I always found the "users want a standard look across platforms" argument a little ridiculous.
That may have been a justification, but I think that the real reason for Mozilla to have non-native widgets is that it's a lot of work to maintain all the platform-specific codebases. There are already platform-specific issues, but in general someone can add a feature to Mozilla without knowing how to code for every platform under the sun.
I don't know exactly how this will work with native widgets, unless the Moz folks want to take a least-common-denominator approach.
Plus, I wonder if they can rely on sizes of various widgets. Remember that they're integrating widgets with chunks of their laid-out document, when placing, say, a Submit button on the window. With their own widgets, they know exactly how big everything is.
Another issue might be different code structures. For example, the Macintosh Toolbox uses an event loop. GTK uses callbacks. How does one reconcile differently structured widget APIs?
I believe that Netscape Navigator 4.x tried to do this with native widgets back in the day...but the widgets operated different from regular widgets on my classic Mac.
I agree that native widgets would be wonderful from a user standpoint, but there *are* issues with having an extremely cross-platform program with native widgets on each platform. Remember that the MSIE developers only have to worry about one platform...
It's true that the POVRay license is rather unusual, and does prohibit commercial distribution. (According to their legal page, the POVRay community has been apparently trying to move away from this to something more common...I hope the BSD or GPL license...and this will apparently be done with the v4 rewrite).
The thing is, while Fedora can be now, I suppose, considered "commercial", Dag and Freshrpms are decidedly not commercial.
Good thought...I suppose that could be the problem.
The problem with using SUSE RPMs is that standardization in spec file format is actually rather poor. The chance of being able to use a Mandrake RPM or SuSE RPM on a Red Hat system flawlessly is minimal, but one would hope that SRPMS would build properly. Nope. Each distro provider has a different set of spec file macros included, different requirements about builds (for example, Red Hat is pretty strict about RPMs also being capable of being built as non-root users, which a number of others distros do not require). Furthermore, the errors are *not* particularly simple to troubleshoot for an end user, because there's no real way for RPM to intuit what a macro should have meant...an unknown macro is simply executed as a shell command. This is very much a flaw in the RPM spec file format -- it's mostly just a shell script that gets rammed through a bit of preprocessing, instead of a proper format. Spec files also have duplication of information (the files installed and the list of files packaged). IMHO, basic packaging is not a very difficult task from a technical standpoint, at least if one simply wants to formalize the list of files in a package. However, it is *extremely* difficult to make really good spec files that conform to all the requirements of a given distro vendor and don't break when a user builds an RPM as a user, or when a user has bz-compressed man pages instead of gz-compressed (or uncompressed) man pages, or something along those lines.
I'm similarly often exasperated with autoconf's oddities and syntax -- it's incredibly hackish, a mass of macros.
I've downloaded RPMs of povray before...I just wish that the major folks, the ones that really know RPM and spec and the distro requirements and issues involved inside out included povray.
As for MegaPovRay compatibility -- I agree. I do have to say that Povray backwards compatibility isn't the greatest. In the software world, it would be a sign of terrible design to say "Well, you need to use version.3 of the library...version.4 causes our software to work differently". However, there are many POV source files out there that don't work past a given version, or require a particular and unique set of extensions. I think that if POV was produced today, instead of having its own language, it would probably be a set of bindings to something like python or java.
What would you expect the closing to be? "I Hope You Die in Agony"?
I mean, sure, business protocol sometimes sounds a bit silly because meanings have diverged from their original meaning (How many *nice* business letter writers really mean "Very Truly Yours"?)
It's a polite nothingness, part of the protocol surrounding the actual content. One could have a word processor simply inject the same closing (I do in my emails) in each communication.
If you want a technology analogy, consider the use of HTTP's "Referer". Yes, it's a misspelling, and so an error in actual content. However, it serves no actual purpose other than as a convenient placeholder, a tag. It is not used for its English meaning any more.
Nobody tries to derive meaning from business letter closings either.
You mean the one to which PA responded by putting up a parody comic of American Greetings portrayed as neo-Nazis?
