Fsf-friends June 2007

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45 participants
59 discussions

The Perfect Replacement For MP3 (Stanley Thomas' blog)
by Frederick Noronha [फर ॆडरीक नोर ोनया] 25 Jun '07

25 Jun '07

http://perfector.wordpress.com/ The Perfect Replacement For MP3 Feedback, bouquets, brickbats to: stanleythomas1(a)gmail.com Digital music is probably the only kind of music everybody is listening to these days. The reason being that its smaller in size and thus makes it easy to share and store. Imagine downloading a 4 minute track thats approximately 40 Mb in size in a place where access to the internet is terrible and costs a bomb (thats usually the case in most places in the world). Thankfully, compression algorithms exists that can compress the same audio track to one-tenth its size, thus we do not have to imagine the above. Few weeks back I downloaded 2 albums, "My Dying Bride - A Line Of Deathless Kings" and "Slayer - Christ Illusion". The Slayer album was ripped at a very low bitrate and was not sounding too good. The album contained 14 tracks and obviously it was ripped at a lower bitrate to reduce its size. Many thanks to all the people who shared the album with me, but it was just not to my liking. There was no quality and I was furious because it took me a long time to download the album as not many people were sharing it. Boy, what a waste of time and a killer of expectation. Well thats what made me write this. Mp3 is an audio compression format that has taken the world by a storm. Mp3 is almost a synonym for music nowadays as Google is for search. Now, here comes the problem.. MP3 was good at one point in time, but not anymore. What's better? OGG VORBIS. AAC, Lame, MP3Pro neither of 'em match up to Ogg Vorbis' standards. Don't take my word for it, you can do simple tests to prove it. Take your favorite audio cd, select a track that you have heard a million times and don't mind listening to a hundred more and rip it to ogg vorbis as well as to mp3. Compare the mp3 and the ogg file to the track on the cd by listening, well now you know what I'm talking about. The ogg file is a much faithful reproduction of the cd than the mp3. An ogg file of 80kbps (bitrate) is equivalent to an mp3 encoded at 128kbps. Hey, there is still one more issue called "size". Ofcourse here again the ogg file beats the mp3 hollow. For the same size one can achieve a higher bitrate with ogg vorbis than with mp3. The best part ogg vorbis by default encodes in variable bitrate (which deliveres better quality than constant bitrate). Isn't this a great piece of information for any music lover? There are a more advantages in using ogg. Ogg is patent-free. Ok, we are just not bothered about patents here in India, but in this case we have to be because a lot of music that we listen to everyday is coming from outside India. Musicians who sell their songs in mp3 have to pay royalties. They could just save a bit more of cash by selling all over the world their songs in ogg vorbis. Not just does it benefit them but it also benefits listeners and fans. But do you think that they are seriously bothered? Music is become a business rather than an art form. Nobody cares about the quality of music their fans are listening to as long as they are minting big bucks and are being voted for the Grammy's. Portable players like ipod's also have to pay royalties but still are unwilling to support patent-free formats like ogg. Why? Because they too are doing well in selling their products. Neither the musician nor the manufacturers of players are bothered about the listener. As a guy on one of the mailing lists puts it "if only all the music in china was ripped into ogg vorbis", surely then a lot of players would be supporting it. There are a few portable players available that support ogg vorbis. Many of the game developers are using ogg vorbis and are very happy with the quality of sound and even happier because they are getting away without paying licenses. e.g. Doom 3. Ogg is only the container just like avi. It can contain several data streams at once, like video and the corresponding audio. Vorbis is the name of an open source audio compression format. There exists Theora for video compression and Speex for speech. I haven't really tried these though. If you notice I haven't mentioned anything about Windows Media Audio (wma) and Real Audio (ra), thats because I find these to be very cheap proprietary formats. I would never recommend these to any music lover. The best part about using ogg is that its open source. A lot of intense development will continue to take place to ensure that ogg vorbis remains the best. Its going to be literally impossible for any other proprietary format to beat ogg in the future. Almost all linux distributions play ogg out of the box. Things are looking bright for ogg, especially with all the Dell machines being sold with Ubuntu, we can expect a lot of vorbis encoded music from the US. Happy listening! June 25th, 2007 Categories: General . Author: stan . Comments: No Comments -- FN: Frederick Noronha Phone 0091-832-2409490 http://wikiwikiweb.de/MyContacts

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Patent Wars And The Indian Scenario
by Vikram Vincent 25 Jun '07

