Uwe Ochsenknecht - you may also have seen him in "The Greatest Submarine Movie Ever" 'Das Boot' - another production which should feature in geek movie collections.
Trygetting an account at myplay.com, load up a few tracks and then try to 'Share Music'
This basically is supposed to let you make up a 'compilation tape' of mp3's which you want everyone to listen to, a mini radio show of your favourite tracks.
Of course, because of the DMCA broadcasting/sequencing rules myplay has to check and 'approve' your selection before it can be legally made available. Some poor programmer has had to go and code up a DMCA compliance checker. You can't go and put up the complete 'Dark Side Of The Moon', at least not without cheating.
Personally, I've never come close to infringing these sequencing rules, I think the idea is to have fun with the mixing - if you can't come up with more interesting sequencnig than the original then what's the point? BUT! I don't like any rules like this, even if it does help keep the playlists more interesting......
This is the nice thing about emulators - so many classic pieces of software can be contained in a system. I hope that DosEmu will continue until you can run as amny pure DOS apps as possible.
Mathcad looks very impressive to your average user, but Maple is the better package once you get used to thinking about it.
The thing is, if you've ever looked at maple it's clear that many of teh modules haven't actually been planned - through the versions it's evolved in the same way that an OSS project would.
So with a good enough core and foundation then a Maple killer shouldn't be too hard. Till then Maple on Linux will have to do.
One other reason the 33 year cycle was more attractive for a Christian calendar is because thats' the traditional lifetime of Jesus.
But, I mentioned teh 24 hour wander of the time fo the equinox. The equinox is used for the calculation of a number of religious holidays - such as easter. With the gregorian clanedar the wander in time is so large that it can't be kept on the one day. But with the Persian calendar, you can keep it on the same day *if* you choose teh correct meridian.
It just happens that this meridian is about 77 degrees west - roughly where washington DC is... but more interestingly - where Britain founded its first colonies. So, the protestant church could have established this new, more accurate, calendar and if there was a suitable settlement at that longitude, claimed that this was the rightful location of the centre of the christian church.
As it happens the first colony was not well equiped to survive (because tehy were in fact a load of astronomers sent to figure out where teh correct longitude was) and disappeared when britain was unable to supply them for a year.
If you've any interest in calendar manners you'll know that the current 97 leap years in 400 years calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory because the time of the Equinox was slipping away from the date of the equinox - 10 days by the time the calendar was imposed.
The funny thing is - the 97/400 calendar is in fact inferior to the 8/33 year cycle of the Persian calendar, but for 'political reasons it wasn't introduced. The persian cycle has 7 leap years spaced by 4 years, and one spaced by 5.
The reason that the Persian Calendar is better is that the 97/100 cycle lets the dae of the equinox wander by about 56 hours. While the Persian calendar lets it wander by only 24....
Anyway - there's a load of fun political wrangles and a plan by Queen Elisabeth I of Britain to use this better calendar as a secret weapon against the catholic church.... fun fun fun...
At least by your use of the word 'Asphalt' I'd guess you're not in Ireland. So I understand that you've not experienced proper guinness..... or proper beer for that matter.
I'm a huge fan of these three (and the unofficial 4th member - Ewan McGregor). Three? I hear you say?
Yup it's not just Director Danny Boyle, but also producer Andrew MacDonald and writer John Hodge.
I was quite disappointed when they didn;t put Ewen McGregor in this film.... but never mind - I quite like him as a Jedi Knight - the only scotsman in TPM who isn't a Sith Lord.
So I should remind everyone that the 3 have produced 2 classic flms with their first 2 efforts - 'Shallow Grave' - which has convinced me never to share a home with anyone, and 'Trainspotting' which is quite easily the coolest film of the 90's and also made "Born Slippy" one of the greatest musical moments of hte decade. It also launched Johnny Lee Miller who most people here will recognise from Hackers.... and Robert Carlyle didn't do too badly from it. (BTW - was it true that this was dubbed in some US theaters because of the scottish accents??)
Then came along "A Life Less Ordinary" - Personally I think it's fantastic - maybe becuase I'm into surreal wierd stuff.... Definately good fun though. Every slashdotter should see this film.
