#244932 - 30/12/2004 23:23
Money
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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Right, put your money where your mouth is time.
How many of you would pay, up front, to have V3 A worked upon for six months to remove a selected subset of major bugs and get it to Beta condition?
If so, how much?
Which bugs do you want removed/what would you want working on?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners...  #00015
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#244933 - 31/12/2004 01:48
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/10/2000
Posts: 4931
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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I don't know how much at the moment, but I would be willing to pay. My biggest issue is v3 not resuming where I left off. Other than that, it seems to work reasonably well until you use the tuner and it reboots itself.
_________________________
-Rob Riccardelli
80GB 16MB MK2 090000736
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#244934 - 31/12/2004 01:57
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 23/08/2000
Posts: 3826
Loc: SLC, UT, USA
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I'd put up $50. Unfortunately that's all my unemployed ass can afford at the moment, i know that's not much of anything. I haven't even used V3 yet... waiting for it to get stable.
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#244935 - 31/12/2004 02:01
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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I'd pay 50 bucks (US funds). Finally, a reason for me to be upset about the weak US dollar against the Euro! 
I'm just looking for stability and all of the version 2.00 features. Some silly stuff like no "Right click" in emplode would be nice to have fixed too. I love Alpha 3, but am afraid to use it on my main player.
Maybe we could set up a fund were we Paypal (or similar) to a site or account and once it reaches X amount of money, Y amount of hours would be put into the project? That way, all of the work is paid for up front. It'd be like a fund raiser, where we'd all get to see how close we are. It would also allow some people who are more generous to be able to pay as much as they'd like.
Edited by SE_Sport_Driver (31/12/2004 02:02)
_________________________
Brad B.
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#244936 - 31/12/2004 04:08
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Yeah, I'd pitch in 50 bucks, too.
For me, its main problem was that its playlists would get all messed up after a few synchs. And, there were memory problems and such. Hard to reproduce stuff.
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#244937 - 31/12/2004 04:09
Re: Money
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Oh, and while weu're at it, can we please get an updated builder image that can handle any size disk? The current builder doesn't work with big disks.
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#244938 - 31/12/2004 04:28
Re: Money
[Re: tfabris]
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member
Registered: 07/10/2000
Posts: 112
Loc: CA, USA
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I'll also contribute $50.
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#244939 - 31/12/2004 05:36
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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I don't use 3A, so I don't exactly know which bugs are the worst, but if the effort will bring it to good 2B level bugwise, I would be willing to part with at least 50€. Make it 100, if it makes any difference.
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244940 - 31/12/2004 05:50
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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member
Registered: 24/02/2003
Posts: 111
Loc: Elk Grove, CA
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I've been waiting for a beta to try v3, and would also contribute $50.
_________________________
No longer a stranger, finally a full-fledged member! 
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#244941 - 31/12/2004 07:17
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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veteran
Registered: 01/10/2001
Posts: 1307
Loc: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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I'd definitely be happy to part with 50-100 EUR to get a stable, tuner-supporting release.
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#244942 - 31/12/2004 07:26
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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addict
Registered: 27/10/2002
Posts: 568
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Yeah, I'm in. Haven't tried 3A yet so I don't know which bugs are the worst, but getting the radio(RDS) to work a bit better would be nice. And the rest of the bugs people have experienced...  Amount? Oh, I don't know, 100 dollars or euros, tentatively... Stig
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#244943 - 31/12/2004 08:34
Re: Money
[Re: StigOE]
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member
Registered: 30/06/1999
Posts: 179
Loc: Switzerland
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I would also pay 50$-100$ for a V3 Beta. Better RDS support would be fine (Like in 2.0 final)
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#244944 - 31/12/2004 08:54
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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I also haven't used v3a very much, but would be willing to pay $75-$150
It is going to take a lot of people to raise the cash for a person's time for six months though. That is about 1,000 hours of work.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#244945 - 31/12/2004 11:25
Re: Money
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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Reading through the responses here, I don't think anyone has actually understood, apart frm yourself, what I meant. I get the impression that they are talking about paying for the final result , not the development time required. To clarify here - I am talking about paying for the cost of an engineer to work for 6 x 4 x 40 hours to tackle correctional work for a limited list of bugs, for release of a free update to the player software. Although I see that there is some limited interest here, it is not really sufficient to fund an effort of this scale. I think you all need to be pretty realistic here: THERE WILL BE NO MORE SOFTWARE UPDATES FOR THIS PRODUCT . That is the bottom line. Unless there is some serious money pulled together to do this, and a spec agreed for "one final push", then you will be stuck with tuner bugs, graphics bugs, and all the other bugs for the foreseeable future. The car player is not a living, supported product any more, and to think otherwise or hope that secretly, somewhere, someone is working on it is pure fantasy. It's time to wake up and face facts, as unpleasant as they may sound. If you want to do anything to ensure the future of our beloved player, then now is the time. Start thinking about it! 
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#244946 - 31/12/2004 11:44
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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addict
Registered: 02/08/2004
Posts: 434
Loc: Helsinki, Finland
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Ok, I'd pony up $100. What is the estimate for a job like this to be done? Can a quote be made? Thanks.
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#244947 - 31/12/2004 11:54
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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veteran
Registered: 01/10/2001
Posts: 1307
Loc: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Quote:
The car player is not a living, supported product any more, and to think otherwise or hope that secretly, somewhere, someone is working on it is pure fantasy.
But despite that, I assume there is no hope in hell of having the full source released..?
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#244948 - 31/12/2004 12:01
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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journeyman
Registered: 08/10/2004
Posts: 53
Loc: Trondheim, Norway
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Looks like we better start making the software our self...
Audun
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- Audun E -
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#244949 - 31/12/2004 12:24
Re: Money
[Re: tfabris]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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No point in paying somebody to do a builder image -- that stuff is entirely 100% open source, and there's likely 20 people on this BBS (outside of Cambridge) who can do it, given a few hours.
Let's concentrate on the stuff we don't have source code for.
Cheers
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#244950 - 31/12/2004 12:28
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Ahh, well.. if that were really the case (never again a s/w alpha for the player), then any money contributed here would really be MUCH better spent on an Open Source alternative. There are already a couple of those, and with six months full-time effort from virtually any competent Linux hacker, they'd get a lot better rather quickly.
Cheers
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#244951 - 31/12/2004 12:36
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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addict
Registered: 27/10/2002
Posts: 568
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I don't think we'll be able to raise that much money. If we managed to get 100 people to pay 100 dollars each, that would be 10000 dollars. That would be about oh, two months work...? To expect to get much more than 100 people or expect them to pay a lot more than 100 dollars, would be, in my opinion, unrealistic... Unfortunately...
