This does not at all reflect the views of the MPlayer authors. They DO care about licensing, and they DO care about being included in distributions.
The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries, and distros tend to leave out the part of MPlayer thay are the most useful (the Sorensen, ffmpeg, windows-DLL based parts), as a result MPlayer authors get a lot of complaints.
The licensing problems aren't really licensing problems. Most of the libraries that are in the gray area are written by people who work closely with the MPlayer team anyway, and/or are designed for other projects and need heavy modifications to be used in MPlayer (one of the conflicts is just based on the absence of a ChangeLog file!!! You gotta be kidding). There's no risk of lawsuit here, it's just some things have not been done 100% by the book. Somehow that's ok for projects like xine (which includes libavcodec), but MPlayer suffers from some bad rep here.
The fact remains: MPlayer is one of the most IMPRESSIVE piece of open-source software engineering i've ever seen, and it's a shame distros a so conservative about it.
That's a completely ridiculous statement. The pollution caused here is negligible compared to the symbolic value and publicity stunt. Besides, welding the remains will create a Burning Man-like art form in the middle of the desert, which i think is the coolest thing.
You have a serious problem with sorting priorities.
I use SMS regularly here in California (with AT&T GRPS/GSM service), and I've experienced a lot of problems not so much with message losses but rather with delays.
The whole point of SMS messaging is that you know they'll be received and read within minutes. Very often, i receive SMS several hours late, which really defeats the whole purpose of messages such as "i'll be 10 minutes late"...
While Tintin is indeed from Belgium by a Belgium author it is most certainly part of the French culture and can therefore be reasonably accurately be described as French.
You're forgetting that Herge was french/dutch bilingual, and all Tintin were also originally released in Dutch (as 'Kuifje'). It just so happens that the french (as in language) comics market is considerably bigger, hence people remember it mainly as a french (as in language) comics, and sometimes even wrongly as a French (as in country) comics.
That's a difference, i'm pretty sure Haliday never sang in Dutch (thank god!:-))
I personally don't use Windows, neither at work or at home, though obviously i don't play games a lot (besides an occasional Quake III on Linux). There's only ONE Windows application that I use frequently, and that's KaZaA. So i have a VMWare virtual machine that i use just for this, with the KaZaA download directory being a Samba directory on the Linux host.
Just to show that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the music industry works now, let's make an analogy between the music industry and the startup Venture Capitalist business. I think this analogy makes sense because that's precisely one of the roles the record labels are supposed to fill: that of a producer. People come to you with (business plans/demo tapes), and you invest money in those you like.
So, if your VC was like a record label:
- The VC would own 99% of the stock of the company
- The VC would fill all the roles in the startup company, except for the actual product engineering (i.e. music writing/recording). The VC acts as CEO, VP of bizdev, VP of marketing and VP of sales.
- The VC determines at what price your 'product' sell, when and where, if ever.
- You can never get additional funding from any other investors for like, seven years.
- The VC has the right to call it quits at any time.
- You may no quit. Ever. If you do, consider a career change.
Hmm, don't like the conditions. Well, you can't just keep driving up Sand Hill Road. All the contracts are the same!
That mere fact that we had to wait so many years for a feature that has been available to Mac users for, like, 15 years, is the proof that X11 in general and XFree86 in particular, is the most bloated buggy unmaintainnable piece of software ever.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux, one that would be friendly to manufacturers and acceleration modules...
I have great respect for the maintainers of the XFree86 project, considering what they have to deal with, but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space for 99% of the user base.
For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support.
There's plenty of (unofficial) Linux support for WMA. Both MPlayer and avifile support most WMA formats. Plus, Crossover provides a plugin for WMA8 that works just fine (granted it costs $25, but it's the best quality/buck ratio in the business).
It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.
If anyone has some time to waste, it'd be fun to create a fractal drawing of it. Well it's not really a fractal, since it's integer, but anyway. It'd be only a single line of pixels (or a symmetric 2d reflection), and the color code represents how many iterations it took to reach a palindrome. I'm guessing it may not look real spectacular, but who knows...
I disagree simply because with time MP3 will become less and less competitive versus more state-of-the-art formats. MP3 is not going to get much better in terms of encoding quality (it's all in the encoding, but we have a bunch of very good encoders already). So when a number of newer formats arrive that can encode at the same quality in half or third the size of MP3 (we're not far from that already), there'll be more and more pressure to switch to it.
Now whether Ogg will be the winner, that's hard to tell. I'd bet more money on some Micro$oft closed format...
