... is that MS has realised that, without opening up in this way, WinCE doesn't have a hope in hell of making it onto phones.
Case in point: Sendo, who were the main UK manufacturer of WinCE-based phones, eventually gave up and switched to Symbian. One of the reasons behind the move was the release version of Stinger (WinCE for phones) getting later and later and playing havoc with their schedules.
It's worth noting, though, that there's still a lot of ugliness left over with the Sendo case, with suits and counter-suits going back and forth.
Andrew Orlowski's piece in The Register contains many fascinating bits, but most interesting (and most applicable here) is that the main thing Sendo couldn't handle was their own code going back to MS to be incorporated into the OS, thus losing any competitive edge.
The new WinCE license demands such code returns. It shows they've learned their lessons about lawsuits, but maybe not about what their OEM customers actually want.
You dont have to be "leet" as you put it to install the equivilent in Linux but it helps to have actually been a user of linux beyond "I installed Suse today".
Sure, it helps. But, ideally, it shouldn't matter that much. Installing Linux is, in the grand scheme of things, a complex enough task that installing a simple bit of office software should be at least as easy.
So if the writer and Milt are the same person I guess you're right. Otherwise reread the article, again.
No, you reread the article:
As of this morning, I'm happy to report that I have finally accomplished the hard part. After nearly a week of endless frustrations, retries and reinstalls, I finally have OpenOffice, MySQL, and ODBC playing together nicely.
Note use of the first-person singular "I". That's not "Milt", that's "I".
Yes and the few click method generally leaves security holes wide enough to drive a bus through. That method is obviously working.
No, poor security design generally leaves security holes wide enough to drive a bus through. Fast, easy installers with secure defaults generally leave happy users with less hair torn out and less anger at ivory-tower developers who think you should already know a piece of software inside and out before being allowed to install it.
Since when did usability design equate to wide-open holes, apart from in the minds of those who think spending two hours hand-editing a makefile is a vital entry requirement for those who want to use basic office software?
1: The writer of the piece, talking about his install troubles, is a Linuxworld columnist. Now, this may not give them kernel-developer-like skills, but...
2:... how leet should Linux users be before they can install an MS Access equivalent? On Windows, you can do it with a few clicks. It sounds like you want the Linux equivalent to come with a 10-page exam.
I understand (and sympathise with) your points, but I think you're possibly being overly cynical in places:
There is a widespread tendency for experienced UK politicians to adopt a arrogant and patrician attitude (public opinion doesn't matter, we who rule know better than them, if they disagree with us it's only because they're stupid). As witness Bush & Blair's incomprehensible warmongering, against the wishes of a majority of both their electorates.
I agree that there's definitely a tendency to patronise the public. Right now STAND, FaxYourMP's single-issue sister site (say that one three times fast) is fighting the government's efforts to sneak an ID card scheme past us by masking it in anti-terror, anti-asylum rhetoric. However, it isn't working. As with STAND's previous campaign against RIPA extensions, it looks very much like the public outcry is going to force the government into a U-turn.
Our experience with MPs is that, despite a desperate lack of resources, many of them pay close attention to the messages from their constituents and reflect these opinions to government. Many users of STAND have had messages of agreement back from their MPs, whether Tory or Labour, and those MPs are going on to raise questions in the House.
Democratically-elected governments ignore public opinion at their peril. Apart from the current war fiasco, New Labour has been pandering to majority right-wing attitudes rather than sticking to their socialist origins. But don't forget that it's Blair and not Bush who lacks public support for the war.
The friend of the professional politician abd the greatest enemy of democracy must surely be the party political system, for allowing and even encouraging such abuses.
I don't think this is anything to do with party politics. In fact, Blair's current position is ignoring his party almost completely, which is why they're so close to revolt.
But did you know that neither the UK nor the US is actually a democracy? The US is a republic, which is different, and the UK is a parliamentary democracy, which is also different. We're never going to get power devolved to the individual until we manage to expel these witless shysters and install for ourselves some properly democratic government.
I have to confess ignorance over the difference between a republic and a "proper" democracy. However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
As the head of a non-profit group based in NY (can't say which, legal reasons), it is tremendously easy to provide a boilerplate to people concerned about issues rather than make them write an individual letter.
I have ranted elsewhere about this in this/. thread: see here.
