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Open Source

Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development 355

Posted by samzenpus from the best-tools-for-the-job dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.
IT

Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Service Providers When You're an IT Pro? 479

Posted by timothy from the have-your-people-call-my-people dept.
New submitter username440 writes: So, a lot of us will have been here: You have a problem with your ISP, cable TV, cellphone whatever technology and you need to call the provider. Ugh. Foreign call centers, inane fault-finding flowcharts (yes, I have turned it off and on again) and all the other cruft that you have to wade through to get to someone with the knowledge to determine that YOU in fact also have a degree of knowledge and have a real problem.

Recently I had a problem with my ISP, where the ISP-provided "modem" — it's a router — would lock up at least 3 times per day. I had router logs, many hundreds of Google results for that model and release of hardware showing this as a common problem, and simply wanted the ISP to provide a new router (it's a managed device). I replaced the router with a spare Airport Extreme and the problems disappeared, to be replaced with a warning from the ISP that they could't access my managed device" and the connection is provided contingent to using THIER router. However my point was to prove that their router is at fault.

How do you fare when trying to get through to a service provider that they actually DO know something in the field? How do you cut through the frontline support bull*hit and talk to someone who knows what they are doing? Should there be a codeword for this scenario?
Businesses

Bell Media President Says Canadians Are 'Stealing' US Netflix Content 408

Posted by timothy from the oh-canada dept.
iONiUM writes: Today the Bell Media president claimed that Canadians are "stealing" U.S. Netflix, saying the practice is "stealing just like stealing anything else." She went on to say that it is socially unacceptable behavior, and "It has to become socially unacceptable to admit to another human being that you are VPNing into U.S. Netflix. Like throwing garbage out of your car window, you just don't do it. We have to get engaged and tell people they're stealing." Of course, I'm sure the fact that Bell Media profits from Canadian content has nothing to do with these remarks.

Comment Re:What is MediaGoblin? (Score 1) 32

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#49841359) Attached to: MediaGoblin 0.8.0 "A Gallery of Fine Creatures" Released

It seems (still) potentially very useful, and the federation stuff seems like a bigger deal that it might initially sound like (instead of needing one person or organization to provide a huge server and mirrors for a big collection of media and user accounts, smaller groups and individuals can "federate" more manageably-sized small server instances that they each run). Also, native pump.io (which is more or less a very extensible "microblogging" standard if I understand right) support ought to mean you won't need a special "mediagoblin" client to use it outside of the web interface, you'll be able to use whatever general pump.io client software you might already be using on other services at the same time (again, assuming I understood that right).

It's one backend that handles a whole lot of different kinds of "media", so you don't need to install a "photo gallery" and a "video server" and a "document server" and so on separately. It takes whatever supported variety of media you give it and converts it to a "web-friendly" open format as needed. As their wiki currently shows: "In the future, there will be all sorts of media types you can enable, but in the meanwhile there are six additional media types: video, audio, raw image, ascii art, STL/3d models, PDF and Document." (Last I heard, it additionally supports a "blog post" sort of type i.e. HTML text. If MediaGoblin takes off I suspect someone would get around to adding .epub as a supported type as well.)

I'd probably be more familiar with it except of the two media types I could potentially get a lot of use out of it for myself, photos/still images seem to be very well supported but I've already got a much-easier-to-install piwigo instance running for those, and audio support is kind of a kludgy mess at the moment. MediaGoblin would otherwise likely be a great (nigh-ideal, even) system for building a sound-effects library and/or podcast-hosting.

To support audio, you have to install scipy and one or two other modules as I recall (in addition to the rest of the python stuff MediaGoblin needs), though it has nothing to do with the actual audio - from what I remember of what I could glean from trying to poke around in the source (disclaimer, I am NOT very experienced at all at python or even "object-oriented" programming in general) every bit of uploaded audio is currently transcoded twice - once to ogg vorbis, which is only used to generate the still-image "thumbnail" graphic in the form of a spectrogram (that's what scipy et al is for) rather than e.g. extracting "cover art" from the metadata or generating a simple image via gd or something. Then that's discarded and the audio is re-transcoded to "webm audio" rather than .ogg or .opus. As far as I know (see previous disclaimer...) there's no ability to read "tags" from pre-existing metadata, either.

I wish I had a better grasp of python - I know gstreamer has (undocumented?) support for reading and writing media metadata tags, if I knew what I was doing I'd try to come up with some patches for the audio thumbnail/tags support, but since I can't even figure out where one would go in the sourcecode to change the output format (to .opus or .ogg) I suspect the amount of guidance I'd need from the people that know what they're doing would make me more of an irritant than a help...

