is that someone at apple might just read this and see that there is a demand for ogg support and release an update.
if you want ogg support for the ipod say so here, why you want it, if you'd be prepared to pay for it and what advantages it could give to apple (such as royalty free codecs, etc.)
apple are currently touting an mpeg based quicktime to the world and dog, for which they need to pay a royalty per copy. so stand up and be counted. if you really want it, should it from the rooftops (or alternatively, type it on your keyboard and click on submit).
i seem to remember seeing a friend play ogg files from itunes before. but, i don't ever recall them working on the ipod. i couldn't see any mention of this on the apple website.
If the software is going to work without a server I expect it's going to need to share information between clients somehow, so my best guess is that it's going to use P2P technology to do this in conjunction with the Jabber stuff for messaging. But without a central server for replication this is going to mean that data will get out of sync if it has to be cached on other users machines, or otherwise a user will need to keep their machine on all the time they want to share their information such as calendars, etc.
Inter-operaterability with other systems would most likely be ignored whilst prefering to encourage transistion and migration from one system to another. That way they'll be able to get you to move your data over and use it right away, but not talk with the Exchange server requiring an Evolution like connector (which is not open or free).
I wish them luck. I can remember sitting in a bar discussing the pros and cons of coming up with a competing product to Exchange and Outlook around about a week before the first time I saw Evolution mentioned, which was on Slashdot.
I hope that they can pursuade the Mozilla people to allow people to use it if it's that much better.
one thing i forgot to mention is that i'm in the UK. My home town is a small boring out of the way place with nothing going for it. I now live 'in the big city', London at the moment.
It quite one thing to think that all libraries are dull and quite another to say that most are.
I hope to see more interesting and engaging libraries in the future, the same goes for museums, galleries, etc.
The science museum in london is great, and so it the tate modern if any of you that live outside london plan to visit, make sure you give them a go.
that I can't do something similar to my DSL connection and get 3Gbps instead of 1Mbps:-)
Re:what every library needs is...
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually I'm not a parent. But I have rarely visited a library since finishing school.
When I was a student I used the college library a lot, mainly because it was the only place I could use Apple Mac's at the time (Mac Pluses!).
I also used the school library a lot, amazingly because I found it better than the local public library (I was lucky to go to a very successful boy's Grammar school).
Recently I was asked by my boss to find some information for his kids' homework using the net at work. A fact which reinforced my view that kids don't use the library much anymore. When you've got Encarta on a cd/dvd at home and a net connection it's a hundred times quicker and useful for a school kid than actually visiting a library. If I were a kid again I bet I'd be online just as much as I am nowdays as an IT professional.
One of the reasons that libraries are useful is that they are free and open up access to knowledge and learning to those without the funds to pay for the books. I wouldn't mind paying for the priviledge to use the library more if they had a better selection of books. The current library system here in the UK is supported by the local authority, which means that our local taxes pay for the books. If no one visits the library there isn't much justification for paying for nice new books.
what every library needs is...
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
the freedom to take a digital copy of the book, leaving the original on the shelf for someone who is not able to use a digital copy.
In modern day life every town/city library could present the books electronically for the benefit of it's citizens, or indeed the world.
But because of copyright this will never be allowed to happen to the majority of books.
People in this communitity have only recently (in the last five to ten years) started to wake up and realise that technology is not a limiting factor anymore, the legal system is. Librarians probably knew this all along and have not been worried about becoming redundant.
If anything the Internet and libraries can probably learn more from each other than you realise.
Librarians may be depicted in a less than flattering way in the media, but how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days? I myself visit Borders book store, browse, listen to music, have a coffee and chat with my friends most saturdays, but in a library I wouldn't be able to find the latest titles or enjoy myself. Compared to retail a library is a staid boring authoritarian place, which is why the staff of these valuable institutions are depicted in this way.
If they want to change their perception let's encourgage them to change their work place.
-- Sadly, whilst we value knowledge, it will be limited, rationed and paid for. When we cease to value knowledge we will have no use for it. (me)
slashdotted in a nanosecond !