Stig
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#244952 - 31/12/2004 13:20
Re: Money
[Re: StigOE]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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I agree. And on the other hand, $10K would be an incredible incentive for a skilled Linux person to hack away at an Open Source player -- doing a labour of love *and* getting some money for it is a powerful incentive.
Cheers
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#244954 - 31/12/2004 13:35
Re: Money
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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Greetings! I have been mostly lurking or offline completely over the holidays. But this thread caught my attention. It sounds as if there have been some shifts in the way Rio looks (well, looked) at the empeg car customer base as a trial community for experimental features. I know that it has really been the folks @ empeg (current and former) that have been pushing this. Given that people have been moving on and away from Rio, I suspect that the management (term used in a very sarcastic manner) have lost site of the value of their own customer base and user community. Sad. But if the code will not be developed any further, I doubt any amount that could be raised (and I am willing to kick in for this too) would be enough to even get Rio's attention to allow for use of the existing code tree, still under their control. As for third party player work, that is always a possibility. The strength of the player has always been leading edge (for its time) hardware combined with extremely powerful software. I am not sure how easy it would be to replicate this, even with basic features, to give a stable application. I am not a coder, but I certainly would not mind trying to fund someone to find out... While there are certainly some features I would like to see in a final (or even a stable beta) version, I have not loaded 3.0 because I prefer the rock solid stability of 2.01 over having to worry about / tinker with / avoid crashes while listening and driving. If I had a wish list of what I would like to see from 3.0 stable enough to have for a new release, I would say sync with emplode and crossfading would be my two highest priorities. I guess this just turns out to be a long-winded "me too" message... 
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#244955 - 31/12/2004 13:39
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
Reading through the responses here, I don't think anyone has actually understood, apart frm yourself, what I meant. I get the impression that they are talking about paying for the final result , not the development time required.
It makes no difference, Rob: we simply told you how much we would be willing to pay to have the beta materialize. If we talk about commercial development, again it boils down to the same: total sum received for the result has to be greater than investment.
I doubt that anybody had illusions we would be able to scrape together enough to commision on commercial terms the development required from Rio/DNNA. More in the line of pizza and soda for a volunteer with DNNA placet.
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244956 - 31/12/2004 13:45
Re: Money
[Re: mlord]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
I agree. And on the other hand, $10K would be an incredible incentive for a skilled Linux person to hack away at an Open Source player -- doing a labour of love *and* getting some money for it is a powerful incentive.
Agreed. How much of the probem is the fact that hardware is also closed? Perhaps in that area we could be able to talk DNNA into opening it?
But I would really hate to see original empeg SW be thrown away: I feel it was labor of love too, closed source or not....
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244957 - 31/12/2004 14:05
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/02/2002
Posts: 1904
Loc: Leeds, UK
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I would also be willing to stump up a little, but not enough I think.
Maybe we could look at this from another angle, how about giving Rio a big poke with a stick and suggest a few ideas for uses for the code and get the bugs fixed along the way, and make a community investment to show how serious we are.
The sort of thing I am talking about is the SqeezeBox or Roku SoundBridge. I am looking at these devices at the moment, but I am always dispointed with the bottom line. I really want my empeg to do all these things. There is a massive market for these things now (just look at the selection of products from big players like Linksys and Netgear etc...) and we all know that a similar player based on the empeg technology would blow allot of them out of the water. Imagine a slicker streamlined empeg with built in wireless and support for existing opensource server software (SlimServer!!!) there would be no server development to do, just design a snazzy box tweak the code and you have a ready to roll product with features like no other player on the market !!!
So where do I send my ideas to then ??? Anyone got a contact inside the "new" Rio I can bug ???
Cheers
Cris.
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#244958 - 31/12/2004 14:05
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
Agreed. How much of the probem is the fact that hardware is also closed? Perhaps in that area we could be able to talk DNNA into opening it?
Not much of the hardware is closed. The DSP is fairly closed, but there isn't much Rio can do about that, they will have got the documentation on it under a NDA.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#244959 - 31/12/2004 14:45
Re: Money
[Re: andy]
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member
Registered: 07/10/2000
Posts: 112
Loc: CA, USA
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While I can't sling code, and I don't know what V.3 has to offer, I do love my empeg(s). If this gets enough momentum, I would personally comitt US$250, and maybe more through proxy. I deeply appreciate everyone who has provided their support thus far.
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#244960 - 31/12/2004 14:59
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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The reason why I started this thread came from a number of different facts:
- the current software, in various versions, has got a number of problems that ideally need development work to resolve.
- a number of attempts have been made/discussed here to stump up cash to do this, implying that some people at least would be prepared to pay for some development work.
- there is no budget for development work on this product, and no amount of money we can knock together here will interest DNNA to divert the resources needed to do this work (they are only interested in bulk production and current products).
- it is highly unlikely that any perceived cost of this work for a free upgrade to a tiny, diminishing userbase of an obsolete, unsupported device will be considered seriously if DNNA has to pay for it.
- the player software cannot be released to open source, but at the same time, the people who have access to it (legally) cannot work on it (this is an oversimplification, but a reasonable summary).
- the empeg team are likely to be highly busy doing their daily development work on flash players for the foreseeable future.
- I am under an NDA to what was SONICBlue, which may/may not still be in force now that the empeg team and the associated IP has been acquired by DNNA.
- I am unemployed, and likely to be so for the near future - but I still have bills to pay.
- I am a pretty experienced C++ programmer (the language of the player application), with the majority of my professional systems work based on many variants of UNIX (the target OS of the player unit - and no, don't nit pick till you have finished reading).
- I started out as an electronics engineer and transited over to embedded software development, so I should be competent enough to do this type of work.
- I cost a lot less than a staff member at DNNA (Rio division) per hour (ie., zero - read on), without diverting a staff member from his daily work.
Here's the proposal: due to my unusual circumstances (NDA, correct qualifications, available to do the work), I would be prepared to spend time on the player software. Since I am under an NDA, the IP of DNNA is protected and would not be released. Hence, I am in a reasonably favourable position to ask for permission to do this work externally to Rio with a suitable level of product confidentiality.
If permission was granted by DNNA to do this, and if the community here enters a contract with me to pay me a salary to live on for a period of time (say, 6 months) then I could survive whilst working on this as a professional project without any fiscal or practical consequence to Rio/DNNA. I have the facilities to carry out this work at home, without Rio/DNNA having to provide this at their cost.
So: you guys pay me, working as a "protected" and priviledged insider, to provide you with an updated version of the software, without any legal compromises or IP violation. I get a job and can eat, Rio basks in the reflected glory, everyone's happy.