The time and money resources that editors and politicians devote to reading communications is finite. I beg you to think about the individually-crafted letters written by authors without your publicity machines (organisational or mechanical) that you are blocking with your spam.
I'm a volunteer for a UK site that enables citizens to fax/email their Member of Parliament. We are a non-profit organisation that exists because (a) we think being able to contact one's elected representative through the net is important and (b) Parliament, being the technophobic fools that they are, still haven't got around to implementing a real equivalent.
Boilerplate form letters are a major threat to our service. Part of our FAQ pleads with users on the topic:
If you're a pressure group, please think about what you're doing. If you encourage all your members to write to the same MP, you will not show that MP the depth of support for your issue. You'll simply have used up a few sheets of tax-funded fax paper, and irritated an underpaid secretary or researcher. And if you encourage them all to send the same rote letter, MPs will just assume you have a nasty little man with a photocopier blasting them out from your office, and ignore you even more than they did before.
We consider the use of form letters to be an abuse of our service. Not only does it have the problems outlined above, but the effectiveness of our service depends on MPs' willingness to read messages sent from us - we are not an officially sanctioned communication method. If they consider us a source of pointless spam, then legitimate messages will be ignored too.
As a result, when we're made aware of form letters going through our system, we add code to block them.
Thus, I find it quite mystifying when I see party politicians espousing the benefits of boilerplate activism. Either they haven't thought about what'll happen when they start being spammed by supposedly-legitimate communications from their constituents, or they're ignoring their constituents anyway.
I've always wanted something tiny I could carry around that would give me decent QWERTY with a landscape screen capable of displaying VT100 readably (or, better, actual graphics) that could also connect to the net when I'm out and about. This looks like it (though expansion is limited to SD & CF - that's enough for WiFi and BlueTooth, though.)
If Microsoft is still shipping them, it has to either be because they think it's just not important enough to worry about, or because they don't have the resources to hire decent programmers. The rumors going around indicate that Microsoft has abundant resources.
Microsoft has abundant resources, abundant programmers, and abundant code being written. Keeping it all in check is hard. That is where the problem lies for any large software development organisation that needs to ship.
Note that I said tend to. I recall that Mozilla had a couple of nasty exploits that were known about for months before being properly fixed.
There's also the fact that "issuing a patch" can be an entirely different process for two different projects. OSS patches are usually:
a slight change to the source
some quick testing on a couple of machines
issue of a source patch file through the usual channels
updated tarballs and builds
whereas, in MS's case, it probably looks more like:
bug triage by project leads
reassignment of busy coders
slight change to the source
create binary patch for Windows Update along with standalone exe
send patch to QA lab for testing across hundreds of different setups
once back from the QA lab, start the process of fast-tracking the patch to WU
WU
Updated builds pushed to distribution
So yes, OSS is often faster, but you can see why. OSS is better able to handle a patch breaking something for some users, because it'll probably only be installed by power users who'll put up with it and know how to roll back, and the patch can be followed by a better patch. If a WU patch breaks something, even for only 10% of users, it's potentially disastrous because it's going out to everyone and 10% is still several million.
Of course when there is no shareholder value to increase, priorities change. For examples of how this system works, please observe GNU/Linux.
Or, more accurately, please observe GNU/Hurd which is a project several years old that is still nowhere near to a 1.0 release.
Microsoft releases buggy software. So does Redhat. So does Debian. In fact, anyone who releases any reasonably complex code (and an entire operating system with loads of supporting packages is pretty damn complex) and claims that their code is entirely bug-free is lying. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Redhat 6 had a remote root exploit in its default install. Even OpenBSD, that bastion of religious security auditing, discovered recently that it was distributing a package with a hole in it.
The simple reason is that you have to put up with releasing buggy software because otherwise you will never release. No QA system will be able to get rid of all the bugs. The best you can do is prioritise the bugs you have and try and get the most significant ones fixed in time for a reasonable shipping date.
In terms of how good/buggy MS's code is, I think it's fantastic in some areas and terrible in others. I think that they are relatively weak and often irresponsible when it comes to security but they are learning. They share the same problems as any massive software development organisation, which is that as you grow it gets harder to enforce regimented coding practices. God knows they really have no excuse for bounds-checking errors (given the number of implementations of safe arrays they have lying around) other than policing this stuff is very hard, especially when it comes to legacy code.
