One minor annoyance with Windows Media Player is that it assumes I don't own any of my music.  I usually use WinAmp but thought I'd see how well WMP11 Beta 2 was coming along and I noticed that in the List pane of Now Playing, when you hover your mouse over the blue arrow in the top-right it offers up a "Buy" button.  You know, for when you want to rebuy the same song over and over and over and over.

I already own the song, I do not wish to see a stupid "Buy" button cluttering up the UI.

One of the software projects I work on involves printing color-coded, barcoded labels.  Yes, exactly, the height of fun.  Often I need to validate that a code change I just made hasn't completely messed up the rendering engine.  Because resolution is a huge issue in things like barcodes I need to actually print through a printer driver vs. just doing a screen preview.  Being a good recycling citizen I hate wasting paper, hence where Adobe's Acrobat Distiller and my cheap ass nature come into the picture.  I like the concept of Distiller, I don't like paying for it.

So, I took a bunch of freely available tools, namely GhostScript, RedMon, and a Xerox DocuColor40 printer driver and rolled them into a simple NSIS install to create a Distiller Knock-Off.  I did have to write a small Win32 Delphi application to do a little file management between RedMon and GhostScript but all it really does is shuffle files between the temp folder.  I picked a DocuColor40 simply because I wanted the option to print to a 11x17 sheet of paper and I needed a PostScript driver.

You can get it here: Distiller-KO

I've been watching the EU's crusade against Microsoft over the last year and each new development makes me shake my head more.  The news that Adobe and Symantec have officially whined to Nellie Kroes, the EU competition commissioner, has propelled the whole issue into some kind of bizzaro fantasy land.

The issue already had one arm in the straight-jacket when Nellie Kroes accused Microsoft of engaging in a smear campaign to cast her in a negative light.  She was already doing that by herself as she displayed her tenuous grasp on the software industry and the actual concept of a free market.  At one time the EU Competition Commission had a few valid points but as time has gone on the entire issue has turned into a pissing match with the EU not wanting to lose any political face by backing down.

The news of Adobe and Symantic lodging official concerns to the EU takes the cake though.  Their big concern is that their business will be negatively impacted by Microsoft bundling their products and at one time I would have bought into that argument.  Now that Firefox has been on the scene though they've shown that you can still gain significant market share even if you're not a bundled product as long as you have a superior product, which Firefox vs. IE6 definitely is.

It must be a scary position for a company like Symantic to know that a large part of their business has been based on the weakness of another.  What's interesting is that they are accusing Microsoft of giving themselves an unfair advantage yet the Microsoft products don't have access to anything Symantic doesn't.  It's also interesting how many people I talk to that dislike Symantic's security products.  On top of all of this the consumers have been asking, either directly or indirectly, for much better security built into the OS and now that Microsoft has taken that seriously

What's so ironic about Adobe's issue is that PDF files are the Microsoft of formats, meaning 90% of portable documents are PDF-based.  Adobe is really saying they are concerned that Microsoft might topple their hold on the market and bring fixed file formats into a competitive phase.

The bottom line is that what the companies are really complaining about is that now they really have to start competing based on the merits of their products.

Ways the Zune could rock:

- Small/indie bands can embed info into the metadata so once the song gets locked people can still see things like their URL, so people can buy the music directly from the band.

- Show up at location X and get some unreleased tracks from Band Y.  Whether it's at a local gig or a promotional event (Warp Tour, X06, X-Games, etc.) 

-  My mother-in-law plays in a Blues band and people are always asking for her CD's at gigs and sometimes she runs out.  Instead she could share the tracks and keep the music fresh in their mind.  If they have the song still on their Zune, even if locked, it's a reminder that "Oh, yeah, I liked that, I should go buy their music off their site."

- Transfer XBox 360 music, videos and downloaded media content to the Zune.  I'd honestly never watch a movie on a 3" screen but I wouldn't mind showing off the "Gears of War" or "Mass Effect" trailer to my friends.

- Enable profile and game content transfers onto the Zune from the XBox 360.  I often go to a friend's house and want to play the latest demo of some game but some of these demo's weigh in at 500MB, meaning I don't want to wait for him to download it and it didn't fit on my small memory card.  I hate lugging my 360's HD around but if I could dump a game demo onto my Zune and play off of it instead that would rock.

- Wireless kiosk to get new XBox 360 exclusive content.  Really fold it into the Live ecosystem.

- Wireless connection in your car.  Forget the FM transmitter and its loss of quality or the special cup-holder dock or the dangling cable.  Just get in, rock out.

- Wireless streaming party mode.  Don't get it?  Imagine being at a party where *everyone's* Zune was being used in the party mix.  One wireless laptop in the corner pulling the music and randomly selecting songs off of anyone's Zune, or just those tracks that have been tagged with "party".  Imagine the cry's of "that song was HOT!  who was that?" or of course "Seriously? That song? Seriously?"

- 3rd Party Integration.  Imagine SlimPlayer, Sonos, anyone that already uses wireless putting out a firmware update that allows that system to pull directly from your Zune.

There are a ton more but I see too many people comparing the Zune to an iPod on little things like hard drive size, colors, lack of a scroll wheel, etc.  There is a *huge* amount of things that just the WiFi aspect could bring when wielded by Microsoft.  A lot of the suggestions I made can easily work with a cable but sometimes just that extra bit of effort to dock/cable your player is enough to make sure it never gets off the ground.  If you can walk into a room and things just *work* you have a winner.