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.'"

Comments

You BASTARDS!

[nagora]

What have you done with the real AOL?

TWW

Re:You BASTARDS!

[LiMikeTnux]

why would we care what happened to the real AOL? ;)

Re:You BASTARDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but like Java, Javascript surely uses a garbage collection concept meaning it is the browsers responsibility to free memory, and any leaks are thus due to the browser.

Re:You BASTARDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be an @$$. Remember how annoying it was when people said that sites only displayed right in IE 5.5 or "better"? Yeah, you do. Did that get you to use IE? No, it didn't, unless it was your bank or something. So guess what? 90% of people won't go to your non-IE site. Period.

Re:You BASTARDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

but during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?

Yes, and that was the whole damn problem.

The point of HTML was universal interoperability (so Tim Berners-Lee's collegues could all read each other's stuff no matter what computer setup they had). But Microsoft sacrificed this in order to obtain control and market share. They encouraged web developers to use their proprietary markup, which forced people into using their browser if they wanted to access this content.

This was not a benevolent gesture from Microsoft- it was nothing but a power-grab. Open, agreed-upon standards are the foundation of interoperability, and Microsoft always stands against this when it thinks it can monopolize a technology./p

Re:You BASTARDS!

[RicktheBrick]

I think AOL is going through a slow death. I was a member for over 5 years until I moved to an area that had no local access. I have since moved on to broadband(verizon dsl) and would never even consider going back to AOL even if they did have a local number. I live in an area where 7 miles from where I live they have SBC and they offer broadband for $14.95 a month which AOL charges for access with another carrier. I see no use for AOL unless they get their own means of access(wi-max or stratolite) and offer more services(smart home, security, and medical alerts).

Re:You BASTARDS!

[Nefarious420]

It is about time AOL became just another portal pushing their name recognition to get advertising sales. Its fucking ridiculous to think they could maintain all these overpriced dial up users for any long stretch of time with Broadband becoming so cheap and mainstream. Then again it is probably too late, they should have done this 2 years ago or more. http://reiclubli.info/InvestorsJournal/

Re:You BASTARDS!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a library. $20 is a small fine... many users end up with over $50, and I've seen hundreds owing (it's not that hard.. lose 4 hardcovers and that's nearly $200 right there). I would only think this would work if the deposit was much higher.. but of course then no one would use it.

Re:You BASTARDS!

[darkain]

AOL layed off most of the Nullsoft team, and the ones that didnt, quit. Why is AOL opening all of their software now? So they can get development for free. A few of the developers actually asked to open-source various of the Nullsoft products under the condition that they would continue to work on the projects out-of-pocket. So, is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I really cant say, because it does pain me to live in IRC with these guys for the past several years and to hear all about the internal workings of the company. As for the AOL side of things tho? I dont really know anything about them. I just feel for the guys that used to work for Nullsoft that no longer have their jobs with them.

Re:You BASTARDS!

[ccn]

You really want to trust your medical alerts to AOL?

1st post

[Anonymous Coward]

hooray

Pixie-dust projects

[Scorillo47]

Yet another example of pixie-dust projects...

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Synbiosis]

I'm no open source fanatic (I actually think most of it is crap), but I think the fact that the blog is on MSDN is funny as hell. =P

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Is such an approach also useable for finding firefox leaks? As a user (not developer, alas) I'm noticing that it invariably gets sluggish after some period of time, even with few pages open.

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't noticed the memory issue, but i can confirm the cpu usage being 99%. In my case it was caused by an embedded Flash movie on the site. As soon as i closed that (or even rightclicked within the flash movie and choose 'stop' or whatever) things went back to normal.

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[hey!]

quote the linked blog

Pixie-dust projects. Here I put big, commercial projects that were morphed in an open source variation, as in an attempt to sprinkle the open source pixie dust to help them to remain competitive. Examples: Netscape....

Not like anything could come of that kind of airy fairy pixie dust project, eh?

Taking this guy seriously, it's not hard to see that all of the classes of projects he describes do indeed exist. However, if you go the other way, from the important projects to the classifications, you see that none of them really fit any of his classifications.

Where would you put Apache HTTP server? Tomcat? Perl? Wine?

Or for that matter Linux. Sure, you can probably find some organizations that are supporting Linux so they can poke a competitor in the eye, but characterizing corporate support for Linux that way is simplistic.

Some organizations are simply scratching their itches, like that Nasa guy who wrote all those ethernet drivers.

Others just need Linux to exist to make their business viable. I think Red Hat doesn't really set itself up to compete with Microsoft, which is the classic land-war-in-Asia mistake. They'd be foolish to aim to "spoil things" for Microsoft; that's just a possible side effect. It's more like they're trying to create a business model that allows them to make money around Microsoft.

Another reason I see for supporting Linux that doesn't fit into this scheme is strategy. Microsoft is not an important competitor to IBM in any sphere, now that OS/2 is a dead business. Big Blue needs Linux to make sure it stays that way. Without Linux, IBM would have to compete with Microsoft in its business areas but allow Microsoft control over the underlying technology. You could say that is "disruptive", except that is more aimed at maintaining the status quo from IBM's perspective.

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather not be anonymous at thge library. I'd rather have my reading list looked through than participate in a system meant to bypass the current political climate.

Well, sometimes librarians are the only ones fighting for you to keep having some of these rights and not having your reading habits looked through.

They seem to be the only ones who really appreciate the issues involved in the freedoms involved. Oft-times it's counrt challenges made by them that preserves such freedoms.

By participating in an anonymous system, I would feel like I was legitimising the laws and practices that I feel are attacks at my personal liberty.

By protecting your currently held rights to read what you want with privacy you legitimise attacks on your privacy?

That's effectively saying that you concede that only criminals would want to keep things private from the government, so not-guilty people have nothing to hide.

The US constitution was designed to prevent this kind of state-control of the citizenry, not make everyone who tries to uphold it into an outlaw.

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Anonymous Coward]

> In the US most of the large companies have clear strategies to increase open source in their product lines...

I think Microsoft and SCO have very clear strategies about open source. So does Linksys and all others on the BusyBox Hall of Shame

Re:Pixie-dust projects

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another example of pixie-dust projects [msdn.com]...

It may be, but since iChat uses AIM as a network transport it would be really useful for third party developers (GAIM, Adium X) if AIM was open sourced since it may be easier to get access to the A/V features.

Huh?

[TheSpoom]

Wait, does this mean that we're supposed to... like... AOL?

But... it just feels wrong somehow... :^(

Re:Huh?

[dknj]

I think we're just supposed to hate the ISP aspect of AOL, even though that is getting better too. Their software has never been half bad. I have been a big fan of AIM (up until 5.2 or so when they included the WildTangent crap), and even the original design of the AOL client was quite interesting. AOL Server proved itself, but it wasn't free. Now that AVS is open, we can see some more interesting projects spawned off of it (xmms/noatun plugins anyone?). I think they're trying to show the world that we shouldn't hate AOL, just the users.

-dk

Re:Huh?

[doombob]

Yeah, that's ok... it's just their customers we're not supposed to like.

Re:Huh?

[superpulpsicle]

I am convinced more people on slashdot know what to do with AOL than the AOL-management team. Therefore, no... you shouldn't like the company.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, Firefox makes aggressive use of unused resources. If you're not having any slowdowns, then take a deep breath and realize that it's just doing what it's supposed to do.

If you do have accompanying slowdowns, then you have a specific, rare problem. See the other replies you've gotten so far for suggestions.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a kiosk running an html application in IE6. It uses lots of javascript and the front page reloads every couple minutes when idle. It's been running for 6 months on 64mb of ram with no issues. The same browser window has been open all that time.

I remember one time writing a page which by accident, hit a memory leak in Mozilla (before there was a FireFox) which consumed about 1mb of ram a second. All the page did was draw a bouncing line, by creating a div for every line pixel of every frame and displaying them by setting the innerHTML property of another div. IE had no trouble with the page, except that it required some ugly hacks to make the page display correctly, unlike Mozilla, which displayed it perfectly as I had specified in the CSS, albiet leaky.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

me too!!!!! 1!!111!!!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>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).

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists. The demand to have it fixed, therefore, dissipates and developers accept the onus to repeat work-arounds everytime they deploy something. Ultimately, the browser fails to improve, and the costs of errors are passed from the vendor (Microsoft) who never fixes the problem to the public (developers that waste time with work-arounds).

Anyway, if you write things specifically for IE -- then you've already got a more serious problem that you have to address first. There's no excuse for what you already know to be dismal practice.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

because it's your job?

I don't know why you geeks have such a downer on Microsoft for writing buggy software. If it didn't, do you have any idea about how many of you would be out of a job? The capitalisation that flows from Microsofts inability to write good operating systems is immeasurable. If it worked first time - would there be any engineers?

It's sort of analogous to cruise liners. Used to be, because ships weren't terribly well made, a clipper had a huge crew of dirty, scurvey suffering swabbers. Nowadays, you have one captain and a big computer. Currently, IT graduates, computer consultants and systems administraters are that huge crew of disease ridden reprobates, serving on the creaking, rotten, old fashioned Microsoft vessel. And all you want is to be out of a job?

