"Please go away and rethink your business model and come back when you are ready to release something of value."
They just signed contracts with all the major Mobile phone manufacturers. Obviously they are about to go bust, right?
"Release your codecs as a GPL".
They can't. They don't belong to them. They are licensed from others. FYI the open source Helix server/encoder/player includes a Vorbis codec. My guess is that Speex and Theora can also be incorporated soon.
If it turns out SCO don't own any copyright or patents related to the software they want people to license, doesn't that make their licensing scheme a fraudulent scam?
If that turns out to be the case wouldn't they find themselves in a great deal of legal trouble?
I really don't want this to be but it looks like WMA format is pervading and infesting MP3 players to an alarming extent.
I just bought an I-bead which, like many MP3 players in that price range, features WMA format.
Since WMA format is built into MS Media Player along with the facility to rip CDs it is obvious that folks will soon start using it.
Even if OGG does make it into the portable players it won't make it into MS Media Player so most people will never encode anything into it. Why should they? They have MP3 and WMA on tap.
Try this... Run a (good) local GUI application. How does it feel? How responsive is it? How intuititve is it? How fast is it?
OK, now run a web application on your local machine (localhost). Access it with the browser and compare the experience with the GUI app.
Which do you prefer?
Perhaps the next inovation as internet bandwidth and machine power increases will be something like VNC, although I am sure there are more efficient ways for remote access to a machine!
DRM is the world's only
non-proprietary, digital system for short-wave, medium-wave/AM and long-wave with the ability to use existing frequencies and bandwidth across the globe.
Well thank God it's not based on WM9. Unfortunately some DAB radio solution manufactures are looking into WM9 instead of MP1 layer II. I can only conclude they are mad and want their company (and the world) to be ruined like Sendo.
"Just a matter of time before they pick on the wrong people."
Unless they avoid law students or friends of law students then they just have picked on the wrong people!
Students are tomorrow's lawers, judges and polititions. Hopefully they will outlaw and dispand the RIAA since the RIAA are clearly a bullying menace to society.
Well, that's a very good desciption of how electostatic speakers work but that is absolutely nothing like how NXT speakers work. Sorry.
I actually set up some NXT panel ceiling speakers and can testify this to be the case. Neat speakers they were too, the ceiling tile effectively *is* the loudspeaker.
NXT speakers work more like a piano sounding board. The flat panel is exited at one place (or maybe two) and the board vibrates. Obviously, that is a *very* simple explanation of what happens, no doubt there is some heavy-duty maths involved in getting it to work well etc.
As for the "sweet spot", well maybe the marketing guy was exagerating a tad but NXT speakers are a lot different to electrostatics in this respect also. They definitely do not have a miniscule sweet spot like electrostatics. They have a very diffuse directional output. They don't even follow the inverse square law as moving coil speakers do. I'm not sure what law they *do* follow, IIRC it is some sort of logarithmic law. Anyway, the upshot is that the sound decays less with distance than you would normally expect it to.
Clark's blunt staements on the to the need to avoid erosion of privacy rights is rumored to have rubbed the administration the wrong way, prompting his exit.
...so his replacement will readily errode everyone's privacy rights...
Anyone know how Schmitt will view the relative security of closed versus open source?"
...he'll view closed source as more secure and do everything he can to erradicate the open source menace, naturally.
Nothing says "Security" better to me than "Former Microsoft Security Chief".
Yes it would appear a few of us missed the fact that the vouchers could be used for any computer related product. However, there is a potential weasle-clause in there.
"Two-thirds of any unclaimed settlement proceeds will be donated to California's most needy public schools in the form of Microsoft educational and productivity software..."
Let's hope everyone who is entitled to really does make their claim. Any one know how likely that is?
Otherwise, the Monopoly will simply extend itself into the need public schools "in the form of Microsoft educational and productivity software", and we don't want that now, do we?
OK that 1952 experiment was a disaster in terms of the damage it caused, but hey! It worked!
Why go to all the trouble of making this massive, errr, "thing" to scoop up sea water when we know that just sprinkling the clouds with silver-iodide and salt (or whatever it was in 1952) works effectively.
