Re:Were the copyright violations fixed? (yet?)
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
"DivX Copyrights"? I don't recall there being any code from "DivX" in MPlayer at all, though there is still support for the old "divx4linux" codecs (deprecated in favor of Xvid and/or ffmpeg's libavcodec support for mpeg4.)
Again - this isn't an 'end-user' program. Use Xine - there are plenty of pre-built packages for it.
And, seriously, if you NEED Mplayer to play something, the./configure script that comes with the source code is amazingly smart compared to most. No options needed, and './configure' figures out the necessary optimizations and available codecs on its own.
And filters for -vop are applied IN REVERSE ORDER.
Yes, but -vop is deprecated in favor of -vf, which is NOT applied in reverse order. I'm not sure what's so hellish about -fps and -ofps (-fps means "play at this framerate", -ofps means "correct TO this framerate, dropping or copying frames as necessary". Very handy when I mis-type the tv capture line and end up capturing at the wrong framerate...
While I tend to agree that the syntax for some of the options is unusual (especially the complicated ones that are really sets of parameters to pass to OTHER 'programs', e.g. libavcodec), I'm willing to put up with it. It IS confusing and a pain in the butt sometimes, there's no denying that, but I've been able to get a huge variety of things to work with it, and in my admittedly frequent trips through the documentation to try to figure out new features, I can see a lot more there that I've hardly touched. MPlayer reminds me a lot of Regular Expressions in that respect - not necessarily intuitive to learn, but very powerful if you're willing to deal with it.
I do have to agree with you on the DVD syntax, but I think that's partly due to the ongoing shift in syntax. Originally, as I recall, the syntax was "-dvd", much as TV capture was "-tv on[:other-features=whatever:etc]". (tv capture is now also tv:// instead). Hopefully the new syntax will be expanded and work as you suggest later [dvd://title/chapter] - it would be consistent with other URLs [mms://whatever/whatever.wmv or http://some.host.net/quicktimevideo.mov or whatever] then.
What Joe Barr and company seem to refuse to acknowledge is that MPlayer is NOT really written for 'normal end-users'. At all. Just as it seems, it really WAS written for 'nerds' and a conscious decision to forgo 'user-friendliness' in favor of functionality. Joe Barr and company refuse to accept this, and complain as though the developers are out to "get" end-users, and trying to treat the developers as though they are paid technical support, or a commercial software company that should be desperate to please end-users. I tend to sympathise with the developers on this - they've put out an amazingly functional though difficult to use program, and made it available for 'anyone that wants to use it', and their "reward", for the most part, is people popping onto the mailling lists regularly to DEMAND that they stop working on what they're doing and make pretty GUI interfaces or change the commands or explain how to do things (that are already explained in the surprisingly-complete-for-an-open-source-project online documentation) and "they'd better change their ways if they want to 'take over' the media player 'market'."....
I see how regularly that comes up in the mailing lists, and fully understand the fact that the developers have run out of patience for dealing with it...
It's like having people complain that GCC is too hard to use because C is complicated, and why can't GCC have a nice GUI and compile in some form of drag-n-drop LOGO instead...or popping onto the Perl-developers mailing list to yell at the developers because Perl is hard to read sometimes and why can't they be like Python instead [when Python itself is already available to the complainers to use...]
Anyone who complains that MPlayer is too hard to compile and install is NOT the target 'market' for MPlayer. Seriously. Those people should be using Xine or similar programs, which ARE written for the 'end-user' "market" (and Xine is quite nice - and 'cross-pollinates' features with ffmpeg and MPlayer, so they all will tend to support much of the same set of codecs at time goes on.).
I, for one, WELCOME our MPlayer developer overl....wait, did I just type that? Damn. I've been reading too much slashdot....
Now that my first question has been answered (Thanks, cmowire), there's one more related question (not directly relevant to the original top, though).
It's been said that the "ms-dos" format used by default on CompactFlash storage is particularly bad for the chips (excessive writes when updating information on the filesystem). Are there any other commonly-available filesystems that can be recognized and used on CF cross-platform (i.e. JFFS2 appears to be Linux only at the moment) that might be less stressful to the media? UDF ("DirectCD") maybe?
Every time this issue comes up (CompactFlash wearing out) I am reminded that "CompactFlash wears out eventually", but everyone always specifies "CompactFlash"...
Do ALL forms of 'digital storage cards' have the same problem (I've always ASSUMED that they do) (i.e. "MemoryStick", "SecureDigital", etc.)? Presuming they do, does the rate at which they degrade vary, and which are the longest-lasting?
The first thing I noticed was the chart showing IBM and HP holding more or less steady (actually both up slightly when I looked) while SCO was the big red downhill slump line....
...and I thought to myself "Hooray! Another wild press-release from SCO!" And this time they have to get it out on short notice if they want time for it to take affect before the weekend...
Interesting that this comes out on an infamous Friday afternoon when supposedly nobody will notice...was this calculated to cause SCO's stock to close lower before the weekend?
...that so many people assume PHP is "only for web pages". The entire first report linked above seems predicated on the notion that "PHP is for companies to make money setting up websites for other people, and other uses are 'fringe' or irrelevant."
PHP is definitely good for web-pages, but I've increasingly found it to be very useful for a lot of command-line programs and system administration, much as Perl is.
PHP-GTK has also already been mentioned in other postings, and the increasing interoperability with Java means you can implement a variety of parts of your PHP projects in "native Java" if you want to...and that's not just "Java for web pages" code, either.