Where's the logic in that??

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The true source of IE memory leaks?

Korean outsourcing

Re:Huh?

[Cruithne]

It makes sense when you think about it. Open source as a business model is basically about embracing service-based revenue streams rather than product-based ones. AOL has always been a service-based company - the two fit perfectly. This is why MS is so anti-OSS, all they do is sell you a product :)

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats great if you want to turn the library into a bookstore. Dropping $15 (or whatever) for a book is no big deal for some people and they will feel no obligation to return the book.

Re:Huh?

[Tenebrious1]

Wait, does this mean that we're supposed to... like... AOL?

But we can still hate AOL users right?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in 10 years open source might well be illegal there.

Re:Huh?

[Queer Boy]

Just so you young whippersnappers remember, AOL was the reason there's a consumer internet AT ALL! The existence of AOL and its massive userbase was the impetus for improving the usability of things like WWW, Usenet and e-mail.

Did you think you could always point and click your way across the internet?

Re:Huh?

[stuuf]

The headline should have read "Nullsoft open sourcing audio & video technology" Of course we're supposed to like AOL, because they own things like Netscape and Nullsoft.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but we could make do.

Re:Huh?

[nuggetman]

Their software has never been half bad.

It's never been half good either.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was what Mosaic did, not AOL.

Re:Huh?

[dknj]

just out of curosity, what makes the software half bad for you. i don't use aol server regularly, but i didn't have any complaints when i did use it briefly. there still aren't any aim clients that 100% replicate the features in aim. winamp 5. netscape, okay so they may have butchered it here, but if it weren't for aol netscape wouldn't exist anymore.

-dk

Re:Huh?

[HeliumHigh]

No, we still hate them, and always will because of two words: Me too!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

we shouldn't hate AOL, just the users
Wouldn't using that code make us AOL users to some extent?

Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

that most of the stories posted here nowadays just seem like so much flamebait?

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

w00t

Props to them

[m50d]

Anyone know how portable the code is? Any chance we could see milkdrop for xmms (yes I know there are clones around, none of them are as good as the original).

Re:Props to them

[Crimson Dragon]

It would truly depend what they used to write it. It seems difficult to say at this stage of the game.... I would guess some kind of C, but the question of what they use to render the visualization is suspect. Do they use Direct X? OpenGL?

Unless they truly use some concoted scheme for the other logic, only the way in which the vis is rendered is an issue.... I never used the winamp plugins, but writing software all day, if my boss plunked that on my desk that would be my first thought..

Re:Props to them

[ktulu1115]

projectM is a Milkdrop clone which has ports for WinAmp, iTunes, and XMMS. It does a pretty good job replicating Milkdrop's functionality, been using it for awhile now on X... although there are many features it is lacking. It's great to hear Milkdrop is finally being open-sourced, let's hope projectM can work better as a result.

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

There were many, many leaks in Firefox, and many have been fixed for 1.1 (do a search on their Bugzilla for "memory leak"). Hopefully, the situation is now much-improved, but I suspect it will be the case that long periods of heavy-browsing will require you to to restart Firefox for quite a while yet. For this reason, I always recommend the Session Saver extension - makes closing and restarting Firefox less painful.

Memory fragmentation is a big issue for modern desktop systems as the heap used by programs written in C/C++ can't be compacted, and most memory allocation systems weren't necessarily designed to support programs that would be continually allocating and deallocating memory for days on end. Robert Love gave a (fairly detailed and technical) talk on it at while back, with some suggestions for combating it on the Linux desktop, which I recommend to anyone who is interested. It's about 126MB, Ogg format.

http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/6uadec/Robert_Lo ve_-_Optimizing_GNOME.ogg

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your comment! This has been driving me nuts. I installed firefox on various hardware, and on low and machines, it really really sucked. So I've been arguing for some time that the gecko engine (I notice the cpu-usage spikes as well) is really slow, compared to ie, opera or khtml. And always someone replied that he or she tried it, and it wasn't slow, like here

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?

You say that like it's a good thing(!)

"Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?

No; for some pretty obvious reasons: one obvious one being, you exclude anyone not using that particular browser. I thought everyone realised that was a Bad Thing - or maybe you haven't been one of those people who can't use their online bank because the bank decided to arbitrarily depend on IE. One can only hope that accessibility laws will put an end to such stupidities.

It's not surprising that both browser products have memory leaks. However one could reflect deeply on the differences in responsibility and approaches to remediation. In Firefox's case - being open source - you have complete transparency; you can file a bug on it, check the bug db, or even fix it yourself (don't laugh). In M$'s case, all you can do is kiss your money goodbye and hope they fix it "one day".

The same goes for all the rest of their system, too. It is not always obvious what a disturbing abdication of rights using a closed system is. A friend recently told me of a Visual $tudio crash triggered by a few \b backspace characters in a print statement. Not such a big deal, I thought at the time; but I found myself reflecting on his story later. Eventually the true horror of the situation sank in, which is that we have to completely trust the ability and goodwill of the vendor to deal with any and all issues in their O/S. That is no small responsibility and there is not much evidence that M$ is capable of fulfilling their end of the bargain. I would postulate, after RMS of course, that no closed and proprietary system on the scale of M$ products can be adequately maintained by one vendor. And of course maintenance becomes irrelevant when major "rewrites" are involved, such as have been prescribed by Longhr0n to fix W1ndows' fundamental ills (ref Spolsky on rewrites, Things You Should Never Do what a dead-end that is, and for putting in place viable alternatives./p

Re:Props to them

[ktulu1115]

Milkdrop uses DirectX AFAIK, projectM uses OpenGL (written in C).

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure our underfunded libraries and overworked librarians will find this system easy to implement.
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...

I would LOVE this thing if it were implemented. I could go to public libraries when travelling! I could borrow a book I really need for my schoolwork when I forgot my regular library card, etc.

This is a great idea, not only for privacy, but for convenience. You get to use the ressource without the hassle, and it doesn't cost you a fortune, you loan them money, they loan you a book, you exchange it back when you are done. Everyone's happy!

Let's stop creating solutions for problems that don't exist. We have enough real problems in the US that need solutions...

Why don't you go work on solving them instead of posting on slashdot then?
Don't know where to start? Go volunteer to help out your local "overworked librarian", I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

Re:Props to them

[m50d]

It's been around for a while, so it's probably not depending on new directx, so even if it is directx perhaps it could be compiled against winelib? I'm more concerned about the code assuming everything is windows (\ for directory separator, etc)

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

You Europeans need to get your FOSS act together! You need to be more like:

The Finns: that Linus kid seems pretty astute. How about getting him to be a European and do some opens source code?

The Norwegians: a nice cross-platform widget set and development environment would be perfect if you could whip those Trolls in shape and get them to code!

The Germans: Once the Trolls start to churn out code, how about putting together a full GUI environment. Screw with all the Americans and start every program with the letter "K" -- they'll go nuts! Oh, and while you're at it, how about a nice distribution based around all of the above? Red Hat can't do everything, you know.

The French, Polish & Spanish: I think these guys might be able to whip together some decent distros and code.

I'm probably missing a ton. All those little countries with all those funny languages get so confusing! No wonder you all can't get anything done!

Oh, and there is this Welsh guy that Red Hat has locked away somewhere. You might convince him to write some kernel code or some such.

Good luck!

-Charles

Re:Props to them

[The Bungi]

Interesting. This is the entire body of this post. All the other offtopic (Europe, library cards) posts here seem to be coming from +2 and up comments in articles posted today.

Looks like Splashdork is in for another bot attack.

Re:Props to them

[00lmz]

It seems that AVS uses DirectDraw for its drawing. It also has some mmx optimized inline-assembly routines for copying surfaces. The AVS plugins have a little windows dependency (to create the configuration dialog and process values from it), but the plugins render to a int* framebuffer so plugin render code should be fine (that is, if ported to a little-endian, 32bit architecture).

The EEL (expression evaluation library) for avs uses some sort of compiler that seems to generate x86 floating-point code, but since it's contained in a library, it should be easy to change the internal workings of the library to work on other platforms. Actually the source for the EEL library has been available for quite some time with the Winamp SDK. It was intended to be used by AVS plugin creators so their plugins would support the same code as the rest of AVS.

Re:Props to them

[Crimson Dragon]

Yes but that is typical conversion in code that is not multi-platform. I assume the question was directed at matters aside from syntactical adjustment.

Re:Props to them

[m50d]

Code can be written to be cross platform from the start, and not need such adjustments. That was a very trivial example, there can be deeper things. But anyway, what I'm asking is was the code written to be multi-platform.

Re:Props to them

[Anonymous Coward]

Was done before milkdrop wen't OSS, http://xmms-projectm.sourceforge.net/

Non-open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

They created Mozilla as open source.

This is probably the number 1 open source program on Windows.

Re:Non-open source?

[DrXym]

More accurately Netscape did when it was still a largely autonomous company.

Re:Non-open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value.

Borrowing The Terror State from your local library: $20

Parking your car anywhere: $50

Fast lane at the airport, bypassing extra security checks: $100k

Bypassing all important security checks: $10m

Bypassing all security checks and paying for it with American oil money: priceless.