And I also hear they did something called 'Alien Love Triangle' or at least one part of it.
I want to see the beach - not because of Leo, but because of the team behind it, and because it has an 'interesting' soundtrack.
After the huge publicity surrounding SETI@home and the various arguments for and against it we've now got a project which has *real* astronomical applications.
OK OK I will concede that SETI@home has a small chance of finding alien life, but, the chance is still remote and the amount of data that they are processing is miniscule compared to what we really need to be doing to seriously have a chance.
Large OGR's will of course help improve the sensitivity of Long Baseline arrays and other sensors, and therefore improve the quality of data produced. So... who knows - maybe running your CPU on this will help the search for extra terrestrial intelligence more than running seti@home.
Personally I'm waiting for distributed.net to help the Spaceguard foundation save the world from cosmic hazards so that other alien races will have someone to talk to in the future.
So I guess they haven't heard of BO/BO2k/Netbus or anything else....
Of course it's all a media relations exercise.
Personally I've been acting the doomsayer for a long time regarding DDoS and the introduction of thousands of windows PC's on DSL technology. Windows NT and 2k at least make an attempt to be secure on the network, but the lose95/98 machines have had little of those considerations.
Personally - I think that people should get computer licenses - you should have to demonstrate your ability to admin and secure a machine on the internet. This should be needed to get hardware and connections, and users could be licensed to different levels.
Imagine your Pride as you show the modem plebs your license to gigabit networking;-)
Oddly enough - during this rather eventful wekk we've had Brian Marsden as a guest at the Observatory. In case you don;t know - Brian is the man in charge of cataloging all the asteroid observations and determining orbits.
He also decides who the discoverer is and therefore who gets naming rights (so of course I spent the whole time being very nice to him in the hope that I'd get an asteroid 'Manley').
Currnetly there are observations of almost 60,000 objects so it's going to become quite difficult to come up with names.
And now NASA is confounding his problem by taking close up photos of Eros - these photos have craters - and there's now a competition to come up with names for the craters.....
Let's face it - the only reason they are ultimately offering this service is so they can keep track of what you listen to and what you own. This is the kind of info record companies pay for...
So... they're watching you.
There's supposedly this NSA/FBI/CIA profiling system which tracks people who read certain books - do you think they would be interested in who listens to certain types of music? I wonder if they would buy this kind of info from mp3.com.
Or maybe schools want to look for those 'unstable' students who sepend too much time listening to the wrong sort of music.
Is music that you can't hear - and I'd bet that even that statment is overstating the security of SDMI.
SDMI is a nightmare for the consumer and I'm sure that within a week of a proper player release there will the the equivalent to a CD ripper being used to convert these files into mp3.
What a shame that the record companies contracts gave them all the mechanical royalties - the mechanical sales channel can't last too much longer.
The thing with SDMI is it's designed to make sure companies get their money. The fact that artists get paid is merely an extra. What we need is to make sure that the artists get paid for their work while admitting that there's no way to make a secure audio system.
I once spend a lot of time hacking with expect (a tcl based even scripting language) to create an IRC cyborg.
Basically like an irc client with scripts, things to make me look active 24 hours a day, automatic babble generator and a few other 'intelligent' features.
The great thing was that I could wrap this around any shell, so the random babble would work on BBSs, talk, pine.... whatever.
There's all this talk about pluggin people into systems to improve the interface and increase a person's capabilities - but this sort of scripting is essential what cybernetics is all about. all those people with automatic op/kick/greet scripts are essentially IRC cyborgs.....
Actually I'm generally quite happy with it running linux - Under windows the suspend operation has a habit of crashing the machine and MSDOS has recently decided it only want to use 1/4 of the screen. Oh and the DVD drive it ships with is Hardware region locked which is a *major* dilemma for me since I own two DVD's - "The Matrix" R1 and "Blade Runner" R2, how can someone be forced to choose between these films.....
The 1400x1050 graphics works really nicely - I love the screenon the Inspiron 7500 - it's as big as a 15" monitor. OK the machine weighs a tonne, but it's a portable workstation. YOu can also swap out the DVD/Floppy unit and replace it with another battery for those long plane trips....
