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MPlayer uses ffmpeg, which has an open-source DiVX implementation.

I'm sorry but FLAC is not "off-topic" in an article about Theora. Theora is meant to be able to work with FLAC. FLAC is actually an important part of the Xiph.org project. If you haven't heard much about them, have a look at Ogg and FLAC

The OpenEEG people aim to create an affordable EEG kit. There's already some schematics for home tinkerers.

Now I feel bad because I didn't pay attention to learning electronics when I was younger...

Linux on the iPod.

Do you have a reason to use the commericial DivX for Linux? I bet I'm not the only one wanting to know it..

Or you just haven't heard about lavc mpeg4 of ffmpeg? Or XViD? Those two are both much better options, not only because of their opensourceness but better quality IMHO -- especially lavc, although it's pretty unknown. lavc is used in xine and mplayer at least as main decoder, also ffdshow for windows is based on lavc [video] codecs. At least mencoder supports encoding with lavc, with some neat advanced options. AFAIK lavc is used as the main decoder (for mpeg4 atleast) because it's the fastest there is.

Do you have a reason to use the commericial DivX for Linux? I bet I'm not the only one wanting to know it..

Or you just haven't heard about lavc mpeg4 of ffmpeg? Or XViD? Those two are both much better options, not only because of their opensourceness but better quality IMHO -- especially lavc, although it's pretty unknown. lavc is used in xine and mplayer at least as main decoder, also ffdshow for windows is based on lavc [video] codecs. At least mencoder supports encoding with lavc, with some neat advanced options. AFAIK lavc is used as the main decoder (for mpeg4 atleast) because it's the fastest there is.

afaik 2-pass is in or near completion in some developers tree.

the major drawback i see is that the format is too old.

from the methods used to compress the video, that is block mc, dct and a huffman coder,
two of them, dct and huffman, are made obsolete by wavelets and arithmetic coders.
these are common since the early nineties.

but mpeg seems stuck too so there might be a chance for codecs like
dirac or vc5 to set at least prior art.

(and possibly flac, but I can not find the page) support 5.1.(search for 'surround')

FLAC currently supports up to 8 seperate channels of audio with some room for expansion, if I'm reading the docs right. I assume one of those channels would be a .1 subwoofer channel, but that's not explicit in the spec.

> With HD space getting cheap, maybe it's best to just leave the redbook audio in pure WAV format.
> Screw compression of any type, especially if your after high quality audio reproduction.

If you are going down that route, you should use one of the lossless audio compressions, like flac:

" FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see links to the right for supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file."

Flac Homepage

no good excuse not to uninstall Outlook from their machine
There is one good reason..
Like Internet Explorer it's part of the OS now. You'll kinda mess things up.

For users who want an industreal e-mail client Eudora is far better than Outlook anyday.

Also some users (*Cough* Rush Limbaugh *Cough*) complain that the massive amounts of e-mail they get kills most e-mail clients.

As Unix experts learnned long ago Pine has no such problems and there is a Windows version.

Mahogany is annother full featured e-mail client that could easly drop in replace Outlook in most cases.
And it's open source.

I think people go out of there way to suggest Mozilla mail over Eudora becouse Mozilla is open source.

But... Mozilla is a web browser and EVERYTHING takes a back seat to that. Including the e-mail client.
If any e-mail client outside Microsofts own Outlook were to support viruses it would be a browser based one and Mozilla is not immune.
Highly unlikely true.. but it's the MOST likely cannidate.

Scribe looks intresting for corprate e-mail.

The point being here there are quite a few alternitives and it might be worth your time to check them out before advocating a client change to your friend or boss.
You'll go a lot farther if you advise a client suted to the needs, environment and culture of the target.

May I suggest netcomics and a dedicated image browser like gqview?

May I suggest netcomics and a dedicated image browser like gqview?

I had downloaded Stellarium over a year ago when my young son was first starting to be interested in stars. Haven't used it much, but kept it installed on the computer. That was why I remembered it to do the parent post.

I started poking around the sourceforge forum, and not only is my version out of date, but they are actively working on a project to add constellation overlays into the display. Check out Ursa Major and a toucan constellation I'm not familiar with.

Cool stuff.

Great advice. I used WindowsXP exclusively.(mainly do to the fact that I'm too poor to build a second box for linux learning)
The blaster virus didn't even touch me because I had installed the patch fixing the exploit it used a month before it came out. If you're going to use windows (gaming... what else) then you need to at least learn to check windows update religiously.

