"Can someone tell me if Ogg actually does go through some floating point calcs?"
It sure does. This is a BIG problem with putting Ogg Vorbis in devices - while all personal computers these days have floating point, quite a lot of embedded processors don't.
So if you're feeling all inspired, get to work on making the Vorbis decoder integer-clean!
Some even said: "Why would I want to use that? I have MP3 and it works fine!". They simply don't care about patents and such, they just want it to work...
The evangelism tack to take here is that Ogg makes much smaller files for better quality. Like, 70% of the space. So they can fit a lot more on their hard disk, if their interest is their CD collection.
If their interest is filesharing, then obviously that's not going to work as well. But with WinAmp and Real supporting Oggs out the box, people will be able to use.ogg files they find. And if your favoured filesharing network doesn't have.ogg as an audio format, be sure to let the developers know!
"mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping."
Actually, it's the defacto standard for file sharing. For ripping your own CDs, you'd be a fool to stick to mp3 - you can get much better sound in less disk space with Ogg. One place Ogg really needs support is in CD ripping applications, like AudioCatalyst.
See what you can do with your filesharing app to get it to share and search.ogg files - and if it doesn't, lobby the programmers.
"It occured to me a while ago that the ability of a peer-to-peer's network to provide a particular file would go up dramatically if less emphasis was put on "real-time" searching and instead in a sort-of subscription model -- the user would request a file, and the request could propagate overnight from client to client while the network itself decided the best/most reliable way to provide that particular file to that particular user... beyond privacy concerns and TTL spoofing on requests (which are probably both non-trivial problems with this idea) I'd certainly be willing to wait a couple days to get a particular file or set of files as long as I didn't have to "babysit" the client and as long as I could be assured that the file would be full and complete when it finally arrived."
This having been the secret sauce for AudioGalaxy - the fact that you could queue your requests, that it would fetch them from whichever client had them, and that you DIDN'T HAVE TO BABYSIT THE DAMN CLIENT.
The way they did it was to store your requests on the (easy non-moving target) central server.
Whoever can create a p2p network duplicating this functionality will get every orphaned AG user descending upon them with shrieks of joy and large hard drives full of goodies. Walkers might be the way to implement this.
And THAT will make the RIAA shit an entire brickworks, which is almost reason enough.
People buy "crappy DVD players" that happen to have region free hacks because they're cheap, not because they're region free. 99% of the US market couldn't care less about non-region 1 DVDs.
Whereas outside region 1, being region-hackable is a major marketing point for a DVD player. Even if they're probably not allowed to say so out loud in the ad. The general citizenry consider region-encoding a PITA not to be tolerated. So they don't.
If you're unhappy with Zope/Squishdot you should try Postnuke [postnuke.com] rather than slash. It's a real CMS, offers theming, internationalization, dozens of external modules for you to expand your site.
Features? We don't care about features. We care now about stability, and ability to recover from disasters. Slash is the stuff that runs Slashdot, so it should cope just fine with our load. Other strong contender was Scoop, but that hasn't got a stable branch yet.
This is production machinery. Features are candy:-)
We use Squishdot on Rocknerd. It is full of wonderful features and falls over in a stiff breeze. We're at the stage where we're running it single-threaded with an auto-restart thing for when it crashes. Last crash, it corrupted the entire database and we lost two days.
We're currently trying Slash. It's horrible in its own ways, but if we can make it a bit less ugly then at least it'll generally stay up.
Once you download it you are free to do what you want with it within the policies of the GPL.
MPL/NPL, not GPL - most of the code has been relicensed under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, but not all (they're trying to track down those last few contributors to get permission to relicense their bits).
The only feature I really miss is having "popunder" tabs like in Galeon, so you can open a whole array of links without having to switch back to your original window.
Check the tab preferences:-) Mozilla does this just fine.
Being able to filter flash animations would be good too, although kudos for filtering the signal-to-noise ratio of most sites by removing animations, doubleclick banners, and popup windows.
It's a much-demanded feature, and there's an RFE bug open on it. Does Galeon do this already?
A lot of servers and proxies claim to do HTTP/1.1, but don't do pipelining properly. This is why pipelining is switched off in Mozilla by default.