Fighting with journalists, unless the journalists are *really*, *honestly* trying to decieve people by posting false information, is just a losing battle. Journalists are tremendously powerful when it comes to influencing public opinion. A site like Penny Arcade, which both has a large readership *and* doesn't have editors preventing the writers from putting in as many personal opinions as they'd like, is about the *stupidest* thing possible to get mixed up with.
I mean, if the Strawberry Shortcake thing had simply been a comic, nobody would have cared, and I doubt any American Greetings customers would have noticed. AG could have done absolutely nothing and come out much better than running around and being a pain to PA. PA managed to turn the thing into an "oppression of the press" issue, and made AG look bad.
Now, I *will* grant that greeting cards are not a product where branding matters a whole lot. Few people are going to buy a greeting card based on a brand name. However, it doesn't *help* AG to have a negative association attached to their name.
Penny Arcade isn't just a comic and a news post Tim, PA is a community and we have agents everywhere. Chances are they're watching you even now.
Much as I enjoy the comic, does anyone else think that Game and Tycho frequently come off as a bit egotistical? I mean "we have agents everywhere"? Good grief.
I've always been surprised that POVRay is not packaged by any of the major Red Hat packagers -- dag, freshrpms, or fedora. I would think that a lot of people would use POVRay. [shrug] Well, maybe not.
I think that Slashcode could benefit from a timeline model for stories, much like how some professional news sites work.
It would be interesting to have an article that opens a timeline "The 2004 POVRay Small Code Contest", and one that closes it. The same would be true for "The SCO Lawsuit". Currently we have categories, but that doesn't exactly do the same thing.
Plus, a lot of folks say "I'm not interested in Foo, and wish I didn't see stories about it", but if there were timelines, as soon as they see a timeline that they aren't interested in, they could omit it from their Slashdot story listing.
Slashdot editors currently sometimes build ad-hoc timelines by reverse-linking stories to older stories in the same genre, but it's fairly rare that they do this.
What do you expect a search for "education" to return?
I walked up to a person, and asked him to find data associated with "education", I expect I'd get a wide range of crap too.
If I asked him to find me data associated with "funding higher education" or "adult education in cabaras county" or "corruption in kansas public education systems", I might get something usable. Shockingly enough, Google does a pretty good job if given this data.
The search engine cannot read your mind -- you *have* to give it enough data to work with. If I can't expect a person to give me useful data for a search, I can't reasonably expect a search engine to do so.
To amplify one point they bought a bogus licence from someone who quite clearly has no right to sell it.
The license is basically "to not be sued by SCO". It's worthless, because SCO could never win a lawsuit, but it's not fradulent, because they aren't selling you a license to Linux -- just to avoid being sued by SCO for using it. Hell, I can sell you a license to avoid being sued by me for using a ballpoint pen. You'd be awfully stupid to buy it, but I can offer it.
I would like to encourage everyone to take advantage of this exciting opportunity!
EV1 apparently gives anyone willing to threaten them with a lawsuit money to not sue them! All you have to do is file a ridiculous lawsuit and take the money. Heck, sue the CEO for not having blue hair. They'll enthusiastically shell out! Opportunities like this do not come along often -- usually, executives aren't suckers to this degree -- so grab it while you have a chance.
Note that if you are an EV1 customer, you are helping fund the SCO lawsuit.
No, they found oil instead. In unrelated news, there are rumours that Martian terrorists are planning an attack against Saturn, and Bush extends the war against terror to outer space.
Technically, they could be moderating the analysis of the moderation as Insightful. I found it rather Interesting at least, as I hadn't really noticed what was being pointed out.
You should know that I of course believe that God created the world in 7 days. Why not?
Why?
It does not seem that there is any more evidence for the existence of an omnipotent, omnicient Christian God than there is for Shiva.
I have heard some Christians claim that evidence is unnecessary, that pure faith, faith pure of grounding in evidence is necessary. I the fail to see how any Christian can criticize someone for entering, say, David Koresh's cult. There is as much evidence for Koresh being Christ as there is the content of the Bible being true (and, heck, the Bible is self-inconsistent in many places). The same argument a Christian uses to argue in favor of his beliefs being reasonable seems to also justify, say, Satanism.
That's an extremely specialized function. It's something that a dedicated MP3 encoder might worry about, but most software (which just wants to shove a bunch of audio to an encoder) doesn't want to deal with.
