Thinking of Vista?

Some interesting reading regarding the potential cost of Vista DRM to both the industry and consumers.

The ever increasing hold that the content providers are having over the IT industry is scary. Give it a few years and don't expect to own any media. Renting is the best you'll get.

Thankfully, there are lots of folks along the lines of DVD Jon who are likely to see this sort of restriction as the next big challenge.

WMP 11

I posted this on the MS newsgroups, but everyone ignored it, so I thought I'd give everyone a second chance to ignore it here:

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Been playing with WMP11 on XP for a while and now onto Vista RTM:

1) No support for multiple audio streams in an AVI, it just plays them all
at once
2) No VOB support, have to rename as mpg and hope for the best
3) Can't define your own file extensions for the library, .flac, .ogg, etc.
(Luckily there's WMPTSE and it works on Vista)
4) No support for hardware DD 5.1 decoding (e.g. Creative X-Fi). Still need
to use something like AC3Filter.
5) No Aspect Ratio adjustment
6) Timeline slider bar is too narrow
7) No support for RIFF tags in AVI files. Tagging has been missing from
video for far too long (wmv excluded) and this would have been a good
opportunity to get some support going for it.
8) Codec support is also poor. FLAC being unsupported out of the box is one
thing, pretending it doesn't exist and just saying it can't play the file is
abysmal. Surely it wouldn't have been that difficult to provide a link to a
page with some suggestions on what to do about any codecs that Microsoft
can't supply? Yes, I know there's Google, but that's not really the point.
9) Still doesn't appear to be any form of codec manager. Codecs are absolute
hell, even if you've got some idea what your doing. Just something that
allows you to say (for example) XVID and DIVX FourCC files should use
c:\xvid\xvid.ax

There are other things, but these are my biggies.

It really does seem as though all the effort has gone into DRM and making
the interface as unintuitive as possible rather than actually adding new,
useful features. Winamp still beats WMP into a cocked hat for functionality.
I really, really want to use WMP as I vastly prefer the all in one interface
rather than Winamp's multiple windows, but the functionality simply isn't
there. VLC also has much better features and will play almost anything
(terrible interface and no media library though).

I know it's a Microsoft product and it's geared towards Windows Media and
keeping the RIAA and MPAA happy, but would it have been that difficult to
spend some time on features rather just interfaces to online music stores?
Not that I ever buy music online and never will until they are at least FLAC
quality and with no DRM (I know, I know, it's never going to happen...)

Cool gadget

Given my new found interest in running I bought myself a Garmin Forerunner 301 . Standard me thing really, got a new hobby, need new toy to make it more fun.

If you do any sort of regular running or cycling, get one.
Pulse rate, GPS, view your route in Google Earth and more stats than you can shake a stick at it.

Here's where I went the other day (Google Earth required):

Download episode.kml

Buy, buy, buy (using the link above of course :-) ) you won't regret it.

Got Linux... Now What?

I've been thinking for a while that I should get into Linux; after all everyone's been talking about it for ages now :-)

So, a new Microsoft Virtual PC, Suse 9.2 and away we go. Pretty simple install and now I've a new OS to play with. Question is, what the hell do I do with it?

OK, so free software, free OS, etc, etc, but I can't for the life of me think what I actually want it for.
Should I start using it for geek value? I already work in IT so do I really need anymore tech credibility (suppose you'd have to ask my work colleagues about that really...)?

I've got MSDN Universal, so all the usual Office type stuff is covered. Most things I want to do has free and/or shareware versions that get the job done.

So, please tell me why I should move to Linux.