This is the kind of stuff that prompt me to think that Gnome should initiate a complete “reboot” of the Linux desktop, integrating and re-writing everything that a desktop needs: from a new 3D interface and driver hook-up, to new sound engine, to a new window server, and only run the old X apps via either a rootless X server or just virtualization.

First things first:
1. I am a huge proponent of backwards compatibility because in my agenda, the user comes first.
2. Writing a new, truly modern and revolutionary, OS will take Microsoft 10 years (including its maturitization time). Drivers will be scarce, adoption will be a pain (I know the drill, we’ve lost a green card because of it with BeOS).

Despite these huge undertakings and problems, I don’t think Windows has any life on its knees anymore. It’s a 25-30 years old architecture, patched all over. Vista sucked big time — at least in the UI level. I believe that Microsoft has only two options:

1. Use these new ideas they have in their R&D dpt, for a future modern OS and start writing a new OS as soon as possible, in PARALLEL to upcoming Windows 7. All previous versions of Windows should run through virtualization, first releases should include a Windows 7 virtualization version for free.
2. Forget the OS business. Keep supporting Windows after Windows 7 for 3-4 years, and then keep supporting it for specific PCs only, for a fee, for another 20-30 years (like Sun does for Solaris). Move to different business.

I wrote the other day that Gnome should do the same: re-invent the wheel. Not because Gnome 2.22 is bad, but because when you see the bigger picture, with Linux, X11 and all that shit that fuck us users for 15 years now, I believe there’s a need for a clean slate for Linux’s desktop in general too. I just saw Gnome as the project which will bring that change, rather than Gnome itself needing that change (I hope I am making some sense).

Same way with Windows, it’s just so much craft in there, that’s just painful. Either take the big decision and put billions into the development of a new modern OS, or get out of the OS business and just keep lightly supporting the last released OS.

If Microsoft won’t do that, then their OS division will die a SLOW death. It won’t be pretty for any project manager in that division.

UPDATE: Interesting.

The problem is that the only usable players with enough codecs, VLC and Mplayer, have compatibility problems with the PPC-based PS3. Thankfully, with the newer PS3 firmware versions, except the MOV container incompatibility, it supports all other major media files already. And for the MOV container, I just use the $20 Quicktime Pro which is able to re-wrap MOV h.264/AAC videos to MP4 without re-encoding in 1 minute time.

So what I really need is Flash 9 support so I can run Hulu.com and watch “Arrested Development” in the TV instead of the browser. But the PS3 browser only features Flash 7, and the Linux PPC ports doesn’t have PPC Flash 9 plugin support either because Adobe doesn’t care about it.

So honestly, as a normal user, I see no reason whatsoever to run Linux on a PS3.

The Linux lusers are trying to convince us for years now that GNU/Linux is ready for the desktop, but they still can’t manage to put together a reasonable GUI to rip CDs. JBQ got the Foo Fighter CDs and he asked me to rip them on Linux because two of these six CDs have the Sony rootkit for Mac/Win.

So there I went to rip them in mp3 with Sound Juicer and it was a pain in the butt. It took me half an hour to understand all the gst-lame switches and configure them, as there is simply no in-depth user documentation for them (and gst-inspect was not installed even if all the other needed libs were). On the gstreamer manual they tell you that the “mode” switch can take values from 0 to 4, but no one tells you what these values are. To get that information, you have to look at the source code! So after fucking around with it, I think I got my head around most of that shit, so here’s a small tutorial for all of you who feel the same way. A tutorial with real information instead of half baked man pages.

2. Learning about the switches

Assuming you have installed the mp3 libraries and encoders and gstreamer-ugly libraries and other shit that should have been installed by default but they aren’t, Sound Juicer reads the gstreamer presets on how to rip. To modify these presets load the gnome-audio-profiles-properties application from a terminal (or via Sound Juicer’s preferences and profile editor). Create a new mp3 profile and in there you will have to type crazy ass switches, but thankfully I have the most common of them explained for you here:

(used with CBR encodings)
bitrate = Specify the constant bitrate. Goes from 8 to 320 kbps.
quality = With it you can choose which algorithm to use to encode. Default is 5. 0 is best, 10 is worst.