Is this a case of "not invented here" (Scotland) or something?
I dispair when a simple scientific experiment, which must be quite easy to repeat, isn't followed up. Why not just use a bit less sprinkle next time, you know, find the balance?
However much MS say their software "builds" economies the fact is that for anyone outside the US the software is an import i.e. money leaves the country to buy it. Not good. It is also rumoured to contain back doors making it unsuitable unless you like being spied upon. Most don't.
Another possibility is that threatening to use open source encourages MS to make huge donations and be very nice to you. If bribary is normal in your country then there is also the possibility of greatly improving your standard of living by being a decision maker in a government or educational establishment. MS can then buy out all your countries government bodies and universities to make absolutely sure open source will never ever see the light of day in any place that matters.
I would hope that the Japanese government is considering open source for the first reasons in the first paragraph more than the second.
"The watermarks must be present for the player to recognize the disc and play the content. A bootleg DVD-Audio without the watermark would fail to play".
So if I record my own music and want to make a high quality disk out of it the players will act as if I don't own the copyright. This seems like the system is designed to lock out unauthorized musicians. I bet they are hoping this will superceed ordinary compact disks so that indie music will be crushed forever.
When Mandrake set up hurdles for reporting bugs my first though was, "well, if they don't want to hear about them, they ain't gonna find them, they ain't gonna fix them!".
This was an effort to cut down on people reporting non-bugs and taking up valuable resorces, apparently.
It took me a lot of searching throught their website to find the bugzilla and even more effort to be granted posting rights.
There are about 400 bugs in the bugzilla last I checked. I would have expected thousands for an operation this size. Mozilla has thousands because they actually welcome bug reports. If I report one it is usually checked within a few days as real/imaginary/dup etc. and most important, Mozilla is rock solid.
Perhaps spending valuable resources sifting through thousands of bugs for just a few real ones is actually quite a useful part of quality control.
Is it really true that the patent office gets paid only for granting patents and not denying them, or is this the case in Europe as well as the US?
If so, then what incentive does the patent office have to be impartial?
If you agree the system is skewed in favour of granting patents then do you have any ideas on how to make the patent system fair to both those seeking patents and also to those who may be challenged from a patent holder?
I recently had to design a forward converter power supply at work. We dismantled a PC CPU at to get some ideas and see how they work.
They had basically ignored many of the world-wide saftety requirements that apply to power supplies.
1) There space between the live and secondary has to be >6mm (or is it 10mm?). This had a PCB track running through it.
2) The transformers should have either the primary or secondary triple insulated. Neither was.
There were other issues as well. We had to ask the question, "how the *** did they get away with that?!".
In a humid climate this power supply may have had leakage between the live and secondary side. The voltages involved peak at around 1KV. As long as the unit was earthed that probably wouldn't kill anyone but it might fry some of the computer. If the unit didn't happen to be earthed....
It works great but can only available as source code for patent reasons. There is a live streamer (live streamers are rare compared to recording streamers) and a client that will compile in Linux and Windows. It can use Darwin as the server for unicast streams.
The project is quite active (IMHO) but take-up of MPEG4 has cooled somewhat since the braindead streaming tax was announced. However, Quicktime 8 preview is available and now there is an MPEG4 client everyone can now download, why not just encode and stream for outside the US or something?
E-Smith is an excellent little distro but if you consider every service is runs as a security risk then it simply has more of them than a stand alone firewall.
Also, I know Smoothwall has built in support for dyndns, no-ip etc. also. I would think Ipsec does too.
Having seen a few forks in my time (especially at meal times), I can say that the effect of a GPL fork isn't half as bad as the closed-source forks we've seen.
For a start, diverging GPL projects can always converge later, they can shamelessly copy each other's code. It's more like parallel processing than a dead end splinter.
Slashdot Mirror
"Please go away and rethink your business model and come back when you are ready to release something of value."
They just signed contracts with all the major Mobile phone manufacturers. Obviously they are about to go bust, right?
"Release your codecs as a GPL".
