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True but vacuous. Is there any general-purpose distro without plans to support 2.2.x, egcs, and glibc in the very near future?

The devil's in the details -- for example, the libjpeg problem with its unnecessarily fine-grained version code in its header. But these are easily solvable.

As for LSB, as long as it's a reasonable discussion between techies to solve technical problems, bless them. But -- at one point, at least -- it was in danger of becoming yet another vehicle for the overblown Perens ego, to which the various distributions replied (quite properly) by ignoring it and starting side discussions.

I have no idea why Love chose to write this now, unless there's some special situation at Caldera that requires a political statement of LSB support from them. I would have thought that the whole standards thing was mostly a non-issue by now....

Craig

Hack something on top of JNDI ?

There's also Globus but they don't provide copyright info.

Also a no-export thang at MIT .

These are my friends, and my old place of work, so...

If you want the definative place to see research on Agents and related technologies, see the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Specifically, the following three groups:

• Software Agents
• Synthetic Characters
• Perceptual Computing

These are my friends, and my old place of work, so...

If you want the definative place to see research on Agents and related technologies, see the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Specifically, the following three groups:

• Software Agents
• Synthetic Characters
• Perceptual Computing

These are my friends, and my old place of work, so...

If you want the definative place to see research on Agents and related technologies, see the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Specifically, the following three groups:

• Software Agents
• Synthetic Characters
• Perceptual Computing

These are my friends, and my old place of work, so...

If you want the definative place to see research on Agents and related technologies, see the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Specifically, the following three groups:

• Software Agents
• Synthetic Characters
• Perceptual Computing

"Would you rather that your children learn to play the piano, or learn to play the stereo?" This is the opener to Pianos Not Stereos: Creating Computational Construction Kits.

The point is, there is a fundamental tradeoff between power and ease of use, much like the tradeoff between speed and memory usage. The most powerful tools fundamentally require some extra time to learn to use.

I think this is the viewpoint Englebart has when he talks about user friendliness. I've heard user friendly evangelists talk with glazy eyes about interfaces where you just click a button and it all happens for you--well, what's the point of suc ha tool? Why make users press the button at all, if they are going to be given so little choice in what the tool does?

Well, though I can say little about crashing, before Mozilla 1.0 is released, some time ago I too became dissatisfied with the rather lousy X standard fonts just trying to become involved in HTML page rendering.

So what did I do? I converted a bunch of TTF's, and to make a long story short, NS/X11 on my workstation looks reeeeeeally nice.

Check out this page, toward the bottom end, for a tarball of .bdf's and some before/after screenshots. One of them's the ZDNet home page; you've got to admit, it's a noticeable difference }:)

Hope it can make non-W98 browsing a bit more palatable....

In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:

Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.

A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.

Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.

I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.

My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?

Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.

I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.

Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.

In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.

Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing

So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.

Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.

a useful archive of stuff.

According to the Boston Globe, RMS worked 2 months of the year as a consultant, charging $260/hour!

He also won a big award that he lives off the interest of. (From what I'm told).

A rather good collection of links is at Wearables Central .

"Boss, I was working on that report but one of the routers between here and iMacFloppy.com is flapping."

"Boss, give me 10 minutes to upload this 2 meg file, then it'll only take you about 6 minutes to download it."

Excellent. While the site may be real, this testimonial must be a hoax. Or pure stupidity. But maybe after firing the network administrators they can afford 32 internet accounts, business-rate phone lines, and the opportunity cost of all that time waiting for transfers to finish?

I do think iMacFloppy has a good idea for an intranet application, and with SSL and a hole in the corporate Internet firewall, you could present a good business case for iMacFloppy's server tools, at least until folks start to seriously deploy PPTP servers (http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~c ananian/Projects/PPTP/)

I'm afraid I won't have to accept that. Two thousand years does not make anything correct. You seem to have no respect for Plato, and his writings have been around for longer than those of Epicurus.