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
no even any comments and the article is gone. mysql errors all over the place.
no chance of mirroring or copy and pasting the article even:-(
From your sig I see that you're touting Mensa membership. Yet, you profess to be willing to sacrifice Interlectual freedoms in exchange for preserving "mickey mouse".
apple have already ported the core os to x86 with darwin.
they'd never get the third party support they'd need to port to x86. no one is going to report all the existing apps. only open source weenies (guys like us) will be happy, as they compile everything from source when possible. apple can not make money doing that.
they're going to use the ibm power chips, or maybe even alpha or sparc, but never intel chips. at a push i could see a closed architechure based on the amd hammer, but not for a long while.
by changing processor they would break all the old software out there. no matter what we'd all secretly love - os x for x86, i can not see it happening.
if it does i'll gladly buy it, but would you? i doubt it. closed source, no apps, closed architecture... i think not.
and from the majority of comments on here i can see that most of you don't. you don't see the point. he ddi this for his own enjoyment. to make a machine to something it wasn't designed to. to push the bounderies.
most of the comments on this story have been trolls, or sad people on about why does this belong here. it belongs because it's cool.
slashdot may be news for nerds and stuff that matters, but stuff appears on slashdot also because of it's encentric appeal or sheer coolness. don't forget it.
btw, i had a 2600 with star raiders back in the early eighties. it came with one of those 'keyboard' pads, which i tried to plug into my spectrum and monitor the outputs so that i could use it with a game i was writing. i got nothing out of it that the machine could read, so i'm actaully glad that someone used them for something else apart from the one or two games that needed them.
they'd have a chance. But linux is under the GPL I can't see how they'd have a chance of restricting it.
I can picture the courtroom in my mind already. All it would take is a single coder of a single piece of software included in the distribution to say that he doesn't agree and the case against whoever they were taking to court would be thrown out.
I mean who are they to licence this software. It's not as if they wrote the majority of it anyway. If they want to provide a seperate add on package/ cd/ etc. that they licence fine, but attempting to control a linux distribution in this way is asking for trouble.
Sounds like they're taking business lessons from Monty Burns.
For my next trick they'll licence use of the Sun's ("Sol") radiation under a new "Pay lots of Money" licence. If anyone or anything wishes to use Solar radiation for any purpose they must pay for it:-p
As an aside, anyone attempting something like this in the UK or Europe would probably find themselves in prison very quickly. And rightly so in my opinion
I'm sure that you're wrong about this. There is nothing illegal about it at all. In fact there is no law in any country ( as far as I am aware) to prevent *anybody* designing/building/deploying a system to allow for an alternative method of reaching resources on the internet.
Imagine if you will that ICQ decided to allow you to reach their users websites by entering icq://uin1234567890 in your browser, would that be illegal? I doubt it. (Btw, if anyone at AOL/ICQ wants to use that idea... please remember to contact me first and pay me a token amount:-)
The ICANN may not be perfect, but it has worked up to now. It ain't broke, so don't fix it.
The same could be said about the Linux Kernel, but people continue to improve it. The difference here is that they have been given control of many things which affect every internet user in the entire world and are not directly accountable. No body seems to be able to extert pressure on them to do anything. We do not appear to have made any progress since they came along.
I for one agree that material which is obviously pornographic and unsuitable for minors should be placed within a seperate name space which could be easily blocked such as:.xxx,.sex,.pr0n,.porn,.adult, etc. then we wouldn't have to put up with such stupid laws as have just been passed in Austrailia - That all content published on the net should be suitable for children - subject to the judgement of police officers and not courts, judges or a jury of ones peers.
If ICANN had got off their butts and allowed for such a TLD ages ago I would have less contempt for them.
I remember having a similar idea ages ago but it was shot down by somebody who knew a lot more about DNS than I did. Then of course RealName(s) came along and I thought the idea had kinda been done and flopped so there was no point trying anymore. (Also around the same time I first heard about.shop,.sex/.xxx,.firm and those other gtld's which are still being 'pre-registered' even now.)