Besides, as I said earlier, OSS projects have security holes all the time. They just tend to be patched faster and have a smaller impact (due to smaller, more savvy audiences)
That's just bizarre. I've used Mozilla for a long time, and for the last year or so have had it only crash 4 or 5 times. And I tend to leave it running for days on end. *puzzled confusion*
Really, honestly, 1.1 was crashing on me something like once every couple of days. Every time a page asked a bit too much of it (usually involving Java or other plugins) it was BANG! Hello, Talkback! 1.2 also did it to me this morning. (Maybe it'll stop now that I've deleted my chrome.rdf, but I doubt it. I should probably rebuild my profile from scratch)
I depend on the mail client for my IMAP stuff, and while I have a few irritations with it (most notably the IMAP-specific one I filed: 136579) it's pretty good. Easily my favourite feature is the search bar, I use that the whole time. (Mainly because my inbox is 33,000+ mails big - it's a bit of a bugger over IMAP, but Moz handles it okay) The search window, on the other hand, sucks, though I've heard it's better in 1.2 - haven't tried it yet. Apparently 1.3 will have virtual (query-based) folders of some kind.
UK English spellcheck? Oooh! Where?
-- Yoz
Re:So if there's just been one bug fix...
on
Mozilla 1.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Thanks for the advice! I did a complete uninstall and reinstall, no luck. Then I moved my profile dir elsewhere, and then it worked fine.
So now, being faced with having to rebuild my profile from scratch, I wasn't entirely happy, so I took a different route: Backed up my profile and thought about what I could delete that would solve the problem fastest while still keeping the majority of my data and preferences.
Most obvious was registry.dat, but it's over a meg and I probably have lots of important stuff in there. So after some looking around, I killed chrome/chrome.rdf.
Bingo! Works fine now.
How odd.
Still not entirely happy about the experience, but, as you suggested, I've been trying nightlies so that may have introduced the cruft. (I've a sneaky feeling it may have been the Orbit skin, though, in which case that's a nasty bug)
-- Yoz
So if there's just been one bug fix...
on
Mozilla 1.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
... how come I now can't have both my mail and browser windows open at the same time? Worked fine in 1.2 final. Now the mozilla process won't even die when I close all the windows (well, all one of the windows, since now, in an obvious bid to Highlander fans, there can be only one).
Let me demonstrate where I am with Mozilla:
start of tether [----------------|--] end of tether
Don't tell me to bug it, I've already filed loads of bugs (very few of which have even been looked at, let alone fixed), and I haven't the time. 1.1 kept crashing on me, the 1.2 beta was worse, and you can forget about using the nightlies if you don't want to hit completely random regressions every other minute.
No, I know I'm not paying for it, and I know it's a community effort, whatever. Let me just have five minutes of rage. (Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)
Does the book cover the writing and packaging of a test suite? I'm currently writing a Perl module that I hope to submit to CPAN and writing decent tests is one of the parts that scares me most.
Take a look at Speex, an open source codec project aimed at speech compression. It uses Ogg for its file format (but don't confuse it with Vorbis). The quality's pretty good already.
I worked on the
web site for Douglas Adams's game, Starship Titanic. We had immense fun with it. Unfortunately, some of the most fun bits (such as the original brochure for trips on the ship, and the entire novel available in alphabetical order) are not currently up. (I hope we can put them back soon) There are still some fun bits there, such as the FAQ in the Support section.
However, there were two primary Eggs:
I'm not sure if this counts, but in the HTML pages installed with the game, I stuck a massive credits and thank-you list in an HTML comment
This should count, though: If you registered with us during the "Starlight Lines brochure" phase, the company sysadmin "accidentally" sent out an email to everyone on it with the URL of the Starlight Lines intranet. This was followed by an email saying he'd been demoted. However, not only is the secret intranet site still there, full of all kinds of hysterical reports and diaries, but buried deep down there's the Employee Forum. Despite the fact that you have to navigate through ten pages from the front of the site to get to it, it's had about 40,000 postings in the past three years, which still amazes me.
Slashdot Mirror
... is that MS has realised that, without opening up in this way, WinCE doesn't have a hope in hell of making it onto phones.
