This does nothing (it sounds like) for the town[...] of Moscow[...], a college town
Yeah, but it might do something for Pocatello, another college town. Pocatello needs SOMETHING done for it - can you believe that, despite the fact that it's a college town, there are NO donut shops there? NONE. No decent bookstores that I'm aware of, either.
And don't even get me started on the really-needs-a-serious-update curricula available at ISU...
I don't know what's so "Republican" (That is, "Rupertican") about the plan, though. "Let's give a bunch of isolated poor farmers low-cost internet!" isn't the sort of thing I generally associate with that party's platform. The only difference I see with what Disneycrats could have done with a similar plan of their own is they'd more likely (to my mind) have created a state government agency to run the network instead of simply encouraging existing businesses to do it with promises to rob them 3% less next year in taxes...
from the article, it appears that Office 11 will be "incompatible" with any MS operating system earlier then Windows 2000 SP3...
Hmmmm....Isn't that the service pack that introduced the "you agree to let us do pretty much whatever the heck we want to your computer" clause in the EULA?
Is MS planning to "leverage" the still-existing popularity of their Office software to push upgrades to "controlled" versions of their OS?
Seeing the blurb about "wireless communications" and all the posts about being microwaved by antennae, I thought they were talking about "Gaiacomm".
Remember the recent "Saddam Hussein's Email" stories? Remember the "unnamed" company who allegedly had sent him email and claimed to have a 'weapon of mass destruction' based on wireless technology? Found 'em...
Between the wild claims and the flash-based, content free splash page with what I assume are supposed to be whale noises, I'm pretty sure they're nuts .
The article, on the other hand, seems to be talking about a "real" company...how dull.:-)
Re:Whats the big problem with putting ogg everywhe
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Ogg Support For iTunes
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· Score: 4, Informative
Is there an easy way to burn ogg files in Linux?
If you're using KDE, that audiocd "ioslave" is ridiculously easy to use...
Plug in an audio cd, type "audiocd:/" in Konqueror, then drag the.ogg tracks that you want off of the "Ogg" directory to wherever you want them. KDE encodes the track when you do.
I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly easy methods outside of KDE somewhere as well...
Wile E. Coyote never talked. (Unless you count signs)
I can think of at least 3 cartoons where he spoke out loud, and I believe there were one or two others.
I know at least two of them were were relatively recent (i.e. post-Dr.Seuss cartoon) Chuck Jones cartoons, There was at least one that I believe was a Charles M. Jones (same person, but pre-Dr.Seuss style), and I think at least one Robert McKimson...
Uh, yes, I've watched a few cartoons in my time. What of it? When I was a child, like many people, I promised myself that when I got older, I'd watch cartoons whenever I wanted. If I can't even keep a solemn promise I made to MYSELF, how could anyone ELSE ever trust me?...
(I have GOT to get back to California to get a picture of an advertisement billboard they've got out there, before they wake up and take it down. In keeping with the "frog" theme, they have a giant fluorescent frog posing on a series of billboards with the text of the advertisement. One of them says Davis is "Green and Safe and Nuclear Free"....with a GIANT GLOWING FROG standing next to the words. Too funny...)
just HOW does one go about determining whether animals have feelings or not?
I'm curious what the most "scientific" available test for this is myself - the problem isn't really any different than determining whether OTHER HUMAN BEINGS have feelings or not...
Seriously. I mean, if people can think that John Travolta shows 'feelings' when he's acting, surely others could be faking it...how do I know that I'm not the only human being in the world gifted with "feelings" while everyone else is a mindless robot who's just pretending?
Outside of a "hard science" context, that's a pretty nonsensical question - we "just know" other people (in general) have feelings. "I just know" is nowhere near sufficient for real science, though.
Anyone with significant interaction with other (nonhuman) mammals "just knows" those animals have feelings, too, but it's rather difficult to prove in a "hard science" sort of way. I suspect the best that can be done is comparisons of brain scans and such between humans and non-humans to the extent that one can say in a more-or-less "hard science" way - "it is probable that other mammals have subjective feelings similar in quality to those of human beings, or at least, that is the most likely explanation for the similarities of response."
You can use PHP for web page scripting, and not "anywhere else".
I realize you're mainly being facetious, but my knee is jerking...
Although it's "tuned for" server-side web applications, PHP has quite a lot of useful capabilities built into it. Think of it as "PERL lite", with an easier-to-follow syntax.
I find myself using the command-line version of the interpreter frequently. It doesn't have nearly as "broad" of a range of capabilities as, say, PERL does, but it's hard to beat for the sorts of things that it's tuned for - internet communications, text-handling, simple on-the-fly graphics, and talking to database servers, for example, whether you use it within a web page or at the command line as a cron job...
Ah, there, got my knee to stop...
At any rate, I agree completely with the point of your post - just because some people abuse javascript for fluff and nonsense doesn't discount the real usefulness it has. As an earlier poster pointed out, a combination of client-side javascript and server-side PHP can generate some really kick-butt web-based applications...
