xine is also protesting. patents are really bad for multimedia players - essientially xiph's ogg/theora/vorbis is the only really free multimedia format available. luckily they're doing a great job, however the world out there is using other, patented formats like mpeg most of the time.
would be interesting to see what xine could do on this platform. maybe any xbox could be turned into a full-featured dvd player (including menu support) that way?
probably this doesn't apply in your case but i think it is a good idea to double-check wheter you and your departement are really that important for the company or if the company just wants you to think you are important to make you work even harder (some form of motivation).
i used to work for a small software company and me and a few of my coworkers (basically half of the development departement) decided that it was time to move on. it was really hard to quit as the boss made promises and tried to persuade each one of us to stay telling us how important we were. well, eventually we all quit and quickly found new jobs and afaik all of us are happy with the new jobs - and guess what? the old company still exists and is better than ever, even during this economic crisis.
so, at least from my point of view the bottom line here is: if you feel it is time to move on, move on. this is your life and you have to take care of it, not your company. and it is not that unlikely that both sides will profit from that.
The problem with these distributed files systems seems to be that they're either pretty old and lacking features like disconnected operation (AFS) or seem to be unstable or, even worse, unmaintained (Intermezzo, Coda).
For many simple purposes backups can be done quite nicely using rsync or something like bacular. For laptop/notebook support unison is definitely worth a look. It syncs directories like rsync does, but in both directions. Works nicely for me.
of course xine and all media players based on this nice multimedia engine (totem, gxine, kde's arts,...) play back windows media as well, mms/mmsh/http streaming included.
btw the technology behind this comes from ffmpeg and avifile/wine.
of course xine and all media players based on this nice multimedia engine (totem, gxine, kde's arts,...) play back windows media as well, mms/mmsh/http streaming included.
btw the technology behind this comes from ffmpeg and avifile/wine.
For GNU/Linux there is a solution now:
xine does pnm and rtsp real streaming. however, most codecs are available on x86 only. See the xine faq for details.
I wonder how this will be affected if their drm crap really catches on among content providers:-/
While i fully agree with you in that principles and theory are important, practice and looking into the details of a project or a technology is important as well.
From that standpoint taking a course in XML can make sense - especially if it is a practice course where you can learn how to apply the technology to real-world problems and deal with all the little details that make up the real world.
While udp certainly is the right choice for transmitting the actual audio data (low latency etc.) this alone doesn't make a complete telephony protocol.
One standard used often today for call management (listen for incoming calls, register possible recipients etc.) is H323, the one netmeeting and gnomemeeting, among many others, use. Unfortunately H323 does a very bad job when it comes to transmitting data through firewalls, nat-gateways or proxies (typical environment in many companies today) since it contains parts which choose arbitrary high ports for connection. You can work around this by installing e.g. OpenH323 Proxy on your gateway, but usually you'll need your systems administrator to do that - and it is pretty likely that he/she will refuse to do that for security reasons or simply because it can become quite tricky to set up a stable working H323 proxy/gateway (lots of configuration work).
BTW i've heard that some firewall constructors have basically given up on that matter and simply open all ports when they detect some client intends to do netmeeting.
looks like this one is not necessarily a good idea to run on a university workstation cluster...
1.4 Security Considerations
distcc should only be used on networks where all machines and all users are trusted.
The distcc daemon, distccd, allows other machines on the network to run arbitrary commands on the volunteer machine. Anyone that can make a connection to the volunteer machine can run essentially any command as the user running distccd.
distcc is suitable for use on a small to medium network of friendly developers. It's certainly not suitable for use on a machine connected to the Internet or a large (e.g. university campus) network without firewalling in place.
inetd or tcpwrappers can be used to impose access control rules, but this should be done with an eye to the possibility of address spoofing.
In summary, the security level is similar to that of old-style network protocols like X11-over-TCP, NFS or RSH.
Maybe in the future wine(X) can serve as a porting platform?
For companies who don't have the resources
to come up with a true gnu/linux port of their
software (yet) this could be a possibility.
They'd simply test their games/applications
against wine and try to
avoid windows api calls that do not work properly
in wine(x) and thus have a gnu/linux port without much effort.
Of course, a native port and free software is much better, but anyway this could also lead to more software running on the gnu platform.
There are in fact already some existing examples for this, e.g. xilinx is offering their
eda software for the gnu/linux platform
using wine and i've heard of a german company producing tax software for gnu/linux which is also
wine-based.
isn't drm one of the first steps towards giving up control over the computer you own?
your own computer keeping you from accessing data on your disc - a pretty pervert indea, I think.
patents affect source-only software distribution?
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 1
well, mpeg-4 _is_ open source, at least the reference implementation is (and this is what for example opendivx is based upon).
I wonder how these patents will affect other open-source implementations - e.g. lame says that as long as you provide only source code (and no pre-compiled binaries) you're not affected by fraunhofer's (mp3-)patents
is this really just a 4 bytes heap overflow or can the "semantics" of this channel struct also be exploited, e.g. to take over someone else's tcp connection?
