I'm also pissed at Amazon for requiring RealPlayer
I hadn't listened to the excerpts of a CD on Amazon in a long time, but I had the occasion to last Friday, and I was unhappy to find out that Amazon switched away from its self-contained music-sampling system (maybe it was Windows Media, but I didn't have to do anything to make it work, so I have no idea, really) to something else entirely. Something else that required the download of RealPlayer.
Now I haven't actually WANTED to have anything to do with RealPlayer since, probably, 2001, and I really don't need another proprietary program f'ing up my system and constantly trying to sell me crap that I have no intention whatsoever of buying. I couldn't believe RealPlayer and RealAudio were even still around.
The installer was long and complicated, and once it asked me for my name, e-mail address, etc., I bailed out of it. All I need is more spam and another f'ing conglomerate getting its mitts on my personal information.
Luckily that was enough to get the minute-30 song excerpts flowing from Amazon, but sheesh, I hope somebody made a lot of money in this transaction that kind-of, sort-of screws up Amazon's ability to not piss me off.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
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Did the advent of podcasting render Real Audio obsolete? All I remember from using RealPlayer in the early 2000s is the "signal" dropping all the time due to a lack of bandwidth.