And because the topic of SPAM and virus spam came up, I'd like to direct outlook users to SpamBayes I get on average about 130 pieces of spam per day and only about one message a week gets through to my inbox. Same for the virus stuff (which any good AV proggie should catch)

One suggestion is to install POPFile and Quarantine every file with an attachment.

it's really neat but use an anchor next time please.

And if you need help identifying which is which, or exactly where they are, Stellarium is a great GPL'd product available for Linux, Win and Mac.

Sourceforge page

The latest Galeon is out too. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.

Djvu

> So all this 500 fps crap is so much useless bullshit.

500 fps is useless, but not for the reason you cite. It's useless because your monitor updates at about 75fps*. That means your monitor never has a chance to display 425 frames :) Also, it means that your monitor displays many frames in one scan sequence -- resulting in those lines and what looks the image being cut off and replaced with a new one. That's what's happening. Enable sync to vblank and you'll be fine. The picture will look better and you'll be saving some CPU cycles to boot. Wow!

* Somewhere between 60Hz and 120Hz. If you'd like to get more out of your monitor, look up its specs and type them into the XFree86 Modeline Generator. I went from 1152x864@70Hz to 1240x930@84Hz :) It's nice. Most monitors seem to lie to the host video card and say that they max out somewhere way below where they actually do. Just make sure you get the right specs and you should be good to go (this may entail telling your video card to not probe DDC; one of my monitors requires that [it sux anyway, though]). Have fun :)

A good example of seperating content from presentation is to use an XML-type file (at least have a structured document model) where the music data is defined. Then, have somthing like an XLS sound stylesheet to define how the data will sound like. As a developer, this would create greater posibilities what I could do with the sound that my application processes.

On a side noce GNoise is a good sound editor that I recommend to anyone doing edeting or large sounds like game-music (that is uncompressed in raw format.)

I came accross this SF project a few weeks back I thought I'd post it for the benefit of the slashdot readers. OSS for Windows

A bunch of "visionaries" who see that we've used this same model for some time and therefore are convinced it is horribly limiting[...]. They never have any but the most vague suggestions of a better model. They certainly never take the time to explore its limitations longer to ensure it really is workable (much less actually an improvement).

i don't know about the others, but at least jef raskin guides some coders into implementing the humane environment (THE). so far, it is an open source pything editor thingy, so it actually has some practical use.

nevertheless keep the warning from the homepage in mind:

Important observation: You cannot make an interface better without making it different (that's obvious). If it's a lot better, it will be a lot different. This means that it will feel unfamiliar to anybody familiar with present interfaces. Therefore, it has to be used for a while (after you read the manual) before you unlearn your present habits and can begin to appreciate it. You are in a worse position for learning it than a novice who has only to acquire new habits and has nothing to unlearn!

personelly, i haven't figured it out, and rarely use python. still i think that it adds a lot of credibility to raskin's claims.

What's so hard about it? Download MinGW, install, and start compiling.

Java isn't viable as a GUI language. :)

Sorry, but this isn't true, and it hasn't been true for a while now. Java on the client is perfectly viable now, thanks to increases in processing power, improvements in the Java Platform API, and improvements to the Hotspot JIT. If you want to see an example of a complex, viable Java GUI, PCGen is a good example. Google around a little and you'll find a lot of others.

Saying that Java is "too slow" or "klutzy" for GUI apps is old old news, and no longer the case. Let's not spread any more FUD on that issue please.

Reviewing the list of contributors, it's interesting to note that some of them had already stopped programming back when they were interviewed. So why should we listen to them opine about software development techniques today?

My pet peeve on the list would have to be Jef Raskin, who's far better at self-promotion than actually coding. Had people actually listened to his ideas in the early days of the Macintosh project, they would have delivered a machine without a mouse or other features most people associate with the Mac. (As Andy Hertzfeld puts it, he's not the father of the Macintosh so much as the eccentric uncle.)

However, if you want to hear him repeat the same things he's been saying for the last 20 years, he'll be keynoting the Desktop Linux Summit. No doubt he'll be beating the horse's skeleton that mice, icons, and the windowing interface are what's holding Linux back on the desktop. (MacOS X be damned!) Using those special "leap" keys that made the Canon Cat so successful, now that's the future!

Tyler

http://www.soekris.com/ has a Mini-PCI based hardware encryption device, the vpn1211.

