So I got my old phone stolen last week by pickpocket. My old phone was among the most expensive the operator was offering when I got it about 2 years ago. It had every feature you could dream of like Java support, bluetooth, tri-band, video and audio streaming, built in Radio, camera, support for email, slot for memory cards, mp3 playback support, themeable screen and more. Problem was I never ever used any of those features. So my new phone is the cheapest flip-top they had and it has no extra features at all. In fact it is even missing features I thought wasn’t considered a ‘feature’ anymore, like support for sending and receiving address book entries. So now I am doing on the painful job of trying to recreate my list of phone numbers as all my phone numbers got lost with the previous phone.
Monthly Archives: March 2006
Paying people to post on Slashdot?
Was scanning through the slashdot comments on the RIM/NTP
settlement. Scanning through the comments I noticed that the people trying to defend the NTP patent litigation where strangely repetetive in the arguments. Like bringing up the same points in the same order in various posts. Hard to prove, but the postings seemed to alike to purely coincidental. So the question is if companies and groups trying to preserve the current patent regime (and probably other groupings) are now paying PR people to advocate their views on Slashdot and similar forums? Or maybe my own feelings on the subject made me see a conspirancy where there was none. Time to put on the tin foil hat :).
But I think the free/open source software community have become enough of a financial and political force for such things to start occuring, no matter if they actually did happen in this case.
Python everywhere
It is incredible to see how many great projects out there are using Python with GStreamer these days. There is of course Flumotion our streaming server, then there is Pitivi our non-linear video editor. Then there is Jokosher the sound multrack editor. And there is the FU Player music player. The Istanbul screen recorder, Togra the 3D multimedia framework. The Quod Libet the music library manager and finally Serpentine
the audio cd recorder. Probably some I don’t know about also, please add a comment if you know any other projects. I think it is a pretty nice collection of applications. Hopefully with this many Python applications around it makes it easier for new developers too as they have more to look at and more projects to borrow code from.
Vorbis and Theora RTP
Quite some time ago Fluendo funded an effort to get RTP specifications written for Vorbis and Theora. It has taken longer than we hoped at the outset, but things are coming together now. A big thanks to Luca Barbato who have been working on our behalf over the last 4-5 months on getting things sorted out.
The Vorbis RTP specification is now
available in a close to final version which has prelimenary IETF approval. The Theora
specification is a close behind, currently awaiting the initial stamp of approval from IETF.
Having these specifications ready I hope we will see a lot of projects implement them now and free formats start taking further steps forward into the world of VoIP, video conferencing and mobile streaming.