--Bud

Re:Non-open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're talking about Europe though, land of the government enforced 35 hour work week. They never met a regulation they didn't like.

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.

I think that a lot of Europe thinks capitalism and free markets are a fad.

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

Does it really matter?

[Elecore]

'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.' It could rival in pure numbers, but I'd bet that MOST AOL users don't really understand or care what open source is. Most people who do stay clear of AOL to begin with.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Synbiosis]

"It could rival in pure numbers, but I'd bet that MOST AOL users don't really understand or care what open source is. Most people who do stay clear of AOL to begin with."

AIM has an obscenely diverse user base. It's available on all platforms, and virtually everyone (except for Jabber guys who refuse to friend anyone not on Jabber) uses it.

Granted, there will be some people who don't care about open source, but there's definitely quite a few people who would be willing to switch to something less RAM hungry and ad-free for their IMing needs.

As for currently existing open source projects, there's Gaim & Miranda. Gaim is deent, but it's a ram hog and uses GTK, which is the bane of anyone running 1024x768 or less. Miranda IM is the exact opposite, but it's missing key features like *working file transfers*.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm fairly certain there's a leak somewhere in teh FF javascript handler - I've noticed memory usage rocketing on some pages which use JS.

Re:Does it really matter?

[dcclark]

Not to mention that the "open platform" actually consists of letting some outside developers license certain aspects of AIM and its protocols. In particular, there will be some sort of plug-in architecture -- so no chance of getting better access to the protocols for 3rd party use. They aren't actually doing much "opening up," so much as making more business opportunities for themselves.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't think MSIE is inherently evil, I think I could argue that a browser that allows web pages (a resource that should not be trusted) to cause memory leaks is itself flawed. Part of the browser's job is to not expose the user to risk or instability while interpreting documents of unknown maliciousness and quality.

Re:Does it really matter?

[lav-chan]

I wonder if 'open platform' means AOL will let me use Miranda to connect to their service without suspending my account every week.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would only think this would work if the deposit was much higher.. but of course then no one would use it.

Elite Level: For a fee large enough that only rich people (and well-funded cells) will pay it, you can have a library card not traceable to you (until you show up to use it again).

Comrade Level: For free-as-in-police-state, you can have a library card that logs every transaction you make. (Future upgrades will upload the logs directly to DCS1000.)

The surveillance situation in this country is just wrong and it keeps getting wronger(TM), but look where this solution leads us: two classes of access. The principle of libraries is that free public access to information improves society. Free -- not paid, not surveilled -- free.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's evident that the nation isn't just standing idly by and enjoying watching these delicious little tarts parading their flesh on the high street.

That sounds just like the Taliban, except for the ironic inclusion of the adjective "delicious", which gives away the real issue: temptation.

This sort of behavior is only possible in very civilized countries. In most other environments, such young women would soon encounter some unpleasant consequences of their behavior, in the form of predatory and violent males unrestricted by the threat of legal consequences.

The reason the behavior of these young women is so frowned on is that it breaks the mostly unwritten social compact which most nations follow. This compact has been taken to its extreme by the Taliban and other Islamic theocratic goverments: don't tempt us (men) and we'll protect you (women). Tempt us, and all bets are off.

The so-called morals referred to by the OP are in fact a reflection of a primitive culture that hasn't gotten too far beyond the caveman stage. The next time you see a semi-naked, drunk young thing staggering down the street, marvel at what a free and open society you live in, repress the urge to bonk her over the head and drag her back to your apartment, and pat yourself on the back for your own part in a real civilization.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they aren't computed the same way, the comparison is meaningless...

Re:Does it really matter?

[rizzo420]

they released a beta of this new aim product... it's got ads. do you really think the official client from aol won't have ads? come on now...

i use gaim. it's alright, although it does use a lot of ram (but so does the official aim client). i don't have a lot of hope for what they're going to release... the're really just opening the protocol, probably meaning they're not gonna harass 3rd party clients.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could rival in pure numbers, but I'd bet that MOST AOL users don't really understand or care what open source is. Most people who do stay clear of AOL to begin with.

Most AIM users are not, in fact, AOL (the service) users. AIM has a very large and diverse user base which includes plenty of open-source developers.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I'm not an AOL user. I hate AOL the service. I'm an AIM user, primarily because of network effects. All my friends use AIM, and because the purpose of instant messaging is to talk to your friends, not open-source evangelism, I use AIM too.

I'd love to use an open-source IM client, because there are some extra features I'd want to implement. I've tried to mod AIM, but at best it's not easy -- you have to use obscure hacks -- and at worst it violates the ToS. I would use Gaim, but a) my friends aren't, so patches to Gaim are worthless and b) I clicked through the ToS without realizing they prevent me from using Gaim.

Oh, and as for your assertion that there aren't a bunch of AIM people who are also OSS people: Instant Messaging Wikipedians lists a bunch of AIMmers and (gasp!) MSNIMers, far more than the number of Jabberers.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Synbiosis]

True, but if you read the article it suggests that AOL may open-source it in a similar fashion, and ads can be removed.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Good

[mindaktiviti]

More competition is a good thing (and by competition I mean releasing source, and striving to compete with the likes of mozilla, as opposed to being just a rotting corporation that no geek would bother with).

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

But your inflammatory tone would be really cool if our open source alternative in Firefox were somehow better. Right now, Firefox is using 373M on my computer (334M resident) with three windows open, none of which have anything bigger than this /. page. Mozilla is using 279M (I'm also running it) with a single page open. Firefox usually gets up to around 600-700M over the course of 3 or 4 days, after which it generally just dies. Otherwise, I have to kill it due to its slowness.

Why not leave IE to Microsoft; put your effort toward something you can actually fix rather than being an ankle-biting ass.

AOL does contribute to open source software

[fitsy]

AOL does contribute to useful open source software. AOL developers contribute to SQLite and have helped produce numerous useful additions to SQLite.

Quote: The primary purpose for version 3.2.0 is to add support for ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN. The new ADD COLUMN capability is made possible by AOL developers supporting and embracing great open-source software. Thanks, AOL!

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

Without being too familar with Javascript I am reasonably sure Javascript uses Memory too like any other programming language on the planet.

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[Perl-Pusher]

That has to do with AOL & SQL Lite how?

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I just have my head in the sand, but I haven't seen people on /. claiming that "[Europe] always have everything better than [America]" or that "Europe is perfect". I don't mean to sound rude, but you do sound like you are creating a mythical enemy for the purpose of ranting.

There are so many variations between countries that saying one is better than another is entirely subjective. Rather than trying to figure out which one is better, try focussing on how they differ and why.

IMO, Americans have a much better "just do it" approach to life/work and tend to value personal freedom. Europeans OTOH are more focussed on social values, society is more hierarchical and people tend to have a higher regard for style. Britain is halfway between the two.

When it comes to open source, Americans have the usual advantage of having more drive to get things done, whereas Europeans may be more likely to accept the concept due to its wider social implications.

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[DVega]

AOL also released AOLserver. A Free WebServer under MPL License.

From the project's page:

"AOLserver is America Online's Open-Source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is a multithreaded, Tcl-enabled web server used for large scale, dynamic web sites."

Re:AOL does contribute to open source software

[kriston]

I wrote that description when I created the AOLserver project on Source Forge. AOLserver really hasn't caught on and despite releasing 4.0 there isn't really much reason to use it. All of its cutting-edge benefits, like integrated database handling and in-process scripting, are now done better in Apache.

As for being the backbone of the "largest and busiest production environments" that is rapidly changing. They re-released the webmail system using some other software (definitely not AOLserver) and most of the outsourced projects aren't even done on Unix.

The fun is gone.

Jabber

[labratuk]

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.'

Just use XMPP you retards.

Re:Jabber

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me people are now attacking IE now from 3 major angles:

• Memory and resource usage
• Rendering and adhering to web standards
• Security

IMHO, It's laughable to mock IE for memory leaks when Firefox is X (where X > 1) times worse at sucking up and retaining memory.

People have relentlessly said the reason IE is faster to load than IE on Win32 is because it is "embedded into the OS" and somehow brushed off this advantage in favour of it's debateable disadvantage in terms of security. What's next? Will slashdotters crying out something along the lines of "WOW! IE, an embedded part of the Windows, has memory leaks! What does that say for the Operating System? You better use Linux!"?

IE may be guilty of having a buggy implementation of web standards such as CSS2.1 but during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?

Isn't that "Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?

This tool is interesing and useful for developers and I thank jgwebber for writing it as I'm sure it'll be useful even to lowly personal developers like me.
On the other hand i'm a bit baffled as to why this article wasn't simply written as "Hey IE has memory leaks, checkout this new tool by jgwebber and see for youself. Let's discuss how sucky Internet Explorer is and cover up all the flaws in competitor browsers".

It would have had the same effect as CowboyNeal's unnecessary "(ha!)"'s and claims of IE's "horrendous memory leak issues" without a link giving some evidence for these claims for those of us without first-hand DHTML development experience.