What about divx's recorded using ogg vorbis sound..
Agreed, and even better, play.ogg's as well as mp3's, and handle Ogg Theora files
With the freeing of the "Tremor" fixed-point vorbis decoder, there are rumblings of makers of mp3 players looking into adding Ogg Vorbis support as well. With Ogg Theora Alpha 2 being due out December 1, if the pace of development gets less glacial as time goes on (there's not really that much to do as far as I can tell, other than solidify the specification and do some optimization - the interface in Ogg Theora Alpha 1 is pretty crude, but seems to work just fine for the encoding and playback.)
There may not be a lot of initial interest from big commercial outfits, but not having to pay a pile of license fees could make Ogg Theora popular with independent/amateur film-makers and distributers of public-domain works (yes, a few still exist that haven't been locked up again by Congress yet - Retrofilm has a whole mess of 'em.)
Anyway, to get more directly back on-topic - having DivX-capable players hitting the consumer market as well as impending Ogg Vorbis players makes me feel a little more optimistic about seeing Ogg Theora being added to the capabilities as well in a not-too-unreasonably-distant future time...
I seem to recall that MPlayer uses software for decryption and is unaffected by region coding. At least, there have been one or two mail threads on the mailing list from people commenting that they haven't had to change the region on their drives but mplayer plays disks from other regions anyway, and wondering how it accomplishes it...
[...]it's not really "more projects for the same developers", but "more projects with more developers".
Oh, well, then, never mind. Just that pesky knee of mine jerking again...
Thanks, also, in general for being online here - I see you've been posting information elsewhere in the discussion as well, which is always nice to see.
...or is Xiph spreading itself rather thinly these days?
Ogg Vorbis got out the door, and then it was Tarkin/Icecast2/Theora/Helix and now Speex.
They're committed to so many projects right now I wonder if any of them will be completed in the next 5 years...
Theora (my particular favorite) got announced at the beginning of July. The Theora mailing lists' traffic is still made up mostly of people wanting to ask about using VP3 with Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) Directshow(tm) and such, with only a few brief (but informative) bursts of discussion actually relevant to Ogg Theora. After nearly 3 months of near-silence
(not counting the non-Theora related VP3 questions) on the mailing lists and CVS repository, the first Alpha release of Ogg Theora popped up out of nowhere (not even MENTIONED on the mailing lists!)...and quickly returned to silence again. I've actually played with the Alpha code, and it makes me very hopeful for the final product - it's currently unoptimized, but even so its current speed seems about comparable with mjpegtools mpeg2 encoder, and the quality seems quite good at e.g. 300kbps/640x480/29.97fps. With all of the other projects being collected under the Xiph umbrella right now, though, I wonder how much developer time and attention will be available to keep it going...
(It MAY be that, with both codecs involved in Theora being essentially finished, they figure all they really need to do is finalize the specifications, and then spend a little time doing some optimization and they're done, and since there's almost 9 months to go until their projected 1.0 release date that it can wait...Judging by the quality of the first alpha [and thanks go to Monty at Xiph.org and Dan Miller of On2 for getting things that far along!], they may be right...provided there's time to come back and finish up between the other projects...)
I'm strongly in favor of every one of the projects they've taken on so far, I just wish it didn't seem like new projects were being added faster than existing ones are being worked on...
Okay, enough whining from me. I'll go back to quietly waiting impatiently again now...
The KDE League is essentially a "fan club". It was formed, independent of the actual KDE software projects, to promote KDE.
It would be like ME setting up "The Microsoft League" in my basement, and selling Memberships to, say, Compaq, Intuit Software, Ziff-Davis, and a handful of other corporations who like Microsoft. I would have no direct relationship with Microsoft, I'd just be claiming I want to "promote Microsoft".
In this hypothetical case, Compaq, Intuit, etc. may end up having wasted the money they gave me, but it still has no effect on Microsoft...
Dennis E. Powell posted a somewhat sensational story claiming that the KDE League had ceased to exist, asking "what happened to the money?" and so on. (Several people have accused DEP of having a sort of 'vendetta' against KDE in general over political disagreements he had with people on a KDE-mailinglist-hosted-but-not-KDE-related mailing list (i.e. the 'all topics other than KDE' mailing list) - DEP had posted an editorial which began with an implication that maybe the "K" in KDE was there because it resembled a goose-stepping soldier) Andreas Pour of the KDE League posted a response to DEP's story on the KDE League saying, in essence, "It's merely a clerical error, we're getting it sorted out, and we really can't say much more without approval from our members". DEP posted a story in response saying (my interpretation/summary) - "Delaware says you're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so you have to tell us WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY!". The most recent exchange here seems to be Pour saying "We're not a 501(c)(3), We called Delaware and they said A)They didn't say we were B)Nobody there should say were were and C)No, we're NOT a 501(c)(3)", and DEP's response that he "stands by his story".