Furthermore, I suspect that in most cases, this sort of thing would be best done in a non-interactive, batch-processing manner. Audacity is an interactive program.
If you make a small component, people are free to choose the best component of each type and let it do the job.
If you make a large set of integrated software, you have to take the package or leave the package as a whole. This has a habit of not leading to the greatest software.
I've always wondered how unnecessarily inflated those prices are.
I was skimming through some audio forums a while ago when considering getting a nice (well, by my standards) pair of headphones. I was surprised by what a lot of musicians were using for live performances -- relatively inexpensive microphones and headphones. Unless the standard for recording is *far* higher than for live performances, it just seems that musicians are getting overcharged.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a zillion dollar amp and zillion dollar microphone sound nice...but are they worth the order of magnitude increase over the next-lower grade of audio hardware?
Not many people know about Linux audio software -- the Linux audio world is surprisingly quiet (no pun intended). It's easy to lose track of how usable Linux is for audio work...this is kind of like a new version of Apache is for the Linux webserver world. Audacity has at least the potential to be the best-in-field for what it does at the moment, so it's a bit of a big deal.
To be honest, if Linux video editing becomes significantly more feasible suddenly, where one can swap out a Windows or Mac box and use Linux in its place happily, and kino is to credit for this, then I suspect that kino will be on Slashdot before long...
The state of Linux content production software
on
Audacity 1.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's not all rosy: Smurf, the Linux soundfont editor/creator, seems to have fallen behind the times, and hasn't been updated to GTK2.
XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.
Sound servers are still par for the course -- current sound driver systems like OSS and ALSA cannot fall back to software mixing when all hardware channels have been exhausted. Frequently, general audio use is through asound or aRts, which add latency and make it easier for audio to stutter.
On the up side, the 2.6 kernel brings everyone the low-latency and preempt patches, nice for pro audio work. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a new set of sound drivers) is standard in 2.6, and the aging OSS/Free is finally deprecated as the official Linux sound API. Hardware mixing, wavetable sample loading, and other things not in OSS/Free are now generally available. JACK, the Linux pro audio server, is mature and being used in a ton of projects.
PlanetCCRMA, an *excellent* source of packaged software for anyone using a Red Hat distro and interested in audio work, has been maintained and has become a good resource.
The Rosegarden MIDI sequencer is now a complete, pro-class set of composition software.
The main content creation areas:
* Page Layout - Scribus is supposed to fill this gap. I really have no idea how it compares to current pro-class page layout software.
* 3D Modeling - I'm personally not a huge Blender fan (not really comfortable with the interface), but it apparently does a good job. I was always kind of sad that front ends for POVRay never really took off, as that's a renderer with a lot of hours put into it. Not sure what the state of CAD is.
* Vector graphics: Sodipodi is slowly getting there, but there's nothing that I can currently think of that's really on par with Illustrator. For the special case of diagrams, Dia does a pretty good job -- as a matter of fact, I find it to be much faster to enter data into Dia than Visio.
* Natural media raster graphics -- Like Painter, software for producing natural-looking artwork on a computer. Essentially nonexistent in the OSS world -- apparently nobody wants to do a thesis on modelling natural media effects mathematically.
* Video Editing -- not sure what the best of breed is here. I'd be interested in hearing from people about what there is.
* Spreadsheet -- from what I've heard, unless perfect Office compatibility is a primary goal, Gnumeric can pretty much handle anything that Excel can.
* Presentation -- Not sure about how current software adds up. Last time I tried OO.org's presentation module, it was too buggy for day-to-day use and inverted a number of elements of an imported Powerpoint presentation.
* Word Processor -- unless Office compatibility is a primary issue, Open Office seems to be acceptable. I used to run into a number of cosmetic bugs, but it seems to have been cleaned up a lot, even if it is still a bit slow and has a widget set that works differently from native sets.
There are a lot of projects out there, and even a lot of promising ones, but there are few areas that open source content creation apps are on par with their commercial counterparts today, unfortunately (well, as I see it).
Does Fraunhoffer provide an mp3 player that many people use?
Does Sorenson provide a video player that many people use?
No. They provide the codec. The player developers choose to support it.
The only place I can think of that might do codec/dominant player development in-house would be Real.
