Does anyone know what all this crap is? All these chemical names really freak me out. Are they good for me or bad for me? Do they really need to be there?
I wish I had moderator status right now so I could moderate your post up.
<OPINION type="humble">
The last thing we need is a bunch of US government agencies trying to 'manage' the Internet.
This is where it starts, people. You let one three-letter acronym in the door *for whatever reason* and pretty soon they'll be crawling all over the place, making your life hell and charging you a tax to boot. Government agencies will do anything to try to justify their own existence.
FBI go home. Let CERT issue the advisories, and let the free market form its own solution to this.
Right, but do you have any idea how many clueless ISPs are operating today? I interface on a semi-daily basis with people from other companies who have misconfigured routers, mailservers, and nameservers, and don't know how to fix them. They are too busy selling access and web hosting to take the time to set anything up correctly. So, this strikes me as an impossible battle also.
As far as suing me for negligence... please. The Internet has thrived so far because it has been largely free of the petty lawsuits, censorship, red tape and bureaucratic bungling that is such a part of meatspace. We've managed to self-regulate pretty well so far - why stop now?
What's happening, I think, is that every subsystem of Linux is going through a brutal natural selection process. In some cases, one technology emerges as the de facto standard. In other cases, similar technologies serve different markets.
1 - Windows Media Player will *never* become the dominant streaming format as long as Windows NT/2000 is the only platform that can serve it. (This is currently the case, correct?)
I see Real benefitting from this, because they a) currently have the greatest market share and b) offer a solution for both *nix and M$ shops. Neither WMP nor QT can offer that.
2 - I really, *really* would rather have an open-source solution based upon completely open standards. Based upon my limited understanding, the transport is pretty trivial, and the best bet for encoding seems to be MPEG4. Can anyone more knowledgable than I comment on how open the MPEG standard is?
3 - As cowboy junkie noted, the MacOS version of Windows Media player has been in beta forever, and is at this point really crappy quality. I had to use it on my iMac to watch the Transmeta press conference because all the real streams were full, and it locked up my machine every 10 minutes. So I would say don't get your hopes up about WMP for Linux.
From what I've seen of it, the U.S. Federal Government is just one big sinkhole for money and human resources.
Forms upon forms filed in triplicate, agencies that exist for no discernable reason whatsoever, conflicting regulations and administrative guidelines, endless committees and subcommittees, dozens of layers of Pointy-Haired Bureaucrats... I could go on but I won't.
I once helped spec a $90K web project for a federal government agency. It served *no worthy purpose*, but they were doing it anyway just because the money was there in the budget and if they didn't spend it then it would get cut from the budget next year. I've seen plenty of that in corporations too, but the waste I saw in the federal gov't was on a much, much more massive scale. What I saw in that agency was like 93% waste/7% substance.
America is one of the more free countries (please correct me if I'm wrong) but I'm pretty ticked off that ~40% of my income goes to support such utter BS.
I second what you said, plus would like to add that everyone can help improve it by submitting good bug reports.
If you need help with submitting a bug report, every tuesday evening is Bug Day on IRC - I think it's in #mozilla. see mozilla.org for more details.
I'm really looking forward to the final release of Mozilla. It's going to change a lot of things. I'm hoping that it will help to make Linux as good a platform for surfing as it already is for serving.
I actually did once see a videotape of something similar, only it had a more serious application.
Lucent did the demo of research they were doing with advanced MPEG compression of human faces. IIRC, the idea is that there are a finite number of expressions the human face can have, and that one can achieve a high level of compression by transmitting the facial details once, then transmitting the change in expressions as the person talks.
They showed a compressed/avatarized video of a woman talking about something, and it was pretty strange - sort of a creepy disembodied head that wanted to be human.
And yes, I do belive that this is all supposed to be part of a future MPEG standard.
I kind of missed the point - it seemed like a really extravagant length to go to for a questionable amount of compression. But then again I'm not much of a math guy.
