] Pah. imho, realplayer sucks bigtime. Sure, it compresses quite nice and all, ] the image quality is nice so the base product is really great, but oh man, ] if you install it it tries to integrate with your system in every possible Funny that you mention this. Because the integration within the system is exactly what Microsoft also does with its applications like IE and media player. And they drive this integration much and much further. After all, they do have the source of the windows kernel to their availability. And currently they are witholding essential XP low-level programming information from real-software so that they can not make their streaming software integrate with XP.
Note that I would have less objections against IE and mediaplayer domination if those applications would also be available for operating systems that really compete with microsoft. Like Linux. Or Palm OS. Or Psion/symbian. But they are not. And they will never be. While realplayer, netscape, opera and many other non-microsoft internet client tools are available for non-microsoft platforms. In this way, microsoft can leverage its desktop dominance to eventually gain a dominance into other markets via the internet. These days already many websites use so many microsoft specific extensions that they are hardly usable with non-microsoft browsers. And thus also with non-microsoft PDAs etc. Do you now understand my point? Kind regards, Alex Wulms -- Visit The MSX Plaza (http://www.inter.nl.net/users/A.P.Wulms) for info on XelaSoft, Merlasoft, Quadrivium, SD-Snatcher on fMSX, the MSX Hardware list, XSA Disk images, documentation, Japanese MSX news from Ikeda and lots more. -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