Notice the Epicurus lived BEFORE the Christian god existed. He never HEARD of Jesus, or Christ. He lived during a time when Greek and Roman mythology were still bonafide religions. And if you've read any of that mythology, none of the gods were omnipotent or good, and many of them practiced EVIL.

However, it you have also read Plato's work (which came before Epicurus), you will know that there was a lot of revisionism going on. Plato did believe that god was good, and on that basis rejected much of the old mythology. He also believed that god was omnipotent. I don't think that he said that explicitely, but he did say that he didn't believe that anything bad (remember, he had a different understanding of bad than most people) could happen to good people, since the gods wouldn't allow it. Presumably it was works like those of Plato which Epicurus was responding to.

I guess I should mention as a caveat that I obviously don't know what Plato believed, since he only wrote dialogues. However, if I remember right, most of what I have refered to here can be found in Euthyphro, in case you're interested.

This is a really bad thing methinks. Since my country is part of APEC, that means that these stupid decisions will probably apply to us too. And then we'll have all of the terrible scenarios that the League for Programming Freedom has on their website. Fact is, the power to make laws over the things we care about is in the hands of people who know absolutely nothing about what they're doing, and have no idea of the real consequences of their decisions. "The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalttrend (sic) they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states." -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid
--

The best scenario for Free/OSS is that this is true, and that she isn't interested in the profits of this patent. Then she could patent this algorithm, using The League for Programming Freedom This would add a patent to the pool we will need, not that software can be patented.

Would be nice if someone let her know her options.

It is true that MPEG-4, like other modern audio formats, is a lossy psychoacoustic coder, and so the bits aren't the same as on a CD. But MPEG and independent groups have done extensive testing to make the sound quality as good as possible.

MPEG found when testing Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which is the basis for the the high-quality coder in MPEG-4, that at 64 kbps/channel and higher rates it acheives "Indistinguishable Quality" as that term is defined by the European Broadcasting Union. (This means that a certain percentage of highly-trained listeners cannot hear any difference in a formal listening test with certain special methods.)

Anyone who really wants to criticize MPEG-4 sound quality should first read "Report on the MPEG-4 Stereo Verification Tests" by Meares, Watanabe, and Scheirer, available here.

Best to all,

-- Eric
Editor, ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

MPEG-4 Audio is finished. It was finished at the October MPEG meeting and has been in an "editing period" since then, where we've mostly been checking spelling, formatting, cross-references, etc. It is going off to ISO for publication any day now, if it hasn't already. You should be able to buy it from ISO soon.

The "reference software" (slow, user-hostile code to demonstrate how the standard is supposed to work) is all-but-complete and is scheduled to be finished in March. Non-MPEG organizations are already building tools for user-friendly use of the standard.

The whole MPEG-4 Audio standard (not including Video or Systems) is about 1200 pages long. It is formally ISO 14496-3:1999 and is divided into 6 Subparts:

• 1. Introduction and Overview
• 2. Parametric Speech coding
• 3. CELP Speech coding
• 4. General Audio (AAC/TwinVQ merger)
• 5. Structured Audio (audio synthesis)
• 6. Text to Speech Interface

Here is the hype from the beginning of Subpart 1:

ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.

MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high- quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the- art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object-based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.

The official MPEG Audio web page is mirrored here . I have a FAQ about MPEG Audio and patent issues here . I'm happy to answer any other questions about the format.

The "file format" (which tells you how to put the coded data into a computer file, if you don't want to broadcast it or stream it) is the part of MPEG-4 that's based on Quicktime. The codecs (which tell you how to compress the data) don't have anything to do with the codecs in Quicktime, for either audio or video.

Best regards,
Eric Scheirer
Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

MPEG-4 Audio is finished. It was finished at the October MPEG meeting and has been in an "editing period" since then, where we've mostly been checking spelling, formatting, cross-references, etc. It is going off to ISO for publication any day now, if it hasn't already. You should be able to buy it from ISO soon.

