AOL ruined yet another fine service, reminds me why I am redrumloa!

[Glaucus]

Oh boy, Red is starting to sound like one of those damned socialists! The end of the world must be near! :-D

@Red, I hear satellite radio is really big in the US, and has far better quality then both FM & Internet. Have you considered that? Personally, I'd never pay for internet radio, but digital satellite might be an option (depending on costs). My car's Alpine deck has XM radio capabilities but I've never tried it as one needs to have an American billing address to subscribe to the service :-( (and oh yeah, I also removed the antenna from my car :-D ).

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

Hey, btw, what is AOL anyway? I mean, when it first started, it was some sort of dial-up ISP, was it not? I always used a local ISP for dial-up, and now I use shaw cable. But dial-ups are quickly going the way of the dinosaurs, are they not? What does AOL offer these days? I'm surprised they're still in business!

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

Its just hit me like a brick.. In the 7 - 8 years I have been coming here, I just didnt see it. Im sure its been mentioned in the past though.. It has been. Maybe I forgot.

heh...  And remember Red's handle when watching Kubrick's the Shinning (oh, did I just give something away?!? ;-) ).

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

I haven't subjected myself to their service personally so I can't comment on that, but what Red's describing is anti-competitive. If the music streaming service as it stood didn't suit them, why buy it in the first place?

They bought it because they COULD make it into something profitable. From a capitalistic point of view, it makes perfect sense to start charging for the service, especially now that so many people are hooked on it. Sorta like how CompuServ decided to start colecting royalties for the GIF file format well after it was accepted as the standard free format of the internet and everything else. Both companies ended up pissing off their costumers for some quick cash.

Well that's the ugly side of capitalism. The good side is that the customers don't need to keep using those services. GIFs were replaced by PNG files, and the AOL service will eventually be replaced by another (hopefully better) service.

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

Wasn't GIF replaced by JPEG, then PNG came along and Amiga folks got in on the ground floor?

Offically, GIF wasn't replaced by anything. JPEG was around for quite some time as well, and was designed for photographic images. GIF, at the time, was a 256 colour bitmap with slight compression. GIF was the PC world's IFF, and I still think IFF was better. PNG was platform independent, it's just that the Graphics savvy Amiga community caught onto the superior format as quick as they caught onto the Agnus chip in '85. PNG offers better compression and higher bit rate graphics (not sure if there's a limit), and with alpha channels to boot. The fact that PNG isn't all the rage on the web boggles the mind really, but I suspect that graphics professionals use the format alot more heavily then the www developers seem to be.

  - Mike