Case in point: Sendo, who were the main UK manufacturer of WinCE-based phones, eventually gave up and switched to Symbian. One of the reasons behind the move was the release version of Stinger (WinCE for phones) getting later and later and playing havoc with their schedules.
It's worth noting, though, that there's still a lot of ugliness left over with the Sendo case, with suits and counter-suits going back and forth. Andrew Orlowski's piece in The Register contains many fascinating bits, but most interesting (and most applicable here) is that the main thing Sendo couldn't handle was their own code going back to MS to be incorporated into the OS, thus losing any competitive edge.
The new WinCE license demands such code returns. It shows they've learned their lessons about lawsuits, but maybe not about what their OEM customers actually want.
-- YozWow, I don't know which warez sites you've been visiting, but warez'ed games tend to include all the game data too.
(And I'm not even going to start on the assumption that all games get GPLed after five years)
-- Yoz
Sure, it helps. But, ideally, it shouldn't matter that much. Installing Linux is, in the grand scheme of things, a complex enough task that installing a simple bit of office software should be at least as easy.
So if the writer and Milt are the same person I guess you're right. Otherwise reread the article, again.
No, you reread the article:
Note use of the first-person singular "I". That's not "Milt", that's "I".
-- Yoz
Yes and the few click method generally leaves security holes wide enough to drive a bus through. That method is obviously working.
No, poor security design generally leaves security holes wide enough to drive a bus through. Fast, easy installers with secure defaults generally leave happy users with less hair torn out and less anger at ivory-tower developers who think you should already know a piece of software inside and out before being allowed to install it.
Since when did usability design equate to wide-open holes, apart from in the minds of those who think spending two hours hand-editing a makefile is a vital entry requirement for those who want to use basic office software?
-- Yoz
Two points:
... how leet should Linux users be before they can install an MS Access equivalent? On Windows, you can do it with a few clicks. It sounds like you want the Linux equivalent to come with a 10-page exam.
1: The writer of the piece, talking about his install troubles, is a Linuxworld columnist. Now, this may not give them kernel-developer-like skills, but...
2:
-- Yoz
I understand (and sympathise with) your points, but I think you're possibly being overly cynical in places:
There is a widespread tendency for experienced UK politicians to adopt a arrogant and patrician attitude (public opinion doesn't matter, we who rule know better than them, if they disagree with us it's only because they're stupid). As witness Bush & Blair's incomprehensible warmongering, against the wishes of a majority of both their electorates.
I agree that there's definitely a tendency to patronise the public. Right now STAND, FaxYourMP's single-issue sister site (say that one three times fast) is fighting the government's efforts to sneak an ID card scheme past us by masking it in anti-terror, anti-asylum rhetoric. However, it isn't working. As with STAND's previous campaign against RIPA extensions, it looks very much like the public outcry is going to force the government into a U-turn.
Our experience with MPs is that, despite a desperate lack of resources, many of them pay close attention to the messages from their constituents and reflect these opinions to government. Many users of STAND have had messages of agreement back from their MPs, whether Tory or Labour, and those MPs are going on to raise questions in the House.
Democratically-elected governments ignore public opinion at their peril. Apart from the current war fiasco, New Labour has been pandering to majority right-wing attitudes rather than sticking to their socialist origins. But don't forget that it's Blair and not Bush who lacks public support for the war.
The friend of the professional politician abd the greatest enemy of democracy must surely be the party political system, for allowing and even encouraging such abuses.
I don't think this is anything to do with party politics. In fact, Blair's current position is ignoring his party almost completely, which is why they're so close to revolt.
But did you know that neither the UK nor the US is actually a democracy? The US is a republic, which is different, and the UK is a parliamentary democracy, which is also different. We're never going to get power devolved to the individual until we manage to expel these witless shysters and install for ourselves some properly democratic government.
I have to confess ignorance over the difference between a republic and a "proper" democracy. However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
-- Yoz
As the head of a non-profit group based in NY (can't say which, legal reasons), it is tremendously easy to provide a boilerplate to people concerned about issues rather than make them write an individual letter.
/. thread: see here.
As a volunteer for a non-profit site in the UK that does its best to encourage democracy, I can say that form (boilerplate) letters are a major threat to the effectiveness of our service and thus we block them whenever possible.