They can't. They don't belong to them. They are licensed from others. FYI the open source Helix server/encoder/player includes a Vorbis codec. My guess is that Speex and Theora can also be incorporated soon.
If it turns out SCO don't own any copyright or patents related to the software they want people to license, doesn't that make their licensing scheme a fraudulent scam?
If that turns out to be the case wouldn't they find themselves in a great deal of legal trouble?
I really don't want this to be but it looks like WMA format is pervading and infesting MP3 players to an alarming extent.
:-(
I just bought an I-bead which, like many MP3 players in that price range, features WMA format.
Since WMA format is built into MS Media Player along with the facility to rip CDs it is obvious that folks will soon start using it.
Even if OGG does make it into the portable players it won't make it into MS Media Player so most people will never encode anything into it. Why should they? They have MP3 and WMA on tap.
Sad but true
Try this...
Run a (good) local GUI application. How does it feel? How responsive is it? How intuititve is it? How fast is it?
OK, now run a web application on your local machine (localhost). Access it with the browser and compare the experience with the GUI app.
Which do you prefer?
Perhaps the next inovation as internet bandwidth and machine power increases will be something like VNC, although I am sure there are more efficient ways for remote access to a machine!
Well thank God it's not based on WM9. Unfortunately some DAB radio solution manufactures are looking into WM9 instead of MP1 layer II. I can only conclude they are mad and want their company (and the world) to be ruined like Sendo.
"Just a matter of time before they pick on the wrong people."
Unless they avoid law students or friends of law students then they just have picked on the wrong people!
Students are tomorrow's lawers, judges and polititions. Hopefully they will outlaw and dispand the RIAA since the RIAA are clearly a bullying menace to society.
I don't think I would want to buy MS even if I had the $10^23 billon required to do it.
Maybe they have some assets that would interest Redhat or Sun, perhaps.
Or have I misunderstood the question?
Very encouraging to hear Theora is making progress but will there be any server to stream it with?
How long has Icecast2 with OGG support been waiting for official release? And that's only an audio codec!
Well, that's a very good desciption of how electostatic speakers work but that is absolutely nothing like how NXT speakers work. Sorry.
I actually set up some NXT panel ceiling speakers and can testify this to be the case. Neat speakers they were too, the ceiling tile effectively *is* the loudspeaker.
NXT speakers work more like a piano sounding board. The flat panel is exited at one place (or maybe two) and the board vibrates. Obviously, that is a *very* simple explanation of what happens, no doubt there is some heavy-duty maths involved in getting it to work well etc.
As for the "sweet spot", well maybe the marketing guy was exagerating a tad but NXT speakers are a lot different to electrostatics in this respect also. They definitely do not have a miniscule sweet spot like electrostatics. They have a very diffuse directional output. They don't even follow the inverse square law as moving coil speakers do. I'm not sure what law they *do* follow, IIRC it is some sort of logarithmic law. Anyway, the upshot is that the sound decays less with distance than you would normally expect it to.
Boxed sets are an old-hat way of showing support.
I join Mandrake Club and download ISOs.
I get MDK9.1 the day it comes out. Mandrake get finances.
Welcome to the 21st century!!!
Does this mean it will be closed source, proprietry and all that jazz? I hope not.
Yes it would appear a few of us missed the fact that the vouchers could be used for any computer related product. However, there is a potential weasle-clause in there.
"Two-thirds of any unclaimed settlement proceeds will be donated to California's most needy public schools in the form of Microsoft educational and productivity software..."
Let's hope everyone who is entitled to really does make their claim. Any one know how likely that is?
Otherwise, the Monopoly will simply extend itself into the need public schools "in the form of Microsoft educational and productivity software", and we don't want that now, do we?
OK that 1952 experiment was a disaster in terms of the damage it caused, but hey! It worked!
Why go to all the trouble of making this massive, errr, "thing" to scoop up sea water when we know that just sprinkling the clouds with silver-iodide and salt (or whatever it was in 1952) works effectively.
Is this a case of "not invented here" (Scotland) or something?
I dispair when a simple scientific experiment, which must be quite easy to repeat, isn't followed up. Why not just use a bit less sprinkle next time, you know, find the balance?
