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AOL Open Sourcing Audio & Video Technology
daria24 writes "BetaNews says that AOL is open sourcing Winamp AVS and Milkdrop, two popular Winamp plug-ins, and its Ultravox streaming media platform (the successor to Shoutcast). 'Despite helping to launch the Mozilla Foundation and releasing the code to its AOL Server software, America Online has never been synonymous with open source. But a number of new initiatives could change AOL's proprietary image, as the company strives to reach a broader audience on the open Web.' The next-generation AIM release will also be an open platform, which AOL says 'could rival even Mozilla due to its scale and the massive AIM user base.'"
hooray
that most of the stories posted here nowadays just seem like so much flamebait?
w00t
>>It's laughable to mock IE for memory leaks when Firefox is X (where X > 1) times worse at sucking up and retaining memory.
Thanks, I'm glad someone pointed this out. My system has been up for many days now and IE and Firefox are both consuming about the same amount (90-something MB).
It's all about features.
See, first you ball all of the security patches together, and have them all download, even if the user already has them. That way, because it takes longer and is bigger, they think it's a more substantial application.
Second, you add some new features. Like stealing compression code from Stacker, MS will just steal one of the "Tabbed browsing in IE" Plugins and muck the variable names up a bit.
Finally, you tweak the theme. You gotta make it LOOK like a new browser. This is more important than anything else. If it LOOKS the same, people will assume it IS the same. This is why the OS has gotten so much eye candy with each release, it's to make sure the users KNOW they're on a new OS by it LOOKING cooler.
But fixing actual bugs? There's no real Return on Investment on that, so it won't be done.
Because A) Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book, even temporarily. One of the benefits of libraries is that the books are for everyone and not just us rich snobs who go to barnes and nobles every day. B) Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest. Sure, it's only for a few weeks, but that money can add up fast (see: Office Space, Superman, etc).
These fingerprint scans for PC use are a stupid idea implemented by some town in Ill. I've never heard of. I'm sure that program won't fly...
Let's stop creating solutions for problems that don't exist. We have enough real problems in the US that need solutions.../p
i have an interesting story regarding my friend's incident at the airport security. at the security checkpoint, my friend was about to walk through the metal detector. he had on white sneakers, which usually aren't required to be taken off.
the metal detector guard asked if my friend wanted to take off his shoes. he didn't request it, just asked if he wanted to. my friend, being lazy, of course said he'd rather just walk through. the moment he expressed this, he was asked for follow the guard and they went into one of those corners and he closed the drapes around him and did a full body search (no cavity search though).
either way, by saying you want an anonymous card is similar to this situation, where you have the option to, but you'll be more suspicious for them to check you out, probably finding stuff about you that they wouldn't have else known.
But seriously, are you suggesting we should have universal anonymity with universal trust? You must be mad. Did you follow the 'white bicycle' and 'green bicycle' experiments?
Anyway, the 'rich' (in this case those with 20 bucks to spare) only get to be anonymous by forfeiting access to some of their money.
You might as well complain that parking schemes are only for the benefit of those who can afford a car.
Justin./p
First of all, the 'value' of the material you check-out should be increased from the purchase price. I regularly use inter library loan to get materials that are next to impossible to find otherwise. If this system was anonymous and the price of CD say was $15, then all of the obscure music would quickly vanish from circulation. You would need to increase the value to say $60 to discourage stealing.
The way that libraries counteract stealing now is that they have a dollar limit above which they do not lend further materials out to you and you can only have one library card per name address pair. So even if the value is comparable to real world cost, the fact that you can only steal a limited amount before you can return to steal more, and the fact that if you steal enough at one time they will put you in collection work well enough to prevent casual theft.
Already at that increased value rate for the card, this would turn-away most people. But say that they did not mark-up the value, just wait until you have three kids like I do. Right now I have some twenty odd books/videos/CDs checked-out from the library near my home. I also have two movies, two books, and 11 CDs that I am returning today to the library near my work. I do not even know how much my wife has checked-out, but she is a pretty voracious reader too. Think about how much money we would need to set aside for that.
So why is this being proposed? It looks like it is a solution to the wrong end of the problem. The real problem are the laws that force libraries to turn-over information. So guess what the solution is? Yes that's right, change those laws.
Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book
/. would be able to take a couple minutes out of their day to search for library history on Google. Originally, libraries were private. Then, many went 'public', but charged a membership fee. After many years of fighting for equal rights, the membership fees were abolished so that even the poorest Americans would be allowed to use the resources at the public library.