It's not 'hard numbers', but then, a lot of people have already pointed out that hard numbers may not REALLY be what you want. (After all, since when is "Everybody's doin' it" a persuasive argument for a good scientist?)
On the other hand, I see there are still lots of applications listed at the Scientific Applications on Linux site and the NCBI Toolbox of Bioinformatics code compiles and runs just fine on my linux box, and BioPerl, BioJava, and BioPython all run just fine on Linux (there are even a couple of fledgling BioPHP projects out just getting started out there, which will obviously also work.
Disclaimer - both of the semi-active "BioPHP" type projects that I know of - Here and here - were started independently by individual amateurs...and one of them is me. Both projects are still in the early stages (Genephp has more code available at the moment) and have different development approaches, but are slowly working on trying to combine development towards a 'formal' set of "BioPHP" modules. Blatant plug - if you are interested in helping with friendly advice or actual development or testing, please join the mailing list which both projects use)
I have to wonder if the problem isn't pretty much the same thing as the RIAA's - they are attempting to apply 19th-century business logic ("Business=Sell Things") to 21st century business, where a lot of the things being sold aren't, uh, "things".
A number of posters have pointed out that people selling E-Books are having trouble "because they can't control distribution". Fundamentally, that's because an "E-Book" isn't really a "thing" in the traditional sense of the word.
While the market of internet users seems primed to jump for a RATIONAL commercial venture (I think Apple's music service is a step in the right direction, though not QUITE there yet), this is because of the advantages involved in digital media (such as "being able to easily make a lossless copy to bring with me on a trip", or "seeing music/writing/etc. that I want and being able to get it for myself in a matter of minutes"). "Old Media"'s obsession with only selling "things" gets in the way. The purpose of DRM, after all, is really just to make an awkward 'wrapper' around intangible digital data to make it behave like a real "thing". Sorta. But in so doing, you lose the benefits that make digital media interesting to people - I suppose cement-headed executives are still clinging to the notion that they can force the public back to physical CD's and such regardless of the public market's desires.
If the **AA can get it through their evidently thick skulls that when online, they should quit trying to "sell songs" or "sell books" or "sell movies", but instead try selling "song/book/movie access service" at a REASONABLE price, I think they'd be a lot more successful at making money and reducing copyright violations ("piracy"). WIthout obnoxious DRM restrictions, I'd be quite happy to pay roughly the same as video rental costs to download a 'moderate quality', unrestricted-for-personal-use movie (say, $3.00-$5.00 for 'new releases', $1.00 for older movies, $0.50 for TV show episodes, $0.25 for a good-quality MP3/Ogg song, $0.50 for a typical fiction paperback novel in electronic form, etc.). Sure, that's somewhat less than I'd pay for pre-made physical media, but without the cost of physical media and shipping, that ought to STILL be quite profitable, not to mention being sold at a rate that would make 'pirating' the material about as "profitable" as getting a free gumball out of a gumball machine...
This is not to say that I think people should be ALLOWED to re-distribute materials still protected by reasonable copyright (what's "reasonable" is, of course, a whole other issue) without permission. I just think the "Old School" industries need to quit obsessing about it and get on with adapting to the market, and things will be a lot more tolerable for both them AND us. (Why dredge through a P2P application looking for a bad-quality copy of a movie 'for free', which may or may not turn out to be a 'fake' planted by the **AA when one can get a decent quality version for a few dollars or less direct from the copyright owners?)
And I still think the legislature needs to grep through the laws on copyright and simply replace every single "copy" with "distribute" or "distribution" as appropriate, since the doctrine of "fair use" implies that the problem isn't really 'copying' but the distribution of those copies...
Yeah, this irks the heck out of me. The FAQ also solicits outside developers to "hack away" and help get it ready...but with Xiph's continuing silence on the project and a lack of documentation, nobody but Xiph can really contribute anything...
All is not lost, though - Dan Miller has actually been actively working on specifications for the Theora codec and such, and there has been a LITTLE work that's shown up in CVS since the Alpha 2 release. Just nothing real recent.
It sounds as though all that's REALLY left to reach Beta (at which point the API should be standardized and 'outsiders' will be able to effectively use Ogg Theora) is agreement on a couple of aspects of the container format, if Xiph ever gets around to finishing that. You can see the details of what's left HERE. That page is guessing "August" for the beta. Hey, they've still got 10 days, they MIGHT make it...
A couple of other points:
MPlayer, in traditional 'play everything' fashion, now has current working support for the current Theora CVS version in its own CVS - files encoded with the example_encoder program included in the Theora CVS sources play back fine on the code in MPlayer's CVS
In my experience, Ogg Theora looks really promising - the quality (to my eye, anyway) looks at least as good as mpeg4. It seems to become 'blurry' rather than 'blocky' at lower bitrates, which in my opinion doesn't look as bad. The example encoder is completely unoptimized, so it's very slow, but it does work.
There is now also apparently a windows-compatible example playback program included in Theora CVS called 'splayer'. You'll need a package called 'portaudio' to run it.
So, in short, it's going to take some attention from Xiph to get it done, which may take a while, but it IS in a state where it can be productively 'played with'. Perhaps more people playing with it would encourage more developer attention on it from Xiph and associates...
Perhaps the SCO discovered the situation is the OPPOSITE of what they are claiming - one day one of their programmers noticed that a bunch of GPL'd code had been imported at some point into their products. Too much to economically remove (how much does a commercial software developer have to pay programmers to remove and replace 'millions' of lines of code?).
If so, SCO would know that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed and THEY got in trouble for violation of their license to use GPL'd copyright-protected code.
Perhaps they figured they'd launch a pre-emptive strike by claiming that the code went the OTHER way, to give them time to e.g. cash in their stock and do what damage-control they could, before, in the end, they finally said "Well, okay, we did not know our own fiendish programmers would 'taint' our code like that, and let this be a warning to you all about the Evil, Evil GPL" (which of course would explain Microsoft's interest in assisting this charade).
The executives come out looking like poor victims of unscrupulous programmers and walk away with lots of stock money. SCO gets away with all of their lies (after all, the executives were just going with what THEY know, they 'didn't know' that the code came FROM Linux rather than TO. Ignorance IS bliss, even if it's pretended ignorance.) and SCO and MS get to jump up and down excitedly and say "See? See? I TOLD you the GPL was an evil Cancer that can sneak in and rape your Proprietary Code whenever it wants!" (Never mind that if this conspiracy theory is true, it's the fault of the proprietary developer for not paying attention to their own development process...)
Just a conspiracy theory. I don't have any idea if there's even a shred of truth to it, but it sounded interesting to me.
Not really - mitochondria, as I understand it, work at a pretty basic level, generating ATP from fairly basic biological material (fatty acids, glucose, etc.). They're sort of the 'last step' in the long and complex chain of conversions called 'metabolism'.
Also as I understand it, mitochondria across all procaryotes (anything with cell nuclei, i.e. 'not bacteria') are all derived from the same ancestral bacterium that first formed a cooperative partnership with another cell, and are still fairly similar. The amount of energy they produce as individual cells shouldn't vary all that much - the total energy production from them will be much more influenced by how MANY there are.
If a fetus described in the article developed to term, it'd be human. If it were male, the chances are very slim any of the rabbit DNA would be passed on to his children as well (very nearly all mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother - it used to be thought that it was literally all, but evidently there are rare exceptions). Within a generation or two all of the rabbit DNA would be diluted completely out of the gene pool again...
Unless you believe in homeopathy, in which case the magic vibrations of the rabbit DNA molecules would be maginified thousands of times in the process of being diluted away and you'd end up with an unstoppable army of giant humanoid rabbits....
It would, technically, work for computers as you describe, too, since in this case 'platform' is mainly relevant to 'what software will run on it'. PC hardware running a Mac emulator IS a 'Macintosh platform'...albeit probably not the most efficient one.
ROM code doesn't result in the generation of new hardware, the way nuclear DNA guides the generation of new cells...
How many titles does the recurring "Broughton, Reginal C" have? I see "Employee", and "Senior Vice President" and "Senior Executive Vice President" and one unlabelled...among the 9 stock sales transactions listed since June 20....
P.S. any moderators out there who can spare a "+1 informative" for the parent post?....
They also claim to have sold liscences for all Linux servers of one Fortune 500 company.
And I'm guessing they're telling the truth about that.
However, not only do they not say which company it is, they ALSO don't reveal how much the company in question actually PAID for the licenses. For all we know, the mysterious "Fortune 500 company" may have negotiated $1/license, and SCO took them up on it so they could trumpet "Look! Fortune 500 company bought licenses! You should, too!". Just 'priming the pump', so to speak.
I imagine the identity of the mystery company and at least some "believable speculation" on what they actually paid will become known sometime over the next couple of weeks...
I get the impression that a LOT of the Gn* programs have this problem to one extent or the other. "Unfortunately", a lot of 'regular' users never see this, because the get pre-compiled (and generally unoptimized) packages and never know that the person who put the packages together had to go out and track down a plethora of obscure libraries, and then update a few of the other obscure libraries to a newer version because the build complained.
I'm 'nerdly' enough that I like to compile a lot of my system from scratch to squeeze out more optimizations from them, which is how I noticed this. Just to compile the 1.3.x series GIMP (which looks nice, by the way, though I haven't had time to do much with it) I had to:
Update to a more recent GTK+, which demanded that I:
Update to a more recent GLIB
and then the GIMP build commanded me to:
Update atk, which commanded me to:
update pango.....
and somewhere along the way, I had to override XFree86's Xft, Xrender, and Freetype versions with updates...
Not to mention an update of pkgconfig...
I did finally get it all updated and get things running, but it was a pain tracking down the updates, and frustrating that there didn't seem to be any 'up-front' listing of libraries and versions needed (so I had to wait until the./configure script complained to find out what the NEXT library I needed to update was...)
I suspect if the libraries that the Gn* projects depend on got re-collected into larger 'chunks' of related libraries (much as the 'kdelibs' package does for KDE) this would be a bit more manageable...
I realize that this is mostly a federal matter as far as the law and politics[...]
...which leads into what I'd like to know - what can you/will you do at the state level as Governor to deal with the problems caused by this dichotomy (the fight between the 'content' industry and the technical industry in California), and what can/will you do that may help resolve these problems on a Federal level?
In addition to the strict breeding requirements, there's also the fact that race horses seem to have pretty much reached their "design limits", so to speak. WIthout some sort of fairly substantial change (which would render the horse no-longer-conformant to strict race-horse specifications that horse racing organizations use) to the horse's physiology, I doubt anyone could really get anything any better than what already exists...
It does make me wonder, though - you couldn't race a cloned horse according to the existing rules, but could you 'naturally' produce a foal from cloned horses that WOULD be eligible to race?...
Read the actual bill, please - while it does (to my eye) seem badly written, there is ONE bright spot in it.
I have long felt that the problem with "copyright" laws is that 'copying' is no longer synonymous with 'for distribution' (as it really was back when distribution was the only reason anyone would go to the trouble of setting up a printing press to make copies of things). The doctrine of "fair use" more-or-less means that you can make as many copies and "derivations" of a work you've legally purchased as you want...for your own use. The actual PROBLEM isn't copying....it's distribution.
This bill includes a provision that specifically declares that putting up an unauthorized copy of a protected work on a publically-accessible network is "distribution". While it then goes on to specify that (if I'm reading the nigh-unparseable sentence correctly) if you leave the file up over 180 days the law pretends you've automatically distributed it to 10 people and that 'value' of the violation is $2500 regardless of how many people even noticed it was there let alone downloaded it...which I think is a REALLY bad thing to have the law specify...it DOES indicate that MAYBE legislators will eventually become conscious of the difference between "copying" and "distribution", and stop pre-emptively criminalizing copying (whether for distribution purposes or not).
Wish I had some moderation points right now - this (from my reading) is the only part of this bill that's REALLY bad (the others are really merely "redundant").
The bit about "file sharing" specifically mentions "copyrighted works without authorization of the copyright holder", so doesn't criminalize file-sharing of files you ARE authorized to share (public domain, or works you have the copyright to yourself, or works you've gotten permission to share from the copyright holder). However, the provision quoted above (presumably meant to discourage distribution of useful file-sharing utilities with 'electronic warning labels' [akin to the 'smoking is bad for you, duh' labels the US Federal Government requires on cigarettes]) places what I think is an unreasonable procedural/regulatory burden on software developers because of its badly-written nature.
(Are 'click-through' licenses really enforceable? If not, does that mean the obvious procedure of having the "this program could conceivably be used to store stuff on your computer or let people search it" warning as a "click OK" pop-up wouldn't be valid?...)
Maybe legislators should be required to obtain at least 4-year college degrees before they're allowed to legislate all over a field....
So, while the bill isn't nearly as bad as the the article blurb above implies, it's still pretty badly written, and from my perspective just shows Berman's trying to appease his donors. Seems he'll just incrementally 'roll back' what his bills attempt, bit by bit, until he hits one that passes. I'm guessing he'll then procede to add to that bill bit by bit with riders to other bills, etc., and hope nobody notices...
And, yes, *I* (though I am not a lawyer(tm)) would think that "Network Neighborhood" falls perfectly under the description of this provision...
About these 'fingerprints' - are they SIMILAR for similar pieces of music? Or are they only useful for identifying the one piece of music that each fingerprint is for?
If the 'fingerprints' are similar enough, you could ALSO use the technique to search for songs that you may have never heard but match the general style of music that you like. Sounds like something independent musicians could really benefit from ("Hey, I'd never heard of THESE guys before, but their music is exactly the style that I like....")
And if this is NOT the case, is anyone working on a "music style" analysis of some sort that could be stored in a 'searchable' fashion? (i.e. take your favorite song, run it through an analysis program to get it's 'fingerprint', then feed that 'fingerprint' to a search engine to get a listing of similar songs...)
Unfortunately, it appears that Ogg Theora development is "mostly dead". The main developer has been stuck doing contract work (on the integer decoder for Vorbis, as far as I can tell) and can't get to it "for the foreseeable future". The mailing lists are almost completely dead, and, most tellingly, Xiph hasn't updated the theora.org page since January.
I doubt very much they'll have the 1.0 release next month as they have been saying since last June that they'd do...Alpha 1 was looking really promising, but Alpha 2 got pushed back twice (originally scheduled for early December 2002...then late December...then they stopped talking about it anywhere.) Last I'd heard was they were planning to skip Alpha 2 and go straight to Beta in March. Obviously that didn't happen. I do know Monty managed to get some (non-Theora-specific?) work done that will benefit Ogg Theora, but that was back in February, and nobody's talking about it since then.
There are hints that there are other people puttering with the code a little (and VP3 decoding support [the "video codec" part of Ogg Theora - I gather there are still a few "tweaks" to be worked out to turn VP3 into "Ogg Theora"] is slowly being worked on for ffmpeg, Xine, and MPlayer.) but I don't know if Xiph has enough attention on it to get anything out. (Support for VP3/Theora video codec going into Xine is mentioned - very briefly - in the latest "Ogg Traffic" newsletter which at least indicates SOMEBODY remembers that Theora exists. I think if they at least got out some documentation on the format (particularly the.ogg part - they say.ogm is 'horribly hacked' but until there's a "proper" standard available for people to work to, that's all we have for "video-in-ogg") it would help. (If encoding support for Theora in ffmpeg/mplayer isn't far behind, then adoption and work on it outside of Xiph will probably pick up pretty quickly.)
Kinda sad to see the project languish silently as it has for most of the year - some days I can't tell if Xiph will be abandoning Ogg Theora or ever getting back to it or what...
As a side note, back on the topic of "codec comparison", my playing with the one and only release of Ogg Theora way back when it was released (8 months ago!) gave me the impression that it can be a very nice format, especially for more compressed bitrate. Where most codecs seem to get "blockier" as they compress, VP3/Theora seems to get "blurrier" instead, which to my eye generally "looks nicer", despite the fact that it has lost as much actual information from the video as the "blockier" codecs (e.g. mpeg4). IF Xiph ever gets around to some file format documentation and VP3/Theora encoding support appears relatively soon, I can easily imagine Ogg Theora becoming a popular format for internet video and archiving home video.
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"DivX Copyrights"? I don't recall there being any code from "DivX" in MPlayer at all, though there is still support for the old "divx4linux" codecs (deprecated in favor of Xvid and/or ffmpeg's libavcodec support for mpeg4.)
Again - this isn't an 'end-user' program. Use Xine - there are plenty of pre-built packages for it.
And, seriously, if you NEED Mplayer to play something, the ./configure script that comes with the source code is amazingly smart compared to most. No options needed, and './configure' figures out the necessary optimizations and available codecs on its own.
Yes, but -vop is deprecated in favor of -vf, which is NOT applied in reverse order. I'm not sure what's so hellish about -fps and -ofps (-fps means "play at this framerate", -ofps means "correct TO this framerate, dropping or copying frames as necessary". Very handy when I mis-type the tv capture line and end up capturing at the wrong framerate...
While I tend to agree that the syntax for some of the options is unusual (especially the complicated ones that are really sets of parameters to pass to OTHER 'programs', e.g. libavcodec), I'm willing to put up with it. It IS confusing and a pain in the butt sometimes, there's no denying that, but I've been able to get a huge variety of things to work with it, and in my admittedly frequent trips through the documentation to try to figure out new features, I can see a lot more there that I've hardly touched. MPlayer reminds me a lot of Regular Expressions in that respect - not necessarily intuitive to learn, but very powerful if you're willing to deal with it.
I do have to agree with you on the DVD syntax, but I think that's partly due to the ongoing shift in syntax. Originally, as I recall, the syntax was "-dvd", much as TV capture was "-tv on[:other-features=whatever:etc]". (tv capture is now also tv:// instead). Hopefully the new syntax will be expanded and work as you suggest later [dvd://title/chapter] - it would be consistent with other URLs [mms://whatever/whatever.wmv or http://some.host.net/quicktimevideo.mov or whatever] then.
What Joe Barr and company seem to refuse to acknowledge is that MPlayer is NOT really written for 'normal end-users'. At all. Just as it seems, it really WAS written for 'nerds' and a conscious decision to forgo 'user-friendliness' in favor of functionality. Joe Barr and company refuse to accept this, and complain as though the developers are out to "get" end-users, and trying to treat the developers as though they are paid technical support, or a commercial software company that should be desperate to please end-users. I tend to sympathise with the developers on this - they've put out an amazingly functional though difficult to use program, and made it available for 'anyone that wants to use it', and their "reward", for the most part, is people popping onto the mailling lists regularly to DEMAND that they stop working on what they're doing and make pretty GUI interfaces or change the commands or explain how to do things (that are already explained in the surprisingly-complete-for-an-open-source-project online documentation) and "they'd better change their ways if they want to 'take over' the media player 'market'."....
I see how regularly that comes up in the mailing lists, and fully understand the fact that the developers have run out of patience for dealing with it...
It's like having people complain that GCC is too hard to use because C is complicated, and why can't GCC have a nice GUI and compile in some form of drag-n-drop LOGO instead...or popping onto the Perl-developers mailing list to yell at the developers because Perl is hard to read sometimes and why can't they be like Python instead [when Python itself is already available to the complainers to use...]
Anyone who complains that MPlayer is too hard to compile and install is NOT the target 'market' for MPlayer. Seriously. Those people should be using Xine or similar programs, which ARE written for the 'end-user' "market" (and Xine is quite nice - and 'cross-pollinates' features with ffmpeg and MPlayer, so they all will tend to support much of the same set of codecs at time goes on.).
I, for one, WELCOME our MPlayer developer overl....wait, did I just type that? Damn. I've been reading too much slashdot....
Now that my first question has been answered (Thanks, cmowire), there's one more related question (not directly relevant to the original top, though).
It's been said that the "ms-dos" format used by default on CompactFlash storage is particularly bad for the chips (excessive writes when updating information on the filesystem). Are there any other commonly-available filesystems that can be recognized and used on CF cross-platform (i.e. JFFS2 appears to be Linux only at the moment) that might be less stressful to the media? UDF ("DirectCD") maybe?
Every time this issue comes up (CompactFlash wearing out) I am reminded that "CompactFlash wears out eventually", but everyone always specifies "CompactFlash"...
Do ALL forms of 'digital storage cards' have the same problem (I've always ASSUMED that they do) (i.e. "MemoryStick", "SecureDigital", etc.)? Presuming they do, does the rate at which they degrade vary, and which are the longest-lasting?
Numerous stories have been posted on this - I'm surprised "Printer Ink" isn't half of the posts here...
And on that note, I'm just waiting for the deluge of "In Soviet India" jokes...
Curses, beat me to it!
The first thing I noticed was the chart showing IBM and HP holding more or less steady (actually both up slightly when I looked) while SCO was the big red downhill slump line....
...and I thought to myself "Hooray! Another wild press-release from SCO!" And this time they have to get it out on short notice if they want time for it to take affect before the weekend...
Interesting that this comes out on an infamous Friday afternoon when supposedly nobody will notice...was this calculated to cause SCO's stock to close lower before the weekend?
Dagnabbit!...I was just checking to make sure nobody'd mentioned that one yet...
"Destroy him, my robots!"....And I don't think I've ever heard of ANYONE getting to the end of that game (though I imagine SOMEONE must have.)
(Hey, readers, back in those days having recognizable speech coming out of a computer game was a rare and spiffy thing....)
...that so many people assume PHP is "only for web pages". The entire first report linked above seems predicated on the notion that "PHP is for companies to make money setting up websites for other people, and other uses are 'fringe' or irrelevant."
PHP is definitely good for web-pages, but I've increasingly found it to be very useful for a lot of command-line programs and system administration, much as Perl is.
PHP-GTK has also already been mentioned in other postings, and the increasing interoperability with Java means you can implement a variety of parts of your PHP projects in "native Java" if you want to...and that's not just "Java for web pages" code, either.