(mostly used with VBR encodings)
vbr = Specify bitrate algorithm, because the Lame developers can’t decide which one is best, so they leave that to the user to decide who knows nothing about algorithms. Anyways, it goes from 0 to 4. If you are encoding in constant bitrate use 0, otherwise use 4, which is the latest VBR algorithm.
vbr-max-bitrate = Specify maximum VBR bitrate (8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 or 320).
vbr-min-bitrate = Specify minimum VBR bitrate (8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 or 320).
vbr-quality = You can let the system specify the above two VBR bitrates if you don’t want to. 5 is medium quality, 0 is best, 10 is worse. So for example, vbr-quality=0 goes up to 256 kbps.
xingmux = some shit that you add when in VBR mode only, in order to make the mp3 file more compatible — like we didn’t want that to be ON by default!

(used with both CBR and VBR encodings)
mode = goes from 0 to 4. In order 0 means “stereo”, 1 means “joint stereo”, 2 means “dual channel”, 3 means “Mono”, and 4 means “auto”.

(only used when encoding via presets)
preset = Goes from 1001 to 1004, that is, from “medium” quality, to “standard”, “extreme” and finally, “insane” quality. That’s between 96 kbps and 256kbps, VBR.

3. Creating the truly lame gst-lame switches:

1. Constant bitrate CBR.
In this example below we create a joint stereo mp3, with constant bitrate of 160kbps and one of the best but slower algorithms for the encoding (that comes out from the quality=2):
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=0 bitrate=160 quality=2 ! id3v2mux

2. Using VBR.
In the following, we use variable bit rate with joint stereo and VBR algorithm #4, and we specify that we want the minimum bitrate to be 128 kbps and the maximum to be 192 kbps. We have to use the xingmux switch too to make the resulted mp3 file more compatible with players.
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=4 vbr-min-bitrate=128 vbr-max-bitrate=192 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

In the following, we use variable bit rate with joint stereo and VBR algorithm #4, but instead of specifying the minimum and maximum bitrate, we let the encoder decide based on vbr-quality value (I used quality 3) which is about between 160 and 220 kbps or something. Remember, when using VBR instead of CBR you must use the xingmux thingie to make it more compatible with mp3 players (and even then, the Totem Gnome media player has problems).
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=1 vbr=4 vbr-quality=3 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

3. Using Presets.
In the following, we use the preset 1002, which is of standard quality, VBR (at around 160 kbps), that we also run through xingmux.
audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc preset=1002 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

UPDATE: Here’s a mockup of how things should have been.

I just got an email from Microsoft that says that they are postponing their removal of Hotmail access via Outlook Express after “customer feedback”. It seems they lost too many paying customers, just like me.

Windows Live Mail sucks beyond belief. It’s slow, eats lots of RAM, and most importantly, it’s buggy as hell. Outlook Express is a mature application — at least for what it was originally designed to do.

Samsung recently released a full 1080/30p HD camcorder, which records in AVC. But instead of using the actual official AVCHD format, it’s using the MP4 container instead, stereo audio instead of 5.1 surround, and its own internal AVC format. The MP4 container is simply not optimized for editing. If people are cursing 10 times for AVCHD’s .mts not being easy to edit, think that we should be cursing 50 times for Samsung’s MP4.

I did a few tests too, in “draft (auto)” quality, which is the lowest preview quality on Vegas Pro that speeds up the video preview. Here are my findings on my P4 3Ghz DELL PC:

Samsung AVCHD-bastardation 1920×1080/30p: 1 frame per second
Canon & JVC AVCHD 1920×1080/60i: 5 frames per second
HDV 1440×1080/60i: 30 frames (full speed)

I don’t dispute the fact that faster PCs will be able to edit AVCHD faster. But no matter how to put it, Samsung’s MP4 is still 4 times slower than AVCHD. And AVCHD is about 6 times slower than HDV. And HDV is about 10 times slower than plain DV.