My only linux problem is that I was informed that the inspiron internal networking hadware wasn't supported, so I purchased a PCMCIA card which I knew was supported. It works great, unless it starts trynig to write to the disk at the same time at which point my data transfer rate under linux goes to about 4kb/sec;-)
Now.... if I'd waited 2 months I could've got the 650MHz PIII.... and Linux preinstalled...
> nobody is making any effort to archive old >computer games
In the UK the Museum of the Moving image started such a project, they were worried that so much had been lost of the early days of movie making that they didn;t want the same to happen with computer games - especially given the UK's leading position in the industry.
MS have asf specs up on their website, but if you take the time to actually look at them and compare them with what's actually being produced you quickly realise that the documents are waay out of date. The ASF files produced are significanly different from what MS was trying to set up as an open standard - I don't know if they ever completed their attempts to get it accepted as an open standard - but what they produce now isn't the same thing.
I was trying to figure out how to encapsulate mp3's plus metadata using their documentation and asf example files... I didn't get anywhere in the end.
Yes I remember this... The Reson that MS ported netshow to linux was because they were trying to sell the Microsoft media server to people who were using Real. And somebody at MS was advertising it along the lines of it having "A larger audience than Real Player"
I think one of the people they said this to was clever enough to point out that there were real clients available for Solaris, Linux and a number of other platforms...
So of course MS threw together a client for just long enough to promote the server - then it quietly disappeared...
Which is why there are now an awful lot of people streaming mp3 with Icecast and shoutcast.
If you're interested in audio then there's one very persuasive argument to *not* got for Windows Media. A case of market penetration. Real Will argue that they have the largest potential listener base out there - after all their clients are available for an awful lot of platforms. Windows Media if of course only available for Windows and Mac.... no unix clients.
But... Icecast offers even more... because Icecast is as open as possible we can boast a wider potential audience than either WMP or Real.
So if you're going for audio then why bother with Real or WMP....
Well there is the bandwidth argument.... but at the rate badwidth is now increasing that's only going to be important for a couple of years - mp3 is more then Good enough to be usuable at modem speeds and excellent at DSL speeds. Why bother developing proprietory codecs?
OK... we're still working on Live Video, - but we can do static video in many formats (we can even stream windows media video files via icecast;-)
Perhpas people should look back at the technologies which have made the wired world what it is.... all the bits that make up a streaming technology. Lets go right to the place where traditional media is still holding out against the internet.
Digital TV in europe has been one of the most successful hardware launches ever, people talk about DVD being an example of a great hardware launch but this is eclipsed by Digital TV, either satellite or terrestrial.
Now.... I should maybe ask everyone who is promoting Microsoft's media server as being the technology of the future to tell me which video codec is being used... that's right - it's Mpeg2 video.... a universally accepted format which has implementations available for any platform.
What about proprietory streaming technologies which have been launched in the past... after all this is a streaming media list.
What's the most popular audio format available on the internet, do people go searching for Real Audio? Asf? Wma? All of these formats have hyp machines telling us that they are the next generation - in fact they;ve been telling us this for a while. And yet in the past few years it's been Mpeg Layer 3 that's taken off - the VHS of audio formats. It may not be patent free, but it's free enough that every platform has players and encoders...
What about the actual method of delivery? Remember 5 or six years ago, Microsoft was launching windows 95, and at the same time decided that they needed an 'online' serivce, something like AOL or Compuserve. Everyone else at the time was talking about the Internet as being the future, but MS wanted to have the Microsoft Network. A closed system available to the users of Windows, using it's own networks, its own protocols - after all - the internet was based on 25 year old technology - why would users upgrading to windows 95 want to use something so outdated? We all know that microsoft got the whole network thing waaaaay wrong.
5 years on... what's teh standard medium for the exchange of computer data? Is it's AOL's network? Compuserve? Or MSN.... nope, nope, nope.... It's the internet - if you don't speak TCP/IP then you're not in the party. Plus there's all the protocols and formats which form the backbone of internet content - HTTP, FTP, NNTP, HTML, JPEG, GIF.
I could continue to cite other computer technologies which have gone the same way - the IBM PC - technologicall inferior to other systems at the time - but it was easy to copy and so the clone industry was born and created the standard PC that can run Windows95/98/NT, Linux, Beos, Gnu HURD and several varieties of BSD.