As I posted above, I am puzzled why all the noise is coming out of this - it looks like what we have is a handful of rabid pro- and anti- KDE people all getting caught up in the sensationalism. The small handful of ANTI-KDE folks yelling because they want to discredit KDE, and the PRO-KDE folks yelling because they either feel they're being slandered or are worried that the KDE software projects are somehow being "ripped off" by the KDE League (presumably in the mistaken belief that the KDE League is analogous to the Gnome Foundation rather than merely a 'fan club'). The sheer volume of the screaming seems to be bringing attention from a whole mess or more normal people who are trying to figure out what all the fuss is about...
Disclaimer - the above is entirely my interpretation, except were indicated, and could very well be wrong. That IS how I see this issue, though...
The KDE League is merely a "Fan Club"!
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More on the KDE League
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· Score: 5, Interesting
What *I* don't get in all of this is - isn't the KDE League getting its money from private corporations (I see NO individuals in the members list, only corporations, several of which are rather large)...one of whom is KDE e.V. (Am I reading this correctly)? Who in turn says they've got no reason to believe anything funny's going on? It's THEIR money - if THEY don't think anything wrong is being done with it, why the heck does anyone who DIDN'T give them money care?
I've only seen one entity that actually ever had anything to do with the KDE League complain, and that's Shawn Gordon, whose company apparently USED TO BE a member (but are not any more, as far as I know. Unpleasant 'break-up', perhaps?).
I keep seeing comparisons with the Gnome Foundation, which is a completely different type of group. The Gnome Foundation, as I understand it, is directly involved in steering Gnome development - it's actually an official part of the Gnome project(s). The KDE League is purely promotional - to put it bluntly, the KDE League is a "Fan Club". They have no more involvement in 'steering' or otherwise influencing development than any other fan of KDE does.
It's also been pointed out elsewhere that $120,000 is a lot of money when it's sitting in a suitcase on your doorstep in the form of small unmarked bills, but it's a pittance when considered as a yearly budget for any kind of corporation. I think the highest-paid individual there is said to have been paid $36k/year salary to run it. Take out that, rent on facilities, purchase of equipment, and so on, and there's not much left...
Now, as to whether or not the KDE League is effective at DOING anything, I couldn't say. I do certainly get the impression that they've not been active at all (basically, as far as I know, they've spent the little funding they had by just merely existing, and not really accomplishing anything), but given that the unrelated-except-by-name-and-theme KDE Software projects (that is, the actual developers, etc., who have no relationship with the KDE League as far as I know) seem to be doing just fine without the KDE League's additional promotion, I'm not too concerned about it. For all I care, the KDE League could have spent all the money on cheap prostitutes, malt liquor, and pornographic videos featuring necropedobestiality, and it will have still done no more harm than wasting a few thousand dollars each from a handful of private corporations (there are 10 listed on the members page - if they all donated the same amount, that's a "whopping" $12,000 each. That's barely pocket-change to corporations like IBM and Fujitsu-Siemens...), who don't seem to even care what happened to THEIR money...
'Scuze the long post, I'm just utterly baffled at all the screaming going on over this thing. I could understand a chorus of "Ha, ha, member corporations, you wasted your money", but shrieking hatred of the sort reserved for Enron and Worldcom and so on just makes no sense to me at all...
As has been pointed out in bits and pieces in other posts, the KDE League is essentially an independent entity - COMPLETELY - from the actual KDE software projects. It is not analogous to the Gnome Foundation, which, as I understand it, is actually a "steering committee" that determines how development on the Gnome software projects will be done (My interpretation - replies with corrections are welcome). In short, the KDE League, while having been 'resurrected' as a concept by the formation of the Gnome Foundation (The idea for the KDE League had been floating around for some time previously, but nobody at the time had been interested), is more analogous to a "Fan Club" than a "Steering Committee".
So, in short, the reason the KDE League has been sitting around unnoticed for so long is that it is largely irrelevant to actual KDE development. It DOES leave me wondering what they've been doing while they're supposed to be "promoting KDE", but irrelevant nonetheless...
On the other hand...(Note:The following is humor and not meant to be taken seriously)
I noticed that just about the same time as these stories started coming out, the anonymous CVS server for KDE's projects that Sourceforge is supposed to be hosting disappeared from the 'net. Could this be a secret conspiracy by Miguel de Icaza, Dennis E. Powell, Elvis, Sourceforge.net, and radical militant Shinto priests to cripple KDE development???
(More seriously, though - I reported the downed CVS server to sourceforge, and got a form-reply indicating that it was acknowledged, but the system is still innaccessible. Anyone know what's actually going on with it? I'm going into bleeding-edge-KDE-code withdrawals here...)