However, as well as a plug in, I decided to have a webpage for site redirection for anyone who couldn't use the plugin. This would allow a potential website visitor to enter your domain name in a text box, which would sit in a frame at the top almost like an extra address bar. There would also be a cgi redirect allowing you to enter www.whatever/your-wizzy-domain.newtld which would redirect to a traditional site URL for you and leave the URL in the address bar by using frames.
The plug-in would be open source to allow as many people as possible to use the system. There would be a reseller scheme to allow others to serve "domain names" and maintain a central registry.
But in the end I was kind of convinced at the time by my friend that this was the wrong approach and that the BIND and the DNS system should be altered to produce a better solution.
Still, there's nothing stopping the Linux/fsf/gnu communities getting together and coming up with our own solution based on something like that above. If anyone is seriously interested let me know:-)
MattB
Leave it out, it's marvellous!
on
'Snatch'
·
· Score: 3
I'm sure that the majority of Americans just don't "get" good British films.... especially Katz.
The comedy is dark, of course it is we're dealing with bloody villians who wouldn't look at, nevermind laugh at, Friends, Sienfeld or Fraiser.
Bad people do bad things, and actually they can be very funny when looked at in this context. Key to this is the fact that they're always trying hard for things to work out right, but they never do.
It's got spirit and character. It might not be everyones cup of joe, but it's not a mainstream film is it?
All I can say is, if you don't like this film you're probably 'f#cked, proper f#cked'.
Just a thought, considering the sheer number of TeX and LaTeX documents out there, wouldn't it be could if someone wrote a web browser plugin to render these documents within IE and Netscape, etc. the same way as Adobe Acrobat does.
It would open up the material to a wider audience who wouldn't need any expertise to use and view them.
In addition it would allow people to publish complex, richly formatted documents online without having to compromise layout or functionalilty without having to purchase Acrobat from Adobe.
Slashdot Mirror
is that someone at apple might just read this and see that there is a demand for ogg support and release an update.
if you want ogg support for the ipod say so here, why you want it, if you'd be prepared to pay for it and what advantages it could give to apple (such as royalty free codecs, etc.)
apple are currently touting an mpeg based quicktime to the world and dog, for which they need to pay a royalty per copy. so stand up and be counted. if you really want it, should it from the rooftops (or alternatively, type it on your keyboard and click on submit).
i seem to remember seeing a friend play ogg files from itunes before. but, i don't ever recall them working on the ipod. i couldn't see any mention of this on the apple website.
answers on a postcard please...
i've got the money. please just don't hurt her!
oh, sorry, thought you were someone else.
i'm sorry, my mistake. ;-)
would have been funny.
i must stop speed reading
by walking out of the wrong door!
If the software is going to work without a server I expect it's going to need to share information between clients somehow, so my best guess is that it's going to use P2P technology to do this in conjunction with the Jabber stuff for messaging. But without a central server for replication this is going to mean that data will get out of sync if it has to be cached on other users machines, or otherwise a user will need to keep their machine on all the time they want to share their information such as calendars, etc.
Inter-operaterability with other systems would most likely be ignored whilst prefering to encourage transistion and migration from one system to another. That way they'll be able to get you to move your data over and use it right away, but not talk with the Exchange server requiring an Evolution like connector (which is not open or free).
I wish them luck. I can remember sitting in a bar discussing the pros and cons of coming up with a competing product to Exchange and Outlook around about a week before the first time I saw Evolution mentioned, which was on Slashdot.
I hope that they can pursuade the Mozilla people to allow people to use it if it's that much better.
one thing i forgot to mention is that i'm in the UK. My home town is a small boring out of the way place with nothing going for it. I now live 'in the big city', London at the moment.
It quite one thing to think that all libraries are dull and quite another to say that most are.
I hope to see more interesting and engaging libraries in the future, the same goes for museums, galleries, etc.
The science museum in london is great, and so it the tate modern if any of you that live outside london plan to visit, make sure you give them a go.
that I can't do something similar to my DSL connection and get 3Gbps instead of 1Mbps :-)
Actually I'm not a parent. But I have rarely visited a library since finishing school.
When I was a student I used the college library a lot, mainly because it was the only place I could use Apple Mac's at the time (Mac Pluses!).
