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Nat Friedman on the Future of Collaboration

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the listen-up dept.

sp3298622 writes "Nat Friedman, co-founder of Ximian, expresses his excitement about the Hula collaboration Server, talks about the plugins in development for Evolution 2.2, the potential of XGL and the revolution of the Linux Desktop. The interview is a 30MB MP3 file."

7 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. No OGG? by zygoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How the heck am I going to listen to this on Fedora?

    1. Re:No OGG? by Wordsmith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's modded as funny, but this is a valid point when it comes to collaboration. If we can't all use the same resources - media files being one example - we can't effectively collaborate.

      MP3 is the defacto standard for compressed audio and WMA has major support, so virtually no one uses Vorbis. After all - most windows and mac users wouldn't know what to do with an ogg file. But mp3 is patent-constricted, so fedora users can't listen to an mp3 without going outside the distribution for semi-legal support.

      There's a collaboration problem.

    2. Re:No OGG? by LnxAddct · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "But mp3 is patent-constricted..."

      Yes, but whose problem is it? Refusing to use a superior and free product just because it doesn't have mass market is stupid and linux would still be no where if everyone thought like that. They should either use both formats, or tell windows and mac users instructions for playing OGG. Its a better sounding format anyway. Don't support mp3's and software patents just becuase its easy to do. Let people know that its not okay and make a difference. Real Player supports ogg (at least on linux it does, so I'd assume the windows version does too), most people have Real Player. It's people that conform into whatever is accepted at the time that stifle change.
      Regards,
      Steve

  2. Does anybody else hate these audio interviews? by nicpottier · · Score: 5, Insightful


    I mean they are horrible. I know this is the latest trend, podcasting and all, but it's freaking useless.

    I don't care what Nate sounds like, I just want the content, and I want it in txt so I can index it, search against it, quote it easily etc..

    Not only are these shows just incredibly badly done (wtf is the first 3 minutes of this thing?) but the format itself is just asinine. mp3's are great for music, they are not great for interviews.

    For the love of god, at least give us a transcript!

    -Nic

  3. Enough with the audio interviews already! by teneighty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    MP3 and other audio interviews are completely and utterly useless to me. Why? Because I'm DEAF. No "insensitive clod" appeded to the comment here, because I'm not trying to be funny. It's true. Besides, most people have a hard enough time writing in a way that is presentable to a wide audience, even after a great deal of editing - let alone SPEAKING in a way that comes across as polished. Until you can afford a studio, professional editors, and someone to transcribe your speech - please, FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODS - stick to text. It's harder to mess up with text. Trust me on this. Until we have real-time text-to-speech transcription for arbitary speakers, I'd be extremely grateful if the internet stuck to what it's good at: text. While I have my own agenda for this, there's another factor to consider: audio files cannot easily be indexed or searched, so they're really just kind of useless on the internet - after all, a great deal of the power we get from the net today comes from the information being available via search engines.

    1. Re:Enough with the audio interviews already! by alienmole · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OTOH, my girlfriend has severe dyslexia and likes audio sources. She depends heavily on audiobooks. The disability argument ultimately boils down to needing to make info available in multiple formats, not that text is better.

  4. So... by samael · · Score: 3, Insightful

    when is this "Evolution" program being released for Windows?

    --
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