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It's used for compressing the quantized values before they are put into the output stream.

well, there's actually a diffrent between 32 Athlon whatever 3200+ and 32 Athlon MP 2000+, or?

here

Wow, I really hope that they didn't put those 32 processors and 56GB of DDR RAM into use for this. Sounds like they should have read this article instead. Maybe it would have been cooler and not so grainy!

As opposed to The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and their institutes.

As opposed to The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and their institutes.

each EU member has to merge the new restrictions (less cadmium, less lead, forced recycling,...) into their national law until 2005. it really starts on 1.1.2006 and concerns reduction of lead, mercury, cadmium & other heavy metal.
in summer 2001, philips semiconductors, infineon & some other committed to prduce nearly unleaded chips.

more info about EU RoHS (english version)

Show me a free (costs nothing, free of encumberances like patent and EULA issues, etc)

How is MP3 open? Isn't there some company that liscences it?

Doesn't Fraunhofer publish release notes? #&*@!!! That's where I'd look for the addition of both surround sound and DRM.

The DRM that Fraunhofer's planning to add to MP3 is their LWDRM, right? Here's their press release about surround-sound-enabled MP3s, but there's no mention of DRM.

Doesn't Fraunhofer publish release notes? #&*@!!! That's where I'd look for the addition of both surround sound and DRM.

The DRM that Fraunhofer's planning to add to MP3 is their LWDRM, right? Here's their press release about surround-sound-enabled MP3s, but there's no mention of DRM.

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

Not very surprising. Considering that both AAC and Ogg Vorbis (and possibly flac, but I can not find the page) support 5.1.(search for 'surround')

Yes and no. AAC is not really competition from the point of view of the Fraunhofer Institute, since it's developed mainly by the same group:

"Fraunhofer IIS has been the main developer of the most advanced audio coding schemes, like MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) and MPEG AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)."

Nope; it's short for "MPEG Audio Layer 3", where the MPEG is the first version, later called MPEG-1. (References: mpeg.org, Fraunhofer.)

AAC was developed for MPEG-2, and improved for MPEG-4.

I'm a tad confused by this paragraph...

I was trying to put the restrictions on AAC into a context people would be familiar with. As you say, it's not treated exactly the same as MP3, but it's very close in most respects, as compared with WMA, FairPlay-protected AAC, Real, or other formats.

I have yet to encounter a single consumer implementation of an AAC encoding/decoding piece of software other than Apple's.

I came across FAAC earlier today. As you say, there's not a lot else; but considering the high usage of iTunes, QuickTime, the iTMS, and the iPod, I expect to see more in future. (MP3 took a while to take off, too.)

AAC is available on Mac and Windows.
This is not quite correct.
Fraunhofer Institute also offers a licence for Linux.
According to their website, they developed AAC in collaboration with industry partners like Dolby, Sony etc. (This is the same Institute which was one of the major developers of MP3, btw)

AAC was developed by the MPEG group, of which Dolby is a member, but appears to be a large organization with hundreds of members.

According to this site AAC was largely developed by the same group as MP3 (Fraunhofer Institute) in colaboration with various companies (AT&T, Sony, Dolby). You can find more info on AAC here. You can also contact them if you want a licence. ;)

AAC was developed by the MPEG group, of which Dolby is a member, but appears to be a large organization with hundreds of members.

According to this site AAC was largely developed by the same group as MP3 (Fraunhofer Institute) in colaboration with various companies (AT&T, Sony, Dolby). You can find more info on AAC here. You can also contact them if you want a licence. ;)

AAC was developed by the MPEG group, of which Dolby is a member, but appears to be a large organization with hundreds of members.

According to this site AAC was largely developed by the same group as MP3 (Fraunhofer Institute) in colaboration with various companies (AT&T, Sony, Dolby). You can find more info on AAC here. You can also contact them if you want a licence. ;)

AAC is the industry standard.

The patent licensing for MPEG-2/4AAC is handled by Via Licensing Corporation as license administrator.

Please visit http://www.vialicensing.com for more information.

Via Licensing Corporation 999 Brannan Street San Francisco, California 94103-4938 Phone +1 4 15/6 45-47 77 Fax +1 4 15/6 45-44 00 Email: info@vialicensing.com

AAC belongs to the same guys that made mp3, the Fraunhofer Institute.

The low-level software would have some support for existing computer languages. But users would gain maximum benefit when they generated the low-level code based on the new technical computing language Sun has asked IBM and Cray to help define.

I ever since hearing of CMs up to now thought that issues were parallelizing compilers and languages enabling application specific concepts (e.g. "A High-Level, Massively Parallel Programming Environment and Its Realization") Is this so much outdated ?

CC.

P.S.: Besides, this must have been the result of a paraphrasing engine ... erm script effort like mentioned in another 'thread' (/.).

My guess is that they're using the new MPEG-7 standard, which includes metatags to describe what's in the image, movie, or audio clip. These are user-entered metatags, so your quality of search may vary.

Incidentally, MPEG-7 was finalized more than two years ago. This is just one of the first real uses of it.

-T

Just a small note: MP3 is not free. It is owned by the Fraunhofer institute in Germany. They license it to a number of companies, in this case Apple. Apple pays a fixed sum per year to them on their customer's behalf.