The 2001 archive has the little 'requires quicktime 5' logo on it...Actually, I'll slightly amend my original statement - the only archive of a complete ignobel ceremonty that seems to be available at the moment appears to be quicktime 5 only. The 2000 archive is on another site, and is just plain broken, but appears to have been Real as well. (The links that work seem to be a message saying "This program has expired"...) I haven't yet found any complete videos of years prior to 2000 online.
Re:"Clever Hans" the mathematics horse
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Ig Nobels Awarded
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· Score: 5, Informative
"Clever Hans" (the horse in question) is a classic case...
The trainer really THOUGHT his horse could do mathematics. It took some study to determine what was really going on. What was happening is that after presenting the question, the trainer would unconsciously lean forward in expectation, and as Hans reached the correct number of hoof-taps, would relax slightly. It turned out that Hans was cueing off of the slight changes in posture for when to start and stop tapping. They discovered that Hans couldn't get the correct number if he couldn't see the trainer, and that they could get him to tap out any number they wanted (regardless of the math problem presented) by these slight changes of posture done intentionally.
Other animals (that is, animals other than human beings) may not be as good as we are at abstraction, but they can be pretty darn perceptive...
I think you're being overly sensitive...
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Ig Nobels Awarded
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you watch or read the awards, or the associated publications, you'll note that the people running and participating in the awards are themselves science-types with senses of humor. They're laughing at scientific research in general, and in a good-natured manner, and not just sneering at a few scientists with unusual specialties...
The awards actually seem to go to a few different types of endeavors:
Valid but REALLY STRANGE or not-very-useful-outside-of-a-very-narrow-field scientific research, e.g. this years Mathematics prize ("Surface area of an elephant") and Biology prize ("Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain.") or last year's Medicine prize (a study of nose-picking behavior in India - I should point out that the recipient showed up in person for this prize and with appropriate good-humor. "Some people stick their noses into other people's business. I stick my business into other people's noses."...), or the award a few years ago for the invention of blue Jell-O...
Claims or "facts" presented as "scientific" that are blatantly not. (e.g. Last year's Astrophysics award to the evangelists for 'proving' that Christian Hell may be what Black Holes are...), the "Literature" award in 2000 for the 'Breatharian' who says nobody needs to eat, and the 1998 Chemistry prize to Jacques Benveniste for 'proving' that not only does water remember everything it ever touched, but that you can transmit this 'memory' over the internet...
The absurd and ironic that can be somehow "cast" as a scientific endeavor even though it really isn't (e.g. this year's Economics prize to Enron, WorldCom, etc. for " adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.", or last year's Peace prize for the founding of the "Stalinworld" amusement park...
From my perspective, ALL of the awards seem to have gone to endeavors that are fitting subjects for humor, and I see no claims of valid scientific reasoning being INVALID or 'stupid', merely strange or funny. Further, as far as I can see, NONE of the RECIPIENTS are being 'snickered at' at all, only the "research", activity, or claims that earn the award. That is, it's not the PEOPLE being made fun of (ad hominem attacks are not good science), it is what they are doing or claiming.
In short, in my personal opinion, the only people who really have any reason to actually be offended are excessively thin-skinned scientists (e.g. the late Carl Sagan, who feared that the awards would make people "laugh at scientists") and crackpots, who kind of NEED to be made fun of so that they can claim that their Revolutionary Secrets That Shake the Very Foundations of Scientific Knowledge(tm) are being unfairly repressed by The Establishment...
What do they mean "cannot not or should not be reproduced"?!!!!
No, no, I agree with them - I think there is something just plain wrong about staring and playing with mathematics ("Math-turbating"?) while a perfectly good beer is sitting there going flat, instead of DRINKING the poor, lonely brew...
Ironic that awards for technologies with dubious benefits are being streamed in RealVideo...
And that the downloadable archives for those of us (ARGH!) who forgot and missed the live telecast are only being offered for "QuickTime 5"...
(Insert obligatory bitter complaints about the one popular video codec that can't be played outside of Mac and Windows here...)
I wonder if they could be talked into either streaming or archiving in Ogg Theora format starting next year (judging by the good, if incomplete, quality of the existing 1st alpha release, it ought to be ready in plenty of time...)
P.S. Anybody here watch the awards? Did they get a better camera operator and sound technician this year? (Last year, the camera operator stubbornly REFUSED to point the camera at interesting things happening, no matter how relevant. I say REFUSED because I seem to recall that at one point one of the speakers was actually GIVING a slideshow [not to be confused with the semi-random slideshow they are said to have running throughout], and I would have sworn I saw the camera START to swing towards the slides being presented...then stubbornly swing back and stare at the presenter pointing at the slides...also half of the wedding opera was essentially inaudible due to microphone problems...)
There is supposed to be support for it - you are supposed to be able to run the./autogen.sh script that comes with it to generate the necessary makefiles.
Unfortunately, I'm getting a bunch of errors from automake when I do this, so I can't test it...
It's come up in one or two places that I've lurked that a lot of the niceties of the video codec quality actually come from pre- and post-processing, so improvements may very well come for it. As you say, though, they may not come from the Ogg Theora project directly.