The technologies which are successful and end up winning are all either open technologies, or technologies which are open enough that anyone can get in.
And the same will likely be true in the next few years as bandwidth continues to rise and streaming media applications *really* get going.
(So - if anyone wants to help me write a live video encoder/streamer for iceast we'll have a complete package....)
For a 13 year old.... anything that makes you think.
Personally there's a lot of great Lary Niven stories - his short story collections are particularly good for sparking an interest. 'Convergent Series' has a lot of really good ideas that can be explained in a few pages.
Of course I presmue you think that a 13 year old is mature enough to read about sex... since there are a few moments....
And if you think that Independence day is a silly pro-american film then you migh enjoy spending some time with 'Footfall' which does the whole alien invasion business with a bit more of a hard sci-fi attitude.
And while Niven and pournelle may have written "Lucifer's Hammer", one of the better known books about killer impacts. I must say that if you really want to know the science behind the threat of cosmic impacts then you should go and read a book by Bill Napier, called "Nemesis" - not sure if it's available in the US. But it's one of the best books I've read in terms of it's scientific treatment of things - although it spends most of its time closer to teh Tom Clancy school of thrillers than it does to sci fi. (it even mentions linux....).
Re:Still now Shout / IceCast Output Streaming
on
XMMS 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
Shit!!! Once Again I'm doing a BTDTBTS Post...
The preliminary release of my liveice plugin for XMMS was just put up today at http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice-xmms.t ar.gz
Slashdot Mirror
Uwe Ochsenknecht - you may also have seen him in "The Greatest Submarine Movie Ever" 'Das Boot' - another production which should feature in geek movie collections.
This basically is supposed to let you make up a 'compilation tape' of mp3's which you want everyone to listen to, a mini radio show of your favourite tracks.
Of course, because of the DMCA broadcasting/sequencing rules myplay has to check and 'approve' your selection before it can be legally made available. Some poor programmer has had to go and code up a DMCA compliance checker. You can't go and put up the complete 'Dark Side Of The Moon', at least not without cheating.
Personally, I've never come close to infringing these sequencing rules, I think the idea is to have fun with the mixing - if you can't come up with more interesting sequencnig than the original then what's the point? BUT! I don't like any rules like this, even if it does help keep the playlists more interesting......
(go on - try my playlist - DMCA Approved).
This is the nice thing about emulators - so many classic pieces of software can be contained in a system. I hope that DosEmu will continue until you can run as amny pure DOS apps as possible.
So - what versions of windows can run on DosEmu?
Mathcad looks very impressive to your average user, but Maple is the better package once you get used to thinking about it.
The thing is, if you've ever looked at maple it's clear that many of teh modules haven't actually been planned - through the versions it's evolved in the same way that an OSS project would.
So with a good enough core and foundation then a Maple killer shouldn't be too hard. Till then Maple on Linux will have to do.
One other reason the 33 year cycle was more attractive for a Christian calendar is because thats' the traditional lifetime of Jesus.
But, I mentioned teh 24 hour wander of the time fo the equinox. The equinox is used for the calculation of a number of religious holidays - such as easter. With the gregorian clanedar the wander in time is so large that it can't be kept on the one day. But with the Persian calendar, you can keep it on the same day *if* you choose teh correct meridian.
It just happens that this meridian is about 77 degrees west - roughly where washington DC is... but more interestingly - where Britain founded its first colonies. So, the protestant church could have established this new, more accurate, calendar and if there was a suitable settlement at that longitude, claimed that this was the rightful location of the centre of the christian church.
As it happens the first colony was not well equiped to survive (because tehy were in fact a load of astronomers sent to figure out where teh correct longitude was) and disappeared when britain was unable to supply them for a year.
Actually - there's a really trivial way to calculate it.... I just can't remember what it is.
If you've any interest in calendar manners you'll know that the current 97 leap years in 400 years calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory because the time of the Equinox was slipping away from the date of the equinox - 10 days by the time the calendar was imposed.