There are a number of free players and encoders out there that are not liscenced, but these are explicitly infringing on Fraunhofer's patents. They simply have not been taken to court. This is very similar to the whole gif case (the algorithm behind the gif format was patented... recently expired in the US).

Ogg Vorbis is a small player, but it is a truly free one.

And as an owner of a iPod, why would you use mp3 when AAC is so much better.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

Darm, if I'm not mistaken, means 'intestine'. Stadt means city. So this element is Intestine-city-um.

Exactly. AFAIK the city is named after the wriggly litte rivulet Darmbach which is not quite visible any more in the city.

Darmstadt, by the way, is about the geekiest place in old Europe. Seemingly ordinary people may actually understand the print on your T-shirt there. Besides GSI, Darmstadt has a Technical University and a University of Applied Sciences. The European Space Operations Center is located there and the Fraunhofer institutes for Secure Telecooperation, Integrated Publication and Information Systems, Computer Graphics, and Structural Durability. Deutsche Telekom is running a research center there and the headquarters of T-Online are about to move to Darmstadt from the nearby town of Weiterstadt. There is a Linux User Group too. Darmstadt officially carries the title Wissenschaftsstadt (city of science). It is located about 30km south of Frankfurt/Main. The bus ride from Frankfurt airport takes 25 minutes.

MP3 players are popular in Germany, particularly now for cars (MP3/CD) where the compression means you don't need large and inconvenient changers.

Bertelsmann are big though and control distribution rights for both souznd and video products in Germany. They have been lobbying for the implementation of this rule.

However, the real problem is that it is an EU directive. Unless countries can prove a get out under subsidiarity, they must implement the directives or risk a large fine.

The other problem is the multi-region DVD players on sale. This will certainly stop under this technical measures clause. Shame for all those people who want to look at non-region 2 DVDs, for example that large immigrant population from the former Soviet Union.

I think the grandparent is referring to the fact that the MP3 standard is patented by Fraunhofer IIS and licensed by Thompson, in a "non-open-source" kind of way.

We used a PII 400 and got a very reliable 5 output stream box using a multi-output card that isn't manufactured any longer. I tried a number of these cards and most of them worked well. [ As an aside, the MOTU high-end units are excellent if you are going to put the output into high-quality amps and speakers, but they are expensive.]

From the software side, we used a custom, multi-threaded MP3 player compiled using Intel's optimizing compilers (which mad a huge difference on the PII) and used a graphical front end with a screen-per-room display showing the album art (scanned in by the user or installer) along with the tracks, play lists, etc.

We did run into a control problem, even though most of our customers were using systems with centrally located gear, which was that getting a PC to run with multiple distinct (and user-uninterruptable) displays simultaneously was expensive and difficult. To supplement this, we created a serial-based interface which allowed for play lists, random play, and basic start/stop/skip controls for each room and could be combined with the GUI over a commercial home control system (like Crestron or AMX).

Basically, we would watch the serial port for commands and respond to the control system by flipping individual windows that corresponded to the room that was controlling the system at the time. The control system, in turn, would put show the screen output in a kind of touch screen mode and send mouse locations over the serial port back to our controller. This worked, but was expensive and complex to handle, since only one room could have control over the GUI at the time. For things like displaying the playing tracks and album along with the next track and providing basic control of the start/stop/skip/repeat sequences, we could send text to the control system over the serial port and it would be displayed on the screen in text fields (allowing the main display to be required only for play-list management). This helped quite a bit.

The control piece was far and away the most difficult part of the project, but since you only have to satisfy yourself, and not the marketplace, I'd suggest that you might find an 802.11-capable PDA as a controller might be useful (and fun to work on). Of course, then you have to either develop your own control protocol or use some kind of CGI and a web server to do the control, but if you separate the players into individual threads or processes that can be easily located, you should be able to send messages (UNIX signals, perhaps) to them and get the level of control that you need.

From a technical perspective, any OS that has preemptive threading and good interprocess communication should be fine for building this kind of system. We found that by creating our own player (despite the need to license the decode patent from Fraunhofer if we were to sell it commercially), we were able to get a finer control of the playback features (such as pause/skip/repeat) than by using single-shot mp3 play commands that were available at the time. I'd suggest looking for how you can get those useful features if you decide to use existing commands in a Linux environment.

Of course, on a Macintosh, you can do the playback through QuickTime, which is going to be easy and highly-controllable, so you have that oppotunity too.

In the end, we found that the customers who got it loved it, but that the installers we were trying to sell to weren't interested in buying a product that required some set-up.

O

Are you all so busy sweating over the piracy of copyrighted works that you walked right into a patent minefield without realizing it?

Fraunhofer Labs in Germany, the same laboratory that invented the MP3 compression a few years ago, has been working on such a technology for quite a while.

Google for it and i'm sure you'll find some interesting articles.

I've seen roof-tiles with the lotus effect advertised here in Germany. Not that having a clean roof is a major priority for most of us - perhaps they're just easier to make?

Did a little search and here's some information from the Fraunhofer institute about their research (no, they don't _just_ make MP3 codecs).

They also link to this page which is a federally funded research project who are looking at applying microstructures onto large surfaces...

It was, at least in 1999, according to this article. It hasn't been mentioned as a problem in recent articles, such as this

Fraunhofer

Kalrand

-the voice of reason