:) I haven't read any of his other writings. It may be that he just likes to put things down, but what he says about RealNetworks products is pretty-much spot-on... if a little over dramatised.
I dislike secret file formats. It makes life too difficult for us users when the company goes broke or is bought out by another company or just changes their format for no good reason. Suddenly a heap of content becomes difficult or impossible to use. I still have a lot of written documents in formats that can't be read by any modern word processors. The old computers I used are dead or stored away. The documents are effectively lost. RealNetworks are doing the same to video and audio content. A few years down the track all the content previously in their formats will be locked up and almost totally inaccessible. This is the best argument for open standards... but social amnesia is so prevalent we will keep shooting ourselves in the foot, over and over again.
Not to be too pessimistic though, things have been looking up lately with the rise of the opensource movement, we may finally beat such shortsightedness.
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branchandroot
real
Date: 2003-07-16 06:00 am (UTC)wow realy......I don't think he likes real anything...lol
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 05:43 pm (UTC)I haven't read any of his other writings. It may be that he just likes to put things down, but what he says about RealNetworks products is pretty-much spot-on... if a little over dramatised.
I dislike secret file formats. It makes life too difficult for us users when the company goes broke or is bought out by another company or just changes their format for no good reason. Suddenly a heap of content becomes difficult or impossible to use. I still have a lot of written documents in formats that can't be read by any modern word processors. The old computers I used are dead or stored away. The documents are effectively lost. RealNetworks are doing the same to video and audio content. A few years down the track all the content previously in their formats will be locked up and almost totally inaccessible. This is the best argument for open standards... but social amnesia is so prevalent we will keep shooting ourselves in the foot, over and over again.
Not to be too pessimistic though, things have been looking up lately with the rise of the opensource movement, we may finally beat such shortsightedness.