Does anybody still have Real Player installed? And actually use it for a general player and not just for when certain cites require it for video clips?
Of course. RealPlayer is actually pretty good as an mp3 stream player. What else is there on Linux for streaming video anyway ? (besides the almighty mplayer).
I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've never had any problems accessing my PayPal account (or any other of my secure banking accounts for that matter) using Galeon 1.2. As far as I can tell, the PayPal web site doesn't not check or care what browser you're using.
It is true, however, that faking the browser ID is a feature that Galeon misses.
The advantage Hubble has over ground based telescopes with much larger lenses is that is does not have to cope with the distorsion caused by the atmosphere.
I have heard, however, that we now have mathematical models of those atmospheric distorsions that are so accurate that soon ground-based telescopes will regain the "lead". Could somebody with more knowledge confirm/elaborate ?
> And maybe you'll reconsider as well someday when X crashes while running a GL accelerated app. Closed source drivers are 100% illogical and unacceptable under any circumstance. That's all there is to it.
Maybe this is because the Linux kernel device driver framework is so poorly done and un-standardized than you NEED the driver source code to do anything. That certainly is not nVidia's fault or problem...
What i meant was: if you control how people access the network, and if you control the tools that people have to use to access the network, that's awefully close to controlling the network..:-)
Technically, you don't have to go trough a FastTrack machine to download a file from another node (unlike Napster, which required a query to obtain the client IP address, IIRC).
HOWEVER, if FastTrack decides it doesn't want people to download files called "metallica_sucks.mp3", they can do it! They can code the restriction in they library, and force people to upgrade to a new version of their client. I hope you see my point here. After all that's what they did to disable GiFT.
You can of course hack the binary client (or registry entries) to lift some of the restrictions, but that's not for the average Joe user. In effect, the 128kbps restriction works, MP3s above 128 are extremely rare on the network (I've only seen it happen when the MP3 is encoded in VBR...).
This is not true at all. They DO control the network precisely because they control the authentication. The only clients that are allowed to log on the network are the clients that license FastTrack's code, and they have full control over that code (see big fat agreement to license FastTrack's code).
The proof: FastTrack doesn't allow people to share MP3's encoded above 128kbps. How ? Because the restriction is encoded in their library, which is used by the clients they control.
GiFT is another example. All FastTrack had to do to shut down GiFT forever was to boost up its protocol version number and change the authentication mechanism. They definitely have control over their network, which is precisely why they'll loose the legal battle.
My biggest hope, is that GiFT and OpenFT will eventually take over as a true Open-Source alternative to the FastTrack network: a completely decentralized 2-layered network which will become the true successor of Gnutella.
One has to wonder what effect this may have on Disney's relationship with Pixar. After all, Steve Jobs is the CEO of both. I've always hoped that Disney would purchase Pixar. They do great work and would be a valuable addition to Disney. Buy them, and then leave them alone. Don't interfere in that division.
Having been around a lot of cartoon animators in my life, i can tell you that the last thing a successful and talented animator wants is to work for Disney ("work for the rat" as they call it). It does not look good on a reelshow or resume, and the super-corporate Disney environment is not one that encourages artistic creativity.
Actually it is not. It is a testament to the fact that people are much more likely to complain than they are to compliment. Ask the manager at your local grocery store or a restaurant owner which they get more of.
True, but at a grocery store or a restaurant you're not specifically requested to comment on the quality of the service. Typically, hearing no comments means everything is all right.
The situation here is completely different, there is a specific Request For Comments in a very high profile case. People not submitting comments are most likely people who are indifferent or have no strong opinions on the case. You can't really talk about "anti-Microsoft zealots" without mentioning the dual "Pro-Microsoft zealots". There's no reason the former would voice their opinions less or more loudly than the latter.
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This does not at all reflect the views of the MPlayer authors. They DO care about licensing, and they DO care about being included in distributions.
The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries, and distros tend to leave out the part of MPlayer thay are the most useful (the Sorensen, ffmpeg, windows-DLL based parts), as a result MPlayer authors get a lot of complaints.
The licensing problems aren't really licensing problems. Most of the libraries that are in the gray area are written by people who work closely with the MPlayer team anyway, and/or are designed for other projects and need heavy modifications to be used in MPlayer (one of the conflicts is just based on the absence of a ChangeLog file!!! You gotta be kidding). There's no risk of lawsuit here, it's just some things have not been done 100% by the book. Somehow that's ok for projects like xine (which includes libavcodec), but MPlayer suffers from some bad rep here.
