Making the Borg look good
From Boing Boing
Car Talk dumps Real for WMP. The guys who run Car Talk on NPR have dumped RealMedia in favor of Windows Media Player, having gotten fed up with Real’s deceptive practices that try to force you into downloading the payware version of their player.
Here’s the problem. In order to hear our audio, you have to go to Real.com and download their “free” RealPlayer. But when you get to the web site, the free player is harder to find than Osama Bin Laden at night. And the site seems to do everything it possibly can to get you to “buy” a player instead. You have to work very hard to get the free player. And we think that stinks. And get this. It stinks so much that it even makes Microsoft look good by comparison. That’s something, huh?
I completely agree, Real Player makes it nearly impossible to find the free version – something Microsoft gives away – and, last time I checked, you have to be careful you don’t sign up for their for-pay audio feeds, something they also make it hard to aviod doing. Sleazy, sleazy, sleazy.