So buy cameras wisely if you want to edit, depending on your PC’s speed. But even on the fastest machine available today I don’t think that Samsung’s stream will edit full speed. Maybe in 3 years time or so.

On a previous blog post of mine I noted that I preferred either seismic additions (e.g. artificial intelligence), or just evolutionary releases that don’t break ABI and API compatibility with apps. Here’s another way that Gnome should go in my opinion:

Remove GTK+ and X11 requirement. Write both a brand new API using the Java language (by using Classpath, not J2SE), and a brand new, modern, windowing system that doesn’t have an ’80s architecture. In other words, pull a Google Android trick (and Apple Mac OS X too, in a way). You can still run older applications via a rootless or windowed X server, the way Mac OS X does it. And you only support modern ATi, nVidia and Intel (and maybe VIA) graphics cards after having few of your devs signing NDAs to get the 3D specs. Maybe you even rewrite the sound part too (adding support initially for only the 3 most common sound chipsets). In other words, you take over the “user visible” part of the operating system and you integrate with the rest of the system properly rather than legacy layers upon layers.

To truly liberate your platform and enable new powerful and modern applications to be written, that’s what it has to be done. Not beating the old dog. And yes, this is a 5+ year plan. Not something that gets done in a blink of an eye.

Red Hat has the most developers working on X.org, GTK+, Classpath, and Gnome, so they have to be the ones to be either convinced or initiate such a thing. Problem is, Red Hat doesn’t care about the home desktop anymore, they only care about getting corporate. Novell trying to go with Mono, would fail because it wouldn’t get enough tract from the community.

So this will never happen. It was a good 10 minutes of dreaming while writing about it.

I am talking about the apps currently available or soon-to-be-available on Google’s Android and iPhone’s Installer.app. Take a look (.pdf) at Android’s top-50 third party apps. I personally need zero of them. And while my iPhone is jailbroken, out of the 150+ binary apps currently available for it, I have only installed Terminal.app just in case in the future something shitty happens and I need to fix it manually. In other words, I see nothing that changes the way I do things in my life with these apps. Maybe because I don’t want to change my life. But I definitely need features that I take for granted on the desktop.

What I need is the kind of functionality that can’t be brought by third parties but require strong integration with the system and the hardware. I am not interested for example in a non-integrated random third party IM application, because that lack of integration would be more glaring in the mobile environment than an equivalent third party IM app on a desktop OS. Namely, on my phones I always need these:
* Multi-IM (ICQ/AIM/Jabber/Y!/MSN/GTalk) with full A/V support.
* VoIP SIP with A/V support (not Skype, preferably GizmoProject).
* A2DP/AVRCP/PAN/LAP/Obex Bluetooth support.
* Video recording and more still camera settings.
* Cut/Copy/Paste support and Text Select support.
* Adobe’s Flash Lite 3.0 browser plugin with video support.
* File manager/picker that system apps support automatically, e.g. Mail.
* T6 support like this one.
* UPnP server/client support and internet radio integration.
* Sound recorder (this can be done by third parties without integration repercussions).

The only third party app I am interested in seeing, and use only a few times a year, is possibly Skype. Nothing else. Ok, and a few games. But the BULK of what I need, they HAVE to be fully integrated with the system so they don’t behave like poor cousins, and therefore, it has to be Apple’s (or Google’s) job to implement and not the developer’s community.

The only phones that do a lot of what I need are Nokia’s Symbian S60 v3.1 phones and some of the newer Windows Mobile ones. Problem is, I am not willing to go back to a non-touchscreen phone environment (and the new touchscreen Nokia phones don’t inspire me at all), while Windows Mobile’s interface is The Suck.

So I am on “the waiting”.