I truly wasn't aware of any serious IE memory leaks..i'm going to, go off and Google for information now using the cumbersome Firefox. Any links would be much appreciated since CowboyNeal didn't bother.

Re:Jabber

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? So dialup users can have uber slow connection while chatting? So chatting takes up more bandwidth, RAM, and CPU? So blah blah blah, XML sucks, yadda yadda.

Retard.

Re:Jabber

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Jabber, and I use it to talk to, on average, 5 people at a time with a 32 person contact list.

I also have dialup.

So I don't understand how you're coming up with such a lame troll that XMPP somehow makes dialup connections slow.

Re:Jabber

[Anonymous Coward]

You do not need to be a rich snob to purchase books. Look who the largest percentage of smokers are, people in the lowest quartile of income. If 38% of the people in that income quartile can afford $8/day for fags they can certainly afford books as well. They simply choose to fund their drug addiction instead.

http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpcmc/cancer/publ ications/nphs-sboc/nphs16_e.html

Of course you still can argue which is the cause and which the effect. Do they make this senseless choice because they are poor and uneducated or are they poor and uneducated because of this type of choice...

"Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest."

If they have $50 for an entire month how much interest have you lost? At 4% APR it is a whopping $0.16. I don't think "sane people" spend much time worrying about $0.16.

CONFTROLL

[Anonymous Coward]

267210
513880

Reminds me of History

[Dink Paisy]

Does this mean that AOL is about to go the way of Netscape? I wonder if someone will pick up the software pieces and make something decent of them. Winamp is ok, but AIM is a much larger piece of the AOL hegemony. AIM has quality issues that make Microsoft look sweet and refreshing.

Personally, I'm very surprised that virus and worm makers haven't homed in on IM clients yet. I imagine AOL will be very hard hit when they do. Although, an open source AIM client that really was bigger than Mozilla might be able to turn that around.

Re:Reminds me of History

[halltk1983]

maybe it would look similar to GAIM...

Re:Reminds me of History

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, libraries do not like to be treated as book stores. A lot of them have problems with people checking out books and then deciding that they like them and keeping them and deciding to pay the library for the book. A lot of libraries have been charging processing fees to replace missing books in order to deter this practice.
Remember, a majority of the people who work there are volunteers, they don't need to constantly be worrying about how to re-stock a book someone borrow-purchased. THe scheme in TFA would make a perfect book rental store(with a few dollar rental fee) but it sounds like the scheme somebody who is only thinking of themselves and not hte library.

Re:Reminds me of History

[DrXym]

The new AIM client is based on a framework called Boxley. Now that I would like to see open sourced. As it was described way back, it is somewhat like XUL + Javascript without some of the horrific bits like RDF.

Re:Reminds me of History

[javaxman]

Does this mean that AOL is about to go the way of Netscape?

What, you mean, be bought by AOL, found to be expensive to maintain and impossible to make money from, then released as open source to die a slow death or be resurrected through the hard work of people unrelated to the original product creating entirely new code?

It's possible, except with the bonus that they don't have to buy anything...

And no, unless by "AOL" you mean the AIM client and a Winamp plugin or two. That's all this is about. There's plenty to AOL that's going to forever remain proprietary and will have to live or die on it's own. One does have to wonder how much AOL is finally figuring this out, and how much new content is being lost in Rainman-only development v.s. newer HTML initiatives, though.

The sad, important thing to keep note of is that it's just the IM _client_ that's being opened. Big deal. We have better clients already.

Re:Reminds me of History

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Reminds me of History

[Anonymous Coward]

Management in Europe just doesn't have the courage to support Open Source. They hide behind the mantra of: "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM".

I work for the IT department of a large Danish company. We buy exclusively IBM products -- despite the many problems we have with them, and the availability of Open Source alternatives. IBM prices are obscene, but we keep buying them without looking at alternatives.

We don't need a separate IT industry to support Open Source; we need non-IT companies with IT departments to support them.

Linus Torvalds and many other prominent Open Source luminaries might be from Europe originally, but where do they work? In the States, mostly. And that is why Europe is behind the Open Source curve: not enough courage in management to choose Open Source and provide a job for the local luminaries. That's why it's dark here.

Re:Reminds me of History

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that because of litigation costs, larger companies can effectively deter small companies from starting up simply by waving around a fear of legal action. Small businesses, even armed with patents, do not have millions of dollars to defend them. So all the patent system really does is enable large companies to crush small ones. This makes businesses less competitive, not more.

Finally...

[PenguinBoyDave]

I can rush out now and subscribe to AOL. I was just waiting for them to support open source. I'll be the first guy in my lug to have an AOL address. I rock.

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure our underfunded libraries and overworked librarians will find this system easy to implement.

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

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone who uses a library frequently has the $$$ to plop down on a book

This isn't a matter of just not having the money - you'd think that the geeks on /. 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.

I know the idiotic /. 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.

Isn't there some old phrase about learning your history so it doesn't repeat itself?

Ah AOL...

[DrXym]

AOL is run by a bunch of geniuses. I've never seen a company that can invest millions in technologies such as browsers, music & video players, only to shitcan their (superior) solutions in favour of (inferior) ones developed by their main competitors.

I just look at WinAmp and shake my head. There's a programme that could have been iTMS before such a thing even existed. It could still be iTMS rival now, two years too late. And the integrated NSV means it could deliver TV and VOD too with a little work. So why the hell isn't it?

Because AOL is run by a bunch of geniuses.

Re:Ah AOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ah AOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just look at WinAmp and shake my head.

Spot on.

I actually worked for a company that *was* iTMS, in many ways, years ago. We had a... hauntingly similar concept of where and how much people could share the songs they bought online for a buck. We were compatible with the popular MP3 devices of the time, and of course with WinAmp (and Real, back when they were serious).

Unfortunately, we were iTMS without Steve Jobs and without the iPod. Even more unfortunately, the general Napster P2P hysteria spooked the management of the parent company, and the whole thing was shitcanned.

Those of us who worked there flinch a little at every dollar iTMS makes. But at least it proves we were right.

Linky

*sigh*

Re:Ah AOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for them and I totally agree. They're geniuses. There's just no other explanation.

Their decision making process is entirely too complex for my feeble little mind to grasp on even the most basic fundamental levels. After they laid off all my coworkers I should have given them 110% of my abilities because they had a plan to revolutionize and rival all competitors on their way to the moon.

Oh yeah, they loved comparing their technology to the Apollo program. To the moon Alice.. straight to the... I think Alice was an employee before they fired her for not meeting expectations.

Its hard to meet the expectations of a bunch of geniuses.

yay

[Apreche]

Maybe now AIM file transfers will work reliably in gaim.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, having to throw down $20 or so for every book I take out would just cut into the budget too much. However, I wouldn't mind seeing this as just an option to other ways to take books from a library.

Re:yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I just have my head in the sand, but I haven't seen people on /. claiming that "[Europe] always have everything better than [America]" or that "Europe is perfect". I don't mean to sound rude, but you do sound like you are creating a mythical enemy for the purpose of ranting.

I see a lot of bad attitude about America no Slashdot. Not too many people claim that "Europe is perfect", but there is a significant attitude that Americans are just bumbling, selfish, uneducated idiots.

Reminds me of a conversation I had recently. We were talking about alcohol abuse in the US especially among college students. The person I was talking to made the statement that it's much more socially unacceptable to get drunk in Europe. I said "What about all those fans at the 'football' games that get drunk and act like idiots?". She said "That's just the UK". "OK, what about the Russians and Poles? They are renowned for their drinking. I have a friend that is a Russian immigrant and he's told us about some of their three day parties.". She said "Well, that's Eastern Europe".

Seems like when people refer to the sophistication and culture of Europeans it refers to some random part of Western Europe that no one can quite pinpoint. I think Chris Rock summed up the whole craziness quite nicely:

"You know the world's gone crazy when the best rapper's white, the best golfer's black, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, a Swiss holds the American cup, Germany doesn't want to go to war, France is accusing us of arrogance, and the US' three most powerful people are named Bush, Dick, and Colon." -Chris Rock/i

Re:yay

[AussieVamp2]

yeah, and the Scandinavians are all teetotalers

and the Czechs

and the Irish someone said have the odd beer?

Re:Quality Reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

Everytime I try to download ten things firefox goes up to 300 megs of memory usage and 99% cpu usage. And I took the screenshots to prove it.

Frankly, I think you can find problems and features you hate in most programs of a certain size, what matters is that you find the tool for the job that you consider the best match for your needs.

Doing a little dance!!

[DigiShaman]

Oh HELL YA! Milkdrop has got to be THE best plug-in developed. Geiss is genius. How he is able to program the AI to do the things Milkdrop does just blows me away. And now, it's open source! Sweet mother of holy bliss!

http://www.geisswerks.com/

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded up?

What do you expect libraries to do? Give out a load of books to anonymous people with no collateral. That is basically saying anyone can come in and steal whatever books they want.

Anyone that cannot afford the $20 can still go in the library and read the book.

And what bank are you with that the interest on $20 for a few weeks is actually an appreciable amount?