I have ranted elsewhere about this in this
The time and money resources that editors and politicians devote to reading communications is finite. I beg you to think about the individually-crafted letters written by authors without your publicity machines (organisational or mechanical) that you are blocking with your spam.
-- Yoz
I'm a volunteer for a UK site that enables citizens to fax/email their Member of Parliament. We are a non-profit organisation that exists because (a) we think being able to contact one's elected representative through the net is important and (b) Parliament, being the technophobic fools that they are, still haven't got around to implementing a real equivalent.
Boilerplate form letters are a major threat to our service. Part of our FAQ pleads with users on the topic:
If you're a pressure group, please think about what you're doing. If you encourage all your members to write to the same MP, you will not show that MP the depth of support for your issue. You'll simply have used up a few sheets of tax-funded fax paper, and irritated an underpaid secretary or researcher. And if you encourage them all to send the same rote letter, MPs will just assume you have a nasty little man with a photocopier blasting them out from your office, and ignore you even more than they did before.
We consider the use of form letters to be an abuse of our service. Not only does it have the problems outlined above, but the effectiveness of our service depends on MPs' willingness to read messages sent from us - we are not an officially sanctioned communication method. If they consider us a source of pointless spam, then legitimate messages will be ignored too.
As a result, when we're made aware of form letters going through our system, we add code to block them.
Thus, I find it quite mystifying when I see party politicians espousing the benefits of boilerplate activism. Either they haven't thought about what'll happen when they start being spammed by supposedly-legitimate communications from their constituents, or they're ignoring their constituents anyway.
-- Yoz
One word: WANT.
... but Dynamism have done their own English port already. (Any stories/opinions of Dynamism?)
Here's the press release and spec sheet.
It's coming to the US...
Keyboard doesn't look great (but at least it's better than the original tiny Zaurus one)
I've always wanted something tiny I could carry around that would give me decent QWERTY with a landscape screen capable of displaying VT100 readably (or, better, actual graphics) that could also connect to the net when I'm out and about. This looks like it (though expansion is limited to SD & CF - that's enough for WiFi and BlueTooth, though.)
-- Yoz
If Microsoft is still shipping them, it has to either be because they think it's just not important enough to worry about, or because they don't have the resources to hire decent programmers. The rumors going around indicate that Microsoft has abundant resources.
Microsoft has abundant resources, abundant programmers, and abundant code being written. Keeping it all in check is hard. That is where the problem lies for any large software development organisation that needs to ship.
Note that I said tend to. I recall that Mozilla had a couple of nasty exploits that were known about for months before being properly fixed.
There's also the fact that "issuing a patch" can be an entirely different process for two different projects. OSS patches are usually:
whereas, in MS's case, it probably looks more like:
So yes, OSS is often faster, but you can see why. OSS is better able to handle a patch breaking something for some users, because it'll probably only be installed by power users who'll put up with it and know how to roll back, and the patch can be followed by a better patch. If a WU patch breaks something, even for only 10% of users, it's potentially disastrous because it's going out to everyone and 10% is still several million.
Of course when there is no shareholder value to increase, priorities change. For examples of how this system works, please observe GNU/Linux.
Or, more accurately, please observe GNU/Hurd which is a project several years old that is still nowhere near to a 1.0 release.
Microsoft releases buggy software. So does Redhat. So does Debian. In fact, anyone who releases any reasonably complex code (and an entire operating system with loads of supporting packages is pretty damn complex) and claims that their code is entirely bug-free is lying. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Redhat 6 had a remote root exploit in its default install. Even OpenBSD, that bastion of religious security auditing, discovered recently that it was distributing a package with a hole in it.
The simple reason is that you have to put up with releasing buggy software because otherwise you will never release. No QA system will be able to get rid of all the bugs. The best you can do is prioritise the bugs you have and try and get the most significant ones fixed in time for a reasonable shipping date.
In terms of how good/buggy MS's code is, I think it's fantastic in some areas and terrible in others. I think that they are relatively weak and often irresponsible when it comes to security but they are learning. They share the same problems as any massive software development organisation, which is that as you grow it gets harder to enforce regimented coding practices. God knows they really have no excuse for bounds-checking errors (given the number of implementations of safe arrays they have lying around) other than policing this stuff is very hard, especially when it comes to legacy code.