However much MS say their software "builds" economies the fact is that for anyone outside the US the software is an import i.e. money leaves the country to buy it. Not good. It is also rumoured to contain back doors making it unsuitable unless you like being spied upon. Most don't.
Another possibility is that threatening to use open source encourages MS to make huge donations and be very nice to you. If bribary is normal in your country then there is also the possibility of greatly improving your standard of living by being a decision maker in a government or educational establishment. MS can then buy out all your countries government bodies and universities to make absolutely sure open source will never ever see the light of day in any place that matters.
I would hope that the Japanese government is considering open source for the first reasons in the first paragraph more than the second.
You may find that the digitial output is limited to 16bits and 48HKz even when you are playing a 24bit 96KHz disk.
"The watermarks must be present for the player to recognize the disc and play the content. A bootleg DVD-Audio without the watermark would fail to play". So if I record my own music and want to make a high quality disk out of it the players will act as if I don't own the copyright. This seems like the system is designed to lock out unauthorized musicians. I bet they are hoping this will superceed ordinary compact disks so that indie music will be crushed forever.
When Mandrake set up hurdles for reporting bugs my first though was, "well, if they don't want to hear about them, they ain't gonna find them, they ain't gonna fix them!".
This was an effort to cut down on people reporting non-bugs and taking up valuable resorces, apparently.
It took me a lot of searching throught their website to find the bugzilla and even more effort to be granted posting rights.
There are about 400 bugs in the bugzilla last I checked. I would have expected thousands for an operation this size. Mozilla has thousands because they actually welcome bug reports. If I report one it is usually checked within a few days as real/imaginary/dup etc. and most important, Mozilla is rock solid.
Perhaps spending valuable resources sifting through thousands of bugs for just a few real ones is actually quite a useful part of quality control.
Is it really true that the patent office gets paid only for granting patents and not denying them, or is this the case in Europe as well as the US?
If so, then what incentive does the patent office have to be impartial?
If you agree the system is skewed in favour of granting patents then do you have any ideas on how to make the patent system fair to both those seeking patents and also to those who may be challenged from a patent holder?
Regards,
I recently had to design a forward converter power supply at work. We dismantled a PC CPU at to get some ideas and see how they work.
They had basically ignored many of the world-wide saftety requirements that apply to power supplies.
1) There space between the live and secondary has to be >6mm (or is it 10mm?). This had a PCB track running through it.
2) The transformers should have either the primary or secondary triple insulated. Neither was.
There were other issues as well. We had to ask the question, "how the *** did they get away with that?!".
In a humid climate this power supply may have had leakage between the live and secondary side. The voltages involved peak at around 1KV. As long as the unit was earthed that probably wouldn't kill anyone but it might fry some of the computer. If the unit didn't happen to be earthed....
Cisco are running a project on Sourceforge.
http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/
It works great but can only available as source code for patent reasons. There is a live streamer (live streamers are rare compared to recording streamers) and a client that will compile in Linux and Windows. It can use Darwin as the server for unicast streams.
The project is quite active (IMHO) but take-up of MPEG4 has cooled somewhat since the braindead streaming tax was announced. However, Quicktime 8 preview is available and now there is an MPEG4 client everyone can now download, why not just encode and stream for outside the US or something?
1) How about emailing it to a "keeper" in another country where they don't have software patents and let them take the project forward.
2) Release as source-code only like LAME.
3) Move out of the USA (if that is where you are) becuase it is the worst place in the world for a non-corporate programmer to live.
No war is over until good prevails. In history this can sometimes take a few hundred years but....
E-Smith is an excellent little distro but if you consider every service is runs as a security risk then it simply has more of them than a stand alone firewall.
Also, I know Smoothwall has built in support for dyndns, no-ip etc. also. I would think Ipsec does too.
GPL fork != Closed-source fork
Having seen a few forks in my time (especially at meal times), I can say that the effect of a GPL fork isn't half as bad as the closed-source forks we've seen.
For a start, diverging GPL projects can always converge later, they can shamelessly copy each other's code. It's more like parallel processing than a dead end splinter.