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[DigiShaman]

WTF are you talking about? Ryan Geiss no longer has total control of the program when he started working with AOL (Winamp devision). So now that it's AOLs property, they can do what the hell they want with it. Personally however, I will donate some money to Ryan to pay my respects.

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would describe the the first few years of my (way too young) marriage as "first world poverty", we were easily in the bottom 20% bracket. I lost access to the library because I could not afford to pay the fine for a misplaced book. My answer was "op-shops" and second hand books, I never went without smokes because I rolled my own and to this day (25yrs later) I am still addicted. The biggest problem with being poor is that you get oh-so-fucking-sick of scrimping and chasing work. When you occasionally get a wad of cash you stock the cuboards, pay the red bills, get new clothes for the kids and blow the rest on a dirty weekend because you just want a break from it, even for a day.

I agree 100% with your sentiments (except poor does not imply uneducated), if you really want privacy you will find the $50 (~2 slabs in Australian money). If you are that dirt poor that you can't afford it then simply read the book in the library, trust me, you will have the spare time and it will cut down your smoking (librarians frown on that type of thing in thier library).

Librarians are a powerfull force in upholding everyones right to read Chairman Mao, the Koran, the Bible, the Unabomer's manifesto, Osama BL's diatribes or anything we fucking feel like. The interest from a single account would amount to the best part of nothing to anyone living in a country that has local libraries in the first place. If the system became popular, (no offence but I'm sure you would get takers in the US), the total interest could be a tidy sum and used to enhance what I consider is a service at the core of any "free" civilization.

To all the naysayers that are throwing up red herrings such as poverty what is the alternative besides the current status-quo (ie: no option of annonomous accounts for anyone)?

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Jonny_eh]

If it was only made opensource recently, how was it released for the Xbox Media Center a couple months back?

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take away Bush and the NeoCons and the US is a pretty nice place.

The thing we europeans have hard to accept is US external affairs wich are frankly terrible, To manage to go from 9/11 where every european soul felt for the US to current state where US is seen upon as an evil empire is a pretty amazing feat.

We like the US, not just its überlords.

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree.

Re:Doing a little dance!!

[Anonymous Coward]

...Milkdrop has got to be THE best plug-in developed...

Um, my sarcasm meter just exploded. Tell me it's not a false.

-Anonymous Phil

Re:Quality Reporting

[aftk2]

Upward, rather than forward!

And always...twirling, twirling, TWIRLING!

Hmm...

[hubang]

I guess they're too busy with their RIAA and MPAA initiatives to worry about attacking open source.

Re:Hmm...

[part_of_you]

You got ripped off dude. They marked you at +1"blank". Perhaps I'm either the only one that got what you said, or I misunderstood.

Either way, AOL going to open-source is like a hunter owning a deer, in my eyes.

where's the aol client for linux then?

[Anonymous Coward]

So ok, AOL is all 'bout open source now. Then why is it there is no official aol client for linux?

My mother uses aol, and I have to spend ages fixing security issues in windows and generally keeping it going. I'd far rather she used Linux for the web, she'd be safe from 99% of all web exploits, and it would make admin easier for me. Plus I wouldn't have to keep cleaning up all the garbage windows collects on her system.

It took long enough to get her on the web, weaning her from aol is not something I can do. The simplest solution by far is for aol to have native linux support (note, I mean official support, not the linux aol dialer projects)

Keeping Milkdrop from going stagnant

[VanillaDeath]

I was disappointed that development of Milkdrop had died two years ago. At least now it will be able to be under development again, which is a good thing considering it's my favourite vis and the favourite vis of all of my friends nerdy enough to know what a vis is (and aware that Winamp actually has preferences to change it).
I remember when I first started using it my computer was a Pentium 233 with 64MB of RAM, but since I had a 3D graphics card it ran at a reasonable framerate and I have been hooked since. It especially complements Pink Floyd's DSotM, but now I'm getting too offtopic :P

Milkdrop?

[coyotecult]

Oh my god, I LOVED that. It was approximately my favoritest audio visualization ever.

Reasons Why Milkdrop Kicks Ass:

• Milkdrop is the reason I've never needed to take any hallucinogenic drugs.
• Milkdrop's my daddy.
• Milkdrop also fathered my superhuman genius baby.
• Milkdrop isn't God like Dan Bukvitch, but is probably pretty high up there. Like the Holy Ghost or Jesus or something.
• Milkdrop is that irresistable creature with an insatiable love for the dead.
• If Milkdrop conferenced the Middle East, peace would be achieved.
• Milkdrop is actually a gift from a mind-sucking alien race intent on sucking the awe right out of our skulls.
• Few people know this, but Milkdrop is actually nature's suction cup. Watch this. See? It sticks

It's time to learn how to port that sucker to the *Nixes (Linux, BSD, OS X)! I haven't been in Windows enough to enjoy it for a very long time.

Re:Milkdrop?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about getting rid of pure software patents and letting copyright (software licenses etc) do it's work? There's plenty of protection for software outside of patenting it.

Don't get me wrong, I've no problems with patents in general but being allowed to patent pure software is silly and unnessessary. If the software is a part of a bigger invention (perhaps an interface between the user and the actual machinary of the invention) then that's not so much of a problem; it's not just the software that's being protected in that case.

Re:Milkdrop?

[MrNemesis]

Milkdrop is the reason I've never needed to take any hallucinogenic drugs.

Same here. Now imagine when you have a few friends over for dinner, and a few of them happen to make a "special" mushroom omelette. Just for fun, I set my two Linux machines up running xscreensaver's and my windows machine running Milkdrop. There were some fairly ecstatic grins going around... :D

On a more serious note, I cannot frickin' wait until a MilkDrop variant gets ported to XMMS (or, even better, Beep Media Player), even if it's only plugin-compatible and doesn't use the same code. Milkdrop is hands-down the thing that has kept me clinging to Winamp these past few years, and I find myself booting into windows just to play music with it. IIRC it's already been added to CVS builds of the Xbox Media Centre, and hopefully it'll also amke its way into MythMusic too.

I never thought I'd say this, btu thank you AOL for helping make my life more... colourful... swirly... urgh, I feel sick...!

Re:Milkdrop?

[kihjin]

Milkdrop: coyotecult, I am your father.
coyetecult: NOOOOOOOO!!!! ...
coyetecult: ooo pretty

Re:Milkdrop?

[coyotecult]

At this point I will ask you to notice the incestuous connotations in my list of MilkDrop AssKicking as well.

Heck, I think Milkdrop just achieved what Lazarus Long could not.

Re:Milkdrop?

[coyotecult]

From sniffing around the comments, it looks like Milkdrop has already been ported to places! Time to find an OS X port!

If not, it'll be an interesting work -- it would have to be ported from DirectX first to OpenGL.

recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[bogaboga]

My wish is for an experienced hacker to port Winamp to Linux the moment the code is open sourced. Will this happen? I do not see any Linux native application that can stand in place of Winamp.

I know we have the likes of AmaroK, XMMS...but none of these does any video!

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[BiggyP]

I'm not really interested in winamp in particular, however, AVS and Milkdrop are very nice indeed, it would be great to have these vis systems available on the linux players.
As for video playback, XMMS certainly used to do it, I don't know the current status of the SMPEG plugin but it was good at the time. really though, who would want to play videos in a winamp style interface? if you need help finding alternatives head over to this page, totem's nice.

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[Anonymous Coward]

AmaroK does video, just wait a litle bit. It's there :)

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[Erpo]

My wish is for an experienced hacker to port Winamp to Linux the moment the code is open sourced. Will this happen? I do not see any Linux native application that can stand in place of Winamp.

I may be wrong, but I think AOL is only open-sourcing Winamp's AVS and Milkdrop, not Winamp itself. Considering that one of the big draws to "upgrade" to the paid version of Winamp is a compiled-in limitation, AOL certainly seems to have a motive.

As far as Winamp on Linux, you might be surprised to hear that it worked very well under wine the last time I tried it.

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[emidln]

It's been done on the old codebase. Winamp3 was released in alpha form for Linux a few years back. I have a copy somewhere in my archives. I seem to remember that I couldn't make it work on RedHat 9 at the time, though it may have possibly been RedHat 8 or an equivilent Mandrake release. I don't know what the license is, but when I get to an ssh-capable machine, I'll search for it and post it if the license allows. (I doubt it though.)

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[AugstWest]

Milkdrop has already been ported to XBMC.

Re:recompilation/proting of Winamp code

[Mr.Radar]

Most of the video stuff in Winamp is based on Microsoft's DirectShow technology and so you'd essentially have to re-write it. You'd probably be better off just adding video support to an already mature linux-naitive audio player, like XMMS or AmaroK.

Open source abandonware?

[Animats]

This sounds more like open sourcing of abandonware at its end of life. After all, that's what they did with Netscape.

Does this mean Freeamp can start using its own name again? AOL made them change their name to Zinf or something like that, and they were never heard from again. Especially since one of those directory spammers took over their "freeamp" domains, and AOL did nothing about that.

Re:Open source abandonware?

[Anonymous Coward]

...I can't afford a library card.

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

Re:Open source abandonware?