The funny thing is - the 97/400 calendar is in fact inferior to the 8/33 year cycle of the Persian calendar, but for 'political reasons it wasn't introduced. The persian cycle has 7 leap years spaced by 4 years, and one spaced by 5.
The reason that the Persian Calendar is better is that the 97/100 cycle lets the dae of the equinox wander by about 56 hours. While the Persian calendar lets it wander by only 24....
Anyway - there's a load of fun political wrangles and a plan by Queen Elisabeth I of Britain to use this better calendar as a secret weapon against the catholic church.... fun fun fun...
At least by your use of the word 'Asphalt' I'd guess you're not in Ireland. So I understand that you've not experienced proper guinness..... or proper beer for that matter.
I'm a huge fan of these three (and the unofficial 4th member - Ewan McGregor). Three? I hear you say?
Yup it's not just Director Danny Boyle, but also producer Andrew MacDonald and writer John Hodge.
I was quite disappointed when they didn;t put Ewen McGregor in this film.... but never mind - I quite like him as a Jedi Knight - the only scotsman in TPM who isn't a Sith Lord.
So I should remind everyone that the 3 have produced 2 classic flms with their first 2 efforts - 'Shallow Grave' - which has convinced me never to share a home with anyone, and 'Trainspotting' which is quite easily the coolest film of the 90's and also made "Born Slippy" one of the greatest musical moments of hte decade. It also launched Johnny Lee Miller who most people here will recognise from Hackers.... and Robert Carlyle didn't do too badly from it. (BTW - was it true that this was dubbed in some US theaters because of the scottish accents??)
Then came along "A Life Less Ordinary" - Personally I think it's fantastic - maybe becuase I'm into surreal wierd stuff.... Definately good fun though. Every slashdotter should see this film.
And I also hear they did something called 'Alien Love Triangle' or at least one part of it.
I want to see the beach - not because of Leo, but because of the team behind it, and because it has an 'interesting' soundtrack.
This is rather amusing.... at least to anyone who's familiar with the work of Oscar Wilde
After the huge publicity surrounding SETI@home and the various arguments for and against it we've now got a project which has *real* astronomical applications.
OK OK I will concede that SETI@home has a small chance of finding alien life, but, the chance is still remote and the amount of data that they are processing is miniscule compared to what we really need to be doing to seriously have a chance.
Large OGR's will of course help improve the sensitivity of Long Baseline arrays and other sensors, and therefore improve the quality of data produced. So... who knows - maybe running your CPU on this will help the search for extra terrestrial intelligence more than running seti@home.
Personally I'm waiting for distributed.net to help the Spaceguard foundation save the world from cosmic hazards so that other alien races will have someone to talk to in the future.
So I guess they haven't heard of BO/BO2k/Netbus or anything else....
;-)
Of course it's all a media relations exercise.
Personally I've been acting the doomsayer for a long time regarding DDoS and the introduction of thousands of windows PC's on DSL technology. Windows NT and 2k at least make an attempt to be secure on the network, but the lose95/98 machines have had little of those considerations.
Personally - I think that people should get computer licenses - you should have to demonstrate your ability to admin and secure a machine on the internet. This should be needed to get hardware and connections, and users could be licensed to different levels.
Imagine your Pride as you show the modem plebs your license to gigabit networking
Oddly enough - during this rather eventful wekk we've had Brian Marsden as a guest at the Observatory. In case you don;t know - Brian is the man in charge of cataloging all the asteroid observations and determining orbits.
He also decides who the discoverer is and therefore who gets naming rights (so of course I spent the whole time being very nice to him in the hope that I'd get an asteroid 'Manley').
Currnetly there are observations of almost 60,000 objects so it's going to become quite difficult to come up with names.
And now NASA is confounding his problem by taking close up photos of Eros - these photos have craters - and there's now a competition to come up with names for the craters.....
ho hum
Let's face it - the only reason they are ultimately offering this service is so they can keep track of what you listen to and what you own. This is the kind of info record companies pay for...
So... they're watching you.
There's supposedly this NSA/FBI/CIA profiling system which tracks people who read certain books - do you think they would be interested in who listens to certain types of music? I wonder if they would buy this kind of info from mp3.com.
Or maybe schools want to look for those 'unstable' students who sepend too much time listening to the wrong sort of music.