The way they're dealing with the problems at the moment is to have a list of bad servers/proxies, and, if Mozilla spots that the server is one of those, drop back to HTTP/1.0 for that connection.
The goal is to get pipelining working reliably and transparently so that it can be switched on by default. Anyone who's used Mozilla with pipelining will understand why that's a Good Thing:-)
1. Using an old profile - particularly a Netscape 6.2 profile - is well known to lead to weird stuff happening, as the profile format has changed a lot in a year. 2. This is a bug-testing release, and a lot of shiny new ones are to be expected.
So before assuming something is a Mozilla bug, I would STRONGLY advise using a fresh profile.
Getting data out of an old-format profile is detailed in the FAQ section on profiles. (No, there isn't an automatic tool. Wanna write one? No, there isn't much doc on profile formats either...)
Yup, I think that's the point I've always wondered at. Why is MS so upset at the GPL?
This goes back to the Halloween Papers - which correctly identified the GPL as "immune to FUD tactics". But that's all they've got, so they're trying it again and again.
Microsoft's competition model is to wound their enemy (Netscape, Word Perfect, Novell) and wait for them bleed to death. Copyleft (the GPL, the MPL) is the wound to Microsoft that they cannot heal.
The Roaring Penguin article was reprinted in full in The Age (Melbourne) and the Sydney Morning Herald today. Those IT sections are read by really quite a lot of people in IT in Australia.
The Mozilla API model is based on an old and mean-while superseded assumption: that writing software is expensive. In the OpenSource world having to modify a driver because something changed in the kernel, is an advantage not a disadvange, both economically and techically. Proprietary software goes at the tariff of US$ 50-200 per line of debugged code. No such price applies to OpenSource software.
This is not what is happening in practice. Now that 1.0 is out, add-ons are coming out like crazy.
This is because developers frustrated with all the API changes up to now finally have an API that isn't a moving target to write against.
mozilla.org knew exactly what they were doing with an API freeze.
"If you want something to look the same on all sites, use a PDF or PNG."
Ha! Have a look at the Mozilla 1.0 Start Page. In particular, look at detect-problems.js. You know why it's called that? And why it's so long? Because IE's PNG handling is from Mars. IE6 (and MacIE5) uses a different default gamma to everyone else. IE5 can't handle alpha transparency. And just giggle hysterically if IE4 is mentioned.
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It sure does. This is a BIG problem with putting Ogg Vorbis in devices - while all personal computers these days have floating point, quite a lot of embedded processors don't.
So if you're feeling all inspired, get to work on making the Vorbis decoder integer-clean!
The evangelism tack to take here is that Ogg makes much smaller files for better quality. Like, 70% of the space. So they can fit a lot more on their hard disk, if their interest is their CD collection.
If their interest is filesharing, then obviously that's not going to work as well. But with WinAmp and Real supporting Oggs out the box, people will be able to use .ogg files they find. And if your favoured filesharing network doesn't have .ogg as an audio format, be sure to let the developers know!
Actually, it's the defacto standard for file sharing. For ripping your own CDs, you'd be a fool to stick to mp3 - you can get much better sound in less disk space with Ogg. One place Ogg really needs support is in CD ripping applications, like AudioCatalyst.
See what you can do with your filesharing app to get it to share and search .ogg files - and if it doesn't, lobby the programmers.
Emacs, obviously.
Blunkett is bloody scary, though. RIPA? Removing double jeopardy? ("We'll keep dragging you back into court until you give in.")
Well, not the speed. Neither WINE nor Cygwin are emulators; they are APIs. So you don't have the speed hit of emulation.
With the Mozilla project, the Windows binary sometimes runs faster under WINE on Linux than the native Linux binary does.
Well, it doesn't quite - I've been using it for a few weeks and it still needs way too much babying not to be horribly delayed in getting anything.
Going from AudioGalaxy to WinMX is like going from OS X to Windows 95.
This having been the secret sauce for AudioGalaxy - the fact that you could queue your requests, that it would fetch them from whichever client had them, and that you DIDN'T HAVE TO BABYSIT THE DAMN CLIENT.
The way they did it was to store your requests on the (easy non-moving target) central server.