I WILL, quite frankly, be happy to see an encoder and decoder that I can use for vp3 on my Linux box, though. The CVS repository seems to have been dead for months...
I get the IMPRESSION (purely from various readings, not from experience) that VP3 could, in the end, be as good or marginally better for a lot of 'live' footage than mpeg4, while mpeg 4, tending to be 'sharper', may give better quality for 'sharp' images like digital "movies" (i.e. 'cutscenes' from games) and some types of animation.
Just a purely subjective, speculative observation though. I'm most interested in the 'free as in free-from-patent-lawyers-suing-you-for-distributin g-stuff-in-this-format' aspect of it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it might do something for Pocatello, another college town. Pocatello needs SOMETHING done for it - can you believe that, despite the fact that it's a college town, there are NO donut shops there? NONE. No decent bookstores that I'm aware of, either.
And don't even get me started on the really-needs-a-serious-update curricula available at ISU...
I don't know what's so "Republican" (That is, "Rupertican") about the plan, though. "Let's give a bunch of isolated poor farmers low-cost internet!" isn't the sort of thing I generally associate with that party's platform. The only difference I see with what Disneycrats could have done with a similar plan of their own is they'd more likely (to my mind) have created a state government agency to run the network instead of simply encouraging existing businesses to do it with promises to rob them 3% less next year in taxes...
(No, I don't like EITHER party....)
Never mind them, what about all the people in the booming metropolis of Squirrel? (ALSO not made up...)
I'm on cableone myself, soon to upgrade to 'business class' so I can host my own server here instead of colocated (expensive! Ouch!)...
Hmmmm....Isn't that the service pack that introduced the "you agree to let us do pretty much whatever the heck we want to your computer" clause in the EULA?
Is MS planning to "leverage" the still-existing popularity of their Office software to push upgrades to "controlled" versions of their OS?
Seeing the blurb about "wireless communications" and all the posts about being microwaved by antennae, I thought they were talking about "Gaiacomm".
Remember the recent "Saddam Hussein's Email" stories? Remember the "unnamed" company who allegedly had sent him email and claimed to have a 'weapon of mass destruction' based on wireless technology? Found 'em...
Between the wild claims and the flash-based, content free splash page with what I assume are supposed to be whale noises, I'm pretty sure they're nuts .
The article, on the other hand, seems to be talking about a "real" company...how dull. :-)
If you're using KDE, that audiocd "ioslave" is ridiculously easy to use...
Plug in an audio cd, type "audiocd:/" in Konqueror, then drag the .ogg tracks that you want off of the "Ogg" directory to wherever you want them. KDE encodes the track when you do.
I'd be surprised if there weren't similarly easy methods outside of KDE somewhere as well...
I can think of at least 3 cartoons where he spoke out loud, and I believe there were one or two others.
I know at least two of them were were relatively recent (i.e. post-Dr.Seuss cartoon) Chuck Jones cartoons, There was at least one that I believe was a Charles M. Jones (same person, but pre-Dr.Seuss style), and I think at least one Robert McKimson...
Uh, yes, I've watched a few cartoons in my time. What of it? When I was a child, like many people, I promised myself that when I got older, I'd watch cartoons whenever I wanted. If I can't even keep a solemn promise I made to MYSELF, how could anyone ELSE ever trust me?...
They should have used an effective and inexpensive method, like building a tunnel for the frogs...
(I have GOT to get back to California to get a picture of an advertisement billboard they've got out there, before they wake up and take it down. In keeping with the "frog" theme, they have a giant fluorescent frog posing on a series of billboards with the text of the advertisement. One of them says Davis is "Green and Safe and Nuclear Free"....with a GIANT GLOWING FROG standing next to the words. Too funny...)
I'm curious what the most "scientific" available test for this is myself - the problem isn't really any different than determining whether OTHER HUMAN BEINGS have feelings or not...
Seriously. I mean, if people can think that John Travolta shows 'feelings' when he's acting, surely others could be faking it...how do I know that I'm not the only human being in the world gifted with "feelings" while everyone else is a mindless robot who's just pretending?
Outside of a "hard science" context, that's a pretty nonsensical question - we "just know" other people (in general) have feelings. "I just know" is nowhere near sufficient for real science, though.
Anyone with significant interaction with other (nonhuman) mammals "just knows" those animals have feelings, too, but it's rather difficult to prove in a "hard science" sort of way. I suspect the best that can be done is comparisons of brain scans and such between humans and non-humans to the extent that one can say in a more-or-less "hard science" way - "it is probable that other mammals have subjective feelings similar in quality to those of human beings, or at least, that is the most likely explanation for the similarities of response."
I realize you're mainly being facetious, but my knee is jerking...
Although it's "tuned for" server-side web applications, PHP has quite a lot of useful capabilities built into it. Think of it as "PERL lite", with an easier-to-follow syntax.
