Yes, you could of course improve (or just take) existing ISO reference source code for video encoding and decoding. But I guess ESR, RMS etc. won't be happy with that - they want something that is legal everywhere, and that might be a good idea in the long run.
MPEG-4 might be better for low bitrates. But the problems come with the patents. See this more audio-oriented FAQ on MPEG-related patent issues. Especially interesting: 18. If the open source community develops a new compression standard, can we use it without paying FhG?
Unfortunately, most (all) of the good video compression algorithms are patented and cannot be used. Even if some may not like it, Microsoft's ASF (players and encoders, surprise, are both free; looks like someone has a lot of resources) is very good, it uses MPEG-4, suitable for low bitrate video. From my personal experience, the competitors don't come close.
The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.
Even if there would be a product, standardization is another large obstacle. Take image file formats: There are products superior to JPEG (like DJVU or LWF), but no website creator uses them, many people wouldn't know how to install the plug-ins (which are available for free). I guess even JPEG2000 will have a hard time once it's out. The success will depend on decoders being built into standard browsers by default. And they should work flawlessly (remember PNG)!
I didn't have the opportunity to test the latest Línux JDK releases of Sun myself, but at least the Blackdown folks seemed to pass most tests. On Jan 3 Sun released RC-2 and they explicitly mentioned the inclusion of the Swing components: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAcces s/j2sdk122 (you'll need a free login). The VM also is faster, but I'm not sure how it compares to IBM's fast 1.1 VM.
On the missing free version of the libs, that is of course true. BTW, while I know that classpath.org is supporting AWT, do they plan to come up with Swing? Is anyone else writing a free clone?
Of course there are lots of applications that don't need a GUI. But in case you want to create a mulit-platform GUI application, you should consider Java and either AWT or Swing. Depending on who you ask about their experience with it they'll come up with answers ranging from 'it worked great' to 'total crap'. I'd really like to see a fair test of a larger Java app on many operating systems using different virtual machines. Java is not right for everything, but if your app is GUI-intense and you don't need every bit of performance, development is sure easier with lots of potential error sources (pointers, memory allocation etc.) removed. Not meant as flamebait! I still use C for CPU-intensive jobs...
Could someone please explain to us non-Americans what 'soccer moms' are, and what was their importance in the '96 elections? They were mentioned in some comments, but I still don't get it.
People ask FAQs all the time, but only elitist flamers from USENET seem to jump all over people who ask FAQs.
'Jump all over' is not really what happened here. I also have experienced quite an increase of unrelated postings or FAQ's in Usenet, compared to the good ol' days... I think it's a form of politeness to read an FAQ list if there is one before you start posting to that forum. Unfortunately, new users don't learn this anymore. All you need is an AOL CD-ROM and there you go...;-( Will ISP's provide an introductory text to new users about what rules one should stick to or at least give some links to corresponding sites? Not bloody likely... Look Ma, the Internet!
As soon as I read your original posting (a FEMALE talking about adoring Woz on SLASHDOT) I knew there would be at least one slightly offtopic remark. I wasn't let down;-)
But you shouldn't feed the troll, simply ignore him (or her).
I don't want to get in the way of your prejudices, but I think the original posting was about your average Linux programmer who has nothing to do with his / her government at all. So, with tons of new users and coders, there is a large likelihood that more people will be active in the development of Linux. It worked for about any other country on the planet... For a real coder it's a certain satisfaction to have his extensions / improvements integrated in the kernel. I don't think that'll be different with the Chinese (no matter whether the original announcement was a hoax or not).
In a press release made yesterday, Suse announces that ReiserFS 3.5.12 (that's not the latest version) can now be downloaded from their site at ftp://ftp.suse.com:/pub/suse/i386/update/6.3/reise rfs/. It's not a final version and you won't get support for it (if you have bought Suse 6.3).
See the Heise newsticker posting at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ps-04.01.00-00 0/ or Suse's announcement at http://www.suse.de/de/news/news/kurzmeldungen/reis erfs.html (both in German, Babelfish may help).
There is only a Windows player available, but the nice codec written for low bitrates is basically nothing but MPEG-4, which is a standard. So, a player could be created - see http://www.microsoft.com/asf/aboutASF.htm .