Whoever can create a p2p network duplicating this functionality will get every orphaned AG user descending upon them with shrieks of joy and large hard drives full of goodies. Walkers might be the way to implement this.
And THAT will make the RIAA shit an entire brickworks, which is almost reason enough.
Whereas outside region 1, being region-hackable is a major marketing point for a DVD player. Even if they're probably not allowed to say so out loud in the ad. The general citizenry consider region-encoding a PITA not to be tolerated. So they don't.
In a perfect world, we probably could have done something else. But in this one, Squishdot is a POS and something more robust is called for.
Features? We don't care about features. We care now about stability, and ability to recover from disasters. Slash is the stuff that runs Slashdot, so it should cope just fine with our load. Other strong contender was Scoop, but that hasn't got a stable branch yet.
This is production machinery. Features are candy :-)
We're currently trying Slash. It's horrible in its own ways, but if we can make it a bit less ugly then at least it'll generally stay up.
Squishdot and Zope: JUST SAY NO.
MPL/NPL, not GPL - most of the code has been relicensed under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, but not all (they're trying to track down those last few contributors to get permission to relicense their bits).
But the MPL offers a lot of freedom too :-)
And notice how http://mozilla.org/start/1.0/ has Open Source/Free Software at the top.
Check the tab preferences :-) Mozilla does this just fine.
Being able to filter flash animations would be good too, although kudos for filtering the signal-to-noise ratio of most sites by removing animations, doubleclick banners, and popup windows.
It's a much-demanded feature, and there's an RFE bug open on it. Does Galeon do this already?
I meant in terms of memory footprint. Also, M13 wasn't yet feature-complete.
A lot of servers and proxies claim to do HTTP/1.1, but don't do pipelining properly. This is why pipelining is switched off in Mozilla by default.
The way they're dealing with the problems at the moment is to have a list of bad servers/proxies, and, if Mozilla spots that the server is one of those, drop back to HTTP/1.0 for that connection.
The goal is to get pipelining working reliably and transparently so that it can be switched on by default. Anyone who's used Mozilla with pipelining will understand why that's a Good Thing :-)
Yep. Over the course of a year, Mozilla has gotten better, faster and smaller. And more stable. And a hell of a lot less leaky of memory.
How many apps manage that while adding features, huh?
Uhhh ... beware.
1. Using an old profile - particularly a Netscape 6.2 profile - is well known to lead to weird stuff happening, as the profile format has changed a lot in a year.
2. This is a bug-testing release, and a lot of shiny new ones are to be expected.
So before assuming something is a Mozilla bug, I would STRONGLY advise using a fresh profile.
Getting data out of an old-format profile is detailed in the FAQ section on profiles. (No, there isn't an automatic tool. Wanna write one? No, there isn't much doc on profile formats either ...)
This goes back to the Halloween Papers - which correctly identified the GPL as "immune to FUD tactics". But that's all they've got, so they're trying it again and again.
Microsoft's competition model is to wound their enemy (Netscape, Word Perfect, Novell) and wait for them bleed to death. Copyleft (the GPL, the MPL) is the wound to Microsoft that they cannot heal.
The Roaring Penguin article was reprinted in full in The Age (Melbourne) and the Sydney Morning Herald today. Those IT sections are read by really quite a lot of people in IT in Australia.
This is not what is happening in practice. Now that 1.0 is out, add-ons are coming out like crazy. This is because developers frustrated with all the API changes up to now finally have an API that isn't a moving target to write against.
mozilla.org knew exactly what they were doing with an API freeze.
Don't worry, it's just looking at your User-Agent string :-) The script looks at the date on the Gecko tag.
The trunk (not 1.0 branch) now does take advantage of the OS-supplied smoothing. You can still use Silk with previous versions, including 1.0.
Interestingly, IE 6 uses a similar solution (standards and quirks mode) to get standards-based sites to render properly.
Ha! Have a look at the Mozilla 1.0 Start Page. In particular, look at detect-problems.js. You know why it's called that? And why it's so long? Because IE's PNG handling is from Mars. IE6 (and MacIE5) uses a different default gamma to everyone else. IE5 can't handle alpha transparency. And just giggle hysterically if IE4 is mentioned.
IE is such a bastard to code for.