[ZuperDee]

This sounds more like open sourcing of abandonware at its end of life. After all, that's what they did with Netscape.

Actually, the open sourcing of Netscape ocurred well before AOL bought them, and before they spun off the Mozilla Foundation into its own independent entity. I remember at the time of AOL's purchase of Netscape, there were some people in the community wondering what AOL's purchase of Netscape would mean for Mozilla.

On the other hand, if you are talking about the Mozilla Foundation, that's a different matter. I'd say Red Hat's spinoff of the Fedora Project today is VERY similar to AOL/Netscape's spinoff of the Mozilla Foundation into its own entity.

Re:Open source abandonware?

[bobv-pillars-net]

Yup; six months from now, AOL will announce its "New, improved" IM client, which will be nothing more than a re-skinned version of Microsoft Instant Messager. Six months after that, a new AOL Media Player will come out, which will be a re-skinned version of Microsoft Media Player.

Re:Open source abandonware?

[AaronLawrence]

That sounds reasonable. Kind of a simple social contract: we try and make it work as closed source. If it falls over, we release the source so a) the effort wasn't wasted and can be continued and b) those people who did take it up aren't left without support.

Re:Open source abandonware?

[evilviper]

AOL made them change their name to Zinf [zinf.org] or something like that, and they were never heard from again.

Well, the reason they were never heard from again is because it never got any better. The interface needs much improvement, it needs to support many more formats, and it crashes regularly when I try to use it...

I would consider it one of the first adware open source projects... Several things in there they are getting paid to have in there, that you can't disable. I'll be sticking to XMMS.

if AOL really wants to live, they need to head ...

[WindBourne]

to OSS. But even more than offering OSS, they would be wise to do a Linux connection, even possibly a Linux disc. One idea would be to work with major distros geared towards the desktop such as Novell, Mandrake, and Linspire.

Leaks from other topics?

[HawkinsD]

I know this is off-topic, but... Does anybody else see significant numbers of posts that appear to belong to other topics sprinkled throughout Slashdot today?

The other replies to "You BASTARDS" seem to belong to the article regarding IE memory leaks.

Maybe it's just my browser.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Talking Goat]

Yes... This story's comments are a trainwreck. Half are regarding AOL, the other half are regarding IE vs. Firefox memory leaks. Something's b0rk3d.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[falsified]

Nope. It's definitely happening to me, too. A couple other things are acting up on the site as well.

It must be evil.google.com acting up again.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't been reading /. too heavily these last few days, but before that I had started noticing that -- totally unrelated replies, that seemed to belong to other topics. I believe they are always from ACs, so that leads me to believe it's someone's script trying to create havoc in /. (if it weren't for the AC factor, I could see it as being a server error and the replies were being sent to the wrong article).

tmegapscm

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's definitely a script, and likely you have to look no further than the_mad_poster for the culprit behind it.

Personally, he / she / it / whatever should be banninated.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[SirTalon42]

This happened a week or so ago with a massive amount of posts, then slashdot required ACs and low karma users to put in an authentication code for every post and they stopped for a while, I don't know if the authentication codes are still required or not (never had to use them), but I just started seeing them around yesterday again.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to take sides on this arguement, and i didn't read the actual article, but the summary does not say $5.

Here's an example: If a privacy-minded user deposits $20 to get an anonymous library card, she can check out The Terror State without identifying herself. Her account balance is temporarily reduced by $15, and when the library checks the CD back in (in good condition), her balance is restored to its original value.

That means it costs $15 and you have $5 left in the account.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[falsified]

Exactly.

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Anonymous Coward]

How's this for an alternative version of patents: there ought to be a fairly small maximum number of patents allowed (1000? 10000?). This small database should make it easier to determine whether or not a particular invention is infringing on an existing patent.

Let whoever (people/companies/non-government entities) bid on ownership of each submitted patent, and the top bidder will get to own the patent (with all the privileges granted thereof - including selling the ownership of the patent to others).

This will cause the bidders to determine the "value" of each patent as they perform their "due diligence" for each patent. (In other words, you don't have to depend on the expertise of patent examiners to set the price of each patent.) Once a bid has been submitted (through escrow?), it can't be retracted & will be returned only if it is not the maximum bid.

The winning bidder pays the money _directly_ to the submitter of the patent idea. This will allow smart people who have a lot of ideas, but who might not be able to take advantage of their own ideas, to receive an amount which has been determined (by a market process) to be the "value" of their idea. With this kind of jackpot payoff, there should be a lot of people submitting good ideas into the patent process (with the hopes of becoming instantly rich).

As patents expire, or are torpedoed due to obviousness or prior art (which will either require either patent examiners or perhaps organized review-boards of industry experts), that will free up patent "slots" in the allowed # of patents, and new submissions can be bidded on to fill those slots.

Patent submissions which did NOT make it into any of the allowed patent slots wil end up being released immediately into the public domain - so submitters have a vested interest in making sure their submission is a high enough quality to have a good chance of winning the bidding.

Worked this system out myself, although I'm sure some patent/economics expert somewhere has already thought of something like it :-)

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[ssj_195]

I've seen one of mine pop up, reposted anonymously. I feel so violated :(

Re:Leaks from other topics?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow parent should be modded up informative that explains the nonsense i'm seeing here. that has nothing to do with their parents.

AOL / Milkdrop

[slamden]

What does AOL have to do with the open sourcing of Milkdrop? Milkdrop was written by Ryan Geiss, the supergenius who wrote the old skool 'Geiss' screen saver. It totally rocks, and according to geisswerks.com, he opened the code up almost a month ago now.

But I can't see how that anything to do with AOL, other than the fact that it was only a Winamp plugin before...

Re:AOL / Milkdrop

[Anonymous Coward]

How would walking around with an anonymous library card with cash collateral tied to it be any different from walking around with (anonymous) cash?

Some people prefer not to, and get a card with features that reduces their potential loss at the cost of it being possible to trace transactions, and other prefer to walk around with anything from a few small bills to large wads of high denomination bills.

Why does it have to be either/or?

Modern WinAMP for the Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any hope that WinAMP itself might go open source and
we see an up-to-date WinAMP for the Mac?

Open source Ultravox?

[leathered]

Does Midge Ure know about this?

Three letters

[mikefe]

NIH.

Jabber is "Not Invented Here". So that makes it worthless and crappy.

Just because they are open sourcing some of their tech does not mean that they are willing to give up on something they have invested *years* developing.

Re:Three letters

[tapo]

That's not the problem. AOL's problem isn't three letters, but two words.

Network Effect.

The only way AOL manages to keep their AIM software popular is because that's the only program people can talk to their friends with, and they dont want to bother switching networks, as they'd lose all of their friends.

Jabber, if implemented, will allow the users to select a client, and server that is not AOL with ease. Aside from that, there's AOL's bad experience with Microsoft using AOL's own TOC protocol to allow AIM-MSN communication, which allower AIM to grow. With Jabber being an open protocol, this could easily happen again.

Re:Three letters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about moving to open platforms. It's about brandishing a stick they can show when negotiating with Microsoft. We're sure to see a silent nice fat contract pretty soon.

Zonk

[Anonymous Coward]

I sincerely think slashdot should get rid of Zonk. He is not the typical editor and chooses story really badly. His also famous for putting too may dupe stories as well as deleting stories when he finds it out. Mod be down if you want, but you can look at the quality of posts when Zonk is posting here.

That could be very clever

[NickFortune]

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.'"

Which could be the cleverest thing AOL have done for a long time, depending on whether the company can muster the will to see if through to the end. MS lost money for years trying to destroy AIM and AOL. For their part, AOL lost the top spot in the messenger wars, but kept a large userbase.

By opening AIM, AOL stand to gain a lot of new users, and to force MS into re-investing in MSN just when they'd really like to divert resources back to IE.

As I say, it all depends on whether they have the will to see the process through to the end. And I suppose, upon what they mean by an "open platform". Open Source a la mozilla would be fine, but the proposal may wind up being watered down into something akin to MS's "shared source" mockery. A shame if so, since they could be onto something with this.

hi i am aol

[demon411]

aol head: "hey i don't think spamming people aol cds is working anymore what can we do?"

"let's buy netscape"

AOL buys them and now AOL has a deal with Microsoft for using IE.

later ...

aol head: "hmm that didn't work what should we do now?"

"umm. how about buy winamp for 100 million dollars"

Justin Frankel (winamp creator) resigns

5 years later ...

aol head: "we are still broke, whatever happened to that winamp stuff we bought?"

"um we are working on some cool plugins! hey maybe we could make it open source! i hear mozilla is doing well and they are open source"

aol head: "good idea, we can make aim open source too"

Re:hi i am aol

[TheHawke]

Replace "aol head" with Steve Case, up until 5 years later.

You get the idea.

Re:hi i am aol

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents are here to stay, whether we like 'em or not. They are required to protect the IP of both a startup or an (evil) corporation. So since we cannot get rid of it what can be done to make it "reasonable"?

First of all how about you cannot patent an idea. You have to have a working prototype. You cannot just draw something and say this could work. Show us that it works. We need to see that you have actually used some "intellect" of your own that needs protected. Just because you dreamed of something shouldn't stop someone else from contributing something real.