Trust me.... It's all about information.
Is music that you can't hear - and I'd bet that even that statment is overstating the security of SDMI.
SDMI is a nightmare for the consumer and I'm sure that within a week of a proper player release there will the the equivalent to a CD ripper being used to convert these files into mp3.
What a shame that the record companies contracts gave them all the mechanical royalties - the mechanical sales channel can't last too much longer.
The thing with SDMI is it's designed to make sure companies get their money. The fact that artists get paid is merely an extra. What we need is to make sure that the artists get paid for their work while admitting that there's no way to make a secure audio system.
[spm@szyzyg spm]$ nc mp3-2.thesync.com 8000 | cat -v | more
;-)
/. radio interest you?
t ar.gz)
ICY 200 OK^M
icy-notice1:
This stream requires no crappy nullsoft client^M
icy-notice2:icecast server version 1.3.0
^M
icy-name:Geeks in Space^M
icy-genre:Talk^M
icy-url:http://www.thesync.com/geeks/^M
icy-pub:0^M
icy-br:32^M
^M
So... if you ever want someone to get you up to date with the streamer and the server - you have my account.
How would proper
(XMMS/Liveice plugin update - http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice-xmms.
I once spend a lot of time hacking with expect (a tcl based even scripting language) to create an IRC cyborg.
Basically like an irc client with scripts, things to make me look active 24 hours a day, automatic babble generator and a few other 'intelligent' features.
The great thing was that I could wrap this around any shell, so the random babble would work on BBSs, talk, pine.... whatever.
There's all this talk about pluggin people into systems to improve the interface and increase a person's capabilities - but this sort of scripting is essential what cybernetics is all about. all those people with automatic op/kick/greet scripts are essentially IRC cyborgs.....
;-)
I bought a 500MHz model for christmas.....
;-)
Actually I'm generally quite happy with it running linux - Under windows the suspend operation has a habit of crashing the machine and MSDOS has recently decided it only want to use 1/4 of the screen. Oh and the DVD drive it ships with is Hardware region locked which is a *major* dilemma for me since I own two DVD's - "The Matrix" R1 and "Blade Runner" R2, how can someone be forced to choose between these films.....
The 1400x1050 graphics works really nicely - I love the screenon the Inspiron 7500 - it's as big as a 15" monitor. OK the machine weighs a tonne, but it's a portable workstation. YOu can also swap out the DVD/Floppy unit and replace it with another battery for those long plane trips....
My only linux problem is that I was informed that the inspiron internal networking hadware wasn't supported, so I purchased a PCMCIA card which I knew was supported. It works great, unless it starts trynig to write to the disk at the same time at which point my data transfer rate under linux goes to about 4kb/sec
Now.... if I'd waited 2 months I could've got the 650MHz PIII.... and Linux preinstalled...
> nobody is making any effort to archive old >computer games
In the UK the Museum of the Moving image started such a project, they were worried that so much had been lost of the early days of movie making that they didn;t want the same to happen with computer games - especially given the UK's leading position in the industry.
MS have asf specs up on their website, but if you take the time to actually look at them and compare them with what's actually being produced you quickly realise that the documents are waay out of date. The ASF files produced are significanly different from what MS was trying to set up as an open standard - I don't know if they ever completed their attempts to get it accepted as an open standard - but what they produce now isn't the same thing.
I was trying to figure out how to encapsulate mp3's plus metadata using their documentation and asf example files... I didn't get anywhere in the end.
Exactly what I've been working on!
So - are there any experts on video capture and encoding who would like to help me get such a project to a usable state?
Yes I remember this...
The Reson that MS ported netshow to linux was because they were trying to sell the Microsoft media server to people who were using Real. And somebody at MS was advertising it along the lines of it having "A larger audience than Real Player"
I think one of the people they said this to was clever enough to point out that there were real clients available for Solaris, Linux and a number of other platforms...
So of course MS threw together a client for just long enough to promote the server - then it quietly disappeared...
Which is why there are now an awful lot of people streaming mp3 with Icecast and shoutcast.