It is designed to be used with their micro-systems (which are much better suited for the frequently suggested task of being a firewall, due to the available dual NICs), but miniPCI is miniPCI, and there are experimental linux drivers (as well as full driver support for Open/NetBSD)

Blaster disabled a system, but it was fixable. This one can make a total mess.

Grub is pretty close to what you're looking for. You can also see grab its source.

Check out iRATE for example.

--

• import rlcompleter, readline and
• here

The availability of a free-as-in-beer compiler for Windows doesn't have as much of an impact on Windows programmers as you might think. In the free-software world, the good coders tend to work on the Linux kernel and such things. In the Windows world, the good coders tend to want money for their work. Which means that the people left to develop freeware (i.e. free-as-in-beer, not-usually-free-as-in-speech software) are...

The not-so-good coders. The coders who would just look at you funny if you suggested that they use a command-line tool.

Sure, there are exceptions, like the excellent IrfanView and of course the wonderful (and also free-as-in-speech!) utility CDEX, and of course many "cross-platform" projects like Audacity and The GIMP (many of which originated in the Linux/Unix world anyhow)... buuuut... the majority of the freeware coders in the Windows world tend to be those who couldn't easily make a living off of their code.

You have to remember that the CULTURE in the Windows world is not like that of the Linux world...

While we're on the topic of comparative culture (drifting rapidly off-topic here, but...), please note that in Windows-land, money is a much stronger motivator. Additionally, in Windows-land, conformity is a lot more prevalent. You still see Unix coders who prefer some obscure clone of EMACS or vi, or an even more obscure editor no one's heard of, or one they wrote themselves. Windows people tend to write their papers in MS Word, and only MS Word... because that's what everyone else uses. It is a more conformist culture (this isn't a judgment, it's simply a fact!)

I am, at this very moment, editing a letter using GNU nano and a CGI I scripted in Perl to format it nicely for printing and/or PDFing. I'm not using MS Office, or even OpenOffice. And there are gajillions of people using "weird" or otherwise obscure solutions like that throughout the Unix world. In Windows-land, a weird approach like that would just get you funny looks. Like I said-- differences in culture...

The availability of a free-as-in-beer compiler for Windows doesn't have as much of an impact on Windows programmers as you might think. In the free-software world, the good coders tend to work on the Linux kernel and such things. In the Windows world, the good coders tend to want money for their work. Which means that the people left to develop freeware (i.e. free-as-in-beer, not-usually-free-as-in-speech software) are...

The not-so-good coders. The coders who would just look at you funny if you suggested that they use a command-line tool.

Sure, there are exceptions, like the excellent IrfanView and of course the wonderful (and also free-as-in-speech!) utility CDEX, and of course many "cross-platform" projects like Audacity and The GIMP (many of which originated in the Linux/Unix world anyhow)... buuuut... the majority of the freeware coders in the Windows world tend to be those who couldn't easily make a living off of their code.

You have to remember that the CULTURE in the Windows world is not like that of the Linux world...

While we're on the topic of comparative culture (drifting rapidly off-topic here, but...), please note that in Windows-land, money is a much stronger motivator. Additionally, in Windows-land, conformity is a lot more prevalent. You still see Unix coders who prefer some obscure clone of EMACS or vi, or an even more obscure editor no one's heard of, or one they wrote themselves. Windows people tend to write their papers in MS Word, and only MS Word... because that's what everyone else uses. It is a more conformist culture (this isn't a judgment, it's simply a fact!)

I am, at this very moment, editing a letter using GNU nano and a CGI I scripted in Perl to format it nicely for printing and/or PDFing. I'm not using MS Office, or even OpenOffice. And there are gajillions of people using "weird" or otherwise obscure solutions like that throughout the Unix world. In Windows-land, a weird approach like that would just get you funny looks. Like I said-- differences in culture...

The work being done by Deb Roy's Cognitive Machines Group @ MIT might also be of interest.

Sure would be nice if Grand started making bits of code and a few technical papers available. Guess he can't just give it away if its his bread and butter though.

Coolplayer is free and will render an ogg or mp3 to wav (by selecting disk writer for output)... although its a really great lightweight ogg/mp3 player in its own right

I mean, we've got the OpenBIOS project, Linux BIOS, and FreeBIOS.

Isn't it time to cut out the last bits of non-free software in the computer?

Magnatune is great. Unlike most online music stores, they sell lossless CD quality audio (in FLAC format, or WAV if you want to waste everyone's bandwidth). The selection is steadily growing, and there is some excellent music there. All their music can be previewed in 128kbps MP3, and it's only $5 (or more if you are feeling generous) an album if you want higher quality.