I second that. IE5, although it requires a lot of memory and is occasionally quirky, is faster, more up-to-date with standards, more stable, and provides a better browsing experience than Netscape 4 on any platform.
That said, I'm really looking forward to Mozilla - the daily builds are really starting to get good, and the skins support is pretty unique.
By supplying free sw developers with better tools (hosting, CVS, FTP, etc) they are accelerating the pace at which Linux improves. Something on the scale of SourceForge is likely to have a dramatic impact.
The better that Linux becomes, the more people will use it. The more people that use it, the more boxes VA sells (and the more developers there will be to improve it, repeat ad infinitum).
They are releasing the source code because it will do them a lot of good if others use it to host free software projects. It also happens to help us.
They are also exploiting their speed, agility, and 100% focus on Linux to become THE brand name for Linux hardware before one of the major manufacturers gets around to pulling their head out of their ass and making any substantial move.
Overall, it seems to me that VA is a very cool company that a) knows what's up b) has a solid business plan c) makes good hardware and d) does the right thing by the Linux community. I think my next workstation will be from them.
It's interesting that you should post such a story just I have finished consuming lots of... how do you say in America? Beer.
I am rather fsck'd up, too. But don't hate me because I'm beautiful and more 3l337 h@x0r than you. Or however that goes. Your distro wars mean nothing to me anyway.
I wish someone would post a beer haiku because I like beer and I like haikus and I think the two things put together would be funny except I don't know anything about haikus, except I do know a lot about beer if that helps. I like beer.
I like porters especially. Sometimes a nice ale or stout; rarely a pilsner. Pilsners are for Winbl0ze and TI99/4a uZerZ. Sorry, nothing pers0n@al, d00dz.
Beer. In the year 2000 and beyond. To infinity... and shit. I hate stupid cartoons.
Some of the beer I had earlier was Guinness. It was so thick it was like drinking bread, only thicker. Then I had a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Does anyone else like beer like I do? I really like to drink me some beer.
Does anyone else like wine - perhaps a little Riesling or Piesporter? Red wine, on the other hand, is like drinking Sour Patch Kids for me.
I second this. Either get an NT server or a new accounting package.
There are way too many little differences between SQL databases to transparently move from one to the other, 'specially without the blessing or support of the application's vendor.
IMHO, MS SQL Server 7 is one of the better MS products. It seems to work well as a backend for small-to-mid size web sites. Unfortunately it runs on NT:P
Since I posted my last message I did a little reading on MPEG licensing, and found that it might not be as open as I had thought. There's a URL in one of the other comments here to an MPEG licensing FAQ, that basically says that different corporations who contribute technology to the MPEG consortium may still choose to patent pieces of it, or something like that. Not sure I understood it all, but it sounded like it could make for some sticky situations if one was trying to write open source sw around it.
Also, someone else said that Real supports RTSP, but not RTP. I checked their site, and this appears to be true (they mention RTSP repeatedly, but not RTP). More info on real stuff can be found at this URL.
RTP/RTSP is an open IETF standard, and is used by both RealNetworks and Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Real *used* to use a proprietary protocol called PNM, but no longer.
The codecs are indeed the problem. Most are patented, and licensed only in binary format.
From what I understand about it so far, it seems like MPEG4 is our best bet for an open codec. If I recall correctly:
MPEG1 = Up to VHS quality. File-based format not at all suitable for streaming.
MPEG2 = broadcast-quality video, very compute-intensive algorithms require expensive coding/decoding hardware on either end.
MPEG3 = was abandoned during development, I forget why
MPEG4 = open spec for encoding AV content, a new revision specifically designed for Internet streaming & multimedia is currently under development
Cybikos will relay emails for each other, if I understand correctly. I haven't used one, but it sounds like a badass little toy for $99. Plug it into your computer and you can serve as an Internet gateway (CyWIG) for any other Cybiko in range.