Comment Re:This seems foolproof! (Score 2) 94

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#49778515) Attached to: Russian Space Agency Misused $1.8 Billion, May Be Replaced
"You propose to replace it with a sole-source, crony capitalist, 'state corporation', to take advantage of the important synergies between the public sector's capabilities in corruption and mediocrity and the private sector's sophistication in financial and organizational malfeasance?"

(No, I'm not going to write it! NO! I said! My will is strong! I cannot...)

In Soviet Russia, State corrupts Corporations!

(Dagnabbit...)
DRM

Firefox 38 Arrives With DRM Required To Watch Netflix 371

Posted by timothy from the chinese-finger-trap dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from VentureBeat: Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android. Firefox 38 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Note that there is a separate download for Firefox 38 without the DRM support. Our anonymous reader adds links to the release notes for desktop and Android.
Software

Ask Slashdot: What's the Future of Desktop Applications? 276

Posted by Soulskill from the software-becomes-softwhere dept.
MrNaz writes: Over the last fifteen years or so, we have seen the dynamic web mature rapidly. The functionality of dynamic web sites has expanded from the mere display of dynamic information to fully fledged applications rivaling the functionality and aesthetics of desktop applications. Google Docs, MS Office 365, and Pixlr Express provide in-browser functionality that, in bygone years, was the preserve of desktop software.

The rapid deployment of high speed internet access, fiber to the home, cable and other last-mile technologies, even in developing nations, means that the problem of needing offline access to functionality is becoming more and more a moot point. It is also rapidly doing away with the problem of lengthy load times for bulky web code.

My question: Is this trend a progression to the ultimate conclusion where the browser becomes the operating system and our physical hardware becomes little more than a web appliance? Or is there an upper limit: will there always be a place where desktop applications are more appropriate than applications delivered in a browser? If so, where does this limit lie? What factors should software vendors take into consideration when deciding whether to build new functionality on the web or into desktop applications?
Businesses

Swiss Launch of Apple Watch Hit By Patent Issue 111

Posted by timothy from the called-dibs-too-late dept.
wabrandsma points out this Reuters story, according to which: Apple is not able to launch its new smartwatch in Switzerland until at least the end of this year because of an intellectual property rights issue, Swiss broadcaster RTS reported on its website. The U.S. tech giant cannot use the image of an apple nor the word 'apple' to launch its watch within Switzerland, the home of luxury watches, because of a patent from 1985, RTS reported, citing a document from the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property.
Biotech

Lawsuit Over Quarter Horse's Clone May Redefine Animal Breeding 172

Posted by Soulskill from the reasons-genetic-superhorses-will-take-over-the-world dept.
schwit1 sends this report from the LA Times: "Lynx Melody Too, a clone of a renowned quarter horse, is at the center of a lawsuit that could change the world of animal breeding and competition. Texas horse breeder Jason Abraham and veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen sued the American Quarter Horse Assn., claiming that Lynx Melody Too should be allowed to register as an official quarter horse. A Texas jury decided in their favor in 2013, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in January, saying there was 'insufficient' evidence of wrongdoing by the association.

The suit is among the first to deal with the status of clones in breeding and competition, and its outcome could impact a number of fields, including thoroughbred horse racing and dog breeding. The quarter horse association is adamant that clones and their offspring have no place in its registry. "It's what AQHA was founded on — tracking and preserving the pedigrees of these American quarter horses," said Tom Persechino, executive director of marketing for the association. "When a person buys an American quarter horse, they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it."
Businesses

Pandora Pays Artists $0.001 Per Stream, Thinks This Is "Very Fair" 305

Posted by samzenpus from the getting-your-cut dept.
journovampire writes with this story about how much artists make on Spotify. "Pandora founder Tim Westergren has claimed that the company is paying out 'very fair' sums to artists, despite its per-stream royalty weighing in at just one sixth of Spotify's. The digital personalized radio platform has previously gone on-record as saying that it pays music rights-holders approximately $0.0014 for each play of their tracks: Westergren blogged in 2013 that Pandora pays ‘around $1,370 for a million spins’. That’s around 80% smaller than Spotify’s per-stream payout, which officially stands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084."
Open Source

Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System 755

Posted by samzenpus from the taking-sides dept.
lkcl writes The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarized all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

Comment Re:Mac and "PC" only...oh, I see. (Score 4, Insightful) 117

by Dr.Dubious DDQ (#49012211) Attached to: Google Earth Pro Now Available Free
UPDATE: Oh, I see what you mean. Instead of honestly saying "Huh? Linux? What's that? We've forgotten!", Google is quietly sending Linux users a copy of the previous version (6.0.something) of the "free" Google Earth (that's what's in the "GoogleEarthLinux.bin" file), and appears not to have bothered with Google Earth Pro.

I knew I shouldn't have put my pitchfork and torch away so quickly. Friggin' Google. As much as I love playing with maps, Google can take a long walk off a short pier - I'm not desperate enough for their "product" to mess around with WINE.

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