Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Offshore, Oratory, Goals
Not asking, not telling. jeffthompson writes: "The Havenco web site says it is now fully operational and open for business." A lot of people seemed convinced that Havenco wouldn't even be around by this time, but sticking around is the best revenge. I'd like to go aboard one day, promise I'll wear a blindfold and not look at anything ...
GNU, Linux, GNU/Linux, Freedom and the American Way. bkuhn writes: "Now, both the electronic audio and transcript of RMS' NYU talk are available."
The audio is in Ogg format, and the transcription is in blessed plaintext. Thanks!
Sign #37 of the coming apocalypse: Speaking of Mundie, software Freedom (and free-ness), Simone Paddock of O'Reilly writes with news that might raise a few eyebrows:
"Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie set off a compelling debate recently when he discussed Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, which blends the sharing of source code with the preservation of intellectual property rights.Michael Tiemann (CTO of Red Hat) will speak after Mundie, and a panel of IP law and software experts (including Tim O'Reilly) will discuss the issues raised. Sounds worth being in San Diego for. If you're interested, there's more information online.Tim O'Reilly invited him to attend the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention (July 23-27, 2001 in San Diego). Mundie not only agreed to attend, he agreed to speak.
Mundie will discuss ways in which shared source differs from open source, and how the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software use."
In the Tolkein, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense. SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "This is a follow-up on the recently-released LOTR trailer. It's now available for download. Two versions are available to suit your bandwidth and patience. Unfortunately, it's still only available in Real format, but I guess we can't have everything."
Semi-alive and kicking. IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Stephen Cass writes:
IEEE Spectrum , the house magazine of the IEEE is launching an online forum devoted to the noble sport of robosoccer . Robosoccer is different from things like Battle Bots or Robot Wars in that the robots play in teams and the whole thing is completely autonomous once started. There are a number of competitions, the biggest of which is the annual Robocup tournament, which will be held in Seattle this year. Robosoccer is a great reasearch tool for exploring A.I., automous agent behaviour, computer vision, simulation and mechanical and electrical design. It attracts participants ranging from high school students to academic researchers.Our website (which incidentally runs slashcode) will also be a clearing house for us to award sponsorship money for teams building robosoccer robots as well as a place to exchange information.
Hard to get enough of Robots playing soccer, and prize money means you can buy more marshmallows to roast at your victory bonfire.
T O L K I E N.
Well, if I ever get time, I'll actually write a series of cross-platform players using my N-dimensional signal processing library I wrote last summer, including plugins, and GNU it. I hope I get time... right now I'm working 60 hours a week, and going to surgery next week.
;) ). Indeo if the only major format out there that uses wavelets, and theirs are only 2d... but the video quality on indeo is still quite nice for its size (they need to work on their audio, though, and their license is the most appalling codec licenses I have ever read (Summary: if you write something in Indeo, Intel owns it)). By using a 3d wavelet transform you can benefit from the ability to eliminate random fluctuations in the video between frames, take advantage of repeated patterns in the time domain, and the like... and, while it can't be encoded while streaming, it can still be decoded while streaming.
:)
My the algorithm I plan to use is a 3d Daubechies wavelet algorithm, with effectively infinite iterations (iterates until it's processing a single pixel - its not as slow as it sounds, trust me - its already written, and my test environment was a slow laptop
Additionally, for audio, I plan to experiment. One idea I've toyed with is to write a windowing function, and analyze that. Now, at first, that may seem crazy - it adds a whole new dimension to compress! However, if you look at the windowed data, it is almost entirely on the noise floor, with little sections of energy - and both dimensions are smaller than your original single dimension, so its not really squaring the data there. And, then, when you consider that by compressing the time axis on the windowed image you eliminate the need to store the N blocks you would have had to store during that time period, it starts to seem reasonable. And, instead of doing a block transform and losing the advantage of capturing repeating patterns over time, at regular sinous (benefitted by DCT) or block (benefitted by wavelet) intervals, you can simply do low-res time decomposition while maintaining high-res frequency decomposition of the data. And, windowed data is more accurate in the frequency domain to begin with. Its an idea I plan to toy with, amongst others; I very well may just end up going with a traditional time-encoded block-dct 1d signal, of course
- Rei
P.S. - anyone have any good algorithms to suggest for compressing the data once inaudible (or, in the case of video, unnoticable) signals have been zeroed? I mean, the standard is Huffman encoding, but there has to be something better...
Look at me, still talking while there's science to do.
How about good ole, regular MPEG? It compresses well, it streams, and every OS under the sun can play it.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Anyways I'd love to see the following 10 robots to be created within the next few years.
Want Root?
this comes up just every time a video link is presented on slashdot. i've seen complaints about videos in Windows Media format, Quicktime and Real Video. what i'd like to know is, what format would the slashbots like to see their video in? i know personally as an OS X user i'd like to see videos in Quicktime (and Windows Media is most convenient when i'm using Windows), but are there any decent video formats available to Linux? formats that get reasonable compression rates like the new Windows Media or the newest Sorenson CODECs? if not is there anything that can be done about this apart from continuing to petition Sorenson, Microsoft and the others?
- j
"Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie set off a compelling debate recently when he discussed Microsoft's Shared Source Philosophy, which blends the sharing of source code with the preservation of intellectual property rights." It works this way: You share YOUR source code. We preserve OUR intellectual property rights.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Strong Free Software types maintain that the issue is freedom ... that the software model is itself a statement about human priorities. I don't subscribe to all of their philosophy, myself, but I think I understand where they're coming from. And I'm glad there is still someone out there saying, "Making money is only one human priority and, moreso, it is not the most important one."
In the end, that's what's both so frustrating and so exhilirating about the Free Software movement: It's about something... something more than hoarding and sleeping and feeding and knowing not a thing.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach