Plus the fact that the US can't seem to develop its own culture and has to keep stealing from others. Just look at that site! It's OBVIOUSLY an exact replica of what a JAPANESE site would look like! Have they no shame?
toy civilians that bleed just like real ones?
That would not be permitted. As has been reported by the news media many times, that sort of thing leads directly to uncontrollable urges to commit violent acts against actual human beings, the same way that "Pokemon(tm)" causes animal cruelty...
I've been playing with the 2.5 series off and on mainly for the USB Storage support (devices that don't seem to work in 2.4 seem to work fine in 2.5 - at least the two or three that I've tried.) For the longest time, there was always ONE of the features that I really wanted that wouldn't compile or work, either the USB, or Video 4 Linux, or something else...
I came back and tried it again at 2.5.63. That was the first version what compiled and ran everything I used perfectly..64 and.65 seem to have had a timing glitch that messed up my scheduled recordings (by mencoder via V4L), but that seems to be fixed again in 2.5.66, which has been working beautifully for me so far.
I honestly expect to see "2.6.0preXX" versions start appearing in the relatively near future...
One possibility is that, in addition, we don't want to risk letting enough information out that Saddam's people can figure out where the US is getting its information on the prohibited weapons, and kill those involved...
(On an unrelated note, I'm getting utterly sick of hearing "Weapons of Mass Destruction(tm)" (which is bandied about in the press so much that everyone's been abbreviating it WMD instead...). Not because of what they're referring to or anything, but because I think the term is nonsensical and designed entirely for "marketing" reasons, much like "assault weapon" (isn't a WEAPON, by DEFINITION, for assaulting things?). How is a canister of gas capable of killing off most of a building's inhabitants more a weapon "of Mass Destruction" than a really big conventional bomb which is capable of doing the same thing, as well as destroying the building itself (which, I gather, really isn't "Mass Destruction", according to the usage of the terminology by the media)?...
If you look at Bush's speech you see that he never said we are at war with Iraq
I had noticed that, too. I keep wondering if Congress actually has the guts to participate in Government in a MEANINGFUL way and actually DECLARE war (or, conversely, actively refuse to do so). Somehow, my cynicism won't let me believe they'll do anything at all...
I still haven't heard a plausible mechanism for "The US" (the government? US Oil companies? Truckloads of citizens carrying buckets?) to simply "take" Iraq's oil....
At the same time, the puffery about "Free the Iraqi People from Evil(tm)" excuse doesn't fit, either. I just can't see the federal government doing ANYTHING for simplistic reasons (be it "take their oil", "Free Iraq", "Saddam Hussein is a bad, bad man", etc.). I suspect the reason behind the hyperactive "push" to get to this point is complex and includes elements of most of the simplistic theories. Of course, trying to actually UNDERSTAND the reasons behind what's going on requires thinking, which most human beings around the world today seem to think is some sort of (metaphorically) back-breaking labor (and therefore detailed facts are seen as not being in demand, so no news media source, regardless of its individual biases, bothers to come up with any...).
Though I do have a whacky conspiracy theory to add to the list (not that I necessarily BELIEVE it, but):
If it turns out to be possible to "boil down" the impetus for this "military action" (NOTE: THERE IS NO WAR! It's only some sort of EUPHEMISM for war until the US Congress grows a spine and decides to actually DECLARE war. I predict this'll be another "undeclared war" when all is said and done...) to ONE purpose, could that purpose REALLY be:
Saddam Hussein is a Bad, Bad, Man? - I can't see this as being sufficient - there have been plenty of Bad, Bad Men in power that the US appears to have ignored all this time. It may be a factor, sure, but I can't see it as THE reason.
Take Iraq's Oil/Benefit US Oil Companies? - I don't see how the US can possibly get away with "just taking" oil from Iraq....and I have no idea how a glut of foreign oil is supposed to IMPROVE the profits of US Oil companies. On the other hand, I understand that France and Russia have/had rather lucrative oil-related deals in the pre-Police Action(tm) Iraq... At any rate, no, I can't see THIS as a sole purpose for the conflict.
"Daddy's War"? - Please. As fun (and easy) as it is to insult the current Chief Executive of the US, This one is blatantly just a manufactured insult. If it WERE truely the sole (or even primary) reason for the conflict, I think it would be more blatantly obvious (even to people who haven't yet reached the stage of reflexively hating and insulting the current president no matter what...)
How about this...what if the SINGLE intended goal of the conflict was.... We want the economic sanctions against Iraq lifted. (Like I said, "conspiracy theory"...).
Not that if this were the case it would be because of lofty humanitarian reasons, but rather "Enlightened Self-Interest". Now, if this was the reason, we couldn't simply start lobbying the UN to just lift all the sanctions - after all, Saddam Hussein is still in power, and his actions WERE the reasoning behind the sanctions in the first place (the "Saddam Hussein is a Bad, Bad Man" factor), so getting him and his "regime" removed is necessary before we can push to have the sanctions lifted. Once the conflict is over, Iraq will need its economy jump-started even more than the US's does, which means they'll need to be able to trade prodigiously and freely (the "Free the Iraqi People" factor), and exportation of oil is going to be a major source of income for the nation of Iraq - and the an increase in Iraqi output will drive down prices (the "'Take' Iraq's Oil" factor). Lower cost oil available to the US will be a small detriment to US oil companies' profit margins, but will drive down manufacturing and freight costs, conceivably causing a boost to the economy ("Enlightened Self Interest") both in the US and in countries that the US would like to see an increase in exportations to (giving them more money to spend on US stuff), and, of course, if all the intended positive effects actually take place, it means more credibility for the Bush fa
The source of the most unbiased news on ANYTHING that's available is called "thinking rationally". It seems that most of the world regards thought as some sort of CHORE (I recall the bland, low-content speech President Bush gave to announce the 48-hour deadline...and the calls that came into C-Span afterwards. NOBODY was thinking. I heard "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I believe it, that settles it! Praise George Bush, for He Can Do No Wrong!"....followed by "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I don't believe it, that settles it! Curse George Bush, for He Can Do No Right!". No wonder we're denied any useful information - it's assumed everyone's decided on their opinion and won't change it no matter what, so why bother with facts?...). Anyway, back to my point - being willing to honestly think about and evaluate information will give you the most accurate "news".
I doubt it's possible to find a single "unbiased" news source. You CAN, though, find a whole mess of different sources that all have different biases. By comparing what they report and how they report it, it's just a matter of actual thinking to determine, approximately, what the "unbiased" truth really is.
For this, I recommend The Illustrious Google News and Columbia Newsblaster as starting points. Fark occasionally has some interesting pointers to more amusing angles on breaking news as well, though Fark is more for entertainment and amusement than "serious" news...
. Google News, in particular, seems to include a fairly wide variety of viewpoints, including "America is a bunch of evil imperialists who want to rule the world" type "Arab" news sites as well as, for example, the "Rah, rah, rah! Bomb Everybody!" Rupertican-party Fox channel (along with the various other "mainstream" channels that toe either a Disneycrat or Rupertican party line) and a not-unreasonable collection of international news outlets as well.
>So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because...
Fine with me, but then they shouldn't have used other people's GPL code in their software.
(Sigh)...
Again, as far as *I* can tell, since the last of the non-GPL-able code was replaced in MPlayer, there have been NO efforts to STOP distribution of binaries. There's a BIG difference between "don't WANT binaries being distributed" and "FORBID binaries to be distributed"...
At ONE TIME MPlayer had a "no binary distribution clause" BECAUSE OF the non-GPL-able code that it still contained at the time. Evidently, people are still hung up on the fact that this GPL-incompatible clause existed at one time, even though it no longer does. People are mis-interpreting the opposition to binary distributions of MPlayer for TECHNICAL reasons as being an outright PROHIBITION on binary distribution for LICENSING reasons as a result...
The names of the.dll's suggest that that's where all the codec work is done.
Nope, only the work on codecs that have not been successfully reverse-engineered yet. A great deal of the codecs out there are currently handled by libavcodec, from the looks of things.
One suspects a bit of thievery going on here.
This one doesn't.:-) The.dll's are only there to enable playback of not-yet-reverse-engineered formats. Given that MPlayer's key goal is "play as many different media types as possible, especially those that otherwise can only be played on Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime", this seems like a perfectly valid approach until native decoders can be worked out.
And I wouldn't say that MPlayer is "thieving" from ffmpeg (whence libavcodec comes) either. Not only because libavcodec is FOR other projects to use for audio and video encoding and decoding, but because I've noticed that one or more of the MPlayer developers seem to be active participants in libavcodec development as well...
"Arrogance", no. "Intolerance", yes. I think if I were subject to the amount and kind of abuse heaped on them by people who don't agree with the focus that the MPlayer project has, I'd get pretty terse with people, too. Especially people emailling to say "you are just a fucking elitist"...
Think of it this way. Imagine you're a volunteer developer. Now imagine you're ALSO the tech support for the project.
NOW imagine some third party packages your project with their distribution.
Your phone starts ringing. Your email goes nuts. They're all saying "Your program is broken/deleted my files/raped my dog/etc.".
At first it's easy to be polite. "You say it doesn't work? Can you give me a description of what it's doing wrong? Um, I'll need more detail besides 'it doesn't run', does it give an error message of some sort? No? What does it do? Oh, it DOES give an error message. Can you tell me what it says? No, I mean read what it literally says...."
Not only does this sort of thing REALLY grate on any rational person's nerves very quickly, but it's extremely time-consuming to deal with and prevents you from actually DEVELOPING anything.
Having lurked on the MPlayer user mailing list for some time, I find myself actually somewhat sympathetic for the MPlayer developer's hard line on dealing with things like this.
Consider what MPlayer is SUPPOSED to be - the most capable and efficient media player available for *nix systems. This focus has never BEEN "make it pretty and simple", but rather "make it effective". This is an important point - everyone harassing the MPlayer team with demands (and they often are - "you have to make it easier to use", "this software cannot continue like this", etc.) are, in effect, trying to "hijack" the project into a different focus. MPlayer ISN'T XINE and isn't supposed to be. The Xine project IS more focussed on user-friendliness than MPlayer. That's by design.
The friction the MPlayer project seems to attract seems to come entirely from people who think they should change the focus of their project from what the DEVELOPERS want to what the complaintants want. This, to my mind, is silly. Xine is much simpler to use. If "simple to use" is what you want, Xine is the program you want. If you're willing to read some documentation and deal with slightly arcane and very flexible command-line arguments in exchange for broader capability and somewhat better performance, then MPlayer is what you want. Choice is good.
I think the "Xine vs. MPlayer" alleged war is about as real as the "Gnome vs. KDE" one, which is to say, not at all except for a few peripheral folks who THINK there is one. Xine and MPlayer seem to cross-pollinate ideas well enough. The Xine project figured out Sorenson 1 and wrote a native decoder. MPlayer said "great work, thanks" and incorporated the concept into MPlayer (Giving full credit to Xine, as I recall). They, in turn, managed to puzzle out use of windows DLL's to get Sorenson 3 decoding capability. From what I can see, I think this is now in the most recent Xine releases as well.
It's all good. Everyone relax. Nothing to see here....
As *I* understand it (disclaimer - I have NOT been reading the aforementioned flamewar) there are a couple of issues here, none of which are really worth flaming over:
One issue is that while the "core" of MPlayer really is GPL (and as far as I can tell, nobody at MPlayer has ever actually tried to stop anyone from distributing binaries), a couple of the features that MPlayer is best known for - ability to play "Windows Media" and now even QT with Sorensen 3 video codec - REQUIRES use of windows DLL's, which are obviously not GPL and can't be redistributed.
This leads the next issue, which is the MPlayer developers' legendary (both in the sense of "famous" AND, in my opinion, in the sense of "greatly exaggerated") intolerance for bad or irrelevant bug reports and questions that are dealt with in the rather extensive documentation they've gone to the effort of making available. Having lurked on the MPlayer-user mailing lists for quite some time now, I can say that there is SOME truth to this, but that callousness towards this sort of thing isn't totally unjustified.
Precompiled binaries for MPlayer would, quite frankly, grossly increase the incidence of harassment and bogus complaints that the MPlayer development team would have to wade through. Firstly, that "Hey, MPlayer's supposed to play quicktime now, but the Debian/RedHat/Mandrake/Slackware/Somethingorotheri x package doesn't do it! It must be a bug! Fix it!" would be reported repeatedly...due to the fact that the Windows DLL's that would have to be distributed with the packages...can't. Secondly, complaints that "MPlayer is the slowest piece of crap I ever tried to run! Bug! Fix it!"...caused by having a pile of different distributions almost certainly only compiling for 486 or Pentium optimizations (rather than having a complete separate binary package for each CPU)...whereas the MPlayer developers have put a great deal of effort, from my perspective, setting up the source code configure script as painlessly simple and automatic as possible. "./configure ; make ; make install" really is all it should ever take to generate binaries optimized for one's own system. Really.
And, of course, there's the problem with each distribution (and each VERSION of each distribution) having a different precompiled binary package. Despite the package coming from the distributor, a huge proportion of the "bug" reports and complaints will be directed at the MPlayer developers rather than the distributor (MPlayer has an entire page discussing the problems with the buggy GCC 2.96 that RedHat included some time back and the fact that people were STILL complaining that the problems with GCC 2.96 were MPlayer's fault, as an example of this).
Dealing with all of that noise is distracting and time consuming. Considering how fast and how well MPlayer has developed over the last year, I think the developer's strong focus on trying to avoid a deluge of this kind of distraction is paying off...
They DO have a fairly complete explanation in their online documentation of what they need to know to be able to do anything useful with a bug report, and I can say that from what I've seen, when people actually bother to follow those guidelines, the developers are actually quite responsive. I just think they've gotten a bit touchy after years of people not bothering to notice the widely-scattered "please read bugreports.html" notices and pop onto the list with posts like "I, like, tried to play the Italian release of the "JoeSchmoe's Dungeon of Pleasure" DVD and it didn't work. What's wrong?"...
Disclaimer - As someone who's done over a decade of tech-support now, I am probably somewhat biased in favor of people who are trying to get work done while being yelled at for things that aren't their fault (or even under their control)...
So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because they won't be optimized and will lack functionality, both of which they're likely to get a lot of undeserved blame for. On the other hand, there ARE (widely regarded as suboptimal and/or buggy) binary distributions available, and I don't recall ever seeing MPlayer developers actually try to STOP them (though they may "discourage" instead). If Debian wants to distribute versions of MPlayer that only include a limited "known GPL-safe subset" of features, they CAN...they just SHOULDN'T. I suspect that's where the conflict is.
If there are other issues, I don't know about them, but I imagine someone else will have posted them here by the time I get done typing all of this and post it.
IF they can get the standard stabilized and code to the point where more than one person can effectively contribute to development before it's too late, at least. Very promising project, in my opinion.
For some values of "vaporware" which include "you can download and play with it, and it works".
And, I must say, as someone who downloaded and played with Ogg Theora Alpha 1 within days of its release, it kicks butt.
The only problem Theora has right now is that development is being done "offline" semi-invisibly by one person and is getting rather behind (Theora Alpha 2 code updates are about a month-and-a-half late at this point - the LAST posted date was "shortly after Dec 27".). This MAY not be much of an issue, considering how well Alpha 1 performed, but I really wish development would start happening in CVS instead of on someone's personal hard-drive. The standard's not yet defined well enough for anyone else to contribute code yet, it seems...
Beta 1, when the format is supposed to be "frozen", is/was due to arrive March 1, last I heard. I'm looking very much forward to seeing it, but am beginning to despair of seeing "Theora 1.0" by June 2003 unless development becomes more visible and accessible soon...I fear Theora may miss its chances for public visibility if the license fee wars blow over before it appears...
All that said, I can say that even with Alpha 1's unoptimized code, I found the quality of 640x480 video at a low quality setting (about 600kbps at that size at 29.97fps) was very good for "live" video (I haven't looked at animation yet, which may or may not be different - lots of blocks of solid color and all that...)
Oh, and if anyone from Xiph is browsing here - how about some updates once in a while!
The logo is indeed frightning, why is the eye watching at Europe for instance instead of the USA?
I think the logo is VERY telling. The globe is turned so that the Middle East region faces the viewer...while the All Seeing Eye is focussed on the Eastern US and Western Europe, i.e. the alleged "Free World".
It's as though they were blatantly saying "while you, the viewer, have your attention on the Middle East, we'll have our attention on YOU..."
(No, this is NOT a lead-in to one of those stupid "in soviet russia" jokes, I'm serious...)
As I understand it, material produced by the federal government is NOT copyrightable. Was the logo produced by the federal government, and therefore available to be passed around by the public?...
I thought the intent of his question was pretty obvious. He's noticed that readily-available media offerings aren't generally high-quality, but that there is a fair amount of good stuff floating around that's relatively freely available, and though he isn't sure what's involved yet, he'd like to put his metaphorical money where his proverbial mouth is and try to contribute to this pool of good watchable material.
In other words, "While there seem to be fewer and fewer worthwhile shows in the mainstream media (such as the unnamed show that has been canceled, and I think most slashdotters can guess what the likely quality of its replacement show will be) there seems to be a growing pool of good free material online, and I'd like to contribute. Has anyone here been involved in this? What do I need to know to participate?"
Yes, it IS a very general question, which contains a lot of smaller questions within it, but this is Slashdot, not rec.arts.video.online.bandwidth-questions or some similarly specific tech support forum. I think what the poster was hoping for is some discussion of all of the aspects so that he'll be able to formulate more specific questions and take them to more focussed forums. Besides - general or not, someone interested in improving the quality of available entertainment ought to be encouraged regardless of how much they already know about the subject, not told to go away until they already know most of what they need to do...
(I didn't at all get any sense that he wanted to continue the cancelled show, just that the cancelling of what he considered to be a good show was an indicator of the decline of "mainstream media" quality, which I think most of us can sympathise with.)
So, yes, all of the above, and more. Seems a perfectly valid and potentially informative topic for discussion here. A few of us occasionally read the more general "ask slashdot" discussions for general education ourselves...
So...to contribute what little I can:
Firstly, decent writing and acting (even for animation - hey, somebody has to do the voices) is the key to watchable material. This is probably already obvious to the person asking the question (as well as everyone else here) but it should be said.
As to the "internet distribution" portion of the question, one might contact the The Internet Archive and the folks at Creative Commons about hosting and licensing, if one's willing to release the material freely.
At this point I'll also throw in a nod to one of my "pet causes" - Ogg Theora which, if they get a bit more visible on the development of it (likely to happen in March, when the format freeze is supposedly scheduled, though the second Alpha release is due Real Soon Now. At the moment, though, development appears to be a "Monty Only" project that shows up as infrequent "chunks" of updates in CVS when official releases come out. At least news is starting to show up on the mailing list...) will supply a very nice no-license-hassle format for distribution.
Transforming the recordings to a wide variety of internet-ready formats can be done with MPlayer/MEncoder in combination with a few other tools (ffmpeg, mjpegtools, the aforementioned Ogg Theora), not to mention using mjpegtools' encoders to convert video dumped from MPlayer to VCD or SVCD format for viewing on standalone players.
Someone else will have to comment on technical issues of camera and recording media types most suitable for generating internet-ready material. In MY opinion, if one handles the rest of the matter well, it's probably possible to produce perfectly adequate "good amateur quality" internet videos with ordinary off-the-shelf video cameras and a halfway-decent digitizing card. Last time I attempted video capture it was from a VHS tape, with a BT878-based card and "streamer" from Xawtv to store as a relatively high quality mjpeg/pcm quicktime file [to allow > 2GB files] then dumped to mjpegtools to generate SVCDs.
Any other topics in this broad discussion I've missed?...
I've been blaming PHP for the fact that I haven't gotten around to learning much of Perl or Java - I've been able to do everything I've needed to so far (Nothing TOO complex, obviously) with PHP. I've been "going to start playing with Java to learn it Real Soon Now" for well over a year at this point...
On the other hand - from the article: "PHP5's object model has syntax very similar to the Java programming language, so it will be easy for J2EE programmers to learn it"
Using PHP as a metaphorical stepping stone to learn Java then?...works for me...
if one were to legally purchase an eBook and use Elcomsoft's software to convert the eBook into a PDF to view in otherwise incompatible viewers, for personal use only (not to be shared), then I believe that would be legit
Almost certainly, except for one problem - if I'm reading the results right, there is nothing indicating that it is LEGAL now to sell the eBook Processor software, and in fact, if Elcomsoft offered it in the US again, they would obviously "willfully" be distributing the software.
Though the judge's instructions to the jury that mere ABILITY to commit copyright infringement is insufficient for a guilty verdict in this case is nice to see, it still doesn't go so far as to explicitly declare in any way (let alone one that sets a precedent) that substantial non-infringing use therefore makes a software product legal, and THAT'S the precedent we really need to get the DMCA under control...
The long-delayed (but progressing, evidently) icecast2 apparently has Ogg support in it.
Icecast2 is apparently in Alpha now - if you check out the "icecast" module from xiph.org, that's actually "icecast2". There may be some delays going on with the notion that they'll add support for "general" Ogg streaming (e.g. for streaming Theora/Vorbis video over Ogg) once some specs come out for it. That's purely speculation on my part, though...
As has been seen with many other projects, the code gets branched at that point and progress towards and stable and bug-free final release is hindered.
In some cases, that might be a good thing if development of the "main" branch is languishing...
I'm eager to see Ogg Theora ready, but I've been kind of disappointed at how "quiet" the developers are. (As of this moment, my CVS grab of Alpha 1 from September is STILL showing no updates since then - I just moments ago did a cvs up...). The developers rarely reply to "outsiders" on the mailing lists or even post updates to it. Offers of help are at the moment being ignored (again, at least on the public mailing list, which until very recently still had more traffic from "how do I use VP3 with Microsoft(tm) DirectShow(tm)" than from discussion of Ogg Theora development...
We already have "ogm tools", the "blame" for which I put squarely on the desire to have Ogg video (with vorbis audio) and lack of (or just slow, quiet, and/or "offline") development on it from the official developers (xiph.org).
Even this slashdot "article" (at the moment, at least) has this sort of "secretive" feel to it - none of the links on it seem to have anything indicating a release today (or, indeed, any information more recent than September 25th), there have been no announcements (or even much in the way of comments) on the mailing lists, and CVS doesn't appear to be any more recent than September 25th. Personally, I suspect somebody has just noticed Theora Alpha 1 - released two months ago - which was billed as the "first Milestone"?. I DO recall seeing a "press release" for this release wherein Emmett Plant (Xiph.org ceo) mentioned that they had "big plans" for a December 1st release of the next alpha, but requests for comments or hints on what those "big plans" may be on the Theora mailing lists get only silence.
I fairness, I imagine a lot of this comes from the development being so "early" and the core developer(s) not wanting a million people popping in and immediately "wiggling" the path of development around, but some comments on the mailing list from the developers about the current development plans would go a long way to making the development seem open...
Does ANYBODY have any more detailed information about what's going on out there at xiph.org/Ogg Theora? Will there be the mysterious unnannounced appearance of a "theora2" branch in CVS instead of an update of the existing code (much as theora appeared without updates to the 'vp32' branch back in September)?
Incidentally, I DID grab Ogg Theora Alpha 1 when it was released 2 months ago. I ran into a LITTLE difficulty getting it compiled, but in the end got it going...and it kicks butt. Even unoptimized, the performance was "pretty good" (certainly comparable with, say, mjpegtools' mpeg2 encoders) and the video quality looks good - I'd even say the quality is pretty good at the lowest "quality setting"...
So...please excuse my pessimistic post and mild rant - the code (on those occasions that it gets released) being open but the development work seeming closed and secretive has been eating at me, considering how interested I am in the project and am relatively eager to help. (I am not qualified to do much coding, but testing and documenting I can - indeed, I have (egad, I'm about to slashdot my own server, aren't I?...).
we are planning on upgrading to the windows version in Jan
Ow. If their license fees are as astronomical as I remember them to be, that'll hurt...(Note that while my commentary on this specific product and company are slightly off-topic to the question [RPro is/was tailored for retail, especially, as I recall, clothing stores], the general commentary on dealing with proprietary companies of this general variety should be on-topic...)
It seems to me that it would be pretty basic to put a frontend on an SQL query that would let anyone pull up the reports that we do now.
From what I remember of the system, that's probably still correct.
Back when I had a good knowledge of RTI and their software (some years ago), the "polling" from stores and reporting would have been a lot of work to recreate from scratch. With modern tools and components available, though, I honestly think that unless their license and support fees have come down drastically (along with whatever markup their dealers are charging [wonder how many of them are still in business?]) it'd be no more expensive to build a whole new system from scratch (they still have that "export" module to dump data, don't they?), and cheaper (and better matched to the company's needs, and quite possibly even easier) in the long run.
I suspect most proprietary retail software licensors probably don't have a canned product whose capabilities are worth the expense of switching, but a homebrew system might very well. Freeing yourself of dependence on the vendor's "goodwill" and support fees would probably be a good thing as well.
Again, though, my opinions of the company, their affiliates/dealers, and their product here are from rather old experiences, so obviously my opinions should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt - though on the other hand what I remember of them suggests to me that they are unlikely to have changed their practices much...and in case any of their lawyers are reading over your shoulders, I reiterate that these are my opinions...
Hey,are they STILL writing in Pascal and running in MS-DOS? (Serious question - they still were as of around '98 or so...though at the time I'd heard they had a windows-based "main menu" that ran the individual MS-DOS based programs that made up the rest of the system...) and did Borland ever fix the compiler to get rid of all the "off-by-a-penny" bugs that would occasionally show up? (The programmers claimed that the cause was the compiler rather than the code - and I actually believe them, having run into the same thing in a very early programming class that used Borland Pascal...)
It's been some time since I saw their system, but what I remember of it strikes me as really not too difficult to re-implement with modern open components. Backend with postrgesql or even mysql running on apache/PHP, frontend written as a Mozilla app. The only really "hard" (more "laborious" than "complex") parts are reporting (the specific piddly differences that each individual retailer demands for their reports) and "polling" the individual stores for their daily transactions (I ASSUME RPro supports doing this by internet by now - the cost of having the central office make long-distance phone calls to all the stores can get prohibitive...) - which these days ought to be as simple as a carefully formatted, encrypted email the stores could automatically collate and send to the main office on a daily basis...
'scuze all the questions - I once had some dealing the the company that makes RetailPro, so I'm curious what/how they're doing these days...
Slashdot Mirror
Plus the fact that the US can't seem to develop its own culture and has to keep stealing from others. Just look at that site! It's OBVIOUSLY an exact replica of what a JAPANESE site would look like! Have they no shame?
toy civilians that bleed just like real ones?That would not be permitted. As has been reported by the news media many times, that sort of thing leads directly to uncontrollable urges to commit violent acts against actual human beings, the same way that "Pokemon(tm)" causes animal cruelty...
I've been playing with the 2.5 series off and on mainly for the USB Storage support (devices that don't seem to work in 2.4 seem to work fine in 2.5 - at least the two or three that I've tried.) For the longest time, there was always ONE of the features that I really wanted that wouldn't compile or work, either the USB, or Video 4 Linux, or something else...
I came back and tried it again at 2.5.63. That was the first version what compiled and ran everything I used perfectly. .64 and .65 seem to have had a timing glitch that messed up my scheduled recordings (by mencoder via V4L), but that seems to be fixed again in 2.5.66, which has been working beautifully for me so far.
I honestly expect to see "2.6.0preXX" versions start appearing in the relatively near future...
One possibility is that, in addition, we don't want to risk letting enough information out that Saddam's people can figure out where the US is getting its information on the prohibited weapons, and kill those involved...
(On an unrelated note, I'm getting utterly sick of hearing "Weapons of Mass Destruction(tm)" (which is bandied about in the press so much that everyone's been abbreviating it WMD instead...). Not because of what they're referring to or anything, but because I think the term is nonsensical and designed entirely for "marketing" reasons, much like "assault weapon" (isn't a WEAPON, by DEFINITION, for assaulting things?). How is a canister of gas capable of killing off most of a building's inhabitants more a weapon "of Mass Destruction" than a really big conventional bomb which is capable of doing the same thing, as well as destroying the building itself (which, I gather, really isn't "Mass Destruction", according to the usage of the terminology by the media)?...
Yup!
If you look at Bush's speech you see that he never said we are at war with IraqI had noticed that, too. I keep wondering if Congress actually has the guts to participate in Government in a MEANINGFUL way and actually DECLARE war (or, conversely, actively refuse to do so). Somehow, my cynicism won't let me believe they'll do anything at all...
[ Reply to This ]I still haven't heard a plausible mechanism for "The US" (the government? US Oil companies? Truckloads of citizens carrying buckets?) to simply "take" Iraq's oil....
At the same time, the puffery about "Free the Iraqi People from Evil(tm)" excuse doesn't fit, either. I just can't see the federal government doing ANYTHING for simplistic reasons (be it "take their oil", "Free Iraq", "Saddam Hussein is a bad, bad man", etc.). I suspect the reason behind the hyperactive "push" to get to this point is complex and includes elements of most of the simplistic theories. Of course, trying to actually UNDERSTAND the reasons behind what's going on requires thinking, which most human beings around the world today seem to think is some sort of (metaphorically) back-breaking labor (and therefore detailed facts are seen as not being in demand, so no news media source, regardless of its individual biases, bothers to come up with any...).
Though I do have a whacky conspiracy theory to add to the list (not that I necessarily BELIEVE it, but):
If it turns out to be possible to "boil down" the impetus for this "military action" (NOTE: THERE IS NO WAR! It's only some sort of EUPHEMISM for war until the US Congress grows a spine and decides to actually DECLARE war. I predict this'll be another "undeclared war" when all is said and done...) to ONE purpose, could that purpose REALLY be:
How about this...what if the SINGLE intended goal of the conflict was....
We want the economic sanctions against Iraq lifted. (Like I said, "conspiracy theory"...).
Not that if this were the case it would be because of lofty humanitarian reasons, but rather "Enlightened Self-Interest". Now, if this was the reason, we couldn't simply start lobbying the UN to just lift all the sanctions - after all, Saddam Hussein is still in power, and his actions WERE the reasoning behind the sanctions in the first place (the "Saddam Hussein is a Bad, Bad Man" factor), so getting him and his "regime" removed is necessary before we can push to have the sanctions lifted. Once the conflict is over, Iraq will need its economy jump-started even more than the US's does, which means they'll need to be able to trade prodigiously and freely (the "Free the Iraqi People" factor), and exportation of oil is going to be a major source of income for the nation of Iraq - and the an increase in Iraqi output will drive down prices (the "'Take' Iraq's Oil" factor). Lower cost oil available to the US will be a small detriment to US oil companies' profit margins, but will drive down manufacturing and freight costs, conceivably causing a boost to the economy ("Enlightened Self Interest") both in the US and in countries that the US would like to see an increase in exportations to (giving them more money to spend on US stuff), and, of course, if all the intended positive effects actually take place, it means more credibility for the Bush fa
The source of the most unbiased news on ANYTHING that's available is called "thinking rationally". It seems that most of the world regards thought as some sort of CHORE (I recall the bland, low-content speech President Bush gave to announce the 48-hour deadline...and the calls that came into C-Span afterwards. NOBODY was thinking. I heard "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I believe it, that settles it! Praise George Bush, for He Can Do No Wrong!"....followed by "I don't need any information! George Bush says it, I don't believe it, that settles it! Curse George Bush, for He Can Do No Right!". No wonder we're denied any useful information - it's assumed everyone's decided on their opinion and won't change it no matter what, so why bother with facts?...). Anyway, back to my point - being willing to honestly think about and evaluate information will give you the most accurate "news".
I doubt it's possible to find a single "unbiased" news source. You CAN, though, find a whole mess of different sources that all have different biases. By comparing what they report and how they report it, it's just a matter of actual thinking to determine, approximately, what the "unbiased" truth really is.
For this, I recommend The Illustrious Google News and Columbia Newsblaster as starting points. Fark occasionally has some interesting pointers to more amusing angles on breaking news as well, though Fark is more for entertainment and amusement than "serious" news...
. Google News, in particular, seems to include a fairly wide variety of viewpoints, including "America is a bunch of evil imperialists who want to rule the world" type "Arab" news sites as well as, for example, the "Rah, rah, rah! Bomb Everybody!" Rupertican-party Fox channel (along with the various other "mainstream" channels that toe either a Disneycrat or Rupertican party line) and a not-unreasonable collection of international news outlets as well.Ah...and the results when the IP lawyers delay things too long...
"Oops. Sorry about that. Guess I don't need to get into the bathroom any more. Here's a quarter for the laundry."
Though afterwards, think what the "what are you in for" conversation the poor guy will have with his cellmate will sound like...
Fine with me, but then they shouldn't have used other people's GPL code in their software.
(Sigh)...
Again, as far as *I* can tell, since the last of the non-GPL-able code was replaced in MPlayer, there have been NO efforts to STOP distribution of binaries. There's a BIG difference between "don't WANT binaries being distributed" and "FORBID binaries to be distributed"...
At ONE TIME MPlayer had a "no binary distribution clause" BECAUSE OF the non-GPL-able code that it still contained at the time. Evidently, people are still hung up on the fact that this GPL-incompatible clause existed at one time, even though it no longer does. People are mis-interpreting the opposition to binary distributions of MPlayer for TECHNICAL reasons as being an outright PROHIBITION on binary distribution for LICENSING reasons as a result...
Nope, only the work on codecs that have not been successfully reverse-engineered yet. A great deal of the codecs out there are currently handled by libavcodec, from the looks of things.
One suspects a bit of thievery going on here.This one doesn't. :-) The .dll's are only there to enable playback of not-yet-reverse-engineered formats. Given that MPlayer's key goal is "play as many different media types as possible, especially those that otherwise can only be played on Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime", this seems like a perfectly valid approach until native decoders can be worked out.
And I wouldn't say that MPlayer is "thieving" from ffmpeg (whence libavcodec comes) either. Not only because libavcodec is FOR other projects to use for audio and video encoding and decoding, but because I've noticed that one or more of the MPlayer developers seem to be active participants in libavcodec development as well...
"Arrogance", no. "Intolerance", yes. I think if I were subject to the amount and kind of abuse heaped on them by people who don't agree with the focus that the MPlayer project has, I'd get pretty terse with people, too. Especially people emailling to say "you are just a fucking elitist"...
Think of it this way. Imagine you're a volunteer developer. Now imagine you're ALSO the tech support for the project.
NOW imagine some third party packages your project with their distribution.
Your phone starts ringing. Your email goes nuts. They're all saying "Your program is broken/deleted my files/raped my dog/etc.".
At first it's easy to be polite. "You say it doesn't work? Can you give me a description of what it's doing wrong? Um, I'll need more detail besides 'it doesn't run', does it give an error message of some sort? No? What does it do? Oh, it DOES give an error message. Can you tell me what it says? No, I mean read what it literally says...."
Not only does this sort of thing REALLY grate on any rational person's nerves very quickly, but it's extremely time-consuming to deal with and prevents you from actually DEVELOPING anything.
Having lurked on the MPlayer user mailing list for some time, I find myself actually somewhat sympathetic for the MPlayer developer's hard line on dealing with things like this.
Consider what MPlayer is SUPPOSED to be - the most capable and efficient media player available for *nix systems. This focus has never BEEN "make it pretty and simple", but rather "make it effective". This is an important point - everyone harassing the MPlayer team with demands (and they often are - "you have to make it easier to use", "this software cannot continue like this", etc.) are, in effect, trying to "hijack" the project into a different focus. MPlayer ISN'T XINE and isn't supposed to be. The Xine project IS more focussed on user-friendliness than MPlayer. That's by design.
The friction the MPlayer project seems to attract seems to come entirely from people who think they should change the focus of their project from what the DEVELOPERS want to what the complaintants want. This, to my mind, is silly. Xine is much simpler to use. If "simple to use" is what you want, Xine is the program you want. If you're willing to read some documentation and deal with slightly arcane and very flexible command-line arguments in exchange for broader capability and somewhat better performance, then MPlayer is what you want. Choice is good.
I think the "Xine vs. MPlayer" alleged war is about as real as the "Gnome vs. KDE" one, which is to say, not at all except for a few peripheral folks who THINK there is one. Xine and MPlayer seem to cross-pollinate ideas well enough. The Xine project figured out Sorenson 1 and wrote a native decoder. MPlayer said "great work, thanks" and incorporated the concept into MPlayer (Giving full credit to Xine, as I recall). They, in turn, managed to puzzle out use of windows DLL's to get Sorenson 3 decoding capability. From what I can see, I think this is now in the most recent Xine releases as well.
It's all good. Everyone relax. Nothing to see here....
One issue is that while the "core" of MPlayer really is GPL (and as far as I can tell, nobody at MPlayer has ever actually tried to stop anyone from distributing binaries), a couple of the features that MPlayer is best known for - ability to play "Windows Media" and now even QT with Sorensen 3 video codec - REQUIRES use of windows DLL's, which are obviously not GPL and can't be redistributed.
This leads the next issue, which is the MPlayer developers' legendary (both in the sense of "famous" AND, in my opinion, in the sense of "greatly exaggerated") intolerance for bad or irrelevant bug reports and questions that are dealt with in the rather extensive documentation they've gone to the effort of making available. Having lurked on the MPlayer-user mailing lists for quite some time now, I can say that there is SOME truth to this, but that callousness towards this sort of thing isn't totally unjustified.
Precompiled binaries for MPlayer would, quite frankly, grossly increase the incidence of harassment and bogus complaints that the MPlayer development team would have to wade through. Firstly, that "Hey, MPlayer's supposed to play quicktime now, but the Debian/RedHat/Mandrake/Slackware/Somethingorotheri x package doesn't do it! It must be a bug! Fix it!" would be reported repeatedly...due to the fact that the Windows DLL's that would have to be distributed with the packages...can't. Secondly, complaints that "MPlayer is the slowest piece of crap I ever tried to run! Bug! Fix it!"...caused by having a pile of different distributions almost certainly only compiling for 486 or Pentium optimizations (rather than having a complete separate binary package for each CPU)...whereas the MPlayer developers have put a great deal of effort, from my perspective, setting up the source code configure script as painlessly simple and automatic as possible. "./configure ; make ; make install" really is all it should ever take to generate binaries optimized for one's own system. Really.
And, of course, there's the problem with each distribution (and each VERSION of each distribution) having a different precompiled binary package. Despite the package coming from the distributor, a huge proportion of the "bug" reports and complaints will be directed at the MPlayer developers rather than the distributor (MPlayer has an entire page discussing the problems with the buggy GCC 2.96 that RedHat included some time back and the fact that people were STILL complaining that the problems with GCC 2.96 were MPlayer's fault, as an example of this).
Dealing with all of that noise is distracting and time consuming. Considering how fast and how well MPlayer has developed over the last year, I think the developer's strong focus on trying to avoid a deluge of this kind of distraction is paying off...
They DO have a fairly complete explanation in their online documentation of what they need to know to be able to do anything useful with a bug report, and I can say that from what I've seen, when people actually bother to follow those guidelines, the developers are actually quite responsive. I just think they've gotten a bit touchy after years of people not bothering to notice the widely-scattered "please read bugreports.html" notices and pop onto the list with posts like "I, like, tried to play the Italian release of the "JoeSchmoe's Dungeon of Pleasure" DVD and it didn't work. What's wrong?"...
Disclaimer - As someone who's done over a decade of tech-support now, I am probably somewhat biased in favor of people who are trying to get work done while being yelled at for things that aren't their fault (or even under their control)...
So, in summary, MPlayer's developers don't WANT binaries being distributed because they won't be optimized and will lack functionality, both of which they're likely to get a lot of undeserved blame for. On the other hand, there ARE (widely regarded as suboptimal and/or buggy) binary distributions available, and I don't recall ever seeing MPlayer developers actually try to STOP them (though they may "discourage" instead). If Debian wants to distribute versions of MPlayer that only include a limited "known GPL-safe subset" of features, they CAN...they just SHOULDN'T. I suspect that's where the conflict is.
If there are other issues, I don't know about them, but I imagine someone else will have posted them here by the time I get done typing all of this and post it.
Your Wish Is Granted.
IF they can get the standard stabilized and code to the point where more than one person can effectively contribute to development before it's too late, at least. Very promising project, in my opinion.
And, I must say, as someone who downloaded and played with Ogg Theora Alpha 1 within days of its release, it kicks butt.
The only problem Theora has right now is that development is being done "offline" semi-invisibly by one person and is getting rather behind (Theora Alpha 2 code updates are about a month-and-a-half late at this point - the LAST posted date was "shortly after Dec 27".). This MAY not be much of an issue, considering how well Alpha 1 performed, but I really wish development would start happening in CVS instead of on someone's personal hard-drive. The standard's not yet defined well enough for anyone else to contribute code yet, it seems...
Beta 1, when the format is supposed to be "frozen", is/was due to arrive March 1, last I heard. I'm looking very much forward to seeing it, but am beginning to despair of seeing "Theora 1.0" by June 2003 unless development becomes more visible and accessible soon...I fear Theora may miss its chances for public visibility if the license fee wars blow over before it appears...
All that said, I can say that even with Alpha 1's unoptimized code, I found the quality of 640x480 video at a low quality setting (about 600kbps at that size at 29.97fps) was very good for "live" video (I haven't looked at animation yet, which may or may not be different - lots of blocks of solid color and all that...)
Oh, and if anyone from Xiph is browsing here - how about some updates once in a while!
I think the logo is VERY telling. The globe is turned so that the Middle East region faces the viewer...while the All Seeing Eye is focussed on the Eastern US and Western Europe, i.e. the alleged "Free World".
It's as though they were blatantly saying "while you, the viewer, have your attention on the Middle East, we'll have our attention on YOU..."
(No, this is NOT a lead-in to one of those stupid "in soviet russia" jokes, I'm serious...)
As I understand it, material produced by the federal government is NOT copyrightable. Was the logo produced by the federal government, and therefore available to be passed around by the public?...
I thought the intent of his question was pretty obvious. He's noticed that readily-available media offerings aren't generally high-quality, but that there is a fair amount of good stuff floating around that's relatively freely available, and though he isn't sure what's involved yet, he'd like to put his metaphorical money where his proverbial mouth is and try to contribute to this pool of good watchable material.
In other words, "While there seem to be fewer and fewer worthwhile shows in the mainstream media (such as the unnamed show that has been canceled, and I think most slashdotters can guess what the likely quality of its replacement show will be) there seems to be a growing pool of good free material online, and I'd like to contribute. Has anyone here been involved in this? What do I need to know to participate?"
Yes, it IS a very general question, which contains a lot of smaller questions within it, but this is Slashdot, not rec.arts.video.online.bandwidth-questions or some similarly specific tech support forum. I think what the poster was hoping for is some discussion of all of the aspects so that he'll be able to formulate more specific questions and take them to more focussed forums. Besides - general or not, someone interested in improving the quality of available entertainment ought to be encouraged regardless of how much they already know about the subject, not told to go away until they already know most of what they need to do...
(I didn't at all get any sense that he wanted to continue the cancelled show, just that the cancelling of what he considered to be a good show was an indicator of the decline of "mainstream media" quality, which I think most of us can sympathise with.)
So, yes, all of the above, and more. Seems a perfectly valid and potentially informative topic for discussion here. A few of us occasionally read the more general "ask slashdot" discussions for general education ourselves...
So...to contribute what little I can:
Firstly, decent writing and acting (even for animation - hey, somebody has to do the voices) is the key to watchable material. This is probably already obvious to the person asking the question (as well as everyone else here) but it should be said.
As to the "internet distribution" portion of the question, one might contact the The Internet Archive and the folks at Creative Commons about hosting and licensing, if one's willing to release the material freely.
At this point I'll also throw in a nod to one of my "pet causes" - Ogg Theora which, if they get a bit more visible on the development of it (likely to happen in March, when the format freeze is supposedly scheduled, though the second Alpha release is due Real Soon Now. At the moment, though, development appears to be a "Monty Only" project that shows up as infrequent "chunks" of updates in CVS when official releases come out. At least news is starting to show up on the mailing list...) will supply a very nice no-license-hassle format for distribution.
Transforming the recordings to a wide variety of internet-ready formats can be done with MPlayer/MEncoder in combination with a few other tools (ffmpeg, mjpegtools, the aforementioned Ogg Theora), not to mention using mjpegtools' encoders to convert video dumped from MPlayer to VCD or SVCD format for viewing on standalone players.
Someone else will have to comment on technical issues of camera and recording media types most suitable for generating internet-ready material. In MY opinion, if one handles the rest of the matter well, it's probably possible to produce perfectly adequate "good amateur quality" internet videos with ordinary off-the-shelf video cameras and a halfway-decent digitizing card. Last time I attempted video capture it was from a VHS tape, with a BT878-based card and "streamer" from Xawtv to store as a relatively high quality mjpeg/pcm quicktime file [to allow > 2GB files] then dumped to mjpegtools to generate SVCDs.
Any other topics in this broad discussion I've missed?...
I've been blaming PHP for the fact that I haven't gotten around to learning much of Perl or Java - I've been able to do everything I've needed to so far (Nothing TOO complex, obviously) with PHP. I've been "going to start playing with Java to learn it Real Soon Now" for well over a year at this point...