25 Jun '07

Hello, An insightful analysis into the Patent regime and the role played by the Free and Open Source(FOSS) community in leading th battle against it. http://www.delhiscienceforum.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=… Prabir Purkayastha is an engineer and a science activist in the power, telecom and software sectors. He is one of the founding members of Delhi Science Forum and its Secretary. -- Regards Vikram Vincent +919448810822 http://groups.google.com/group/bangalore_alive/ http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Campaign_to_promote_free_software_in_karnataka

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Poll on KDE
by Mani A 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

Every other Linux distribution modifies desktops according to some usability heuristics. This poll about how users see the end result. The poll is at http://www.ilug-cal.info/index.php Best A. Mani -- A. Mani Member, Cal. Math. Soc

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[x-posted] 'Moonlight' sannata waltzes with GnuLinux
by Linux Lingam 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

dear all, this is rather impressive! 'moonlight' is a drop-in replacement for silverlight, and runs on linux. http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight "Mono is the GPL'd EMCA implementation of the .NET Framework for Linux. Moonlight is the new Silverlight-compatible runtime for the *nix world." a blog here mentions the plight of mono's developers. http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/mono-doesnt-get-enough-credit/ what's missing, the sounds of applause, appreciation, support, and encouragement for moonlight. hence 'sannata' a hindi word that means 'soundless' or 'silence'. :-) niyam

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Will The Real Open Source CRM Please Stand Up?
by Praveen A 21 Jun '07

21 Jun '07

"Open Source has grown up. Now it is time for us to stand up. I believe that when we do, the vendors who ignore our norms will suddenly recognize that they really do need to make a choice: to label their software correctly and honestly, or to license it with an OSI-approved license that matches their open source label. And when they choose the latter, I'll give them a shout out, as history shows. Please join me, stand up, and make your voice heard--enough is enough." by Michael Tiemann, President, Open Source Initiative Read the complete blog post http://opensource.org/node/163 Also on digg http://digg.com/linux_unix/The_Open_Source_Initiative_Finds_Its_Backbone Cheers Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Simplified Grub
by Mani A 20 Jun '07

20 Jun '07

Rescue tasks with Grub can be a bit hard at times. The Super Grub Disk project has been doing well. http://sgd.howto-linux.de/download/ Recommended for faster rescue operations. .. (especially if you have to deal with unknown operating systems like M$-Windows and MS-DOG on systems with the latest Linux systems) Best A. Mani -- A. Mani Member, Cal. Math. Soc

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[Fwd: [Fsf Programmers] hi]
by Nagarjuna G. 20 Jun '07

20 Jun '07

Since FSF-Programmers is not widely read, I am posting this here. If any of you want to help laxmipathi, please contact off line. Nagarjuna

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Ubuntu, Red Hat reject Microsoft patent deal
by Sreejith 20 Jun '07

20 Jun '07

Hi all, Red Hat, the largest Linux vendor, and Ubuntu-maker Canonical have both rejected calls from Microsoft to forge a deal similar to the one the Redmond giant signed with Linux distributors Novel, Xandros, and Linspire. read more.. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Ubuntu-Red-Hat-reject-Microsoft-p… Regards, Sreejith --

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Fwd: [Glug-nith-discuss] linuX-gamers LiveDVD
by Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray 19 Jun '07

19 Jun '07

>From the GLUG-NITH mailing list. Cheers, Debarshi ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arjun Shankar <arjunsha(a)gmail.com> Date: 19-Jun-2007 10:41 Subject: [Glug-nith-discuss] linuX-gamers LiveDVD To: "Principal discussion list of GLUG-NITH." <glug-nith-discuss(a)nongnu.org> linuX-gamers is in the process of coming out with a LiveDVD with games which run natively on GNU/Linux machines. The distribution is based on ArchLinux, and aims to run on _any_ x86 machine with a 3D accelerator and 512 Megs of RAM. Details? : http://live.linux-gamers.net/ Arjun -- GPG Key ID: 30115100 Keyserver : subkeys.pgp.net _______________________________________________ Glug-nith-discuss mailing list Glug-nith-discuss(a)nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glug-nith-discuss -- GPG key ID: 63D4A5A7 Key server: pgp.mit.edu

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Friends
by Pradeep (Secretary To MD) 17 Jun '07

17 Jun '07

Hi, My name is Pradeep. I am 37 years old. If any lonely female is interested for friendship and some fun in New Delhi, please do mail back (pradeep(a)winteksa.com). Regards, Pradeep

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Fsf-friends June 2007