Comments?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#244961 - 31/12/2004 15:00
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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I *am* working on a nifty way to get all you DIN-loving empeg owners something bang up to date. Can't say any more than that at the moment, but fingers crossed there will be something for the next owners meet which will have you drooling Hugo
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#244962 - 31/12/2004 15:03
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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What do you think of this proposal?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#244963 - 31/12/2004 16:12
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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Rob, can we pay you in beer? I really like this idea that you're proposing. I guess a lot of us assumed that tweaking existing code wouldn't take 6 months, but that's only because we (or "I" have no experiene in this). Your solution sounds great and I hope that it can be worked out.
_________________________
Brad B.
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#244964 - 31/12/2004 18:40
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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It's definitely an idea, though the empeg codebase is about to have a whole heap of stuff done to it in the general course of development - which will result in a lot of issues being fixed, for starters - and there's the issue of what point the code is branched to be worked on. Not insoluble, obviously, but an issue nonetheless.
Also, support: I would expect you'd need the ear (and/or time) of some developers in order to understand the way the code works - there's probably coming up for 500,000+ lines of code in the player & libs nowadays (though somebody like Peter could tell me I'm including stuff that I shouldn't be, I'm sure) and that's a lot for one person to swallow without any help. There's no one expert in the team now who understand the in's and out's of every part of the player, for example.
I'll be seeing our VP of engineering at CES, I'll ask him what he thinks. It is possible he won't go for it at all though, as this code is not some dark dank corner of the codebase but very much what Rio's future is based on. Risk does come into it.
Hugo
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#244965 - 31/12/2004 18:47
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
The car player is not a living, supported product any more, and to think otherwise or hope that secretly, somewhere, someone is working on it is pure fantasy.
But despite that, I assume there is no hope in hell of having the full source released..?
It would seem so, presumably because it has much (if not all) in common with portables (the future of which also seems cloudy to me)
No cloudiness in the future of Rio portables here, says the hardware designer (ie, me).
As I said in another email, there's a lot of work going on (and scheduled) on the empeg source tree. Whether this will translate into future carplayer releases does depend on the charity and enthusiasm of empeg employees to do the necessary work to knock carplayer builds into shape - but the fact that the codebase is very much current and gaining lots of very cool features should not be doubted.
Hugo
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#244966 - 31/12/2004 18:51
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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Well, I am willing to bribe, uh, well, "financially inspire", anyone doing the work. Perhaps you and Rob could create a PayPal account dedicated to receiving such "inspiration".
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#244967 - 31/12/2004 19:01
Re: Money
[Re: pgrzelak]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
I know that it has really been the folks @ empeg (current and former) that have been pushing this. Given that people have been moving on and away from Rio, I suspect that the management (term used in a very sarcastic manner) have lost site of the value of their own customer base and user community. Sad.
I don't think there's been any such "move away"; it's true that Rob did sell upper management on using the empeg-car alpha group as a great testbed for some of the early audio path testing, but there's never been explicit authorisation for people to work on carplayer code in work hours - the fact that the carplayer and current/future Rio products use the same code does mean that regular builds pop out of autobuilders which compile and link for the carplayer. Just because Rob isn't at empeg anymore doesn't mean this stops happening, or people stop caring about the carplayer.
The challenge is always to take one of these and do the necessary fixes in order to result in a player that's actually *usable* - in the process of adding some feature not applicable to the carplayer, a carplayer feature can get broken. There's also the issue of UI - the carplayer UI is seriously creaking under the weight of Karma features which aren't accessible in an obvious manner, and really needs to be ripped up & redone. Some of this may become easier from further abstraction and tidying of the code, but it could well result in no carplayer builds working at all until somebody rewrites the UI from scratch, for example.
Several empeg guys, including notably Peter and JohnG, have most recently put in stirling work on v3 and helped immensely with getting it usable, but it is very much a labour of love.
The way to really get something state of the art is to have a new car product, which isn't a stupid an idea as it might seem. By my calculations....
Hugo
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#244968 - 31/12/2004 19:09
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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!!!
Now, if that last comment (not repeated in case it needs to be edited later on) is not a rather interesting and leading thought... I know that you cannot share those, uh, calculations. At least not publicly...
The perceived direction shift was based mostly on this thread. I know people have left DNNA for a variety of reasons over the past year, but I am pleased to hear that the interest and dedication are still there!
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#244969 - 31/12/2004 20:43
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31600
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Quote:
Just because Rob isn't at empeg anymore doesn't mean this stops happening, or people stop caring about the carplayer.
Thanks for stating that directly, I'm sure it's something we were all a little bit worried about.
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#244970 - 31/12/2004 22:31
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
How much of the probem is the fact that hardware is also closed?
The schematic is closed to us, but we don't actually need it -- we now have access to extensive documentation on all of the important chips used.. more than enough. Just need a person with the right skills, interest, and some time here and now (not me, by the way.. far to busy right now).
EDIT: I just now read Hugo's recent posts, and the future of the Rio s/w base doesn't sound as bleak as perhaps this thread might have had it -- I'm very happy with the past/current efforts of the Build Brothers et al. So long as it continues from time to time!
Cheers!
Edited by mlord (31/12/2004 22:37)
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#244972 - 01/01/2005 01:27
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
No cloudiness in the future of Rio portables here, says the hardware designer (ie, me).
As I said in another email, there's a lot of work going on (and scheduled) on the empeg source tree. Whether this will translate into future carplayer releases does depend on the charity and enthusiasm of empeg employees to do the necessary work to knock carplayer builds into shape - but the fact that the codebase is very much current and gaining lots of very cool features should not be doubted.
I am very glad to hear that, Hugo. My comment on cloudiness just reflects my frustration with seeing iPods absolutely everywhere, and Karma barely at all. But you know that, of course.
Cheers!
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244973 - 01/01/2005 05:08
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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addict
Registered: 13/06/2000
Posts: 429
Loc: Berlin, DE
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I'm in for 50-100 USD
_________________________
80gig red mk2 -- 080000125
(No, I don't actually hate Alan Cox)
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#244974 - 01/01/2005 15:14
Re: Money
[Re: pgrzelak]
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member
Registered: 03/04/2002
Posts: 169
Loc: Regensburg, Germany
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I second the PayPal account suggestion. Let's try to fill that account up and then we can collectively arrive at a decision of what to do with the dough.
P.S.: For increased contributors' trust some 'public' monitoring of the account may be advisable.
_________________________
32MB, serial: 10101626
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#244975 - 01/01/2005 17:34
Re: Money
[Re: SuperQ]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Seems like a familiar thread... I'm in for 100-250 USD or Euros, whichever is worth more when the time comes to pay.
Hugo - are you hinting that the Rio booth is a must-see at CES? It's already on my long list of course, but I have a lot of stuff to get through in 4 days. Anything being shown in a suite as well?