Finally, what you're asking for already happens. As another person pointed out, WinAMP already bundles Vorbis support. If I google for ogg media-player, up comes a page with a downloadable Windows installer, sure enough.
If they want to sell a product of significantly reduced value at full retail price, they're free to go ahead and try, and see if they can trick, err, convince anyone to purchase their now worthless offering.
I frequently see computer-buying and software-buying situations where I feel that the buyer has been duped to some degree.
reckless endangerment, a threat to public safety, abusing a public resource, illegal wiretapping, creating/distributing a trojan horse, and unauthorized use of a computer.
The law this putz was charged with violating makes it illegal to: (1) intentionally damage (which he obviously did);
I would say yes.
(2) a "protected computer" (which the 911 system obviously was);
No. The system he damaged were the home webtv systems, which happened to interact briefly with the 911-controlling computer. Interaction with a computer certainly does not qualify something as a cybercrime. If I call up almost any 1-800 number just because I'm bored, I'm interacting with a protected computer and potentially keeping someone else from using it. I am not damaging that computer, though I am doing the *same. He *might* be said to be "damaging the integrity of the 911 system as a whole", which is not a computer system.
(3) causing a threat to public health or safety (which multiple fraudulent calls to 911 obviously does).
I agree.
Frankly, speaking from a common sense standpoint, rather than from a "what's currently law" standpoint, I don't think that his penalties should be significantly worse than the penalty of directly calling up 911 as a bogus call from a payphone 21 times. He did not build a propagation mechanism in, so it's hard to blame him for the propagation (as it would have been if someone had made a worm with this same impact). What he did is reprehensible, but it really shouldn't involve "cyberterrorism".
Of course, one could argue that for political reasons, "computer crime" is simply called "cyberterrorism" by politicians these days...
Slashdot Mirror
I always found the "users want a standard look across platforms" argument a little ridiculous.
That may have been a justification, but I think that the real reason for Mozilla to have non-native widgets is that it's a lot of work to maintain all the platform-specific codebases. There are already platform-specific issues, but in general someone can add a feature to Mozilla without knowing how to code for every platform under the sun.
I don't know exactly how this will work with native widgets, unless the Moz folks want to take a least-common-denominator approach.
Plus, I wonder if they can rely on sizes of various widgets. Remember that they're integrating widgets with chunks of their laid-out document, when placing, say, a Submit button on the window. With their own widgets, they know exactly how big everything is.
Another issue might be different code structures. For example, the Macintosh Toolbox uses an event loop. GTK uses callbacks. How does one reconcile differently structured widget APIs?
I believe that Netscape Navigator 4.x tried to do this with native widgets back in the day...but the widgets operated different from regular widgets on my classic Mac.
I agree that native widgets would be wonderful from a user standpoint, but there *are* issues with having an extremely cross-platform program with native widgets on each platform. Remember that the MSIE developers only have to worry about one platform...
It's true that the POVRay license is rather unusual, and does prohibit commercial distribution. (According to their legal page, the POVRay community has been apparently trying to move away from this to something more common...I hope the BSD or GPL license...and this will apparently be done with the v4 rewrite).
The thing is, while Fedora can be now, I suppose, considered "commercial", Dag and Freshrpms are decidedly not commercial.
Good thought...I suppose that could be the problem.
The problem with using SUSE RPMs is that standardization in spec file format is actually rather poor. The chance of being able to use a Mandrake RPM or SuSE RPM on a Red Hat system flawlessly is minimal, but one would hope that SRPMS would build properly. Nope. Each distro provider has a different set of spec file macros included, different requirements about builds (for example, Red Hat is pretty strict about RPMs also being capable of being built as non-root users, which a number of others distros do not require). Furthermore, the errors are *not* particularly simple to troubleshoot for an end user, because there's no real way for RPM to intuit what a macro should have meant...an unknown macro is simply executed as a shell command. This is very much a flaw in the RPM spec file format -- it's mostly just a shell script that gets rammed through a bit of preprocessing, instead of a proper format. Spec files also have duplication of information (the files installed and the list of files packaged). IMHO, basic packaging is not a very difficult task from a technical standpoint, at least if one simply wants to formalize the list of files in a package. However, it is *extremely* difficult to make really good spec files that conform to all the requirements of a given distro vendor and don't break when a user builds an RPM as a user, or when a user has bz-compressed man pages instead of gz-compressed (or uncompressed) man pages, or something along those lines.