;-)
... that's right - it's Mpeg2 video .... a universally accepted format
If you're interested in audio then there's one very persuasive argument to *not* got for Windows Media. A case of market penetration. Real Will argue that they have the largest potential listener base out there - after all their clients are available for an awful lot of platforms. Windows Media if of course only available for Windows and Mac.... no unix clients.
But... Icecast offers even more... because Icecast is as open as possible we can boast a wider potential audience than either WMP or Real.
So if you're going for audio then why bother with Real or WMP....
Well there is the bandwidth argument.... but at the rate badwidth is now increasing that's only going to be important for a couple of years - mp3 is more then Good enough to be usuable at modem speeds and excellent at DSL speeds. Why bother developing proprietory codecs?
OK... we're still working on Live Video, - but we can do static video in many formats (we can even stream windows media video files via icecast
Perhpas people should look back at the technologies which have made the wired world what it is.... all the bits that make up a streaming technology. Lets go right to the place where traditional media is still holding out against the internet.
Digital TV in europe has been one of the most successful hardware launches
ever, people talk about DVD being an example of a great hardware launch but
this is eclipsed by Digital TV, either satellite or terrestrial.
Now.... I should maybe ask everyone who is promoting Microsoft's media server
as being the technology of the future to tell me which video codec is being
used
which has implementations available for any platform.
What about proprietory streaming technologies which have been launched in the
past... after all this is a streaming media list.
What's the most popular audio format available on the internet, do people go
searching for Real Audio? Asf? Wma? All of these formats have hyp machines
telling us that they are the next generation - in fact they;ve been telling us
this for a while. And yet in the past few years it's been Mpeg Layer 3 that's
taken off - the VHS of audio formats. It may not be patent free, but it's free
enough that every platform has players and encoders...
What about the actual method of delivery?
Remember 5 or six years ago, Microsoft was launching windows 95, and at the
same time decided that they needed an 'online' serivce, something like AOL or
Compuserve. Everyone else at the time was talking about the Internet as being
the future, but MS wanted to have the Microsoft Network. A closed system
available to the users of Windows, using it's own networks, its own protocols
- after all - the internet was based on 25 year old technology - why would
users upgrading to windows 95 want to use something so outdated? We all know
that microsoft got the whole network thing waaaaay wrong.
5 years on... what's teh standard medium for the exchange of computer data? Is
it's AOL's network? Compuserve? Or MSN.... nope, nope, nope.... It's the
internet - if you don't speak TCP/IP then you're not in the party. Plus
there's all the protocols and formats which form the backbone of internet
content - HTTP, FTP, NNTP, HTML, JPEG, GIF.
I could continue to cite other computer technologies which have gone the same
way - the IBM PC - technologicall inferior to other systems at the time - but
it was easy to copy and so the clone industry was born and created the
standard PC that can run Windows95/98/NT, Linux, Beos, Gnu HURD and several
varieties of BSD.
The technologies which are successful and end up winning are all either open
technologies, or technologies which are open enough that anyone can get in.
And the same will likely be true in the next few years as bandwidth continues
to rise and streaming media applications *really* get going.
(So - if anyone wants to help me write a live video encoder/streamer for iceast we'll have a complete package....)
For a 13 year old.... anything that makes you think.
Personally there's a lot of great Lary Niven stories - his short story collections are particularly good for sparking an interest. 'Convergent Series' has a lot of really good ideas that can be explained in a few pages.
Of course I presmue you think that a 13 year old is mature enough to read about sex... since there are a few moments....
And if you think that Independence day is a silly pro-american film then you migh enjoy spending some time with 'Footfall' which does the whole alien invasion business with a bit more of a hard sci-fi attitude.
And while Niven and pournelle may have written "Lucifer's Hammer", one of the better known books about killer impacts. I must say that if you really want to know the science behind the threat of cosmic impacts then you should go and read a book by Bill Napier, called "Nemesis" - not sure if it's available in the US. But it's one of the best books I've read in terms of it's scientific treatment of things - although it spends most of its time closer to teh Tom Clancy school of thrillers than it does to sci fi.
(it even mentions linux....).
Shit!!! Once Again I'm doing a BTDTBTS Post...
t ar.gz
The preliminary release of my liveice plugin for XMMS was just put up today at http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice-xmms.
For the brave only...