On the other hand - from the article:
"PHP5's object model has syntax very similar to the Java programming language, so it will be easy for J2EE programmers to learn it"
Using PHP as a metaphorical stepping stone to learn Java then?...works for me...
Almost certainly, except for one problem - if I'm reading the results right, there is nothing indicating that it is LEGAL now to sell the eBook Processor software, and in fact, if Elcomsoft offered it in the US again, they would obviously "willfully" be distributing the software.
Though the judge's instructions to the jury that mere ABILITY to commit copyright infringement is insufficient for a guilty verdict in this case is nice to see, it still doesn't go so far as to explicitly declare in any way (let alone one that sets a precedent) that substantial non-infringing use therefore makes a software product legal, and THAT'S the precedent we really need to get the DMCA under control...
The long-delayed (but progressing, evidently) icecast2 apparently has Ogg support in it.
Icecast2 is apparently in Alpha now - if you check out the "icecast" module from xiph.org, that's actually "icecast2". There may be some delays going on with the notion that they'll add support for "general" Ogg streaming (e.g. for streaming Theora/Vorbis video over Ogg) once some specs come out for it. That's purely speculation on my part, though...
In some cases, that might be a good thing if development of the "main" branch is languishing...
I'm eager to see Ogg Theora ready, but I've been kind of disappointed at how "quiet" the developers are. (As of this moment, my CVS grab of Alpha 1 from September is STILL showing no updates since then - I just moments ago did a cvs up ...). The developers rarely reply to "outsiders" on the mailing lists or even post updates to it. Offers of help are at the moment being ignored (again, at least on the public mailing list, which until very recently still had more traffic from "how do I use VP3 with Microsoft(tm) DirectShow(tm)" than from discussion of Ogg Theora development...
We already have "ogm tools", the "blame" for which I put squarely on the desire to have Ogg video (with vorbis audio) and lack of (or just slow, quiet, and/or "offline") development on it from the official developers (xiph.org).
Even this slashdot "article" (at the moment, at least) has this sort of "secretive" feel to it - none of the links on it seem to have anything indicating a release today (or, indeed, any information more recent than September 25th), there have been no announcements (or even much in the way of comments) on the mailing lists, and CVS doesn't appear to be any more recent than September 25th. Personally, I suspect somebody has just noticed Theora Alpha 1 - released two months ago - which was billed as the "first Milestone"?. I DO recall seeing a "press release" for this release wherein Emmett Plant (Xiph.org ceo) mentioned that they had "big plans" for a December 1st release of the next alpha, but requests for comments or hints on what those "big plans" may be on the Theora mailing lists get only silence.
I fairness, I imagine a lot of this comes from the development being so "early" and the core developer(s) not wanting a million people popping in and immediately "wiggling" the path of development around, but some comments on the mailing list from the developers about the current development plans would go a long way to making the development seem open...
Does ANYBODY have any more detailed information about what's going on out there at xiph.org/Ogg Theora? Will there be the mysterious unnannounced appearance of a "theora2" branch in CVS instead of an update of the existing code (much as theora appeared without updates to the 'vp32' branch back in September)?
Incidentally, I DID grab Ogg Theora Alpha 1 when it was released 2 months ago. I ran into a LITTLE difficulty getting it compiled, but in the end got it going...and it kicks butt. Even unoptimized, the performance was "pretty good" (certainly comparable with, say, mjpegtools' mpeg2 encoders) and the video quality looks good - I'd even say the quality is pretty good at the lowest "quality setting"...
So...please excuse my pessimistic post and mild rant - the code (on those occasions that it gets released) being open but the development work seeming closed and secretive has been eating at me, considering how interested I am in the project and am relatively eager to help. (I am not qualified to do much coding, but testing and documenting I can - indeed, I have (egad, I'm about to slashdot my own server, aren't I?...).
Laughter...
Ow. If their license fees are as astronomical as I remember them to be, that'll hurt...(Note that while my commentary on this specific product and company are slightly off-topic to the question [RPro is/was tailored for retail, especially, as I recall, clothing stores], the general commentary on dealing with proprietary companies of this general variety should be on-topic...)
It seems to me that it would be pretty basic to put a frontend on an SQL query that would let anyone pull up the reports that we do now.From what I remember of the system, that's probably still correct.
Back when I had a good knowledge of RTI and their software (some years ago), the "polling" from stores and reporting would have been a lot of work to recreate from scratch. With modern tools and components available, though, I honestly think that unless their license and support fees have come down drastically (along with whatever markup their dealers are charging [wonder how many of them are still in business?]) it'd be no more expensive to build a whole new system from scratch (they still have that "export" module to dump data, don't they?), and cheaper (and better matched to the company's needs, and quite possibly even easier) in the long run.
I suspect most proprietary retail software licensors probably don't have a canned product whose capabilities are worth the expense of switching, but a homebrew system might very well. Freeing yourself of dependence on the vendor's "goodwill" and support fees would probably be a good thing as well.
Again, though, my opinions of the company, their affiliates/dealers, and their product here are from rather old experiences, so obviously my opinions should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt - though on the other hand what I remember of them suggests to me that they are unlikely to have changed their practices much...and in case any of their lawyers are reading over your shoulders, I reiterate that these are my opinions...
Hey,are they STILL writing in Pascal and running in MS-DOS? (Serious question - they still were as of around '98 or so...though at the time I'd heard they had a windows-based "main menu" that ran the individual MS-DOS based programs that made up the rest of the system...) and did Borland ever fix the compiler to get rid of all the "off-by-a-penny" bugs that would occasionally show up? (The programmers claimed that the cause was the compiler rather than the code - and I actually believe them, having run into the same thing in a very early programming class that used Borland Pascal...)
It's been some time since I saw their system, but what I remember of it strikes me as really not too difficult to re-implement with modern open components. Backend with postrgesql or even mysql running on apache/PHP, frontend written as a Mozilla app. The only really "hard" (more "laborious" than "complex") parts are reporting (the specific piddly differences that each individual retailer demands for their reports) and "polling" the individual stores for their daily transactions (I ASSUME RPro supports doing this by internet by now - the cost of having the central office make long-distance phone calls to all the stores can get prohibitive...) - which these days ought to be as simple as a carefully formatted, encrypted email the stores could automatically collate and send to the main office on a daily basis...
'scuze all the questions - I once had some dealing the the company that makes RetailPro, so I'm curious what/how they're doing these days...
True. After all, "Health" is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die... :-)
I tend to agree, actually. What can you say about a place where the THIRD LARGEST CITY IN THE STATE has NO donut shop and NO decent bookstore...
Not that I'm hung-up on that lack or anything ... :-)