I find myself using the command-line version of the interpreter frequently. It doesn't have nearly as "broad" of a range of capabilities as, say, PERL does, but it's hard to beat for the sorts of things that it's tuned for - internet communications, text-handling, simple on-the-fly graphics, and talking to database servers, for example, whether you use it within a web page or at the command line as a cron job...
Ah, there, got my knee to stop...
At any rate, I agree completely with the point of your post - just because some people abuse javascript for fluff and nonsense doesn't discount the real usefulness it has. As an earlier poster pointed out, a combination of client-side javascript and server-side PHP can generate some really kick-butt web-based applications...
Agreed, and even better, play .ogg's as well as mp3's, and handle Ogg Theora files
With the freeing of the "Tremor" fixed-point vorbis decoder, there are rumblings of makers of mp3 players looking into adding Ogg Vorbis support as well. With Ogg Theora Alpha 2 being due out December 1, if the pace of development gets less glacial as time goes on (there's not really that much to do as far as I can tell, other than solidify the specification and do some optimization - the interface in Ogg Theora Alpha 1 is pretty crude, but seems to work just fine for the encoding and playback.)
There may not be a lot of initial interest from big commercial outfits, but not having to pay a pile of license fees could make Ogg Theora popular with independent/amateur film-makers and distributers of public-domain works (yes, a few still exist that haven't been locked up again by Congress yet - Retrofilm has a whole mess of 'em.)
Anyway, to get more directly back on-topic - having DivX-capable players hitting the consumer market as well as impending Ogg Vorbis players makes me feel a little more optimistic about seeing Ogg Theora being added to the capabilities as well in a not-too-unreasonably-distant future time...
I seem to recall that MPlayer uses software for decryption and is unaffected by region coding. At least, there have been one or two mail threads on the mailing list from people commenting that they haven't had to change the region on their drives but mplayer plays disks from other regions anyway, and wondering how it accomplishes it...
My all-time favorite is the old "ren" error - "Duplicate file name or file not found".
If it's not immediately funny - parse it:
"Duplicate file name" = "The file exists"
"File not Found" = "The file doesn't exist"
So...basically the error message says "the file exists or it doesn't"....
Oh, well, then, never mind. Just that pesky knee of mine jerking again...
Thanks, also, in general for being online here - I see you've been posting information elsewhere in the discussion as well, which is always nice to see.
...or is Xiph spreading itself rather thinly these days?
Ogg Vorbis got out the door, and then it was Tarkin/Icecast2/Theora/Helix and now Speex.
They're committed to so many projects right now I wonder if any of them will be completed in the next 5 years...
Theora (my particular favorite) got announced at the beginning of July. The Theora mailing lists' traffic is still made up mostly of people wanting to ask about using VP3 with Microsoft(tm) Windows(tm) Directshow(tm) and such, with only a few brief (but informative) bursts of discussion actually relevant to Ogg Theora. After nearly 3 months of near-silence (not counting the non-Theora related VP3 questions) on the mailing lists and CVS repository, the first Alpha release of Ogg Theora popped up out of nowhere (not even MENTIONED on the mailing lists!)...and quickly returned to silence again. I've actually played with the Alpha code, and it makes me very hopeful for the final product - it's currently unoptimized, but even so its current speed seems about comparable with mjpegtools mpeg2 encoder, and the quality seems quite good at e.g. 300kbps/640x480/29.97fps. With all of the other projects being collected under the Xiph umbrella right now, though, I wonder how much developer time and attention will be available to keep it going...
(It MAY be that, with both codecs involved in Theora being essentially finished, they figure all they really need to do is finalize the specifications, and then spend a little time doing some optimization and they're done, and since there's almost 9 months to go until their projected 1.0 release date that it can wait...Judging by the quality of the first alpha [and thanks go to Monty at Xiph.org and Dan Miller of On2 for getting things that far along!], they may be right...provided there's time to come back and finish up between the other projects...)
I'm strongly in favor of every one of the projects they've taken on so far, I just wish it didn't seem like new projects were being added faster than existing ones are being worked on...
Okay, enough whining from me. I'll go back to quietly waiting impatiently again now...
The KDE League is essentially a "fan club". It was formed, independent of the actual KDE software projects, to promote KDE.
It would be like ME setting up "The Microsoft League" in my basement, and selling Memberships to, say, Compaq, Intuit Software, Ziff-Davis, and a handful of other corporations who like Microsoft. I would have no direct relationship with Microsoft, I'd just be claiming I want to "promote Microsoft".
In this hypothetical case, Compaq, Intuit, etc. may end up having wasted the money they gave me, but it still has no effect on Microsoft...