The Borders store in Frederick, Maryland, has MAD shelf space devoted to Linux books and sw. It's certainly not as big yet as the MickeySoft section, but it grows every time I go in there. Plus they carry Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, Maximum Linux, and SysAdmin.
I'd say it's about 16 ft. by 12. ft of all kinds of great Linux books, plus a copy of almost every distro - Caldera, Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, etc.
I've noticed a lot of Linux stuff on display racks at Staples lately also - unfortunately its mostly cheesy stuff.
-- Sucka think he good. Sucka think he can whoop me.
When I got my C64 I didn't have any sort of label-based assembler, or for that matter even a text editor, so I would look up the machine language opcodes in a reference book, write out a machine language program on notebook paper during school, then when i got home i would convert it all from hex to decimal and enter it by POKEing it into memory from the BASIC shell. Talk about debugging being a bitch.
That's my story. It's actually completely true. I wrote several video games that way, including 'Free Delivery' and 'Freestylin'.
Huh. Actually I did work on a Digital PDP 11/70 with some 3-letter acronym OS like ITS or IAS or something. It was a hybrid of two other OS's. But EMACS was out of the question on the DecWriter teletype terminal.
Anyone have any friggin idea what OS it is I'm talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know what all this crap is? All these chemical names really freak me out. Are they good for me or bad for me? Do they really need to be there?
Vitamins and Minerals: (from the mexican dilberito)
Calcium Sulfate, Magnesium Oxide, Ascorbic Acid, Vitamin E, Beta Carotene, Ferric-III-Orthophosphate, Zinc Sulfate Monohydrate, D-Biotin, Niacinamide, Calcium D-Pantothenate, Copper Gluconate, Vitamin D3, Manganese Sulfate Monohydrate, Riboflavin, Vitamin B6, Thiamin Monohydrate, Vitamin K1, Vitamin B12, Folic Acid, Chromium Chloride, Potassium Iodide, Sodium Molybdate, Sodium Selenite
I second that. I'll send a old 4MB SIMM to the first person to moderate that up. Just email me your address.
Moderation by proxy?
I wish I had moderator status right now so I could moderate your post up.
<OPINION type="humble">
The last thing we need is a bunch of US government agencies trying to 'manage' the Internet.
This is where it starts, people. You let one three-letter acronym in the door *for whatever reason* and pretty soon they'll be crawling all over the place, making your life hell and charging you a tax to boot. Government agencies will do anything to try to justify their own existence.
FBI go home. Let CERT issue the advisories, and let the free market form its own solution to this.
</OPINION>
Where is the Mandrake Update utility in 7.0? Is it still around? I can't find it anywhere since I upgraded from Mandrake 6.1.
Mandrake 7 is indeed pretty darned good as a desktop distro. Their website sure could use some organizational help though.
Right, but do you have any idea how many clueless ISPs are operating today? I interface on a semi-daily basis with people from other companies who have misconfigured routers, mailservers, and nameservers, and don't know how to fix them. They are too busy selling access and web hosting to take the time to set anything up correctly. So, this strikes me as an impossible battle also.
As far as suing me for negligence... please. The Internet has thrived so far because it has been largely free of the petty lawsuits, censorship, red tape and bureaucratic bungling that is such a part of meatspace. We've managed to self-regulate pretty well so far - why stop now?
What's happening, I think, is that every subsystem of Linux is going through a brutal natural selection process. In some cases, one technology emerges as the de facto standard. In other cases, similar technologies serve different markets.
--
--
1 - Windows Media Player will *never* become the dominant streaming format as long as Windows NT/2000 is the only platform that can serve it. (This is currently the case, correct?)
I see Real benefitting from this, because they a) currently have the greatest market share and b) offer a solution for both *nix and M$ shops. Neither WMP nor QT can offer that.
2 - I really, *really* would rather have an open-source solution based upon completely open standards. Based upon my limited understanding, the transport is pretty trivial, and the best bet for encoding seems to be MPEG4. Can anyone more knowledgable than I comment on how open the MPEG standard is?