Slashdot Mirror
xine is also protesting. patents are really bad for multimedia players - essientially xiph's ogg/theora/vorbis is the only really free multimedia format available. luckily they're doing a great job, however the world out there is using other, patented formats like mpeg most of the time.
would be interesting to see what xine could do on this platform. maybe any xbox could be turned into a full-featured dvd player (including menu support) that way?
probably this doesn't apply in your case but i think it is a good idea to double-check wheter you and your departement are really that important for the company or if the company just wants you to think you are important to make you work even harder (some form of motivation).
i used to work for a small software company and me and a few of my coworkers (basically half of the development departement) decided that it was time to move on. it was really hard to quit as the boss made promises and tried to persuade each one of us to stay telling us how important we were. well, eventually we all quit and quickly found new jobs and afaik all of us are happy with the new jobs - and guess what? the old company still exists and is better than ever, even during this economic crisis.
so, at least from my point of view the bottom line here is: if you feel it is time to move on, move on. this is your life and you have to take care of it, not your company. and it is not that unlikely that both sides will profit from that.
The problem with these distributed files systems seems to be that they're either pretty old and lacking features like disconnected operation (AFS) or seem to be unstable or, even worse, unmaintained (Intermezzo, Coda).
For many simple purposes backups can be done quite nicely using rsync or something like bacular. For laptop/notebook support unison is definitely worth a look. It syncs directories like rsync does, but in both directions. Works nicely for me.
of course xine and all media players based on this nice multimedia engine (totem, gxine, kde's arts,...) play back windows media as well, mms/mmsh/http streaming included.
btw the technology behind this comes from ffmpeg and avifile/wine.
of course xine and all media players based on this nice multimedia engine (totem, gxine, kde's arts,...) play back windows media as well, mms/mmsh/http streaming included.
btw the technology behind this comes from ffmpeg and avifile/wine.
For GNU/Linux there is a solution now: xine does pnm and rtsp real streaming. however, most codecs are available on x86 only. See the xine faq for details.
I wonder how this will be affected if their drm crap really catches on among content providers :-/
While i fully agree with you in that principles and theory are important, practice and looking into the details of a project or a technology is important as well.
From that standpoint taking a course in XML can make sense - especially if it is a practice course where you can learn how to apply the technology to real-world problems and deal with all the little details that make up the real world.
well, I guess this will add a few more entries to the mpeg-4 patentlist.
Let's just hope some day theora will be at least as good.
While udp certainly is the right choice for transmitting the actual audio data (low latency etc.) this alone doesn't make a complete telephony protocol.
One standard used often today for call management (listen for incoming calls, register possible recipients etc.) is H323, the one netmeeting and gnomemeeting, among many others, use. Unfortunately H323 does a very bad job when it comes to transmitting data through firewalls, nat-gateways or proxies (typical environment in many companies today) since it contains parts which choose arbitrary high ports for connection. You can work around this by installing e.g. OpenH323 Proxy on your gateway, but usually you'll need your systems administrator to do that - and it is pretty likely that he/she will refuse to do that for security reasons or simply because it can become quite tricky to set up a stable working H323 proxy/gateway (lots of configuration work).
BTW i've heard that some firewall constructors have basically given up on that matter and simply open all ports when they detect some client intends to do netmeeting.
looks like this one is not necessarily a good idea to run on a university workstation cluster...
1.4 Security Considerations
distcc should only be used on networks where all machines and all users are trusted.
The distcc daemon, distccd, allows other machines on the network to run arbitrary commands on the volunteer machine. Anyone that can make a connection to the volunteer machine can run essentially any command as the user running distccd.
distcc is suitable for use on a small to medium network of friendly developers. It's certainly not suitable for use on a machine connected to the Internet or a large (e.g. university campus) network without firewalling in place.
inetd or tcpwrappers can be used to impose access control rules, but this should be done with an eye to the possibility of address spoofing.
In summary, the security level is similar to that of old-style network protocols like X11-over-TCP, NFS or RSH.
anyone know of any retailer selling these bundled with transparent case mods ?!
Maybe in the future wine(X) can serve as a porting platform?
For companies who don't have the resources to come up with a true gnu/linux port of their software (yet) this could be a possibility. They'd simply test their games/applications against wine and try to avoid windows api calls that do not work properly in wine(x) and thus have a gnu/linux port without much effort.
Of course, a native port and free software is much better, but anyway this could also lead to more software running on the gnu platform.
There are in fact already some existing examples for this, e.g. xilinx is offering their eda software for the gnu/linux platform using wine and i've heard of a german company producing tax software for gnu/linux which is also wine-based.
xine mms://195.158.250.186/EboneLive
make sure you have the necessary win32codecs installed, though.
From the xine hacker's guide:
when in doubt, use lower case. BTW: This thing is called xine, never Xine.
cartoon network was one of the channels I really started to miss when they got encrypted here in europe :-(
isn't drm one of the first steps towards giving up control over the computer you own? your own computer keeping you from accessing data on your disc - a pretty pervert indea, I think.
well, mpeg-4 _is_ open source, at least the reference implementation is (and this is what for example opendivx is based upon). I wonder how these patents will affect other open-source implementations - e.g. lame says that as long as you provide only source code (and no pre-compiled binaries) you're not affected by fraunhofer's (mp3-)patents
is this really just a 4 bytes heap overflow or can the "semantics" of this channel struct also be exploited, e.g. to take over someone else's tcp connection?