The best thing to do if you want something supported is to create a free library written in C like IJG did for normal JPEG. Almost everybody is using their code because it's stable and portable.
That way, all browser creators have to do is link it into their project... At least that works for an additional image file format decoder.
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower.
Well, there is HotJava, a web browser developed by Sun completely in Java (1.1). Get it here.
However, I never got it to run as non-admin under NT (but I don't really care;-)) and there is constant flickering when pages are rendered. If they could remove that... The pages I visit most often look good.
I'm not whining, I'm pointing out a statement in the article that is not based on facts but prejudices (in this case, against desktop OS's in general) - BTW, Mr Moderator, that's why my posting is not off-topic. I like Linux, I use it, but I can't stand that biased Linux-is-better-than-the-rest talk - it doesn't do Linux any good. You won't see people like Linus or AC making those kinds of statements. I react the same way when people tell me that nothing else reaches Windows' GUI capabilities - it's just the same thing: flamebait.
Just a small note - while this is an interesting summary, statements like It becomes as unstable as any desktop OS (except Linux). are not likely to do anything but annoy the reader. Yes, from my personal experience Linux x86 runs more stable than Windows 9?. So what... There are tons of desktop OS's out there and I'm sure the author of that article doesn't know all of them in all setups on all kinds of hardware configurations. These kinds of comparisons won't lead us anywhere.
Most people don't have the time to get a real insight into complex issues. I definitely include myself in this statement...
It would be too easy to manipulate the public view. Can you imagine 300 million Americans voting on crypto laws? You know, crypto, the stuff drug traffickers and terrorists use to communicate;-)
Now then, Donald Trump. Mmm hmm. At least he'll have a flashy campaign. Lots of TV ads I suppose. I've seen Trump on Larry King live. He's about the biggest idiot I can imagine, boasting about how often he's screwing his supermodel girl friend. What a jerk...
Bill Bradley, is that the African-American? No, he's not. He is 'the other' Democratic candidate and has had better results in the polls than Gore (at least some time ago).
I'm not a US citizen myself, but I don't think anyone but Bush, Gore and Bradley has a chance to win. So, while it's great to be informed about the other more exotic people in the race, choose the candidate of these three that has the least idiotic views in your opinion. That's the way I usually vote, because you'll never find a person that perfectly matches your point of view.
Since you seem to know a bit about the topic, do you know how much more the batteries are drained by color displays? I think it never was mentioned (or I overlooked it)... Thanks!
And instant karma is also unnecessary because the real good stuff usually gets moderated up very fast. I'm always amazed that there must (?) be so many folks with moderation points so that insightful links etc. are going up to five only minutes after the message was posted. How many Slashdot readers with accounts are there?
To the original poster: If you're interested in all that JC had to say in this forum, simply click on his user info and you get a list of his statements.
Thanks for your kind words, but I know that page. It will make you download an installer app that by itself will have to get online to get the QuickTime application.
MPEG-1 isn't a choice for (relatively) low bitrates, it just wasn't meant to be, although it would be perfect from a point of view of availability. QuickTime's playback software is quite crappy as pointed out elsewhere in this forum, while MS has a real good product her, combined with a free encoder (based on MPEG-4 which does a very good job with low bitrates) but unfortunately you can get it for WinXYZ only. Real's software is buggy and bloated with tons of 'register here, send us information on you etc.' stuff. So, all of the players leave you with a bad feeling. There's a real chance here in implementing a free, MPEG-4-based encoder / decoder pair for low bitrates. I guess there remain tons of patent issues...;-( Does anyone know more about this?
Next to the other answers to your posting, I can also add the following on QuickTime: It screws up my path settings under NT and it's unable to smoothly play a 400 x 300 Sorenson MOV on my PII 350 - that's not acceptable, really. Add to that the strange download process where everyone has to get the player online.
Get the ASF specs here. It seems that Microsoft wants to make ASF an open standard, whatever that means for them: http://www.microsoft.com/asf/standards.htm. At least they're not hiding anything. And as ASF is built on top of MPEG-4, there should be at least some reference C code out there that one can work on. So I can only support the previous poster: Let's make a free client!
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Yes, you could of course improve (or just take) existing ISO reference source code for video encoding and decoding. But I guess ESR, RMS etc. won't be happy with that - they want something that is legal everywhere, and that might be a good idea in the long run.