Well buddy, if you hit Nyquist's 44100, then no, audio is NOT lossy...not to your ears anyway.

You'll find this of interest before you say there is no lossy compression tools out today.

If you are still looking for an audio recording app check out the windows port of Audacity. It has reat sound quality, mp3 and ogg output, Multi track, 32-bit floating point sound files, etc.

> Oh, and there is no GPL version for Windows

As a matter of fact, there is.

Trolltech has no impetus or obligation to port GPL Qt to Win32. But GPL is GPL, so anybody with enough skill can -- and did -- port the codebase to MS Windows. Yeah, it's not perfect (yet), but I've compiled and run stuff written in Qt2.3NC with this GPL'd version of Qt3.x.

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

PS: It's Windows-native and doesn't need X11 to run, in case you're confusing it with the similar project on the same sourceforge area.

here I am! ? Works for me...

A vast majority of the stuff that was once released as freeware is now open source. There are a number of reasons behind this; the ubiquity of the internet and its usefulness in collaboration, the increased availability of high quality development tools and the fact that if you're not making money off some code, you might as well release the source.

With that in mind, Audacity, while being a bit more full featured than a simple sound recorder, will take care of what you need.

Is anyone aware of OSS products similar to this?

Gnome/GTK+ is available for Win32, although not as neatly packaged as for X11. Dropline has some Win32 packages that are easy to install. Tor Lillqvist has created some packages that a useful in conjunction with the MingGW environment. I believe that there is a Cygwin Project as well (see here but I can't testify as to its status. If you need an IDE, the Bloodshed IDE, Dev-C++, can download GTK+ packages for use within the IDE, and can help you automate integrating GTK+ in your apps. See here for information on the IDE.

Gnome/GTK+ is GPL'd and truly "free software". wxWindows is another option, but someone has already posted regarding that, so I'll leave it to you to investigate your options and decide which you like best.

No -- Seaside keeps the continuations in memory (just like lisp, ruby, python, perl6 [will], etc...). SISC Scheme and Kali Scheme are the ones that can persist continuations to disk. Or send them over the network to be invoked by a remote client. *bamf* ok, my brain just exploded.

... is give these guys a hand up: QT 3 Win32- this project would be totally awesome would it be done!

I have never been a big fan of Java, but that's just me. I think these toolkits are great because it is easy now to write crossplatform apps easily without having to use Java. And, go ahead and flame me, but I don't consider TK a usable interface for most modern day apps.

A downside to QT is that it is not free under windows. While this might be okay with companies, if you ever considered writing crossplatform OSS programs, this can hamper things. There is a project porting the X11 version to windows, so its not a complete roadblock..

Of course there is always GTK which has been known to also run under windows and OS X. It is not my intention to start any flamewars -- I am just pointing out that for those in favour of either toolkit there is plenty of crossplatformability.

If either TK holds any major advantage its that GTK+ natively supports C code, but also has C++ bindings. The signalmm library that came out of gtkmm is actually really nice, and usable for other projects. However, in that case don't forget about boost, which also contains a signal library, not to mention a *really* nice interface to python (which I'm currently using in a project). Just be warned, you need a fast computer for compiling.

A downside to QT is that it is not free under windows. While this might be okay with companies, if you ever considered writing crossplatform OSS programs, this can hamper things. There is a project porting the X11 version to windows, so its not a complete roadblock..

Of course there is always GTK which has been known to also run under windows and OS X. It is not my intention to start any flamewars -- I am just pointing out that for those in favour of either toolkit there is plenty of crossplatformability.

If either TK holds any major advantage its that GTK+ natively supports C code, but also has C++ bindings. The signalmm library that came out of gtkmm is actually really nice, and usable for other projects. However, in that case don't forget about boost, which also contains a signal library, not to mention a *really* nice interface to python (which I'm currently using in a project). Just be warned, you need a fast computer for compiling.

WOW! Just imagine how much completely legal, free or open source DVD ripping software you could store on one of those!

If you put a site together with a little planning and a properly setup cache and then use a template engine that supports output caching you can rival static pages depending on how often the page "needs" to hit the DB.

This really all depends on the sites content, an average ecommerce site probably only needs to hit the database once a day, slash on the other hand could cache the front page for non-logged in users for 5 minutes, which I believe they are doing now with perl.

As usual YMMV.