It's not 'hard numbers', but then, a lot of people have already pointed out that hard numbers may not REALLY be what you want. (After all, since when is "Everybody's doin' it" a persuasive argument for a good scientist?)
On the other hand, I see there are still lots of applications listed at the Scientific Applications on Linux site and the NCBI Toolbox of Bioinformatics code compiles and runs just fine on my linux box, and BioPerl, BioJava, and BioPython all run just fine on Linux (there are even a couple of fledgling BioPHP projects out just getting started out there, which will obviously also work.
Disclaimer - both of the semi-active "BioPHP" type projects that I know of - Here and here - were started independently by individual amateurs...and one of them is me. Both projects are still in the early stages (Genephp has more code available at the moment) and have different development approaches, but are slowly working on trying to combine development towards a 'formal' set of "BioPHP" modules. Blatant plug - if you are interested in helping with friendly advice or actual development or testing, please join the mailing list which both projects use)
I have to wonder if the problem isn't pretty much the same thing as the RIAA's - they are attempting to apply 19th-century business logic ("Business=Sell Things") to 21st century business, where a lot of the things being sold aren't, uh, "things".
A number of posters have pointed out that people selling E-Books are having trouble "because they can't control distribution". Fundamentally, that's because an "E-Book" isn't really a "thing" in the traditional sense of the word.
While the market of internet users seems primed to jump for a RATIONAL commercial venture (I think Apple's music service is a step in the right direction, though not QUITE there yet), this is because of the advantages involved in digital media (such as "being able to easily make a lossless copy to bring with me on a trip", or "seeing music/writing/etc. that I want and being able to get it for myself in a matter of minutes"). "Old Media"'s obsession with only selling "things" gets in the way. The purpose of DRM, after all, is really just to make an awkward 'wrapper' around intangible digital data to make it behave like a real "thing". Sorta. But in so doing, you lose the benefits that make digital media interesting to people - I suppose cement-headed executives are still clinging to the notion that they can force the public back to physical CD's and such regardless of the public market's desires.
If the **AA can get it through their evidently thick skulls that when online, they should quit trying to "sell songs" or "sell books" or "sell movies", but instead try selling "song/book/movie access service" at a REASONABLE price, I think they'd be a lot more successful at making money and reducing copyright violations ("piracy"). WIthout obnoxious DRM restrictions, I'd be quite happy to pay roughly the same as video rental costs to download a 'moderate quality', unrestricted-for-personal-use movie (say, $3.00-$5.00 for 'new releases', $1.00 for older movies, $0.50 for TV show episodes, $0.25 for a good-quality MP3/Ogg song, $0.50 for a typical fiction paperback novel in electronic form, etc.). Sure, that's somewhat less than I'd pay for pre-made physical media, but without the cost of physical media and shipping, that ought to STILL be quite profitable, not to mention being sold at a rate that would make 'pirating' the material about as "profitable" as getting a free gumball out of a gumball machine...
This is not to say that I think people should be ALLOWED to re-distribute materials still protected by reasonable copyright (what's "reasonable" is, of course, a whole other issue) without permission. I just think the "Old School" industries need to quit obsessing about it and get on with adapting to the market, and things will be a lot more tolerable for both them AND us. (Why dredge through a P2P application looking for a bad-quality copy of a movie 'for free', which may or may not turn out to be a 'fake' planted by the **AA when one can get a decent quality version for a few dollars or less direct from the copyright owners?)
And I still think the legislature needs to grep through the laws on copyright and simply replace every single "copy" with "distribute" or "distribution" as appropriate, since the doctrine of "fair use" implies that the problem isn't really 'copying' but the distribution of those copies...
Yeah, this irks the heck out of me. The FAQ also solicits outside developers to "hack away" and help get it ready...but with Xiph's continuing silence on the project and a lack of documentation, nobody but Xiph can really contribute anything...
All is not lost, though - Dan Miller has actually been actively working on specifications for the Theora codec and such, and there has been a LITTLE work that's shown up in CVS since the Alpha 2 release. Just nothing real recent.
It sounds as though all that's REALLY left to reach Beta (at which point the API should be standardized and 'outsiders' will be able to effectively use Ogg Theora) is agreement on a couple of aspects of the container format, if Xiph ever gets around to finishing that. You can see the details of what's left HERE. That page is guessing "August" for the beta. Hey, they've still got 10 days, they MIGHT make it...
A couple of other points:
- MPlayer, in traditional 'play everything' fashion, now has current working support for the current Theora CVS version in its own CVS - files encoded with the example_encoder program included in the Theora CVS sources play back fine on the code in MPlayer's CVS
- In my experience, Ogg Theora looks really promising - the quality (to my eye, anyway) looks at least as good as mpeg4. It seems to become 'blurry' rather than 'blocky' at lower bitrates, which in my opinion doesn't look as bad. The example encoder is completely unoptimized, so it's very slow, but it does work.
- There is now also apparently a windows-compatible example playback program included in Theora CVS called 'splayer'. You'll need a package called 'portaudio' to run it.
So, in short, it's going to take some attention from Xiph to get it done, which may take a while, but it IS in a state where it can be productively 'played with'. Perhaps more people playing with it would encourage more developer attention on it from Xiph and associates...Perhaps the SCO discovered the situation is the OPPOSITE of what they are claiming - one day one of their programmers noticed that a bunch of GPL'd code had been imported at some point into their products. Too much to economically remove (how much does a commercial software developer have to pay programmers to remove and replace 'millions' of lines of code?).