.3 of the library...version .4 causes our software to work differently". However, there are many POV source files out there that don't work past a given version, or require a particular and unique set of extensions. I think that if POV was produced today, instead of having its own language, it would probably be a set of bindings to something like python or java.
I'm similarly often exasperated with autoconf's oddities and syntax -- it's incredibly hackish, a mass of macros.
I've downloaded RPMs of povray before...I just wish that the major folks, the ones that really know RPM and spec and the distro requirements and issues involved inside out included povray.
As for MegaPovRay compatibility -- I agree. I do have to say that Povray backwards compatibility isn't the greatest. In the software world, it would be a sign of terrible design to say "Well, you need to use version
What would you expect the closing to be? "I Hope You Die in Agony"?
I mean, sure, business protocol sometimes sounds a bit silly because meanings have diverged from their original meaning (How many *nice* business letter writers really mean "Very Truly Yours"?)
It's a polite nothingness, part of the protocol surrounding the actual content. One could have a word processor simply inject the same closing (I do in my emails) in each communication.
If you want a technology analogy, consider the use of HTTP's "Referer". Yes, it's a misspelling, and so an error in actual content. However, it serves no actual purpose other than as a convenient placeholder, a tag. It is not used for its English meaning any more.
Nobody tries to derive meaning from business letter closings either.
You mean the one to which PA responded by putting up a parody comic of American Greetings portrayed as neo-Nazis?
Fighting with journalists, unless the journalists are *really*, *honestly* trying to decieve people by posting false information, is just a losing battle. Journalists are tremendously powerful when it comes to influencing public opinion. A site like Penny Arcade, which both has a large readership *and* doesn't have editors preventing the writers from putting in as many personal opinions as they'd like, is about the *stupidest* thing possible to get mixed up with.
I mean, if the Strawberry Shortcake thing had simply been a comic, nobody would have cared, and I doubt any American Greetings customers would have noticed. AG could have done absolutely nothing and come out much better than running around and being a pain to PA. PA managed to turn the thing into an "oppression of the press" issue, and made AG look bad.
Now, I *will* grant that greeting cards are not a product where branding matters a whole lot. Few people are going to buy a greeting card based on a brand name. However, it doesn't *help* AG to have a negative association attached to their name.
Penny Arcade isn't just a comic and a news post Tim, PA is a community and we have agents everywhere. Chances are they're watching you even now.
Much as I enjoy the comic, does anyone else think that Game and Tycho frequently come off as a bit egotistical? I mean "we have agents everywhere"? Good grief.
I've always been surprised that POVRay is not packaged by any of the major Red Hat packagers -- dag, freshrpms, or fedora. I would think that a lot of people would use POVRay. [shrug] Well, maybe not.
I think that Slashcode could benefit from a timeline model for stories, much like how some professional news sites work.
It would be interesting to have an article that opens a timeline "The 2004 POVRay Small Code Contest", and one that closes it. The same would be true for "The SCO Lawsuit". Currently we have categories, but that doesn't exactly do the same thing.
Plus, a lot of folks say "I'm not interested in Foo, and wish I didn't see stories about it", but if there were timelines, as soon as they see a timeline that they aren't interested in, they could omit it from their Slashdot story listing.
Slashdot editors currently sometimes build ad-hoc timelines by reverse-linking stories to older stories in the same genre, but it's fairly rare that they do this.
What do you expect a search for "education" to return?
I walked up to a person, and asked him to find data associated with "education", I expect I'd get a wide range of crap too.
If I asked him to find me data associated with "funding higher education" or "adult education in cabaras county" or "corruption in kansas public education systems", I might get something usable. Shockingly enough, Google does a pretty good job if given this data.
The search engine cannot read your mind -- you *have* to give it enough data to work with. If I can't expect a person to give me useful data for a search, I can't reasonably expect a search engine to do so.
Could you provide a link to support your claim, please?
To amplify one point they bought a bogus licence from someone who quite clearly has no right to sell it.