Bruno
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#244976 - 01/01/2005 18:01
Re: Money
[Re: hybrid8]
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member
Registered: 03/02/2002
Posts: 101
Loc: Sweden
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I'm in for $50-100, but I could maybe think of a monthly payment of $## for a steady flow of motivation(beer? :-)).
/Fredrik
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#244977 - 01/01/2005 19:55
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 06/10/1999
Posts: 2591
Loc: Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
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Quote:
The way to really get something state of the art is to have a new car product, which isn't a stupid an idea as it might seem.
Damn. Caught out by planned obsolesence...again!
_________________________
Jim
'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.
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#244978 - 01/01/2005 20:18
Re: Money
[Re: jimhogan]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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Just another "me too". Although I am thrilled by Hugo's suggesting that something new may eventually emerge I don't mind throwing a few bucks ($50-$100) into the pot to make sure that some development on the player continues.
Given Hugo's comments that there may actually be something at the end of the tunnel, it does seem like Rob S should have an offline discussion with him to make sure he isn't wasting his time.
-Mike
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#244979 - 01/01/2005 20:41
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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Forgive my uneducated brainstorm, but what if we invested in making the empeg software more "hackable". Make a build with the core closed-source functionality (audio, FIDs, caching, etc) but leave the rest unimplemented with hooks so we could bolt on our open-source interfaces, modules, displays, functions, etc. So we wouldn't start from scratch with an open-source player; we'd pay for a solid foundation.
Like Hugo mentioned about the Karma features needing a new UI: let the paid insider work the current closed-source empeg code into a foundation and let us write the UI (and other components). This may work if we had access to the closed-source components which interface with the UI (perhaps just the functions, their paramaters, their return values, and a description of what they do; close-source their code).
I would be willing to contribute $100 to this effort, if the software developers among us think it's reasonable.
One thing to remember is, "hell hath no fury like an empeg user scorned." Meaning: empeg users hate to pay for stuff and get nothing in return. I'm not doubting RobS in the least, but if people put money down, we need a system to be sure that they get what they paid for to avoid any potential problems.
Quote:
My comment on cloudiness just reflects my frustration with seeing iPods absolutely everywhere, and Karma barely at all.
Agreed, saddly. iPods even snuck into the LotR:TTT-EE Appendix 3 DVD. And I couldn't sell my friend on a Karma because he wanted the simplicity and supposed unshaking reliability of an iPod. Thankfully, we still have our empegs!
_________________________
- FireFox31 110gig MKIIa (30+80), Eutronix lights, 32 meg stacked RAM, Filener orange gel lens, Greenlights Lit Buttons green set
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#244980 - 01/01/2005 23:35
Re: Money
[Re: FireFox31]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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I think Firefox pretty much just posted exactly what I had intended to. If there is going to be a push for paid development on the empeg code, I'd like to see it driven to a point where the core playback engine has a lot of features like the crossfading in 3.0, and have some type of 3rd party hook. Hijack and the efforts from people like Tony C are pretty cool, but definitly suffer from lack of such a hook. For me, 2.0 does just fine for daily needs and 3.0 really doesn't add enough for me to justify spending a ton of money on it. However, if that money went to ensuring I could have scrolling lyrics, receiver compatibility, and possibly other unthought features in a non roundabout way, I'd be willing to pay possibly close to what I got my firesale 60gb unit for.
Regarding the iPod issue, Rio beter have something really big up their sleeves to think they can continue to compete in that market. They need to show that:
1. The product is alive. I don't think I have seen a Karma on a store shelf in months now. I've also only seen one release, the 20gb player. In that time, Apple has released the 3rd gen, 4th gen, and iPod Photo units, keeping fresh stock out there for consumers to see. Before the Karma, Rio had the completly different Riot.
2. They can market it. Thanks to the (also dying) ReplayTV I own from DNNA, I don't see many commercials. But I'm certain there really has never been a Karma commercial. iPod, I know for sure gets advertised quite a bit. Maybe a brand name change would help this.
3. Support from 3rd parties. This one will be tough, since not too many iPod accessories appeared until after it was proven to be very popular.
One thing I would love to see is a revival of most of the dead Rio products and them marketed togther. Bring back the Central for music storage, receivers for cheep streaming around the house off it, then add in a portable product that easially and quickly works with the Central or a computer. Even better, work with ReplayTV and have an uber unit that does video as well, and add video out to a receiver for bedroom show sharing cheep. Then, have a car solution for that portable player that proves how bad the iPod + BMW interface is. Rio has the possibility to bring digital music even to those unconfortable with the computer. They just need to do so in a seamless way, instead of changing plans every year. The flash market is probably not going to substain mass growth in the future, so Rio needs other things to survive.
edit: To be fair, the Carbon is a good start. It is decent competition for the iPod Mini. They just need to market it as such now.
Edited by drakino (01/01/2005 23:39)
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#244981 - 02/01/2005 10:36
Re: Money
[Re: FireFox31]
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addict
Registered: 29/06/2002
Posts: 531
Loc: Triangle, VA
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I would really like to see something along FireFox's post happen. That way we wouldnt be so dependant on specific people to get stuff done, the commnuity could start developing differnt parts of the non closed software.
_________________________
-D
Modifying and Tweaking is a journey,
not a destination................................
MKIIa : 60gig - 040103286 - Blue - v2 + PCATS tuner
MKIIa : 20gig - 040103260 - Blue - v3a8 + Mark Lord Special Edition Cherry Dock
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#244982 - 02/01/2005 12:33
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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old hand
Registered: 23/07/2003
Posts: 869
Loc: Colorado
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Hugo, I only reply to your post because of the final comment, which I'll get to. My post applies to all comments in this thread up til this.  I'm going to be brutally honest. Looking at my sig shows what I am willing to pay for. Please nobody waste everyone's time discussing the difficulties of Japanese on the empeg; I think everyone is pretty clear on the difficulties. I'm simply stating, very clearly, what interests me development-wise, and that is being able to have my music not only correctly tagged on my home system, but on the empeg as well. And that is worth $350US. Minimum. Nuff said. As for interest in additional financial contributions for development, I'm sorry, but I don't know that I'd be in. A few things would have to change. First, the "circle-of-friends" thing would have to come to a dead stop. If I put down currency to help development, I wouldn't want to be told "well, you weren't at the meet, so ha ha ha. Just wait 6 months." Yes, I know it was to keep peoples decks from getting pooched. Yes, I know nobody was paying at the time. My point is that if I do pay, I want to get releases (alphas, too) as soon as anyone else. Period. I'm a big boy and can take responsibility for screwing up my player if it comes to that. But I won't pay to be made feel like I'm second tier because I can't afford to take time off of school and fly to Europe for fun. Second, I honestly only have one thing other than crossfading that I want to work, and I've already discussed that. Unless what FireFox spoke about (and I've also mentioned from time to time) regarding locking down the closed source portions of the codebase and making everything more modular to allow the community to produce its own software. Beyond that, what would I be seeing for my money? I have no interest in the specialized receiver builds, etc. I simply want to sort MP3s, play MP3s, and view MP3 tags. I don't need FLAC or OGG support, etc. etc. Having a way to design custom info display modes via an XML schema, in line with what FireFox said (ie. hooks)? That I would pay for. I know you can do it with emphatic, but the slowdown on my system is just too much (can't force myself to turn off visuals and burn-in ) I hope everyone understands, I'm not trying to be negative. I have more respect for the empeg guys, the Build Brothers and pretty much everyone in this community that I could ever say. I just can't justify: a) paying a ton of money for features I really don't have a need or desire for, while not getting the features I want and need, b) paying a ton of money for features to be implemented in the "Amersfoort Club" alpha release that I won't get to try for months. I'm not implying this would continue, just that it happened. Especially with as much money as I have out on the fascia project. (Meeting later today, BTW, to determine just where we're at on that.) As soon as the Japanese thing gets figured out (or released to us, as I remember someone discussing the appearance of a Japanese capable empeg at a meet), let me know. I'll throw the $350 and maybe more, because that is something that, for me, is a huge usability clusterfsck. HUGE. Till then, I'm going to need convincing that I'm going to get something out of my contribution. Sorry if that sounds selfish and crappy.