Dennis E. Powell posted a somewhat sensational story claiming that the KDE League had ceased to exist, asking "what happened to the money?" and so on. (Several people have accused DEP of having a sort of 'vendetta' against KDE in general over political disagreements he had with people on a KDE-mailinglist-hosted-but-not-KDE-related mailing list (i.e. the 'all topics other than KDE' mailing list) - DEP had posted an editorial which began with an implication that maybe the "K" in KDE was there because it resembled a goose-stepping soldier) Andreas Pour of the KDE League posted a response to DEP's story on the KDE League saying, in essence, "It's merely a clerical error, we're getting it sorted out, and we really can't say much more without approval from our members". DEP posted a story in response saying (my interpretation/summary) - "Delaware says you're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so you have to tell us WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY!". The most recent exchange here seems to be Pour saying "We're not a 501(c)(3), We called Delaware and they said A)They didn't say we were B)Nobody there should say were were and C)No, we're NOT a 501(c)(3)", and DEP's response that he "stands by his story".
As I posted above, I am puzzled why all the noise is coming out of this - it looks like what we have is a handful of rabid pro- and anti- KDE people all getting caught up in the sensationalism. The small handful of ANTI-KDE folks yelling because they want to discredit KDE, and the PRO-KDE folks yelling because they either feel they're being slandered or are worried that the KDE software projects are somehow being "ripped off" by the KDE League (presumably in the mistaken belief that the KDE League is analogous to the Gnome Foundation rather than merely a 'fan club'). The sheer volume of the screaming seems to be bringing attention from a whole mess or more normal people who are trying to figure out what all the fuss is about...
Disclaimer - the above is entirely my interpretation, except were indicated, and could very well be wrong. That IS how I see this issue, though...
What *I* don't get in all of this is - isn't the KDE League getting its money from private corporations (I see NO individuals in the members list, only corporations, several of which are rather large)...one of whom is KDE e.V. (Am I reading this correctly)? Who in turn says they've got no reason to believe anything funny's going on? It's THEIR money - if THEY don't think anything wrong is being done with it, why the heck does anyone who DIDN'T give them money care?
I've only seen one entity that actually ever had anything to do with the KDE League complain, and that's Shawn Gordon, whose company apparently USED TO BE a member (but are not any more, as far as I know. Unpleasant 'break-up', perhaps?).
I keep seeing comparisons with the Gnome Foundation, which is a completely different type of group. The Gnome Foundation, as I understand it, is directly involved in steering Gnome development - it's actually an official part of the Gnome project(s). The KDE League is purely promotional - to put it bluntly, the KDE League is a "Fan Club". They have no more involvement in 'steering' or otherwise influencing development than any other fan of KDE does.
It's also been pointed out elsewhere that $120,000 is a lot of money when it's sitting in a suitcase on your doorstep in the form of small unmarked bills, but it's a pittance when considered as a yearly budget for any kind of corporation. I think the highest-paid individual there is said to have been paid $36k/year salary to run it. Take out that, rent on facilities, purchase of equipment, and so on, and there's not much left...
Now, as to whether or not the KDE League is effective at DOING anything, I couldn't say. I do certainly get the impression that they've not been active at all (basically, as far as I know, they've spent the little funding they had by just merely existing, and not really accomplishing anything), but given that the unrelated-except-by-name-and-theme KDE Software projects (that is, the actual developers, etc., who have no relationship with the KDE League as far as I know) seem to be doing just fine without the KDE League's additional promotion, I'm not too concerned about it. For all I care, the KDE League could have spent all the money on cheap prostitutes, malt liquor, and pornographic videos featuring necropedobestiality, and it will have still done no more harm than wasting a few thousand dollars each from a handful of private corporations (there are 10 listed on the members page - if they all donated the same amount, that's a "whopping" $12,000 each. That's barely pocket-change to corporations like IBM and Fujitsu-Siemens...), who don't seem to even care what happened to THEIR money...
'Scuze the long post, I'm just utterly baffled at all the screaming going on over this thing. I could understand a chorus of "Ha, ha, member corporations, you wasted your money", but shrieking hatred of the sort reserved for Enron and Worldcom and so on just makes no sense to me at all...
As has been pointed out in bits and pieces in other posts, the KDE League is essentially an independent entity - COMPLETELY - from the actual KDE software projects. It is not analogous to the Gnome Foundation, which, as I understand it, is actually a "steering committee" that determines how development on the Gnome software projects will be done (My interpretation - replies with corrections are welcome). In short, the KDE League, while having been 'resurrected' as a concept by the formation of the Gnome Foundation (The idea for the KDE League had been floating around for some time previously, but nobody at the time had been interested), is more analogous to a "Fan Club" than a "Steering Committee".
So, in short, the reason the KDE League has been sitting around unnoticed for so long is that it is largely irrelevant to actual KDE development. It DOES leave me wondering what they've been doing while they're supposed to be "promoting KDE", but irrelevant nonetheless...