The license is basically "to not be sued by SCO". It's worthless, because SCO could never win a lawsuit, but it's not fradulent, because they aren't selling you a license to Linux -- just to avoid being sued by SCO for using it. Hell, I can sell you a license to avoid being sued by me for using a ballpoint pen. You'd be awfully stupid to buy it, but I can offer it.
I would like to encourage everyone to take advantage of this exciting opportunity!
EV1 apparently gives anyone willing to threaten them with a lawsuit money to not sue them! All you have to do is file a ridiculous lawsuit and take the money. Heck, sue the CEO for not having blue hair. They'll enthusiastically shell out! Opportunities like this do not come along often -- usually, executives aren't suckers to this degree -- so grab it while you have a chance.
Note that if you are an EV1 customer, you are helping fund the SCO lawsuit.
No, they found oil instead. In unrelated news, there are rumours that Martian terrorists are planning an attack against Saturn, and Bush extends the war against terror to outer space.
It's okay. Bush is a war president.
Technically, they could be moderating the analysis of the moderation as Insightful. I found it rather Interesting at least, as I hadn't really noticed what was being pointed out.
You should know that I of course believe that God created the world in 7 days. Why not?
Why?
It does not seem that there is any more evidence for the existence of an omnipotent, omnicient Christian God than there is for Shiva.
I have heard some Christians claim that evidence is unnecessary, that pure faith, faith pure of grounding in evidence is necessary. I the fail to see how any Christian can criticize someone for entering, say, David Koresh's cult. There is as much evidence for Koresh being Christ as there is the content of the Bible being true (and, heck, the Bible is self-inconsistent in many places). The same argument a Christian uses to argue in favor of his beliefs being reasonable seems to also justify, say, Satanism.
That's an extremely specialized function. It's something that a dedicated MP3 encoder might worry about, but most software (which just wants to shove a bunch of audio to an encoder) doesn't want to deal with.
Furthermore, I suspect that in most cases, this sort of thing would be best done in a non-interactive, batch-processing manner. Audacity is an interactive program.
If you make a small component, people are free to choose the best component of each type and let it do the job.
If you make a large set of integrated software, you have to take the package or leave the package as a whole. This has a habit of not leading to the greatest software.
I've always wondered how unnecessarily inflated those prices are.
I was skimming through some audio forums a while ago when considering getting a nice (well, by my standards) pair of headphones. I was surprised by what a lot of musicians were using for live performances -- relatively inexpensive microphones and headphones. Unless the standard for recording is *far* higher than for live performances, it just seems that musicians are getting overcharged.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a zillion dollar amp and zillion dollar microphone sound nice...but are they worth the order of magnitude increase over the next-lower grade of audio hardware?
Not many people know about Linux audio software -- the Linux audio world is surprisingly quiet (no pun intended). It's easy to lose track of how usable Linux is for audio work...this is kind of like a new version of Apache is for the Linux webserver world. Audacity has at least the potential to be the best-in-field for what it does at the moment, so it's a bit of a big deal.
To be honest, if Linux video editing becomes significantly more feasible suddenly, where one can swap out a Windows or Mac box and use Linux in its place happily, and kino is to credit for this, then I suspect that kino will be on Slashdot before long...
It's not all rosy:
Smurf, the Linux soundfont editor/creator, seems to have fallen behind the times, and hasn't been updated to GTK2.
XMMS, the Linux WinAMP clone, seems to be primarily static -- I don't see a lot of development on it these days.
Sound servers are still par for the course -- current sound driver systems like OSS and ALSA cannot fall back to software mixing when all hardware channels have been exhausted. Frequently, general audio use is through asound or aRts, which add latency and make it easier for audio to stutter.
On the up side, the 2.6 kernel brings everyone the low-latency and preempt patches, nice for pro audio work. ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a new set of sound drivers) is standard in 2.6, and the aging OSS/Free is finally deprecated as the official Linux sound API. Hardware mixing, wavetable sample loading, and other things not in OSS/Free are now generally available. JACK, the Linux pro audio server, is mature and being used in a ton of projects.
PlanetCCRMA, an *excellent* source of packaged software for anyone using a Red Hat distro and interested in audio work, has been maintained and has become a good resource.