_________________________
Dave
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#244983 - 02/01/2005 14:08
Re: Money
[Re: webroach]
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old hand
Registered: 01/10/2002
Posts: 1039
Loc: Fullerton, Calif.
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Quote:
I'm going to be brutally honest. Looking at my sig shows what I am willing to pay for. Please nobody waste everyone's time discussing the difficulties of Japanese on the empeg; I think everyone is pretty clear on the difficulties. I'm simply stating, very clearly, what interests me development-wise, and that is being able to have my music not only correctly tagged on my home system, but on the empeg as well. And that is worth $350US. Minimum. Nuff said.
I would be willing to support this effort only if it were to press for a completely open source player.
I know that I've spent more time translating my chinese mp3s to english that I would have spent adding Big5 support to the player. Lately I've just given up and have lots of songs called "track 1".
There is also a feature/bug in the tuner code that I know would take me seconds to fix, but makes the tuner useless here in Southern California, and I have no access to fix it. It's irritating that I had to install a second head unit to fix a software problem.
I'm thinking that if there are closed portions to the semi-open player, what would be the next minor unfixable bug?
Now that being said, if there were closed modules with hooks, and an open source player finished, it would seem irresistable to create open source modules to go with the player.
I'm with Webroach, V2 works fine for me and it's unlikely that dbcs support would be added or the radio bug fixed, and I don't need all the other features being discussed. I would be willing to pay for a solution that allows me to change what I feel needs changing.
Thanks,
Larry
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#244984 - 02/01/2005 15:46
Re: Money
[Re: FireFox31]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 23/09/2000
Posts: 3608
Loc: Minnetonka, MN
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How about paying someone the money to create a new open source player. Mark has suggested several times that the nescessary info is available but he doesn't want to do it so maybe someone else here could be bribed. I personally was happy with 2.0 but I haven't installed the player in my mini yet due to stupid propritary crap in the car. Also I hope whatever Hugo is hinting at will be a good replacement
_________________________
Matt
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#244985 - 02/01/2005 19:40
Re: Money
[Re: msaeger]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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Quote:
How about paying someone the money to create a new open source player.
I don't think we would be able to come up with enough money to get it done. Assuming we all feel really generous and can scrape together $20k that is still only two or three months of a good programmers time. The current player software has many man years of development put into it. Even the time Mark has put into hijack is small change compared to what it would take to rewrite the player from scratch and just get it to the current level of functionality.
The only way I could see a replacement player happening is to turn it into a community project with lots of us working on it in our spare time. But unfortunately every time someone has tried to get something like that started there seems to have been very little interest.
Paying someone like Rob S to rework the current code base into something more modular with published interfaces so individual components could be replaced with open source pieces over time might be a better path. But, that would still likely be a significant investment and when he was finished we would have something that was likely more buggy than what we started with. The benefits of modularizing everything wouldn't be evident until enough people here started enhancing or replacing individual components.
-Mike
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#244986 - 02/01/2005 20:21
Re: Money
[Re: webroach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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I have to confess to being somewhat disappointed in your post. First off: I organise the Amersfoort events for fun, plain and simple. In order to make it sucessful, I have to make it attractive enough for people to want to attend. Don't forget, I am in competition with TV, football matches, F1 races, and, believe it or not, exams and even national holidays! Thanks to the good graces of the empeg team, one of the pulling points so far has been new builds of software for the player. However - and bear this in mind - this is software produced in their own time, for an unsupported product. The last two "Top secret" releases done for the Amersfoort meets were not meant to be "secret" or "limited" or "just for the club" in any sense, other than to limit it's circulation to prevent a mass software failure stretching through the whole community (you will perhaps note that just about every member of this community has been able to get hold of this stuff given time, regardless of circulation restrictions placed upon it by Rob). This software can only be released as Alpha, never Beta (think about it, heh?) and the very fact that it has been released at all is a pretty good thing. It speaks well for the team that they think with enough responsibility to their former customer base that they are still trying to ensure that people's machines don't get hosed by some lurking nasty that they have insufficient time to test properly for. Read the label - it says quite clearly - "Use AT YOUR OWN RISK!". I rather resent the imputation that you feel that the people who come here have formed a cliquey "club" just because they can afford the ticket price and the cost: that's not the case. You are also quite welcome to come as well. If you have problems with the date of the 2005 event (are you looking at the calender?) due to exams, then let me know NOW and I'll see if I can adjust it - I have done this for several people several times now to make sure that as many people as want to come, can come. Money a problem? Well, I can't help much with that I'm afraid - but I do try to make it fun for everyone who can't attend, even going so far as trying to arrange webcams at the event, and this year an attempt was made at videoing it for a limited "Best of..". For various reasons this hasn't happened - sorry. I realise that at each event, there has been a fair amount of post-event ragging about these releases with an "We know something you don't know!" element to it. Perhaps this is a mistake - but it's only ragging, nothing else! There's nothing intentionally nasty about it! To labour this point somewhat - when I made this current proposal, I was NOT proposing that partially-directed versions be released to a limited crowd who have paid to "join the club". This was the last thing on my mind. The proposal was going to be firmed up along the lines that the people who paid up front would be entitled to regular updates during development, intermediate test builds, so forth - to act as a kind of voluntary A-test team, much the way as I did with the original release test team. Then eventually, everyone - having paid or not - would benefit from a free, Beta upgrade. So why pay at all, then? Why not just sit back and wait for a new sausage to pop out of the pipe? Well, that's what's been happeniing so far (with diminishing frequency), in case you haven't noticed - and the people who have benefitted from this approach have been ... ...yup, you guessed it, the people who came to the Amersfoort meets. And yes, some of them DID pay - like Rob Riccardelli who paid a h*** of a lot in air fare to come over for what was, in the end, just a boozy party with a few hamburgers thrown in for good measure! Does that not sound like "paying" for a priviledged release? It was his choice to do so, nicht wahr? I am also a little bothered that you have attached conditions to what you are prepared to contribute to. While I understand why you want what you want, you are - as other posters here are also doing - Completely Missing The Point. I am Not talking about, nor am I interested in doing, (in a limited time with limited funds) adding new functionality , only making what has been described as an unstable release into a Stable