If so, SCO would know that it was only a matter of time before someone noticed and THEY got in trouble for violation of their license to use GPL'd copyright-protected code.
Perhaps they figured they'd launch a pre-emptive strike by claiming that the code went the OTHER way, to give them time to e.g. cash in their stock and do what damage-control they could, before, in the end, they finally said "Well, okay, we did not know our own fiendish programmers would 'taint' our code like that, and let this be a warning to you all about the Evil, Evil GPL" (which of course would explain Microsoft's interest in assisting this charade).
The executives come out looking like poor victims of unscrupulous programmers and walk away with lots of stock money. SCO gets away with all of their lies (after all, the executives were just going with what THEY know, they 'didn't know' that the code came FROM Linux rather than TO. Ignorance IS bliss, even if it's pretended ignorance.) and SCO and MS get to jump up and down excitedly and say "See? See? I TOLD you the GPL was an evil Cancer that can sneak in and rape your Proprietary Code whenever it wants!" (Never mind that if this conspiracy theory is true, it's the fault of the proprietary developer for not paying attention to their own development process...)
Just a conspiracy theory. I don't have any idea if there's even a shred of truth to it, but it sounded interesting to me.
You sure it's not the other way around? After all, it's the English who can't spell "aluminum".
(Either that, or they can't spell "Platinium" and "Molybdenium"...)
Of course, I could just be full of "shite"[sic] for saying so... :-)
Not really - mitochondria, as I understand it, work at a pretty basic level, generating ATP from fairly basic biological material (fatty acids, glucose, etc.). They're sort of the 'last step' in the long and complex chain of conversions called 'metabolism'.
Also as I understand it, mitochondria across all procaryotes (anything with cell nuclei, i.e. 'not bacteria') are all derived from the same ancestral bacterium that first formed a cooperative partnership with another cell, and are still fairly similar. The amount of energy they produce as individual cells shouldn't vary all that much - the total energy production from them will be much more influenced by how MANY there are.
If a fetus described in the article developed to term, it'd be human. If it were male, the chances are very slim any of the rabbit DNA would be passed on to his children as well (very nearly all mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother - it used to be thought that it was literally all, but evidently there are rare exceptions). Within a generation or two all of the rabbit DNA would be diluted completely out of the gene pool again...
Unless you believe in homeopathy, in which case the magic vibrations of the rabbit DNA molecules would be maginified thousands of times in the process of being diluted away and you'd end up with an unstoppable army of giant humanoid rabbits....
It would, technically, work for computers as you describe, too, since in this case 'platform' is mainly relevant to 'what software will run on it'. PC hardware running a Mac emulator IS a 'Macintosh platform'...albeit probably not the most efficient one.
ROM code doesn't result in the generation of new hardware, the way nuclear DNA guides the generation of new cells...
Egad!
How many titles does the recurring "Broughton, Reginal C" have? I see "Employee", and "Senior Vice President" and "Senior Executive Vice President" and one unlabelled...among the 9 stock sales transactions listed since June 20....
P.S. any moderators out there who can spare a "+1 informative" for the parent post?....
And I'm guessing they're telling the truth about that.
However, not only do they not say which company it is, they ALSO don't reveal how much the company in question actually PAID for the licenses. For all we know, the mysterious "Fortune 500 company" may have negotiated $1/license, and SCO took them up on it so they could trumpet "Look! Fortune 500 company bought licenses! You should, too!". Just 'priming the pump', so to speak.
I imagine the identity of the mystery company and at least some "believable speculation" on what they actually paid will become known sometime over the next couple of weeks...
I get the impression that a LOT of the Gn* programs have this problem to one extent or the other. "Unfortunately", a lot of 'regular' users never see this, because the get pre-compiled (and generally unoptimized) packages and never know that the person who put the packages together had to go out and track down a plethora of obscure libraries, and then update a few of the other obscure libraries to a newer version because the build complained.
I'm 'nerdly' enough that I like to compile a lot of my system from scratch to squeeze out more optimizations from them, which is how I noticed this. Just to compile the 1.3.x series GIMP (which looks nice, by the way, though I haven't had time to do much with it) I had to:
- Update to a more recent GTK+, which demanded that I:
- Update to a more recent GLIB
- and then the GIMP build commanded me to
:
- Update atk, which commanded me to:
- update pango.....
- and somewhere along the way, I had to override XFree86's Xft, Xrender, and Freetype versions with updates...
- Not to mention an update of pkgconfig...
I did finally get it all updated and get things running, but it was a pain tracking down the updates, and frustrating that there didn't seem to be any 'up-front' listing of libraries and versions needed (so I had to wait until theI suspect if the libraries that the Gn* projects depend on got re-collected into larger 'chunks' of related libraries (much as the 'kdelibs' package does for KDE) this would be a bit more manageable...
...which leads into what I'd like to know - what can you/will you do at the state level as Governor to deal with the problems caused by this dichotomy (the fight between the 'content' industry and the technical industry in California), and what can/will you do that may help resolve these problems on a Federal level?
In addition to the strict breeding requirements, there's also the fact that race horses seem to have pretty much reached their "design limits", so to speak. WIthout some sort of fairly substantial change (which would render the horse no-longer-conformant to strict race-horse specifications that horse racing organizations use) to the horse's physiology, I doubt anyone could really get anything any better than what already exists...
It does make me wonder, though - you couldn't race a cloned horse according to the existing rules, but could you 'naturally' produce a foal from cloned horses that WOULD be eligible to race?...