I also used the school library a lot, amazingly because I found it better than the local public library (I was lucky to go to a very successful boy's Grammar school).
Recently I was asked by my boss to find some information for his kids' homework using the net at work. A fact which reinforced my view that kids don't use the library much anymore. When you've got Encarta on a cd/dvd at home and a net connection it's a hundred times quicker and useful for a school kid than actually visiting a library. If I were a kid again I bet I'd be online just as much as I am nowdays as an IT professional.
One of the reasons that libraries are useful is that they are free and open up access to knowledge
and learning to those without the funds to pay for the books. I wouldn't mind paying for the priviledge to use the library more if they had a better selection of books.
The current library system here in the UK is supported by the local authority, which means that our local taxes pay for the books. If no one visits the library there isn't much justification for paying for nice new books.
the freedom to take a digital copy of the book, leaving the original on the shelf for someone who is not able to use a digital copy.
In modern day life every town/city library could present the books electronically for the benefit of it's citizens, or indeed the world.
But because of copyright this will never be allowed to happen to the majority of books.
People in this communitity have only recently (in the last five to ten years) started to wake up and realise that technology is not a limiting factor anymore, the legal system is. Librarians probably knew this all along and have not been worried about becoming redundant.
If anything the Internet and libraries can probably learn more from each other than you realise.
Librarians may be depicted in a less than flattering way in the media, but how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days? I myself visit Borders book store, browse, listen to music, have a coffee and chat with my friends most saturdays, but in a library I wouldn't be able to find the latest titles or enjoy myself. Compared to retail a library is a staid boring authoritarian place, which is why the staff of these valuable institutions are depicted in this way.
If they want to change their perception let's encourgage them to change their work place.
--
Sadly, whilst we value knowledge, it will be limited, rationed and paid for. When we cease to value knowledge we will have no use for it.
(me)
no even any comments and the article is gone. mysql errors all over the place.
:-(
no chance of mirroring or copy and pasting the article even
it's damn ugly.
at least the ipaq and fujitsu loox are nice looking. the zarus is nice as well... but this is blurgh.
i don't care what it runs... it's gotta look good too if i'm gonna buy one.
From your sig I see that you're touting Mensa membership. Yet, you profess to be willing to sacrifice Interlectual freedoms in exchange for preserving "mickey mouse".
You sir, are an idiot.
SG1 !
the vertical scroll bar even appears on the left side of my window in IE.
i've even got used to reading the url's backwards.
apple have already ported the core os to x86 with darwin.
they'd never get the third party support they'd need to port to x86. no one is going to report all the existing apps. only open source weenies (guys like us) will be happy, as they compile everything from source when possible. apple can not make money doing that.
they're going to use the ibm power chips, or maybe even alpha or sparc, but never intel chips. at a push i could see a closed architechure based on the amd hammer, but not for a long while.
by changing processor they would break all the old software out there. no matter what we'd all secretly love - os x for x86, i can not see it happening.
if it does i'll gladly buy it, but would you? i doubt it. closed source, no apps, closed architecture... i think not.
is a car which speaks the binary language of moisture vapators.
seriously, this isn't the car you're looking for.
you want to go home and rethink your lifestyle.
and from the majority of comments on here i can see that most of you don't. you don't see the point. he ddi this for his own enjoyment. to make a machine to something it wasn't designed to. to push the bounderies.
most of the comments on this story have been trolls, or sad people on about why does this belong here. it belongs because it's cool.
slashdot may be news for nerds and stuff that matters, but stuff appears on slashdot also because of it's encentric appeal or sheer coolness. don't forget it.
btw, i had a 2600 with star raiders back in the early eighties. it came with one of those 'keyboard' pads, which i tried to plug into my spectrum and monitor the outputs so that i could use it with a game i was writing. i got nothing out of it that the machine could read, so i'm actaully glad that someone used them for something else apart from the one or two games that needed them.
they'd have a chance. But linux is under the GPL I can't see how they'd have a chance of restricting it.
I can picture the courtroom in my mind already. All it would take is a single coder of a single piece of software included in the distribution to say that he doesn't agree and the case against whoever they were taking to court would be thrown out.