one, with a pre-selected list of fixes to certain bugs that will provide the maximum benefit to the entire user community. If you wish to be partial, and only contribute to directed development that benefits only yourself and no-one else (I don't see anyone else clamouring for Japanese ID3 support here - do you?), then I would prefer that you withdrew and did not offer funds as I will not be able to do what you ask - there won't be the opportunity. Sure, there are about a dozen new things I would like to build into the the player software but I will have neither the time, nor funds to do this. I suspect saying it this way will upset you: I sincerely hope not, as I do not wish for this to happen - your posts and contributions on this board are enjoyable and I enjoy reading your thoughts. But as you say yourself - I have to be brutal about this: I will have very little time to do what I propose. I am not even sure I will be able to do enough: I will be taking a huge financial risk on your behalf and to be anything less than totally focussed on what is practically achievable is without any doubt in my mind, POINTLESS. If you all want this to happen, then you have a very small window of opportunity to consider what you want, pool your funds, and make a concrete contribution, for which I promise you will be rewarded with my greatest efforts. But if it's not important enough for you - well, why should I commit to the risk?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#244987 - 02/01/2005 20:31
Re: Money
[Re: mcomb]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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Not a bad summary, but the idea of Modularity is just not achieveable due to practical aspects of how the player actually works in normal operation. The guys have looked at this (remember the big discussions about the "plug in decoder" architecture?) and it's just not on, otherwise they'd have done it! They are pretty smart cookies - if it's not been done so far, there's a good reason for it.
No, we are better off focussing in stability and correction of dysfunction. A final release version of V3 with all the minor playlist issues, caching, graphics, memory allocation, radio tuning and RDS to get a good meat-and-potato release of the quality of V2 Final, along with a revised disk builder seems to me to be the way to go. It is work based on established material, and has a better chance of success.
Why not an effort to work on the open source players that have been floating around for a while? Well, indeed - but why hasn't it been done by now? As much as I feel this is an alternative (Look at Mike's jEmplode), it has not happened. I am certain if I worked on material like this for 6 months, 40 hours a week, I could produce some excellent results. But I can't survive another 6 months without something to pay my mortgage and bills - I still would need funds. And why pay for an open source one when I could (potentially) work on the real thing?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#244988 - 02/01/2005 21:06
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
(I don't see anyone else clamouring for Japanese ID3 support here - do you?)
There is at least one more 'clamourer' for Japanese support . I would like to see addition of Latin2, but I don't see it as something that benefits the community enough to warant the use of scarce resources for it.
Quote:
If you all want this to happen, then you have a very small window of opportunity to consider what you want, pool your funds, and make a concrete contribution, for which I promise you will be rewarded with my greatest efforts. But if it's not important enough for you - well, why should I commit to the risk?
Again, I didn't try 3A and consequently don't feel very strongly about particular bugs. Actual 3A users will have their priorities, and I am perfectly happy to trust their and in particular your judgment. But perhaps you could share your 'preliminary top-10 list'?
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244989 - 02/01/2005 21:17
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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veteran
Registered: 21/01/2002
Posts: 1380
Loc: Erie, CO
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Quote:
Not a bad summary, but the idea of Modularity is just not achieveable due to practical aspects of how the player actually works in normal operation. The guys have looked at this (remember the big discussions about the "plug in decoder" architecture?) and it's just not on, otherwise they'd have done it! They are pretty smart cookies - if it's not been done so far, there's a good reason for it.
This is too bad, I thought this (modular code) would be our "best case" option.
Quote:
No, we are better off focussing in stability and correction of dysfunction. A final release version of V3 with all the minor playlist issues, caching, graphics, memory allocation, radio tuning and RDS to get a good meat-and-potato release of the quality of V2 Final, along with a revised disk builder seems to me to be the way to go. It is work based on established material, and has a better chance of success.
I can't justify paying for a player that will still be closed source, with no modularity (read: no future as far as I can see) with only two major features above V2: crossfading and fixed RDS and tuning. Especially since I do not have a tuner. You aren't getting a lot of interest because V2 final was most of what we need.
Quote:
Why not an effort to work on the open source players that have been floating around for a while? Well, indeed - but why hasn't it been done by now?
V2 does most of what we want, there is no killer feature yet that an open source player would provide, in fact it would be moving backwards (at least at first). jEmplode was written so it could be used on non-PC platforms, a feature that many people wanted (including the developer).
Quote:
And why pay for an open source one when I could (potentially) work on the real thing?
An open source player cannot be EOL'd. Rio cannot halt development or distribution of an open source player. We would then own the hardware, the kernel, the player and all 3rd party applications. The real thing may not have a future, and our money will have been wasted.
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#244990 - 02/01/2005 21:48
Re: Money
[Re: cushman]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
An open source player cannot be EOL'd. Rio cannot halt development or distribution of an open source player. We would then own the hardware, the kernel, the player and all 3rd party applications. The real thing may not have a future, and our money will have been wasted.
True, and I would like very much to have an open source player, but I don't know how to counter two Rob's arguments: scope of the task (juged both by the amount of effort put into existing player by a very competent bunch of guys@empeg and by 'inventorying' its features) and the fact that all nice add-ons we have have been single-developer efforts (I think that only Hijack got some patches by somebody other than 'lead developer'). We simply don't have very good 'bazaar' development track record
OTOH, perhaps having a promising open source player 'skeleton' commisioned by the community and started by somebody like Rob S would energize our collective development spirit. I don't know. In the meantime, I am willing to subscribe to the bug fix effort, even if the result will not be spectacularly better than 2 final.
Edited by dbrashear (03/01/2005 01:11)
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#244991 - 02/01/2005 22:57
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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IMHO an open source player would be the best solution, and if it were pulled off I have no doubt that project would end up on many targets other than the empeg car player. Unfortunately I can't see that happening - a certain level of functionality and commitment is required before an open source project is taken seriously enough to gain wider momentum. The original (pre-1.0) player was written in a few months essentially by one person (Mike) if you don't include drivers (Hugo - but open source, so no need to duplicate) and visuals (Toby). I'd say that level of functionality would generate interest in the project, so we're looking at a commitment of maybe six months full time development by someone. If that someone expects reasonable remuneration then that's probably £15 - £20K.
