joeljkp - Slashdot User

Submission + - Sony CONNECT music store closing

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @10:07PM

joeljkp writes: "In what probably won't be a shock to anyone, Sony is shuttering its old ATRAC-based CONNECT music store sometime early next year. The store was meant to compete with iTunes in the Sony realm, and was based on its proprietary ATRAC3 codec and the SonicStage music management application.

For those with purchased songs, Sony offers this advice:

What can I do with ATRAC content that has DRM (Digital Rights Management)?
For your purchased music from CONNECT, you can burn it to audio CD and re-rip it into MP3 format to continue enjoying it for personal use.

"

Submission + - Community-based porting of commercial games

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Thursday June 21, 2007 @07:09PM

joeljkp writes: "Here's an idea I thought I'd run by the Slashdot community. For a commercial Windows game to get ported to Linux, there are a few options. The game could be open-sourced, the owner could hire icculus, or a deal could be struck with LGP. All of these options have produced good results, but they each have their drawbacks. Open-sourcing unfortunately isn't very common, icculus requires payment, and LGP needs a fanbase big enough to make up its expenses. Also, these last two options put the burden on a closed team of (highly skilled) developers.

It struck me that a hybrid approach might be possible: a community-based project wherein anyone with the interest and the time could help out with the development, but in which the source of the game would be kept secret behind an NDA. All potential contributors would have free access to the code, but would be required to agree to the NDA before they would be let in. Such an approach would share some benefits with the open-source model (a wide development base, free porting on the part of the owner) and with the closed methods (protecting the intellectual property rights of the owner). A single such site could serve as a middleman between coders and publishers for multiple projects.

What do you think? Could such an idea work?"

Submission + - OpenMotif 2.3 Released (motifzone.net)

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Monday June 18, 2007 @01:40PM

joeljkp writes: "OpenMotif 2.3 has been released, marking the first major release to the venerable toolkit since 2000. Major features include anti-aliased fonts, UTF-8 support, and native support for PNG and JPEG images, among other things. OpenMotif is the open source counterpart to the Motif toolkit, which, according to the site, "is the leading user interface toolkit for the UNIX based operating system.""

Submission + - What's your news rotation?

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Monday April 02, 2007 @08:18PM

joeljkp writes: "Nearly everyone has a news rotation — that list of sites you visit each day to catch up on the latest in whatever you're into, be it foreign affairs or knitting. I usually do the rounds at BBC News, The New York Times, a couple local papers, and then the mandatory Slashdot. What have you found that keeps you informed and entertained every day?"

Submission + - The state of web annotation

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Sunday March 18, 2007 @06:13PM

joeljkp writes: "The promise of web annotation systems is great: the ability to comment on specific content of any website, to correct errors and misconceptions, and to provide background information for future readers. It seems that this promise has not been fulfilled, but not for lack of trying. Notwithstanding systems like Stet, which work for local content only, there have been attempts ranging from Annozilla, a Firefox extension that works with the W3C's Annotea spec, to "Web 2.0" offerings such as Diigo and Fleck. Why haven't any of these systems caught on, and is there any hope in sight? If the community picks one, can we boost it to success?"

Submission + - Fluendo releases WM, MPEG GStreamer codecs

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Monday January 15, 2007 @06:41PM

joeljkp writes: "Fluendo today released the first set of general-use GStreamer plugins for patented codecs such as Windows Media, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Previously available only in legally-questionable form from the FFMpeg or MPlayer projects, or bundled with the TurboLinux or Linspire products, these codecs now allow anyone using a GStreamer-based media player to view media produced with such codecs. The plugins are compatible with GStreamer 0.10.x, and are available from Fluendo's webshop."

Submission + - WeRelate: Free, Wiki-based Genealogy

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @06:42PM

joeljkp writes: "WeRelate.org, previously a wiki community for genealogical places and sources, has opened its doors for person and family entries, making it a full-blown wiki-based open genealogy site. This makes it the newest and most promising of the online genealogy sites, as it is free, editable by everyone, and like Wikipedia, is only limited by the resources of the interested public.

Full disclosure: I have been involved with several like-minded projects, and currently run the "competing" IGDB project."

Submission + - gstreamer news and tidbits

Submitted by

joeljkp

on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @02:56PM

joeljkp writes: "GNOME's Christian Schaller recently posted a long list of news and tidbits about GStreamer, Fluendo, and the Totem media player.

For example:
Speaking of Dirac, work is still continuing at full speed on Schroedinger our Dirac implementation. David Schleef is currently polishing up the code to make sure the produced bitstreams are 100% compatible with the ones created by the Dirac library. Once that work is finished we will cut a new release before moving on to a optimisation phase to make sure Schroedinger is a really high performance Dirac implementation.
"

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