3 - As cowboy junkie noted, the MacOS version of Windows Media player has been in beta forever, and is at this point really crappy quality. I had to use it on my iMac to watch the Transmeta press conference because all the real streams were full, and it locked up my machine every 10 minutes. So I would say don't get your hopes up about WMP for Linux.
--
From what I've seen of it, the U.S. Federal Government is just one big sinkhole for money and human resources.
Forms upon forms filed in triplicate, agencies that exist for no discernable reason whatsoever, conflicting regulations and administrative guidelines, endless committees and subcommittees, dozens of layers of Pointy-Haired Bureaucrats... I could go on but I won't.
I once helped spec a $90K web project for a federal government agency. It served *no worthy purpose*, but they were doing it anyway just because the money was there in the budget and if they didn't spend it then it would get cut from the budget next year. I've seen plenty of that in corporations too, but the waste I saw in the federal gov't was on a much, much more massive scale. What I saw in that agency was like 93% waste/7% substance.
America is one of the more free countries (please correct me if I'm wrong) but I'm pretty ticked off that ~40% of my income goes to support such utter BS.
Thanks for listening and letting me vent.
--
If you need help with submitting a bug report, every tuesday evening is Bug Day on IRC - I think it's in #mozilla. see mozilla.org for more details.
I'm really looking forward to the final release of Mozilla. It's going to change a lot of things. I'm hoping that it will help to make Linux as good a platform for surfing as it already is for serving.
--
Lucent did the demo of research they were doing with advanced MPEG compression of human faces. IIRC, the idea is that there are a finite number of expressions the human face can have, and that one can achieve a high level of compression by transmitting the facial details once, then transmitting the change in expressions as the person talks.
They showed a compressed/avatarized video of a woman talking about something, and it was pretty strange - sort of a creepy disembodied head that wanted to be human.
And yes, I do belive that this is all supposed to be part of a future MPEG standard.
I kind of missed the point - it seemed like a really extravagant length to go to for a questionable amount of compression. But then again I'm not much of a math guy.
I hope I explained all that right.
--
I second that. IE5, although it requires a lot of memory and is occasionally quirky, is faster, more up-to-date with standards, more stable, and provides a better browsing experience than Netscape 4 on any platform.
That said, I'm really looking forward to Mozilla - the daily builds are really starting to get good, and the skins support is pretty unique.
--
By supplying free sw developers with better tools (hosting, CVS, FTP, etc) they are accelerating the pace at which Linux improves. Something on the scale of SourceForge is likely to have a dramatic impact.
The better that Linux becomes, the more people will use it. The more people that use it, the more boxes VA sells (and the more developers there will be to improve it, repeat ad infinitum).
They are releasing the source code because it will do them a lot of good if others use it to host free software projects. It also happens to help us.
They are also exploiting their speed, agility, and 100% focus on Linux to become THE brand name for Linux hardware before one of the major manufacturers gets around to pulling their head out of their ass and making any substantial move.
Overall, it seems to me that VA is a very cool company that a) knows what's up b) has a solid business plan c) makes good hardware and d) does the right thing by the Linux community. I think my next workstation will be from them.
--
I wanted to moderate my beer up.
--
I am rather fsck'd up, too. But don't hate me because I'm beautiful and more 3l337 h@x0r than you. Or however that goes. Your distro wars mean nothing to me anyway.
I wish someone would post a beer haiku because I like beer and I like haikus and I think the two things put together would be funny except I don't know anything about haikus, except I do know a lot about beer if that helps. I like beer.
I like porters especially. Sometimes a nice ale or stout; rarely a pilsner. Pilsners are for Winbl0ze and TI99/4a uZerZ. Sorry, nothing pers0n@al, d00dz.
Beer. In the year 2000 and beyond. To infinity... and shit. I hate stupid cartoons.