A player with 3.0 functionality would be considerably more work. I'm planning a project of similar scope for a different market (closed source, sorry!) and working on the assumption of 6,000+ man hours. To make that a reality in an open source world it would be necessary to attract more developers with time on their hands than we're likely to find in the empeg community - hence targeting other platforms (e.g. generic in-car PC's).
As another option, I suspect a couple of weekends of work by three or four key people at Rio would yield an acceptably usable 3.0 Beta. At one time job satisfaction and a few pizzas would generate sufficient motivation for this, but these days I suspect it may take something more tangible.
Rob
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#244992 - 03/01/2005 00:12
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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old hand
Registered: 23/07/2003
Posts: 869
Loc: Colorado
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I have to confess to being somewhat disappointed in your post. First off: I organise the Amersfoort events for fun, plain and simple. In order to make it sucessful, I have to make it attractive enough for people to want to attend. Don't forget, I am in competition with TV, football matches, F1 races, and, believe it or not, exams and even national holidays!
Rob, I'm truly sorry my post upset you. I had not intended to make it seem as if I was slamming the Amersfoort meets, nor do I believe anything I said in my post should lead one to believe that was my intention. Even though I've not been, I can tell from the posts / stories how much fun they are....
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Thanks to the good graces of the empeg team, one of the pulling points so far has been new builds of software for the player.
Of course. And that has been appropriate.
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However - and bear this in mind - this is software produced in their own time, for an unsupported product.
This is, of course, a well understood fact.
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I rather resent the imputation that you feel that the people who come here have formed a cliquey "club" just because they can afford the ticket price and the cost: that's not the case.
And I rather resent having it implied that I said things I did not. What I said was:
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First, the "circle-of-friends" thing would have to come to a dead stop. If I put down currency to help development, I wouldn't want to be told "well, you weren't at the meet, so ha ha ha. Just wait 6 months." Yes, I know it was to keep peoples decks from getting pooched. Yes, I know nobody was paying at the time. My point is that if I do pay, I want to get releases (alphas, too) as soon as anyone else. Period. I'm a big boy and can take responsibility for screwing up my player if it comes to that. But I won't pay to be made feel like I'm second tier because I can't afford to take time off of school and fly to Europe for fun.
Nowhere there do I make mention of a "cliquey club". Perhaps I was not clear enough, but the "circle-of-friends" comment referred to Rob's order that the Amersfoort Alpha could be shared with your friends in person, but not online. So I'm sorry if you're upset by my pointing it out, but it did indeed become a "circle-of-friends" thing, in the form of PM'd download locations, etc. The threads are there to back up what I'm saying. And my whole point was not arguing about what has happened, but instead detailing as what I could see as issues with paid development.
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You are also quite welcome to come as well. If you have problems with the date of the 2005 event (are you looking at the calender?) due to exams, then let me know NOW and I'll see if I can adjust it - I have done this for several people several times now to make sure that as many people as want to come, can come. Money a problem? Well, I can't help much with that I'm afraid - but I do try to make it fun for everyone who can't attend, even going so far as trying to arrange webcams at the event, and this year an attempt was made at videoing it for a limited "Best of..". For various reasons this hasn't happened - sorry.
No apology necessary. And thank you for the invitation, though I never felt like I was unwelcome. Finances and schedule simply do not allow it. But my point was that with paid development, I think that "Meet Only" releases would have to stop. While making attending a meet a requirement to get early access to an Alpha works in the unpaid model, it becomes harder to convince people that they should wait longer than others for something they've also paid for.
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I realise that at each event, there has been a fair amount of post-event ragging about these releases with an "We know something you don't know!" element to it. Perhaps this is a mistake - but it's only ragging, nothing else! There's nothing intentionally nasty about it!
This is exactly what I was talking about. No, it wasn't nasty, but it got pretty old after a month or two. And if people are paying, it would have to stop.
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To labour this point somewhat - when I made this current proposal, I was NOT proposing that partially-directed versions be released to a limited crowd who have paid to "join the club". This was the last thing on my mind. The proposal was going to be firmed up along the lines that the people who paid up front would be entitled to regular updates during development, intermediate test builds, so forth - to act as a kind of voluntary A-test team, much the way as I did with the original release test team.
I agree, 100%. And it's exactly what I said in my post, admittedly not as clearly. I was trying to get across the idea that the determiner would now have to be did you pay for development rather than did you attend Amersfoort.
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Then eventually, everyone - having paid or not - would benefit from a free, Beta upgrade. So why pay at all, then? Why not just sit back and wait for a new sausage to pop out of the pipe? Well, that's what's been happeniing so far (with diminishing frequency), in case you haven't noticed - and the people who have benefitted from this approach have been ...
...yup, you guessed it, the people who came to the Amersfoort meets. And yes, some of them DID pay - like Rob Riccardelli who paid a h*** of a lot in air fare to come over for what was, in the end, just a boozy party with a few hamburgers thrown in for good measure! Does that not sound like "paying" for a priviledged release? It was his choice to do so, nicht wahr?
Indeed it does. Ibid.
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I am also a little bothered that you have attached conditions to what you are prepared to contribute to. While I understand why you want what you want, you are - as other posters here are also doing - Completely Missing The Point. I am Not talking about, nor am I interested in doing, (in a limited time with limited funds) adding new functionality , only making what has been described as an unstable release into a Stable one, with a pre-selected list of fixes to certain bugs that will provide the maximum benefit to the entire user community. If you wish to be partial, and only contribute to directed development that benefits only yourself and no-one else (I don't see anyone else clamouring for Japanese ID3 support here - do you?), then I would prefer that you withdrew and did not offer funds as I will not be able to do what you ask - there won't be the opportunity. Sure, there are about a dozen new things I would like to build into the the player software but I will have neither the time, nor funds to do this.
I'm sorry if it bothers you that I don't feel like paying for a lot of features I don't have a need for out of some altruistic sense of community duty. And I'm sorry I've missed the point. If fixing bugs in 3.0 is the key, I'm out; I don't listen to the radio, and it's not worth a lot of money to me to have crossfading. And I'm also sorry for wanting something that's very important to me added in. But me being sorry isn't going to make me stop wanting it, especially given the rumors, as I said, of it having already been done before.