MPEG-4 might be better for low bitrates. But the problems come with the patents. See this more audio-oriented FAQ on MPEG-related patent issues. Especially interesting:
18. If the open source community develops a new compression standard, can we use it without paying FhG?
Unfortunately, most (all) of the good video compression algorithms are patented and cannot be used. Even if some may not like it, Microsoft's ASF (players and encoders, surprise, are both free; looks like someone has a lot of resources) is very good, it uses MPEG-4, suitable for low bitrate video. From my personal experience, the competitors don't come close.
The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.
Even if there would be a product, standardization is another large obstacle. Take image file formats: There are products superior to JPEG (like DJVU or LWF), but no website creator uses them, many people wouldn't know how to install the plug-ins (which are available for free). I guess even JPEG2000 will have a hard time once it's out. The success will depend on decoders being built into standard browsers by default. And they should work flawlessly (remember PNG)!
I didn't have the opportunity to test the latest Línux JDK releases of Sun myself, but at least the Blackdown folks seemed to pass most tests. On Jan 3 Sun released RC-2 and they explicitly mentioned the inclusion of the Swing components: http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAcces s/j2sdk122 (you'll need a free login). The VM also is faster, but I'm not sure how it compares to IBM's fast 1.1 VM.
On the missing free version of the libs, that is of course true. BTW, while I know that classpath.org is supporting AWT, do they plan to come up with Swing? Is anyone else writing a free clone?
Of course there are lots of applications that don't need a GUI. But in case you want to create a mulit-platform GUI application, you should consider Java and either AWT or Swing. Depending on who you ask about their experience with it they'll come up with answers ranging from 'it worked great' to 'total crap'. I'd really like to see a fair test of a larger Java app on many operating systems using different virtual machines. Java is not right for everything, but if your app is GUI-intense and you don't need every bit of performance, development is sure easier with lots of potential error sources (pointers, memory allocation etc.) removed. Not meant as flamebait! I still use C for CPU-intensive jobs...
Could someone please explain to us non-Americans what 'soccer moms' are, and what was their importance in the '96 elections? They were mentioned in some comments, but I still don't get it.
People ask FAQs all the time, but only elitist flamers from USENET seem to jump all over people who ask FAQs.
;-( Will ISP's provide an introductory text to new users about what rules one should stick to or at least give some links to corresponding sites? Not bloody likely... Look Ma, the Internet!
'Jump all over' is not really what happened here. I also have experienced quite an increase of unrelated postings or FAQ's in Usenet, compared to the good ol' days... I think it's a form of politeness to read an FAQ list if there is one before you start posting to that forum. Unfortunately, new users don't learn this anymore. All you need is an AOL CD-ROM and there you go...
As soon as I read your original posting (a FEMALE talking about adoring Woz on SLASHDOT) I knew there would be at least one slightly offtopic remark. I wasn't let down ;-)
But you shouldn't feed the troll, simply ignore him (or her).
I don't want to get in the way of your prejudices, but I think the original posting was about your average Linux programmer who has nothing to do with his / her government at all. So, with tons of new users and coders, there is a large likelihood that more people will be active in the development of Linux. It worked for about any other country on the planet... For a real coder it's a certain satisfaction to have his extensions / improvements integrated in the kernel. I don't think that'll be different with the Chinese (no matter whether the original announcement was a hoax or not).
In a press release made yesterday, Suse announces that ReiserFS 3.5.12 (that's not the latest version) can now be downloaded from their site at ftp://ftp.suse.com:/pub/suse/i386/update/6.3/reise rfs/. It's not a final version and you won't get support for it (if you have bought Suse 6.3).
0 0/ or Suse's announcement at http://www.suse.de/de/news/news/kurzmeldungen/reis erfs.html (both in German, Babelfish may help).
See the Heise newsticker posting at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ps-04.01.00-0
Thanks for the info, great links!
A little correction: You left out an 'e' in the Cinefex link, it must (obviously) be http://www.cinefex.com.
There is only a Windows player available, but the nice codec written for low bitrates is basically nothing but MPEG-4, which is a standard. So, a player could be created - see http://www.microsoft.com/asf/aboutASF.htm .
The best thing to do if you want something supported is to create a free library written in C like IJG did for normal JPEG. Almost everybody is using their code because it's stable and portable.