Some of the beer I had earlier was Guinness. It was so thick it was like drinking bread, only thicker. Then I had a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Does anyone else like beer like I do? I really like to drink me some beer.
Does anyone else like wine - perhaps a little Riesling or Piesporter? Red wine, on the other hand, is like drinking Sour Patch Kids for me.
I like beer.
And Linux.
--
I second this. Either get an NT server or a new accounting package.
There are way too many little differences between SQL databases to transparently move from one to the other, 'specially without the blessing or support of the application's vendor.
IMHO, MS SQL Server 7 is one of the better MS products. It seems to work well as a backend for small-to-mid size web sites. Unfortunately it runs on NT :P
--
Since I posted my last message I did a little reading on MPEG licensing, and found that it might not be as open as I had thought. There's a URL in one of the other comments here to an MPEG licensing FAQ, that basically says that different corporations who contribute technology to the MPEG consortium may still choose to patent pieces of it, or something like that. Not sure I understood it all, but it sounded like it could make for some sticky situations if one was trying to write open source sw around it.
Also, someone else said that Real supports RTSP, but not RTP. I checked their site, and this appears to be true (they mention RTSP repeatedly, but not RTP). More info on real stuff can be found at this URL.
--
RTP/RTSP is an open IETF standard, and is used by both RealNetworks and Apple's Darwin Streaming Server. Real *used* to use a proprietary protocol called PNM, but no longer.
The codecs are indeed the problem. Most are patented, and licensed only in binary format.
From what I understand about it so far, it seems like MPEG4 is our best bet for an open codec. If I recall correctly:
MPEG1 = Up to VHS quality. File-based format not at all suitable for streaming.
MPEG2 = broadcast-quality video, very compute-intensive algorithms require expensive coding/decoding hardware on either end.
MPEG3 = was abandoned during development, I forget why
MPEG4 = open spec for encoding AV content, a new revision specifically designed for Internet streaming & multimedia is currently under development
More info about MPEG can be found at http://drogo.cselt.stet.it/u fv/leonardo/mpeg/index.htm.
Also, the best introductory resource I've found is at http://www.nyquist-media.co .uk/streaming/streaming.html. It's an excellent overall introduction to the technical standards and mechanisms of streaming video.
On a related note, is there a consensus on the license for Apple's Darwin Streaming Server? Is it open enough?
--
--
Cybikos will relay emails for each other, if I understand correctly. I haven't used one, but it sounds like a badass little toy for $99. Plug it into your computer and you can serve as an Internet gateway (CyWIG) for any other Cybiko in range.
Anyone else have one of these yet?
--
I'd say it's about 16 ft. by 12. ft of all kinds of great Linux books, plus a copy of almost every distro - Caldera, Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat, etc.
I've noticed a lot of Linux stuff on display racks at Staples lately also - unfortunately its mostly cheesy stuff.
--
Sucka think he good. Sucka think he can whoop me.
Shouldn't you index all files with MIME type text/html or text/plain, regardless of file extension?
Just curious.
When I got my C64 I didn't have any sort of label-based assembler, or for that matter even a text editor, so I would look up the machine language opcodes in a reference book, write out a machine language program on notebook paper during school, then when i got home i would convert it all from hex to decimal and enter it by POKEing it into memory from the BASIC shell. Talk about debugging being a bitch.
That's my story. It's actually completely true. I wrote several video games that way, including 'Free Delivery' and 'Freestylin'.
Huh. Actually I did work on a Digital PDP 11/70 with some 3-letter acronym OS like ITS or IAS or something. It was a hybrid of two other OS's. But EMACS was out of the question on the DecWriter teletype terminal.
Anyone have any friggin idea what OS it is I'm talking about?
Since this is sorta related, can anyone recommend the best place for me to sell a domain name?
I have FINDFILE.COM. seems like I could get a few duckets for it, but I'm not really sure where to go to pimp it.
Or am I scum for trying to cash in on a domain name?