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Domain: abock.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to abock.org.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:Innovation is... by tomhudson · · Score: 1 · on Ubuntu 12.04 To Include Head-Up Display Menus

    All your ideas are great, spot-on, 100% insightful - which is why they'll never happen :-(

    As for the "getting some revenue streams", look at the damage that was done to their reputation with replacing the Amazon id in Banshee with their own. Was it really worth it?

    Please keep in mind that the majority of that revenue is NOT from Canonical - several other major distros don't replace the Banshee projects' id with their own, unlike Canonical. opensuse, for example, is 100% to Banshee/Gnome. Mint gives 50% - and Canonical, since their take-it-or-leave-it offer was rejected, has since disabled it completely.

    Something can generate revenue and still not, in the bigger scheme of things, be worth doing. Hummers were a good example - at one point they made money, then not so much, then they became a drain on resources, attention, and cash.

    Canonical doesn't have the development resources to be a serious innovator, having decided to concentrate on marketing and "blingy" stuff instead.

    What would I do differently? Get Android working properly. Hire real software developers, with cross-platform experience, and open up a porting lab. Then approach companies, the same as Loki did, and offer a percentage deal for doing ports from Windows to both the linux and mac platforms (a 2'fer). Not just consumer-facing software either. Grow the market instead of looking for change behind the cushions.

  2. Re:Music by smegmatic · · Score: 1 · on 2010 May Be the First Year YouTube Turns a Profit

    it has a linux version. i've been using it for years. http://www.amazon.com/gp/dmusic/help/amd.html

    also, some linux media players are integrating the amazon mp3 store directly: http://abock.org/2010/07/13/amazon-mp3-store-in-banshee

  3. ...and Moonshine! by benwaggoner · · Score: 0 · on Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux

    Moonshine runs Moonlight from inside a Firefox plugin to emulate the older Windows Media Player ActiveX embeds. It can also play back local WMV files.

    http://abock.org/moonshine/

    Which is good, as VLC and thus presumably ffmpeg hasn't been able to play VC-1 files with B-frames for years, which is pretty much the default these days.

  4. Re:No Banshee for OS X? by Chris+Burkhardt · · Score: 2, Informative · on iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition

    If I understand Aaron's post, version 1.4 and on will be released for Mac OS X.

    The OS X changes were merged into the main svn branch on Oct. 23: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/banshee/trunk/banshee

  5. Re:Mono by SEMW · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Releases First Open XML SDK

    I mean commercial, end user applications. For example, search "requires .NET" applications and look if they can ship to Linux thanks to Mono. As I said in my post, more than one of the apps I linked to are cross-platform. However, it's true they were mostly FOSS rather than commercial; and so I suppose if you have some wierd, skewed definition of "end-user application" that restricts itself to "commercial" programs only, as you apparently do, then my list wouldn't be very good at alleviating ignorance.

    However, never fear, as five seconds of Googling that you are apparently unable or incompetent to do yourself yields lots of examples of commercial cross-platform mono apps; such as unity3d, plasticSCM, Versora, Voelcker

    From Linux land, thanks to Trolltech Qt, a true multiplatform framework, Amarok 2 will release on X11/OS X and Windows using the same code. "From Linux land, thanks to mono, a true multiplatform framework, Banshee will release on X11/OS X and Windows using the same code." (Banshee on Windows, Linux). Many more examples are available at the end of a Google; just because you're ignorant doesn't mean they don't exist. Educate yourself!
  6. ...and they still get it wrong by peterprior · · Score: 3, Interesting · on IT's Big Spenders

    $6.58 billion on R&D and they still have dialog boxes like this.

    Incredible.

  7. Harmony on Linux Bounty by schwaang · · Score: 1 · on MythDora — MythTV 0.2 In a Box

    On a related note, this guy is offering a bounty up to $225 for a Linux program that implements configuration syncing for the Harmony 880.