That way, all browser creators have to do is link it into their project... At least that works for an additional image file format decoder.
What's the problem? Andover.net has made a lot of money and they're contributing some of it for a good purpose. That's great! No need to rant...
If you develop a web browser, you would probably be insane if you did it in Java (I would love to be proved wrong) because it would be so much slower.
;-)) and there is constant flickering when pages are rendered. If they could remove that... The pages I visit most often look good.
Well, there is HotJava, a web browser developed by Sun completely in Java (1.1). Get it here.
However, I never got it to run as non-admin under NT (but I don't really care
I'm not whining, I'm pointing out a statement in the article that is not based on facts but prejudices (in this case, against desktop OS's in general) - BTW, Mr Moderator, that's why my posting is not off-topic. I like Linux, I use it, but I can't stand that biased Linux-is-better-than-the-rest talk - it doesn't do Linux any good. You won't see people like Linus or AC making those kinds of statements. I react the same way when people tell me that nothing else reaches Windows' GUI capabilities - it's just the same thing: flamebait.
Just a small note - while this is an interesting summary, statements like
It becomes as unstable as any desktop OS (except Linux).
are not likely to do anything but annoy the reader. Yes, from my personal experience Linux x86 runs more stable than Windows 9?. So what... There are tons of desktop OS's out there and I'm sure the author of that article doesn't know all of them in all setups on all kinds of hardware configurations. These kinds of comparisons won't lead us anywhere.
Most people don't have the time to get a real insight into complex issues. I definitely include myself in this statement...
;-)
It would be too easy to manipulate the public view. Can you imagine 300 million Americans voting on crypto laws? You know, crypto, the stuff drug traffickers and terrorists use to communicate
Now then, Donald Trump. Mmm hmm. At least he'll have a flashy campaign. Lots of TV ads I suppose.
I've seen Trump on Larry King live. He's about the biggest idiot I can imagine, boasting about how often he's screwing his supermodel girl friend. What a jerk...
Bill Bradley, is that the African-American?
No, he's not. He is 'the other' Democratic candidate and has had better results in the polls than Gore (at least some time ago).
I'm not a US citizen myself, but I don't think anyone but Bush, Gore and Bradley has a chance to win. So, while it's great to be informed about the other more exotic people in the race, choose the candidate of these three that has the least idiotic views in your opinion. That's the way I usually vote, because you'll never find a person that perfectly matches your point of view.
Since you seem to know a bit about the topic, do you know how much more the batteries are drained by color displays? I think it never was mentioned (or I overlooked it)... Thanks!
I totally agree.
And instant karma is also unnecessary because the real good stuff usually gets moderated up very fast. I'm always amazed that there must (?) be so many folks with moderation points so that insightful links etc. are going up to five only minutes after the message was posted. How many Slashdot readers with accounts are there?
To the original poster: If you're interested in all that JC had to say in this forum, simply click on his user info and you get a list of his statements.
Thanks for your kind words, but I know that page. It will make you download an installer app that by itself will have to get online to get the QuickTime application.
MPEG-1 isn't a choice for (relatively) low bitrates, it just wasn't meant to be, although it would be perfect from a point of view of availability. QuickTime's playback software is quite crappy as pointed out elsewhere in this forum, while MS has a real good product her, combined with a free encoder (based on MPEG-4 which does a very good job with low bitrates) but unfortunately you can get it for WinXYZ only. Real's software is buggy and bloated with tons of 'register here, send us information on you etc.' stuff. So, all of the players leave you with a bad feeling. There's a real chance here in implementing a free, MPEG-4-based encoder / decoder pair for low bitrates. I guess there remain tons of patent issues... ;-( Does anyone know more about this?
Next to the other answers to your posting, I can also add the following on QuickTime: It screws up my path settings under NT and it's unable to smoothly play a 400 x 300 Sorenson MOV on my PII 350 - that's not acceptable, really. Add to that the strange download process where everyone has to get the player online.
Get the ASF specs here. It seems that Microsoft wants to make ASF an open standard, whatever that means for them: http://www.microsoft.com/asf/standards.htm. At least they're not hiding anything. And as ASF is built on top of MPEG-4, there should be at least some reference C code out there that one can work on. So I can only support the previous poster: Let's make a free client!