On the other hand...(Note:The following is humor and not meant to be taken seriously)
I noticed that just about the same time as these stories started coming out, the anonymous CVS server for KDE's projects that Sourceforge is supposed to be hosting disappeared from the 'net. Could this be a secret conspiracy by Miguel de Icaza, Dennis E. Powell, Elvis, Sourceforge.net, and radical militant Shinto priests to cripple KDE development???
(More seriously, though - I reported the downed CVS server to sourceforge, and got a form-reply indicating that it was acknowledged, but the system is still innaccessible. Anyone know what's actually going on with it? I'm going into bleeding-edge-KDE-code withdrawals here...)
All I have to say is: I don't want to hear any more complaints about what a crappy name "Ogg Vorbis" is ever again! :-)
The 2001 archive has the little 'requires quicktime 5' logo on it...Actually, I'll slightly amend my original statement - the only archive of a complete ignobel ceremonty that seems to be available at the moment appears to be quicktime 5 only. The 2000 archive is on another site, and is just plain broken, but appears to have been Real as well. (The links that work seem to be a message saying "This program has expired"...) I haven't yet found any complete videos of years prior to 2000 online.
They DO have an .avi of "Highlights from some older ceremonies" but not complete videos, except for some available for purchase (on videotape).
"Clever Hans" (the horse in question) is a classic case...
The trainer really THOUGHT his horse could do mathematics. It took some study to determine what was really going on. What was happening is that after presenting the question, the trainer would unconsciously lean forward in expectation, and as Hans reached the correct number of hoof-taps, would relax slightly. It turned out that Hans was cueing off of the slight changes in posture for when to start and stop tapping. They discovered that Hans couldn't get the correct number if he couldn't see the trainer, and that they could get him to tap out any number they wanted (regardless of the math problem presented) by these slight changes of posture done intentionally.
Other animals (that is, animals other than human beings) may not be as good as we are at abstraction, but they can be pretty darn perceptive...
If you watch or read the awards, or the associated publications, you'll note that the people running and participating in the awards are themselves science-types with senses of humor. They're laughing at scientific research in general, and in a good-natured manner, and not just sneering at a few scientists with unusual specialties...
The awards actually seem to go to a few different types of endeavors:
From my perspective, ALL of the awards seem to have gone to endeavors that are fitting subjects for humor, and I see no claims of valid scientific reasoning being INVALID or 'stupid', merely strange or funny. Further, as far as I can see, NONE of the RECIPIENTS are being 'snickered at' at all, only the "research", activity, or claims that earn the award. That is, it's not the PEOPLE being made fun of (ad hominem attacks are not good science), it is what they are doing or claiming.
In short, in my personal opinion, the only people who really have any reason to actually be offended are excessively thin-skinned scientists (e.g. the late Carl Sagan, who feared that the awards would make people "laugh at scientists") and crackpots, who kind of NEED to be made fun of so that they can claim that their Revolutionary Secrets That Shake the Very Foundations of Scientific Knowledge(tm) are being unfairly repressed by The Establishment...
No, no, I agree with them - I think there is something just plain wrong about staring and playing with mathematics ("Math-turbating"?) while a perfectly good beer is sitting there going flat, instead of DRINKING the poor, lonely brew...
And that the downloadable archives for those of us (ARGH!) who forgot and missed the live telecast are only being offered for "QuickTime 5"...
(Insert obligatory bitter complaints about the one popular video codec that can't be played outside of Mac and Windows here...)
I wonder if they could be talked into either streaming or archiving in Ogg Theora format starting next year (judging by the good, if incomplete, quality of the existing 1st alpha release, it ought to be ready in plenty of time...)
P.S. Anybody here watch the awards? Did they get a better camera operator and sound technician this year? (Last year, the camera operator stubbornly REFUSED to point the camera at interesting things happening, no matter how relevant. I say REFUSED because I seem to recall that at one point one of the speakers was actually GIVING a slideshow [not to be confused with the semi-random slideshow they are said to have running throughout], and I would have sworn I saw the camera START to swing towards the slides being presented...then stubbornly swing back and stare at the presenter pointing at the slides...also half of the wedding opera was essentially inaudible due to microphone problems...)
Unfortunately, I'm getting a bunch of errors from automake when I do this, so I can't test it...
It's come up in one or two places that I've lurked that a lot of the niceties of the video codec quality actually come from pre- and post-processing, so improvements may very well come for it. As you say, though, they may not come from the Ogg Theora project directly.
I WILL, quite frankly, be happy to see an encoder and decoder that I can use for vp3 on my Linux box, though. The CVS repository seems to have been dead for months...
I get the IMPRESSION (purely from various readings, not from experience) that VP3 could, in the end, be as good or marginally better for a lot of 'live' footage than mpeg4, while mpeg 4, tending to be 'sharper', may give better quality for 'sharp' images like digital "movies" (i.e. 'cutscenes' from games) and some types of animation.
Just a purely subjective, speculative observation though. I'm most interested in the 'free as in free-from-patent-lawyers-suing-you-for-distributin g-stuff-in-this-format' aspect of it :-)