The fact remains: MPlayer is one of the most IMPRESSIVE piece of open-source software engineering i've ever seen, and it's a shame distros a so conservative about it.
DZM
I hope this guy is paying royalties to Tintin's friend : Professor Tournesol. He was definitely first
DZM
That's a completely ridiculous statement. The pollution caused here is negligible compared to the symbolic value and publicity stunt. Besides, welding the remains will create a Burning Man-like art form in the middle of the desert, which i think is the coolest thing.
You have a serious problem with sorting priorities.
DZM
I use SMS regularly here in California (with AT&T GRPS/GSM service), and I've experienced a lot of problems not so much with message losses but rather with delays.
The whole point of SMS messaging is that you know they'll be received and read within minutes. Very often, i receive SMS several hours late, which really defeats the whole purpose of messages such as "i'll be 10 minutes late"...
DZM
While Tintin is indeed from Belgium by a Belgium author it is most certainly part of the French culture and can therefore be reasonably accurately be described as French.
:-))
You're forgetting that Herge was french/dutch bilingual, and all Tintin were also originally released in Dutch (as 'Kuifje'). It just so happens that the french (as in language) comics market is considerably bigger, hence people remember it mainly as a french (as in language) comics, and sometimes even wrongly as a French (as in country) comics.
That's a difference, i'm pretty sure Haliday never sang in Dutch (thank god!
DZM
I grew up on French comics, which I guess is some excuse, but...
Tintin is not a French comic, it's from Belgium. Herge (Tinin's belgian author) laid down the foundation of an entire school of belgian comic writers.
DZM
I personally don't use Windows, neither at work or at home, though obviously i don't play games a lot (besides an occasional Quake III on Linux). There's only ONE Windows application that I use frequently, and that's KaZaA. So i have a VMWare virtual machine that i use just for this, with the KaZaA download directory being a Samba directory on the Linux host.
DZM
Just to show that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the music industry works now, let's make an analogy between the music industry and the startup Venture Capitalist business. I think this analogy makes sense because that's precisely one of the roles the record labels are supposed to fill: that of a producer. People come to you with (business plans/demo tapes), and you invest money in those you like.
:
So, if your VC was like a record label
- The VC would own 99% of the stock of the company
- The VC would fill all the roles in the startup company, except for the actual product engineering (i.e. music writing/recording). The VC acts as CEO, VP of bizdev, VP of marketing and VP of sales.
- The VC determines at what price your 'product' sell, when and where, if ever.
- You can never get additional funding from any other investors for like, seven years.
- The VC has the right to call it quits at any time.
- You may no quit. Ever. If you do, consider a career change.
Hmm, don't like the conditions. Well, you can't just keep driving up Sand Hill Road. All the contracts are the same!
DZM.
That mere fact that we had to wait so many years for a feature that has been available to Mac users for, like, 15 years, is the proof that X11 in general and XFree86 in particular, is the most bloated buggy unmaintainnable piece of software ever.
When will somebody free the world of X11 and write a light-weight fast and efficient graphics layer for Linux, one that would be friendly to manufacturers and acceleration modules...
I have great respect for the maintainers of the XFree86 project, considering what they have to deal with, but I strongly believe 2/3 of the functionality of the X11 architecure is just a big waste of time and disk space for 99% of the user base.
DZM
For portable devices, it almost makes sense - except, of course, for the lack of linux support.
There's plenty of (unofficial) Linux support for WMA. Both MPlayer and avifile support most WMA formats. Plus, Crossover provides a plugin for WMA8 that works just fine (granted it costs $25, but it's the best quality/buck ratio in the business).
DZM
It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.
One word: VMWare
-DZM
Errrrr, why don't you ask Janis Ian how many millions of dollars she has in the bank ? Or how many albums she has in the top 20 ?
DZM
If anyone has some time to waste, it'd be fun to create a fractal drawing of it. Well it's not really a fractal, since it's integer, but anyway. It'd be only a single line of pixels (or a symmetric 2d reflection), and the color code represents how many iterations it took to reach a palindrome. I'm guessing it may not look real spectacular, but who knows...
DZM
We would never agree on which language to use for the radio transmissions....
Let us remember the first man to walk on the moon was Belgian
DZM
the industry won't allow its movies to be broadcast because they don't want viewers to record 'perfect copies' of movies."
Perfect copies ? You mean, the blurry pan-and-scanned content-edited time-edited verions they show on cable ? Good lord.