The Rosegarden MIDI sequencer is now a complete, pro-class set of composition software.
The main content creation areas:
* Page Layout - Scribus is supposed to fill this gap. I really have no idea how it compares to current pro-class page layout software.
* 3D Modeling - I'm personally not a huge Blender fan (not really comfortable with the interface), but it apparently does a good job. I was always kind of sad that front ends for POVRay never really took off, as that's a renderer with a lot of hours put into it. Not sure what the state of CAD is.
* Vector graphics: Sodipodi is slowly getting there, but there's nothing that I can currently think of that's really on par with Illustrator. For the special case of diagrams, Dia does a pretty good job -- as a matter of fact, I find it to be much faster to enter data into Dia than Visio.
* Natural media raster graphics -- Like Painter, software for producing natural-looking artwork on a computer. Essentially nonexistent in the OSS world -- apparently nobody wants to do a thesis on modelling natural media effects mathematically.
* Video Editing -- not sure what the best of breed is here. I'd be interested in hearing from people about what there is.
* Spreadsheet -- from what I've heard, unless perfect Office compatibility is a primary goal, Gnumeric can pretty much handle anything that Excel can.
* Presentation -- Not sure about how current software adds up. Last time I tried OO.org's presentation module, it was too buggy for day-to-day use and inverted a number of elements of an imported Powerpoint presentation.
* Word Processor -- unless Office compatibility is a primary issue, Open Office seems to be acceptable. I used to run into a number of cosmetic bugs, but it seems to have been cleaned up a lot, even if it is still a bit slow and has a widget set that works differently from native sets.
There are a lot of projects out there, and even a lot of promising ones, but there are few areas that open source content creation apps are on par with their commercial counterparts today, unfortunately (well, as I see it).
How many codec produers provide this?
Does Fraunhoffer provide an mp3 player that many people use?
Does Sorenson provide a video player that many people use?
No. They provide the codec. The player developers choose to support it.
The only place I can think of that might do codec/dominant player development in-house would be Real.
Finally, what you're asking for already happens. As another person pointed out, WinAMP already bundles Vorbis support. If I google for ogg media-player, up comes a page with a downloadable Windows installer, sure enough.
I don't believe Fraunhoffer has patents that would block decoder implementation -- just encoder implementation. This has come up on Slashdot before.
Of course, I'd hardly shed tears if this damages MP3's viability. I'd much rather see people using Ogg Vorbis...
If they want to sell a product of significantly reduced value at full retail price, they're free to go ahead and try, and see if they can trick, err, convince anyone to purchase their now worthless offering.
I frequently see computer-buying and software-buying situations where I feel that the buyer has been duped to some degree.
I've seen people write "wheresgeorge.com" on the bills that they register so that people know that the bill is being tracked.
Probably defacing of federal currency, but it's fun to do.
reckless endangerment, a threat to public safety, abusing a public resource, illegal wiretapping, creating/distributing a trojan horse, and unauthorized use of a computer.
I'd have to disagree with illegal wiretapping.
The law this putz was charged with violating makes it illegal to: (1) intentionally damage (which he obviously did);
I would say yes.
(2) a "protected computer" (which the 911 system obviously was);
No. The system he damaged were the home webtv systems, which happened to interact briefly with the 911-controlling computer. Interaction with a computer certainly does not qualify something as a cybercrime. If I call up almost any 1-800 number just because I'm bored, I'm interacting with a protected computer and potentially keeping someone else from using it. I am not damaging that computer, though I am doing the *same. He *might* be said to be "damaging the integrity of the 911 system as a whole", which is not a computer system.
(3) causing a threat to public health or safety (which multiple fraudulent calls to 911 obviously does).
I agree.
Frankly, speaking from a common sense standpoint, rather than from a "what's currently law" standpoint, I don't think that his penalties should be significantly worse than the penalty of directly calling up 911 as a bogus call from a payphone 21 times. He did not build a propagation mechanism in, so it's hard to blame him for the propagation (as it would have been if someone had made a worm with this same impact). What he did is reprehensible, but it really shouldn't involve "cyberterrorism".
Of course, one could argue that for political reasons, "computer crime" is simply called "cyberterrorism" by politicians these days...