Read the actual bill, please - while it does (to my eye) seem badly written, there is ONE bright spot in it.
I have long felt that the problem with "copyright" laws is that 'copying' is no longer synonymous with 'for distribution' (as it really was back when distribution was the only reason anyone would go to the trouble of setting up a printing press to make copies of things). The doctrine of "fair use" more-or-less means that you can make as many copies and "derivations" of a work you've legally purchased as you want...for your own use. The actual PROBLEM isn't copying....it's distribution.
This bill includes a provision that specifically declares that putting up an unauthorized copy of a protected work on a publically-accessible network is "distribution". While it then goes on to specify that (if I'm reading the nigh-unparseable sentence correctly) if you leave the file up over 180 days the law pretends you've automatically distributed it to 10 people and that 'value' of the violation is $2500 regardless of how many people even noticed it was there let alone downloaded it...which I think is a REALLY bad thing to have the law specify...it DOES indicate that MAYBE legislators will eventually become conscious of the difference between "copying" and "distribution", and stop pre-emptively criminalizing copying (whether for distribution purposes or not).
Wish I had some moderation points right now - this (from my reading) is the only part of this bill that's REALLY bad (the others are really merely "redundant").
The bit about "file sharing" specifically mentions "copyrighted works without authorization of the copyright holder", so doesn't criminalize file-sharing of files you ARE authorized to share (public domain, or works you have the copyright to yourself, or works you've gotten permission to share from the copyright holder). However, the provision quoted above (presumably meant to discourage distribution of useful file-sharing utilities with 'electronic warning labels' [akin to the 'smoking is bad for you, duh' labels the US Federal Government requires on cigarettes]) places what I think is an unreasonable procedural/regulatory burden on software developers because of its badly-written nature.
(Are 'click-through' licenses really enforceable? If not, does that mean the obvious procedure of having the "this program could conceivably be used to store stuff on your computer or let people search it" warning as a "click OK" pop-up wouldn't be valid?...)
Maybe legislators should be required to obtain at least 4-year college degrees before they're allowed to legislate all over a field....
So, while the bill isn't nearly as bad as the the article blurb above implies, it's still pretty badly written, and from my perspective just shows Berman's trying to appease his donors. Seems he'll just incrementally 'roll back' what his bills attempt, bit by bit, until he hits one that passes. I'm guessing he'll then procede to add to that bill bit by bit with riders to other bills, etc., and hope nobody notices...
And, yes, *I* (though I am not a lawyer(tm)) would think that "Network Neighborhood" falls perfectly under the description of this provision...
About these 'fingerprints' - are they SIMILAR for similar pieces of music? Or are they only useful for identifying the one piece of music that each fingerprint is for?
If the 'fingerprints' are similar enough, you could ALSO use the technique to search for songs that you may have never heard but match the general style of music that you like. Sounds like something independent musicians could really benefit from ("Hey, I'd never heard of THESE guys before, but their music is exactly the style that I like....")
And if this is NOT the case, is anyone working on a "music style" analysis of some sort that could be stored in a 'searchable' fashion? (i.e. take your favorite song, run it through an analysis program to get it's 'fingerprint', then feed that 'fingerprint' to a search engine to get a listing of similar songs...)
Unfortunately, it appears that Ogg Theora development is "mostly dead". The main developer has been stuck doing contract work (on the integer decoder for Vorbis, as far as I can tell) and can't get to it "for the foreseeable future". The mailing lists are almost completely dead, and, most tellingly, Xiph hasn't updated the theora.org page since January.
I doubt very much they'll have the 1.0 release next month as they have been saying since last June that they'd do...Alpha 1 was looking really promising, but Alpha 2 got pushed back twice (originally scheduled for early December 2002...then late December...then they stopped talking about it anywhere.) Last I'd heard was they were planning to skip Alpha 2 and go straight to Beta in March. Obviously that didn't happen. I do know Monty managed to get some (non-Theora-specific?) work done that will benefit Ogg Theora, but that was back in February, and nobody's talking about it since then.
There are hints that there are other people puttering with the code a little (and VP3 decoding support [the "video codec" part of Ogg Theora - I gather there are still a few "tweaks" to be worked out to turn VP3 into "Ogg Theora"] is slowly being worked on for ffmpeg, Xine, and MPlayer.) but I don't know if Xiph has enough attention on it to get anything out. (Support for VP3/Theora video codec going into Xine is mentioned - very briefly - in the latest "Ogg Traffic" newsletter which at least indicates SOMEBODY remembers that Theora exists. I think if they at least got out some documentation on the format (particularly the .ogg part - they say .ogm is 'horribly hacked' but until there's a "proper" standard available for people to work to, that's all we have for "video-in-ogg") it would help. (If encoding support for Theora in ffmpeg/mplayer isn't far behind, then adoption and work on it outside of Xiph will probably pick up pretty quickly.)
Kinda sad to see the project languish silently as it has for most of the year - some days I can't tell if Xiph will be abandoning Ogg Theora or ever getting back to it or what...
As a side note, back on the topic of "codec comparison", my playing with the one and only release of Ogg Theora way back when it was released (8 months ago!) gave me the impression that it can be a very nice format, especially for more compressed bitrate. Where most codecs seem to get "blockier" as they compress, VP3/Theora seems to get "blurrier" instead, which to my eye generally "looks nicer", despite the fact that it has lost as much actual information from the video as the "blockier" codecs (e.g. mpeg4). IF Xiph ever gets around to some file format documentation and VP3/Theora encoding support appears relatively soon, I can easily imagine Ogg Theora becoming a popular format for internet video and archiving home video.