DZM
I disagree simply because with time MP3 will become less and less competitive versus more state-of-the-art formats. MP3 is not going to get much better in terms of encoding quality (it's all in the encoding, but we have a bunch of very good encoders already). So when a number of newer formats arrive that can encode at the same quality in half or third the size of MP3 (we're not far from that already), there'll be more and more pressure to switch to it.
Now whether Ogg will be the winner, that's hard to tell. I'd bet more money on some Micro$oft closed format...
DZM
Does anybody still have Real Player installed? And actually use it for a general player and not just for when certain cites require it for video clips?
Of course. RealPlayer is actually pretty good as an mp3 stream player. What else is there on Linux for streaming video anyway ? (besides the almighty mplayer).
-DZM
I like Galeon, but there's one big problem: you can't set the browser identification string. That means I have to get into Konqueror to access my PayPal account.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've never had any problems accessing my PayPal account (or any other of my secure banking accounts for that matter) using Galeon 1.2. As far as I can tell, the PayPal web site doesn't not check or care what browser you're using.
It is true, however, that faking the browser ID is a feature that Galeon misses.
DZM
The advantage Hubble has over ground based telescopes with much larger lenses is that is does not have to cope with the distorsion caused by the atmosphere.
I have heard, however, that we now have mathematical models of those atmospheric distorsions that are so accurate that soon ground-based telescopes will regain the "lead". Could somebody with more knowledge confirm/elaborate ?
DZM
> And maybe you'll reconsider as well someday when X crashes while running a GL accelerated app. Closed source drivers are 100% illogical and unacceptable under any circumstance. That's all there is to it.
Maybe this is because the Linux kernel device driver framework is so poorly done and un-standardized than you NEED the driver source code to do anything. That certainly is not nVidia's fault or problem...
DZM
You definitely have a point.
:-)
What i meant was: if you control how people access the network, and if you control the tools that people have to use to access the network, that's awefully close to controlling the network..
Technically, you don't have to go trough a FastTrack machine to download a file from another node (unlike Napster, which required a query to obtain the client IP address, IIRC).
HOWEVER, if FastTrack decides it doesn't want people to download files called "metallica_sucks.mp3", they can do it! They can code the restriction in they library, and force people to upgrade to a new version of their client. I hope you see my point here. After all that's what they did to disable GiFT.
You can of course hack the binary client (or registry entries) to lift some of the restrictions, but that's not for the average Joe user. In effect, the 128kbps restriction works, MP3s above 128 are extremely rare on the network (I've only seen it happen when the MP3 is encoded in VBR...).
DZM
This is not true at all. They DO control the network precisely because they control the authentication. The only clients that are allowed to log on the network are the clients that license FastTrack's code, and they have full control over that code (see big fat agreement to license FastTrack's code).
The proof: FastTrack doesn't allow people to share MP3's encoded above 128kbps. How ? Because the restriction is encoded in their library, which is used by the clients they control.
GiFT is another example. All FastTrack had to do to shut down GiFT forever was to boost up its protocol version number and change the authentication mechanism. They definitely have control over their network, which is precisely why they'll loose the legal battle.
My biggest hope, is that GiFT and OpenFT will eventually take over as a true Open-Source alternative to the FastTrack network: a completely decentralized 2-layered network which will become the true successor of Gnutella.
DZM
One has to wonder what effect this may have on Disney's relationship with Pixar. After all, Steve Jobs is the CEO of both. I've always hoped that Disney would purchase Pixar. They do great work and would be a valuable addition to Disney. Buy them, and then leave them alone. Don't interfere in that division.
Having been around a lot of cartoon animators in my life, i can tell you that the last thing a successful and talented animator wants is to work for Disney ("work for the rat" as they call it). It does not look good on a reelshow or resume, and the super-corporate Disney environment is not one that encourages artistic creativity.
DZM
If they had their way, I know of at least a few radio stations that would be shut down.
Well they are, and the entire digital music radio business is seriously compromised.
DZM
Actually it is not. It is a testament to the fact that people are much more likely to complain than they are to compliment. Ask the manager at your local grocery store or a restaurant owner which they get more of.
True, but at a grocery store or a restaurant you're not specifically requested to comment on the quality of the service. Typically, hearing no comments means everything is all right.
The situation here is completely different, there is a specific Request For Comments in a very high profile case. People not submitting comments are most likely people who are indifferent or have no strong opinions on the case. You can't really talk about "anti-Microsoft zealots" without mentioning the dual "Pro-Microsoft zealots". There's no reason the former would voice their opinions less or more loudly than the latter.
DZM