/. solution is that the poor people who can't afford to plop down cash can just get an old card - one that isn't anonymous. Toss equal rights right out the window. The rich get to be anonymous. The poor get tracked.
This isn't a matter of just not having the money - you'd think that the geeks on
I know the idiotic
Isn't there some old phrase about learning your history so it doesn't repeat itself?
Remember the old, completely paper-driven library cards of 30+ years ago? The borrower's name was written on the card, and every borrower before them was on a permanent list. No anonymity there at all. More recently, you were issued a bar-coded card that tracked what you borrowed against your name. No anonymity there, either (because, if you don't return the book, they need to know who's running around with a $50 copy of a coffee-table Leonardo DaVinci collection, or whatever).
Now, you walk into a library, as you've been able to do for centuries, pull a book off the shelf, sit down, and read it. Put it back. There's no tracking involved, never has been (except perhaps at the Library Of Congress and some other huge collections where you have to put in a request for the book to be brought out - and there's been no anonymity there, either). But if you want to walk away with the book, they want to know who's got it. Why is that a bad thing? If you want to temporarily take posession of something that the taxpayers paid for (or which was donated to the community by a private party), it's certainly reasonable for the community to have in place a way to get hold of that person when they don't return the item, or to charge them a fee if they hang onto it for longer than is reasonable.
Now, you walk into a library and want to use the internet. Fine. But suppose your entire purpose of using that service is to phish, defraud, or otherwise be bad? If some merchant somewhere tracks a fraud attempt, or a bank tracks the use of a stolen credit card back to an IP address mapped to a machine in a facility provided by taxpayers, isn't it reasonable to be able to figure out who was driving at the time they were committing a crime? The fingerprinting issue was about computer use. Biometrics are about making sure you are who you say you are, so that lifting an acquaintence's card doesn't allow you to commit crimes in her name using public facilities.
That said, I don't think I'd want a bored IT intern at a library able to troll through proxy logs and see, by name, who was looking at what on the web. Biometrics should just be a hash, and that sort of log data should be just like financial transaction data, with need-to-know one-way storage. Yes, that can be cracked. But so can everything if you can't trust anyone, ever. If a municipality, county, or school wants to continue to offer free computer/net use, but wants to mitigate the obviously real risk of people running scams from their network, they should certainly have the option of doing something about it. It's all about transparency, though: letting the users know what's being collected when they sign on, and generally how it's being protected and under what circumstances (subpeona, etc) it can be retrieved.
Most of the larger corporations in Europe are ready to switch, having done extensive development work with FOSS tools internally. However, they never exposed their efforts since the vast majority of governments are completely tied with Microsoft and would never consider anything else.
Doesn't it strike anyone as unusual that it actually makes headlines if a town like Munich turns to linux? Shouldn't there be many more initiatives like that in a healthy market place ?
One reason for this complete lockin is that Europe still hasn't grown together (and might actually fall apart yet more after the failed elections about the new EU constitution in France and Netherlands), and individual governments don't seem to have the guts or the power anymore to stand up against an industy giant and monopolist.
They need to call a continental committee and write it up as an amendement #1,567,804 on page 57,119,328 of their EU Constitution Defining What Rights The Glorious Motherland Of Europe Benevolently Grants It's Cogs^H^H^H^HCitizens. But they are busy now adding the amendment banning women from shaving their under arms or the other one defining the acceptable Pantone colors for cheese wrappers.
Since they aren't computed the same way, the comparison is meaningless...
That wasn't insightful, it was simply wrong. On both counts, actually.
For a start, the limit is 48 hours, not 35, and there's currently an opt-out that many European nations are keen to retain. This isn't a great example of over-regulation anyway: there's a pretty good case for enforcing a 48 hour limit and removing the opt-out, based on solid information about both abuse of workers and the performance of overworked staff, and if you're going to do something like that in a relatively open labour market, it makes sense to do it on a common basis.
In any case, you may not have noticed but a couple of European nations just voted down the whole Euro constitution in referenda, and some major government figures have left their posts as a result. It's pretty clear what the people think about European over-regulation and beaurocracy at this point.
There's a difference between thinking something's a fad and simply not trusting your whole economy/culture to it. If slavish adherence to a capitalist dogma results in the kind of corporate-centric, slave-worker culture that we keep hearing about across the Atlantic, then personally I'm quite happy if a more flexible approach is taken, thanks./p
It's a troll, not a technical issue.
wow parent should be modded up informative that explains the nonsense i'm seeing here. that has nothing to do with their parents.