Second, make it mandatory for patents to be "usable" for humanitarian needs. Lets say your corp has invented a drug that cures AIDS. Thus you have two options:

• Your patent is valid for a short period where you make maximum profit (and let people die as they cannot afford it). Then every other company can copy it and help save lives.
• Keep your patent valid for the current time allowed but you are forced to provide cheap (or free) alternatives to help humankind.

I don't think people should worry about silly patents like say "one-click" etc. Granted they are gonna create problems, but in the grander scheme, if we can get them to agree to some thing more "reasonable" heck go ahead and patent every fucking idea or dream!

Re:Quality Reporting

[hotdiggitydawg]

Erm... because it's America On-line?

a close-source AOL will be better

[rozz]

the best thing AOL can do for the international community and for the Internet, is to "close source" their users .. just keep them on a sepparate "AOLNet" and everybody will be happy
i'm ready to pay a monthly subscription to AOL for that ! ;)

AOL Open Sourced Milkdrop? I think not...

[inmate]

actually, milkdrop was opensourced by geiss himself in may this year.
see http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/ for more details.

I think it a rather poor show that AOL grabs the bragging rights. AFAIK, they had nothing to do with it!

Ignore those

[WindBourne]

it appears to be either someone, or some bot that is reposting old postings. they are either being themselves (an asshole), or it is designed to decrease the signal to noise ratio so as to drive ppl off this site. For some odd reason, I suspect the later.

Re:Ignore those

[Perl-Pusher]

I see, checking other threads it seems to be getting worse. I reported it to the site admin.

Re:Ignore those

[cortana]

Is the new Captcha that ineffective then?

Re:Ignore those

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Visualization plug-ins?

[youknowmewell]

Who friggin' cares about those? Open Winamp so I can use it on Linux!

Re:Visualization plug-ins?

[TheStonepedo]

Exactly. There are times for "ooh" and "aah" but seriously what is gained from open sourcing trippy visualizations? More developers will spend more time dicking with the output of a closed program for a closed OS. I think the real concern is that these cats are listening to music so crappy that they have no choice but to watch trippy visualizations or the music would be intolerable.

Re:Visualization plug-ins?

[/dev/trash]

What's wrong with XMMS?

Screw Midge Ure!

[Black-Man]

John Foxx is the *real* UVox singer!!

Mod Notification Leaks

[Doc Ruby]

And in the past 24 hours, I've gotten notifications of moderations not reflected in the report in the moderated post itself (click the post's ID, no moderation shows).

Re:Mod Notification Leaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan's late 80s effort to leap ahead in information technology using AI?

People in the US had just watched the Japanese automakers spend a decade kicking their US competitors in the nuts, and now they were fixin' to do our IT industry. Except that it didn't exactly happen that way. It's possible that it did some good; maybe it's responsibel for a lot of fuzzy logic being built into consumer goods. And it may have shaken loose some US government money in grants and contracts for our domestic AI people.

After a while, you begin realize that fear is one of the few ways somebody with an agenda can nudge the ship of state in one direction or another. It's not always a bad direction, it's just supported with invalid arguments. Like the classic example of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, getting education reform because of the "emergency" of falling SAT scores. The reason Johnny couldn't read was that the Johnnies of the world never had been able to read. We just didn't know because we only tested kids ranking above him, the kids going to college. Because Johnny now has to go to college, he has to take the test.

The thing is, we did need ed reform, not because Johnny is stupider than he was in years past, but for the same reason Johnny is being forced to go to college: the economy needs more highly educated workers and less uneducated ones. Right priorities, wrong reason.

Same pretty much applies here:

"What I think is that Europe doesn't have a software industry today. The only software industry today is the American one, and in the future we may have Chinese or Indian ones. We should decide whether we want a European software industry or not," he added.

The illogic is stunning, if you think about it. Even supposing that somehow Europe is going to fall behind, if somebody else is going to make a product and share it with you for free, why does this matter?

The reason it matters is control of your destiny. European companies and organizations of all sizes will be readily able to get software tailored to their needs. If Open Source becomes the dominant paradigm in the next decade or two, then the software industry itself will be transformed to be a software services industry. If it does, it will be because this model fits customer needs better, and if that's true it means customers who don't have a OSS strategy will be at a competitive disadvantage. It doesn't matter if the programmers doing the work are located in Paris or Bangalore; do whatever is economically most efficient.

Re:Mod Notification Leaks

[Doc Ruby]

Wow, this thread leak is worse than it first looked. Hopefully Slashdot is backed up pre-sieve - I don't want to lose all my old comments.

Re:Mod Notification Leaks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a troll, not a technical issue.

Other AOL Open Source

[Skynet]

AOL also open sourced the modified version of Midori/Mobile Linux it used on the Gateway appliance.

Hence, http://opensource.aol.com

Please AOL, open WinAMP!

[Anonymous Coward]

WinAMP has been effectively dead since 5.0 came out with the exceptions of bug fixes. AOL should fund it again, or let it go F/OSS.

Xbox Media Center

[EvilMonkeySlayer]

The milkdrop source was added to the XBMC cvs a couple of weeks ago.

It looks purty.

See Here.

Re:Quality Reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

And may I ask, how do you know that I don't contribute to Wiki? Because as a matter of fact I do. [...] Why don't you stop making assumptions (because you know what they say about assumptions) and take a reality check.

I'm not making assumptions, I just don't respect the "get your priorities straight / think of the children" posts (your post being an independant entity from you, btw) because they never contribute anything to the discussion. Off course there are other problems in life, more pressing, more life threatning, etc.

If you're going to say there are more pressing matters to this thread, why not write a macro that'll post the exact same thing to every. single. thread. up until such times as hunger, war and disease have been wiped out from the world? Might as well.

It already is

[Mitchell Mebane]

"It's great to hear Milkdrop is finally being open-sourced, let's hope projectM can work better as a result."

It already is. From the projectM home page:

5/6/05 - projectM 0.97 Released!

Nullsoft released the Milkdrop source code so I have fixed the behavior of waveforms 2, 3, & 5, zoom, and custom shapes (tex_ang and tex_zoom). I also added the Darken, Brighten, and Solarize filters. Things look much better with these added features. We also have some stability patches for xmms-projectM in this release courtesy of Richard McKnight.

So this is just the beginning. Now that the Milkdrop source is out, expect good things. This is just a quick release to show how much progess we've made in just a few days with the source. Expect more.

Re:It already is

[w1z7ard]

I poked around the milkdrop code for a while trying to figure out how the evaluator worked. Apparently the equations are compiled on the fly into assembly, which is not even close to the way I am doing it in projectM. My code is just a prefix operator tree, nothing particular fancy. Its a goddamn miracle it runs about as fast as milkdrop seeing as I have significant recursive overhead when doing evaluations.

As for the next feature, I am going to take a look at his smooth preset switching code and hopefully mimic the procedure in projectM.

Cheers, Carmelo

Player Souce/API?

[Doc Ruby]

I wish they'd open the source to the base WinAmp5 player, at least Read-Only. I've been trying for months to figure out the API for a few essential functions to make an interactive playlist plugin that replaces, or at least can be used instead of, the default playlist GUI. Wasabi was a project forked off WinAmp3 that released its source years ago, but that's a dead end (no codebase shared with WinAmp5).

If you've got insights, how would you implement my playlist, which lets you click Artist - Title - Album "columns" in the display of song rows, sorting the clicked column, and restyling (eg. italicizing, bolding, underlining) the font of all text only in that column? It has to 1> get the click, 2> know which row was clicked, 3> get the data from that row, 4> resort the rows in the display, 5> restyle some of the text in each row. If I can't get the coordinates of the click, I can just rotate the sort column after each click. And if I can't restyle some of the row text, I can insert "***" characters or something. And if I can't make a plugin override the default playlist (make it appear instead), I suppose I can make it a MediaLibrary plugin or something. And for real wizardry, I'd like the plugin to use WinAmp's builting HTTP client to periodically retrieve and install plugin updates from my Internet server.

I don't need the algorithms to do those things, I need the API hooks to call the rest of WinAmp to do its part. I want to call them, but I also want to trace them for debugging, as the datapath "submerges" into the main app. If AOL won't open the source to WinAmp5 entirely, maybe some Slashdotter already knows how to do it "anyway".

Re:Player Souce/API?

[Anonymous Coward]

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)...

No, no, no, you've got it all wrong. It's the GNU/US Department of Health and Human Services (GNU/HHS). I'm going to report this to the Free Software Foundation's Department of Making Sure GNU Appears Anywhere GNU/Linux is Used (GNU/RMS)./p

Re:Player Souce/API?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just go to the irc channel and ask. irc.cockos.com #nullsoft

Re:Quality Reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not paying attention then.
Google, Yahoo, IBM, Novell, Orbitz, The US Army, Tivo, Linksys, Apple, Intel and soon Palm are all using Linux/OSS developing OSS or selling OSS products or selling products that run on OSS.
There are a LOT of big US companies that are working on or with OSS.
Are there any big companies in the EU developing or using OSS software? It may be that I have just not heard of any. BT? Airbus? Phillips? Thompson? If so I would love to hear about them.
Now the EU does have two important Open Source companies even if they are not large. Troll Tech and while I am still not too pleased with how "open" they are they are important. the second is Mandrake/what ever strange name they are now.
Does Suse still count as an EU company :)

Milkdrop's source has been available...