The "reference software" (slow, user-hostile code to demonstrate how the standard is supposed to work) is all-but-complete and is scheduled to be finished in March. Non-MPEG organizations are already building tools for user-friendly use of the standard.

The whole MPEG-4 Audio standard (not including Video or Systems) is about 1200 pages long. It is formally ISO 14496-3:1999 and is divided into 6 Subparts:

• 1. Introduction and Overview
• 2. Parametric Speech coding
• 3. CELP Speech coding
• 4. General Audio (AAC/TwinVQ merger)
• 5. Structured Audio (audio synthesis)
• 6. Text to Speech Interface

Here is the hype from the beginning of Subpart 1:

ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.

MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high- quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the- art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object-based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.

The official MPEG Audio web page is mirrored here . I have a FAQ about MPEG Audio and patent issues here . I'm happy to answer any other questions about the format.

The "file format" (which tells you how to put the coded data into a computer file, if you don't want to broadcast it or stream it) is the part of MPEG-4 that's based on Quicktime. The codecs (which tell you how to compress the data) don't have anything to do with the codecs in Quicktime, for either audio or video.

Best regards,
Eric Scheirer
Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

The URL for a complete description of mp4 is http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4

The "reference software" (slow, user-hostile code to demonstrate how the standard is supposed to work) is all-but-complete and is scheduled to be finished in March. Non-MPEG organizations are already building tools for user-friendly use of the standard.

The whole MPEG-4 Audio standard (not including Video or Systems) is about 1200 pages long. It is formally ISO 14496-3:1999 and is divided into 6 Subparts:

• 1. Introduction and Overview
• 2. Parametric Speech coding
• 3. CELP Speech coding
• 4. General Audio (AAC/TwinVQ merger)
• 5. Structured Audio (audio synthesis)
• 6. Text to Speech Interface

Here is the hype from the beginning of Subpart 1:

ISO/IEC 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio) is a new kind of audio standard that integrates many different types of audio coding: natural sound with synthetic sound, low bitrate delivery with high-quality delivery, speech with music, complex soundtracks with simple ones, and traditional content with interactive and virtual-reality content. By standardizing individually sophisticated coding tools as well as a novel, flexible framework for audio synchronization, mixing, and downloaded post-production, the developers of the MPEG-4 Audio standard have created new technology for a new, interactive world of digital audio.

MPEG-4, unlike previous audio standards created by ISO/IEC and other groups, does not target a single application such as real-time telephony or high- quality audio compression. Rather, MPEG-4 Audio is a standard that applies to every application requiring the use of advanced sound compression, synthesis, manipulation, or playback. The subparts that follow specify the state-of-the- art coding tools in several domains; however, MPEG-4 Audio is more than just the sum of its parts. As the tools described here are integrated with the rest of the MPEG-4 standard, exciting new possibilities for object-based audio coding, interactive presentation, dynamic soundtracks, and other sorts of new media, are enabled.

Go here for more information on MPEG-4 Audio.

Best regards,
-- Eric Scheirer
Editor, ISO 14496-3 (MPEG-4 Audio)

1. Zephyr

   It works, it scales (somewhat), it supports real authentication, it's open, it presents the right paradigm for instant messaging and online discussion. (Since I used it heavily at CMU, using AOL Instant Messenger, IRC, and ICQ is just painful.)

   Go to ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/z ephyr/ to download the source.

2. IMPP

   There's an effort underway by the IETF to come up with a standard protocol for instant messaging and "presence information" called IMPP. Anyone considering working on a project like this should get in the loop so they can make sure all their bases are covered, and so that they can interoperate with others' servers.

   Go to http://lists.fsck.com/cgi-bin/wilma/pip for mailing list archives.

I strongly suggest that everyone also visit www.linuxhq.com and look at the CHANGES area under the 2.1.x kernel area. Upgrading to those packages will solve a lot of problems before they arise.

FWIW - I'm running 2.2.0pre2 at present, and the only complaint I have is that lockd seems to crap out and not let /usr get unmounted on reboot. =(

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)