I mean who are they to licence this software. It's not as if they wrote the majority of it anyway. If they want to provide a seperate add on package/ cd/ etc. that they licence fine, but attempting to control a linux distribution in this way is asking for trouble.
:-p
Sounds like they're taking business lessons from Monty Burns.
For my next trick they'll licence use of the Sun's ("Sol") radiation under a new "Pay lots of Money" licence. If anyone or anything wishes to use Solar radiation for any purpose they must pay for it
As an aside, anyone attempting something like this in the UK or Europe would probably find themselves in prison very quickly. And rightly so in my opinion
:-)
.xxx, .sex, .pr0n, .porn, .adult, etc. then we wouldn't have to put up with such stupid laws as have just been passed in Austrailia - That all content published on the net should be suitable for children - subject to the judgement of police officers and not courts, judges or a jury of ones peers.
I'm sure that you're wrong about this. There is nothing illegal about it at all. In fact there is no law in any country ( as far as I am aware) to prevent *anybody* designing/building/deploying a system to allow for an alternative method of reaching resources on the internet.
Imagine if you will that ICQ decided to allow you to reach their users websites by entering icq://uin1234567890 in your browser, would that be illegal? I doubt it. (Btw, if anyone at AOL/ICQ wants to use that idea... please remember to contact me first and pay me a token amount
The ICANN may not be perfect, but it has worked up to now. It ain't broke, so don't fix it.
The same could be said about the Linux Kernel, but people continue to improve it. The difference here is that they have been given control of many things which affect every internet user in the entire world and are not directly accountable. No body seems to be able to extert pressure on them to do anything. We do not appear to have made any progress since they came along.
I for one agree that material which is obviously pornographic and unsuitable for minors should be placed within a seperate name space which could be easily blocked such as:
If ICANN had got off their butts and allowed for such a TLD ages ago I would have less contempt for them.
I remember having a similar idea ages ago but it was shot down by somebody who knew a lot more about DNS than I did. Then of course RealName(s) came along and I thought the idea had kinda been done and flopped so there was no point trying anymore. (Also around the same time I first heard about .shop, .sex/.xxx, .firm and those other gtld's which are still being 'pre-registered' even now.)
:-)
However, as well as a plug in, I decided to have a webpage for site redirection for anyone who couldn't use the plugin. This would allow a potential website visitor to enter your domain name in a text box, which would sit in a frame at the top almost like an extra address bar. There would also be a cgi redirect allowing you to enter www.whatever/your-wizzy-domain.newtld which would redirect to a traditional site URL for you and leave the URL in the address bar by using frames.
The plug-in would be open source to allow as many people as possible to use the system. There would be a reseller scheme to allow others to serve "domain names" and maintain a central registry.
But in the end I was kind of convinced at the time by my friend that this was the wrong approach and that the BIND and the DNS system should be altered to produce a better solution.
Still, there's nothing stopping the Linux/fsf/gnu communities getting together and coming up with our own solution based on something like that above. If anyone is seriously interested let me know
MattB
I'm sure that the majority of Americans just don't "get" good British films.... especially Katz.
The comedy is dark, of course it is we're dealing with bloody villians who wouldn't look at, nevermind laugh at, Friends, Sienfeld or Fraiser.
Bad people do bad things, and actually they can be very funny when looked at in this context. Key to this is the fact that they're always trying hard for things to work out right, but they never do.
It's got spirit and character. It might not be everyones cup of joe, but it's not a mainstream film is it?
All I can say is, if you don't like this film you're probably 'f#cked, proper f#cked'.
p.s. keep an eye out for 'zee germans'!
Just a thought, considering the sheer number of TeX and LaTeX documents out there, wouldn't it be could if someone wrote a web browser plugin to render these documents within IE and Netscape, etc. the same way as Adobe Acrobat does.
It would open up the material to a wider audience who wouldn't need any expertise to use and view them.
In addition it would allow people to publish complex, richly formatted documents online without having to compromise layout or functionalilty without having to purchase Acrobat from Adobe.
Just a though.