[Stalin]

Since July of 2003 -- http://www.nullsoft.com/free/milkdrop/. The author of the plugin is Ryan Geiss. His plugins are the best I have ever seen.

Re:Milkdrop's source has been available...

[Stalin]

Seems that I can't read very well. It was released this past May.

He released the source to one of his applications a while back I just can't find it now... oh well.

That's good...

[Spy der Mann]

now we should wait for them to opensource winamp the app.

Minutes unti...

[Kihaji]

RMS whines that this is not good enough...

5, 4, 3, 2...

AOL and open source

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is true in public perception, but at least for the last few years it's false in practice. Besides Mozilla, and AOLServer, and now this code, that everyone gets to see, inside AOL itself there is quite a bit of support for Open Source.

I'm not an employee of AOL proper, but I do work for the corporate behemoth of which AOL is a part. I've also got a few friends that are involved in engineering and networking at AOL specifically, and their situation is similar to mine.

We are allowed and, in most cases, encouraged to use Open Source software. A surprisingly large part of our infrastructure depends on it. We have significant in-house expertise with Linux kernel development, Apache (which we don't use exclusively, but we do roll out when the situation permits) module development, and a huge portion of our internal development work is done with Perl and Java (which isn't open per se, but we use lots of open components such Apache's Jakarta stuff).

Our management in general is supportive of Open Source, and while most of our development is specific to our environment (meaning it wouldn't be that useful to redistribute it), a lot of us contribute on our own time to various Open Source projects, which is something we couldn't do to the extent that we do if we didn't work with them extensively already to feed our families.

If you're ever in a position to come work for AOL, you'll find that they seek out people with experience with Open Source software. Work experience with visible Open Source projects on your resume will make you look good. And once you get here you'll find a culture that wants you to use those tools and that experience in the majority of what you do. For someone who really likes Open Source, in that respect it's a great place to work.

More coasters?

[oneandoneis2]

As if AOL didn't send out enough CDs already. Now they're moving towards FOSS, can "AOLoppix" be far behind?

GAIM

[Anonymous Coward]

might we see working file transfer and file sharing in GAIM because of this?

Star Wars comment, disreguard

[part_of_you]

It's just another way of trying to get us to turn to the dark side.

Don't trust AOL. This new service is only cool to those that know the whole functionality of it. I think most AOL users do not know the whole functionality of ANYTHING, nor do they care. So surely this is a stunt to try to get half-wit geeks, like myself, to join the dark side. That and all these free AOL CDs.

Off topic, but does anyone remember when the US postal service tried to get a special tax established in order to cover the money they were losing, because of e-mail, and IMing? Then you go into the US Post office, and there they are, the free AOL CDs. It's a 'sham' I tell ya.

Re: lamapods

[Anonymous Coward]

yes and we could be listening to lamapods

Source for Winamp 2.x available?

[The Bungi]

There's more talk about Winamp 5.x here but I noticed a few people mentioning there were forks of WA 2.x around? Was the source to 2.x released at some point and I missed it?? I'd love to get my hands on that!

yes, it does

[cahiha]

AOL users don't have to understand what open source is in order to benefit from the wider range of clients available for AOL services that will be available as a result.

Not Open Source ...

[opencomputing]

Note that the article states the AOL's "next-generation AIM release will also be an open platform" - OPEN PLATFORM, NOT OPEN SOURCE.

Two very different things - what this means is that AOL will open up it's platform to the AIM system (not client) for licensing. This is classic big company marketing spin - has nothing to do with open source or Mozilla.

AOL is clearly floundering when they have piggy back on the movement of Mozilla / Firefox. Even the abandoned but still barely breathing Netscape division of AOL is piggy backing on Mozilla / Firefox. Hell, they used to own / manage Mozilla before their brilliant executive management decided to let them go because they were clueless on what to do with Open Source technology (and thank God they did for Mozilla's (and our) sake).

Additional proof that AOL executive management for the past 10 years are complete boobs and absolutely clueless about real consumer software - AOL killed or derailed every innovative company they purchased during that time period: WinAMP, PersonaLogic, CompuServe, GNN, Netscape, Mozilla, Spinner, ShoutCast, WAIS, InfoGate, Mapquest - ICQ, MovieFone and Signingfish are they only companies they did not F-up (yet).

Heck, they launched AIM into the non-AOL member base market 8 years ago to attempt to capture more web users but completely failed due to executive managements ignorance of the market changes and lack of any strategic vision - they are doomed within the next 1-2 years.

But they do make a great mass CD marketing company with that CD distribution model and modem pool management (only after the whole America Offline debacle of course) - that is about the only two things they seem to know how to do - maybe that is their next stage (ha ha ha). CD distribution and the Internet boom of the late 90's is the only thing AOL can be thankful for - AOL has nothing of value long term.

Right here, on their download page.

[lullabud]

Download AIM for Linux

Re:Right here, on their download page.

[AndyBusch]

They want the full AOL client to access AOL content. Not just the AIM client.

Re:Right here, on their download page.

[Disoculated]

Uhm, why? You can get all the content off aol.com and you can use IMAP with AOL to get your mail. The only thing that they don't have (that they should) is a Linux dialer.

Ehhh...yeah ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modding down anony-holes like you and me has very little point, unless the poster is a prolific griefer. But I have yet to see a subnet ban, or at least see one that makes a difference.

I hope no one wastes the points.

Geiss

[drteknikal]

I don't understand something. Milkdrop is from Geisswerks. Winamp AVS is from Nullsoft, which AOL owns. I get that. I wasn't aware of any relationship between Geiss and AOL. How does AOL get credit for open sourcing Geiss' software?

Re:Geiss

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Geiss was hired by AOL, shortly after they bought out Nullsoft, to make winamp plugins. Later he got laid off, and now I think he works at Nvidia.

Milkdrop is one of my favorite pulgins, but my favorite still remains the origional Geiss plugin for winamp. Pump it up to 16million colors, and you would have hours of beautiful entertainment. I just wish either the origional plugin would be updated to handle larger resolutions, or that he would allow more colors than 256 on the Geiss 2 plugin.

-Moo

good idea

[Khashishi]

not that I think it will happen, but that would be a great idea. They would create a free distribution that is preloaded with AOL. Casual users who only need a computer for the internet could buy a box (it wouldn't need Windows), and pop in the AOLoppix cd, and sign up for AOL internet.

opensource AIM server and win

[Cheeze]

They will totally win the instant messaging wars if they open the AIM server, or at least a working copy of it.

How are patents related to my dirty Milkdrop lovin

[coyotecult]

Don't get me wrong, but I don't see what the hell that had to do with my comment. I don't think Milkdrop is patented, it was just closed source -- isn't that exactly what you're talking about? Copyright and licenses doing its work?

Am I wrong here -- is Milkdrop patented or something?

HAHA

[ToasterofDOOM]

Me too! (just check the jargon file for AOL)

Great news for SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

If AOL manages to do to Open source what it did to Usenet by embracing it... SCO has nothing to worry about.

oh, for godsakes ...

[jabberwock]

AOL didn't even get you ON the Internet until they got scared by a couple of years of explosive dial-up growth. And it did so poorly, even then ... I think it was 1997. The growth of the Internet terrified AOL. It forced them to go to "unlimited" dial-up. They were lucky to keep up long enough to stay at the top for a few short years.

XBMC

[Penguinoflight]

XBMC already ported the open sourced milkdrop in early may. It runs well, but theres a few bugs (player skips) at random with a complex visualization like this.

The XBMC team came up with a port in about a week, so assuming the xmms core visualization code is solid, porting this wont be hard.

XMMS does video

[BinLadenMyHero]

XMMS has a plugin to play videos using MPlayer.
But I miss AVS.
There are some XMMS vis plugins that does something in the lines of AVS (a scriptable generic effect engine), but the real value of AVS is on the fantastic presets that comes with it.

MilkDrop can also show the lyrics as they're sung!

[ClioCJS]

Well, not by itself. There's a program called EvilLyrics. It can display the lyrics of a song AS THEY ARE SUNG. It can send it to milkdrop using milkdrop's internal messaging system.

Best visual music-listening experience ever!

However, the idea of an external program rewriting milk_msg.ini every few seconds is a less-than-perfectly-elegant solution. Better would be for milkdrop to be able to somehow receive an entire file of lyrics+timing, queue it up, and display them without any kludges. Someone please add this! It could simply be sent the filename of an LRC file, which has a timestamp and line of lyrics on each line.

Nice job AOL...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just went to their site to check it out and found that they have a sub-site dedicated to a single race of people. I was so put off by this that I forgot all about the audio/video I initially wanted to check out. Is it just me or is anyone else surprised that a corporation this size could get away with a racism of this magnitude?