Besides, as I said earlier, OSS projects have security holes all the time. They just tend to be patched faster and have a smaller impact (due to smaller, more savvy audiences)
-- Yoz
... turns out to be bug 144027.
Cheers to the Mozilla bugspotters for pointing me in the right direction!
start of tether [--|-------------] end of tether
-- Yoz
That's just bizarre. I've used Mozilla for a long time, and for the last year or so have had it only crash 4 or 5 times. And I tend to leave it running for days on end. *puzzled confusion*
Really, honestly, 1.1 was crashing on me something like once every couple of days. Every time a page asked a bit too much of it (usually involving Java or other plugins) it was BANG! Hello, Talkback! 1.2 also did it to me this morning. (Maybe it'll stop now that I've deleted my chrome.rdf, but I doubt it. I should probably rebuild my profile from scratch)
-- Yoz
I depend on the mail client for my IMAP stuff, and while I have a few irritations with it (most notably the IMAP-specific one I filed: 136579) it's pretty good. Easily my favourite feature is the search bar, I use that the whole time. (Mainly because my inbox is 33,000+ mails big - it's a bit of a bugger over IMAP, but Moz handles it okay) The search window, on the other hand, sucks, though I've heard it's better in 1.2 - haven't tried it yet. Apparently 1.3 will have virtual (query-based) folders of some kind.
UK English spellcheck? Oooh! Where?
-- Yoz
Thanks for the advice! I did a complete uninstall and reinstall, no luck. Then I moved my profile dir elsewhere, and then it worked fine.
So now, being faced with having to rebuild my profile from scratch, I wasn't entirely happy, so I took a different route: Backed up my profile and thought about what I could delete that would solve the problem fastest while still keeping the majority of my data and preferences.
Most obvious was registry.dat, but it's over a meg and I probably have lots of important stuff in there. So after some looking around, I killed chrome/chrome.rdf.
Bingo! Works fine now.
How odd.
Still not entirely happy about the experience, but, as you suggested, I've been trying nightlies so that may have introduced the cruft. (I've a sneaky feeling it may have been the Orbit skin, though, in which case that's a nasty bug)
-- Yoz
... how come I now can't have both my mail and browser windows open at the same time? Worked fine in 1.2 final. Now the mozilla process won't even die when I close all the windows (well, all one of the windows, since now, in an obvious bid to Highlander fans, there can be only one).
Let me demonstrate where I am with Mozilla:
start of tether [----------------|--] end of tether
Don't tell me to bug it, I've already filed loads of bugs (very few of which have even been looked at, let alone fixed), and I haven't the time. 1.1 kept crashing on me, the 1.2 beta was worse, and you can forget about using the nightlies if you don't want to hit completely random regressions every other minute.
No, I know I'm not paying for it, and I know it's a community effort, whatever. Let me just have five minutes of rage. (Actually, let me have the original 1.2 final installer back, because at least that one seemed to work, and minor DHTML bugs are something I'll put up with if they let me read the web and my mail at the same time)
-- Yoz
At last, a straight answer from Limewire people about spyware.
Does the book cover the writing and packaging of a test suite? I'm currently writing a Perl module that I hope to submit to CPAN and writing decent tests is one of the parts that scares me most.
-- Yoz
It was Reitman. Check Neil Gaiman's "Don't Panic"
-- Yoz
Yes. In the two years leading up to his death he wrote a couple of new drafts, and already had a production company and Jay Roach on board.
-- Yoz
It's not the final book. Whoever contributed this story has it wrong.
The movie is a retelling of the first book, but likely with some major changes.
-- Yoz, who worked at The Digital Village while DNA was working on the drafts
Take a look at Speex, an open source codec project aimed at speech compression. It uses Ogg for its file format (but don't confuse it with Vorbis). The quality's pretty good already.
I worked on the web site for Douglas Adams's game, Starship Titanic. We had immense fun with it. Unfortunately, some of the most fun bits (such as the original brochure for trips on the ship, and the entire novel available in alphabetical order) are not currently up. (I hope we can put them back soon) There are still some fun bits there, such as the FAQ in the Support section.
However, there were two primary Eggs:The project homepage, with papers and downloads, is here.
You can read a piece about the 15-year-old kid behind it here.