Canada's CBC - Powered By OSS 47
Otter Escaping North writes "Blake Crosby's Under the Hood column on CBC's website recently discussed how almost the entire site is powered by open source software. It's great to see a government-funded agency making frugal technology decisions, and even better to see them trumpeting the benefits of doing so."
Re:McAfee says... (Score:2)
Bah. Ogg streaming? (Score:1, Troll)
But seriously...Windows Media for streaming? That's not open. It doesn't even work well.
And Ogg as the only alternative, in limited numbers?
Gimme a break. Give us a platform independent technology neutral streaming solution. MP3 would even be fine -- it might not be the best solution, but it is the lingua franca of the encoded music world at the mo
So? (Score:2)
Re:So? (Score:2)
Sure there's a compatible player now, but Windows Streaming Media is NOT going to last for other platforms.
Quicktime would have been a better choice, even, as it supports a large number of "open" codecs. Vidoe's could be streamed as MPEG and audio could be streamed as MP3 (or MP4 and AAC or any of a number of other more widely available formats.
Re:Bah. Ogg streaming? (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/ [www.cbc.ca]
No Windows Media required
Re:Bah. Ogg streaming? (Score:2)
Now for the media content (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Now for the media content (Score:1)
Re:Now for the media content (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, www.cbc.ca (Apache/1.3.29 (Linux/SUSE) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_jk/1.2.6-dev) has changed dramatically in the last year, the page is now dominated by advertisements where previously there were none, and at the expense of content. It has lost the professional look it had, it now gives the impression of something like an ISP homepage instead of a national news agency.
Also an auto refresh on a main page i
Re:Now for the media content (Score:1)
Re:Now for the media content (Score:2)
Re:Now for the media content (Score:1)
Re:Now for the media content (Score:2)
Microsoft has never been a leader is streaming, and they certainly aren't now.
Radio 3 streams in MP3 and is available through iTunes (as well as a number of other ways.) It's also not "always excellent": sometimes Grant Lawrence hosts it.
The fact that the CBC uses OSS..... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.
Re:The fact that the CBC uses OSS..... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO what makes this interesting isn't money, it's that a huge technology-centric organization like the CBC can use OSS and that it works great!
Re:The fact that the CBC uses OSS..... (Score:2)
Re:The fact that the CBC uses OSS..... (Score:1)
The threats are never really all that serious - but they haven't had an increase in a really long time.
But then that's one of the things I really liked to hear - when pressed to be frugal, they used free software to do the work that it was perfectly capable of doing. Most of my career has been in start-up companies, and you wouldn't believe how often they take the seed money and start spending it on Exchange, and ClearCase, and Oracle
Re:The fact that the CBC uses OSS..... (Score:2)
Hardly Praise (Score:2, Interesting)
- I would be hard pressed to count this as praise for OSS when the CBC has no idea what they're doing in almost every other department.
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:5, Insightful)
As well, CBC News is still considered to be some of the best in the business. CBC Newsworld is by far the best news channel I've ever seen, and George Stromboulopoulos's The Hour is truly amazing.
While they may be losing out on some major bids due to lack of funds, that doesn't really matter as much to the CBC as it would to a completely corporate network, because the advertising dollar isn't their sole bottom line.
As for Corner Gas, that's CTV, not CBC.
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:2)
The series should have been renamed to "Here's Another Endangered Species; Oh, How Foolish We Are!". I'm not sure if there were any episodes with a different theme.
It's too bad that the second season has almost zero laughs.
The only Can-Con that was on my must-watch list was Traders.
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:1)
No endangered species there. While Suzuk
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:2)
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:1)
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:4, Interesting)
But...
Most of the innovation in television programming in the US comes out of PBS.
Would there be a cooking channel without Julia Child? Home improvement shows without This Old House and Crockett's Victory Garden? The History Channel without a long tradition of shows like The American Experience and of course Ken Burns Civil war? A Disocvery Channel without Nova? Even reality TV shows have their origins in public broadcasting (albeit the PBS versions were considerably more high brow).
Sure, you may like Discovery Channel better than Nova (I don't), but the fact is people don't invest in something like that until the know it's going to be popular.
Somebody has to dare to be unpopular, even if it's because they're stuffy and pretentious.
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:1)
CBC TV is abysmal.
CBC Radio is highly regarded.
Whenever funding cuts to the CBC are proposed, it is the fans of the radio network that rally to its support, usually with some success.
But CBC management don't get it of course. Radio has no prestige for them, so they spend 90% of their budget on what people don't want (TV) and almost none on what people do want (Radio).
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:2)
To put it another way: CBC TV makes me bored with Canada, while CBC Radio makes me fascinated by and in love with my country.
My biggest complaint is that they don't have more podcasts on their website.
Re:Hardly Praise (Score:2)
Losing the Olympics hurt big time too, though it hard to win bids when the biggest two commercial competitors, Bell (CTV/TSN) and Rogers (SportsNet), team up to bid against you. Funny how the CRTC made Bell sell SportsNet when they bought TSN so that they wouldn't have a monopoly on s
Good. (Score:2, Funny)
I don't believe it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't believe it (Score:1)
Re:I don't believe it (Score:2)
Re:I don't believe it (Score:2)
Reminds me of the heady days when I was young of separatist debates between Trudeau an dLevesque. Levesque always refered to himself as a Quebecer, not a Canadian.
I suspect Alberta will do the same, at least until the oil is too hard to extract from the tar sands.
The CBC's shame. (Score:2)
Yes, it's so embarassing — they're way behind the 75%-95% crap level of commercial radio.
Netcraft confirms ... (Score:2)
I found the story a bit odd to post though. Most websites run on apache which is free/oss. The default case is free software for all websites (and open source). Wouldn't it be interesting to talk about why 30% of the web chooses closed source software for their webservers instead?
/., are you confused? (Score:1)
All right! (Score:3, Interesting)
(...even if the game is a shameless clone of BurgerTime [wikipedia.org] with different sprites. Using Wasabi as a weapon is just too cool for words.)