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I suspect saying it this way will upset you: I sincerely hope not, as I do not wish for this to happen - your posts and contributions on this board are enjoyable and I enjoy reading your thoughts. But as you say yourself - I have to be brutal about this: I will have very little time to do what I propose. I am not even sure I will be able to do enough: I will be taking a huge financial risk on your behalf and to be anything less than totally focussed on what is practically achievable is without any doubt in my mind, POINTLESS.
Not upset at all, and thank you very much for the kind words. But as I said, bug fixes to correct problems with something I don't use is a bit of a hard sell.
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If you all want this to happen, then you have a very small window of opportunity to consider what you want, pool your funds, and make a concrete contribution, for which I promise you will be rewarded with my greatest efforts. But if it's not important enough for you - well, why should I commit to the risk?
I think you're 100% right. I think now is the time for everyone to put up or shut up. Perhaps Drakino could set something up so that the next time each member visits the boards, they first have to vote at to whether or not they would be interested in contributing. Then there will be no more question.
Rob, just let me say that I have a great deal of respect for you, both in general as well as for what you are attempting to do. As I'm sure everybody here does as well. Please don't forget that. And thank you for all the effort. I sincerely hope my comments didn't imply anything different.
_________________________
Dave
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#244993 - 03/01/2005 00:12
Re: Money
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 27/06/1999
Posts: 7058
Loc: Pittsburgh, PA
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Here are my thoughts on the "what shall we do now?" issue...
First off, let's all keep our credit cards and checkbooks sheathed. Any time you introduce money into the equation, good things can happen, but bad things can also happen. Very few requests are as simple as Dave's "I'll give you 350 bucks if you can provide Japanese tag support." As an example, If I opened a PayPal account tonight to fund a 3rd party empeg player project, and people started donating to it, they'd want to know where their money is going, and every one of them would have a different idea of what the priorities should be. Doing it the capitalist way, the people who donated the most money would have the greatest proprotion of say in the direction of the player, and those who "only" chipped in $50 or $100 would feel like their donation was wasted.
This could lead to all sorts of bad blood between those who are funding the effort and those who are trying to make the project work, especially if the project slows down... Remember, no matter how much money is donated, most of us have other priorities that are going to get in the way. The great thing about not making any money on my empeg projects is that I don't have to answer to anyone if things aren't done a certain way, or if they're not done quickly enough. Software guys get enough of that type of stress in their real jobs, and developing pet projects like emphatic is a way to do all the things you can't do at work. Once the money starts coming in, as great of an incentive as it is, I don't think it's healthy in the long run.
Ultimately, my enjoyment of this BBS and the empeg community is more important than the cash I could potentially make from my development efforts. That's not to say I'm into doing charity work, far from it... Who wouldn't want to make some money off of something they do for fun? The thing is, before I signed onto such an effort, I'd need to feel like getting involved in it wouldn't ruin the good will and fun atmosphere that has always existed around these parts. I'd also need to be confident that there's a very solid understanding of the expectations on both sides (the buyers and the sellers) such that the workload and the project schedule don't encroach on my real responsibility to my employer.
Now, putting those more "abstract" issues to the side for a moment, the next question is how would we proceed? Upon first glance, the FireFox31/drakino "closed source core player build with bolt-on 3rd party functionality" sounds like a wonderful idea. However, as someone who knows a little bit about the player/app interface from the app side, I would imagine it would take a lot of work from our "empeg insiders" to bring about anything that would work. You don't just take an application and throw in some "hooks." You first need to unhook the hooks that are already there between your own components, then you need to know EXACTLY what the 3rd party developers want from their interface.
Furthermore, with empeg officially involved, there will be all sorts of red tape to clear before anyone can get started. It took me a couple months just to get official approval to use a couple player fonts in emphatic -- imagine what it'd take to get them to do the work it'd take to make the player extensible? Try to sell that one to management.
So, ultimately, if we really want this, I think it's on our time, and our dime. We'd not only need developers, we'd need testers, documentation writers, and the like. While the community is remarkably strong for an EOL product, I don't know if we're strong enough to sustain the momentum it'd require. If someone can make a good case to the contrary, I'm all ears.
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#244994 - 03/01/2005 00:55
Re: Money
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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At one time job satisfaction and a few pizzas would generate sufficient motivation for this, but these days I suspect it may take something more tangible.
I remember the days when many of us would call the local pub and start a drinking fund for you guys for this very purpose. Has the environment changed in such a way that even if some key people wanted to stay after a few weekends (after being enticed by us owners) that they would not even have the permission to do this work - not on company time? Even though the company would still own the finished product?
From reading Hugo's post, it seemed to me that more builds coming out of empeg were not unrealistic. I know that everyone got excited about hints of a future product, but I also saw hints of future builds. Is there some way we can "wet the wheels"? I know John G. and others are not very active on these message boards, but they have been very responsive in email when I contacted them about my "empeg sound" web site.
I much as I love Rob S's original post, I don't know if we'd be able to raise enough funds to get him to eat. And if more builds can come from empeg, would it even be the best way to go?
Fixing bugs should be the priority. There are so many cool features built into alpha 3 (auto EQ, auto volume adjust, CROSSFADING, pitch bending, etc) that I'd settle for bug fixes and no new features.
Did I mis-read Hugo's post?
I just don't see the point in reinventing the wheel. It would take so long just to get to 1.3 functionality that we'd be going backwards to do this. If we're serious about an opensource movement, maybe it'd be best to see what "empeg 4" Hugo has up his sleeve and work on an open source player for that.
Edited by SE_Sport_Driver (03/01/2005 00:57)
_________________________
Brad B.
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#244995 - 03/01/2005 01:30
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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Not a bad summary, but the idea of Modularity is just not achieveable due to practical aspects of how the player actually works in normal operation.
Bummer, but to be honest that is basically the answer I was expecting. It reinforces my original gut feeling which is essentially that I would throw in a few bucks for bug fixes, but for me to put in any significant resources (money or time) we need to start seriously talking about an open source, community driven effort. Which is too bad because I do appreciate what you are tying to do here, but it doesn't seem like there is enough potential benefits for most of us to get that excited about it
-Mike
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#244996 - 03/01/2005 08:21
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
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At one time job satisfaction and a few pizzas would generate sufficient motivation for this, but these days I suspect it may take something more tangible.
I remember the days when many of us would call the local pub and start a drinking fund for you guys for this very purpose. Has the environment changed in such a way that even if some key people wanted to stay after a few weekends (after being enticed by us owners) that they would not even have the permission to do this work - not on company time? Even though the company would still own the finished product?
I think one of the things to bear in mind is that as people get older, they generally have less time. I have a pile of things that need doing at home (paperwork, tidying, cleaning - some of which dates back to the earlier empeg times when I deferred it all and hoped it'd go away ), I'd like to see Claire, etc etc. It's like looking back on university days, where there appeared to be limitless time to hack on random things as well as drink heavily and occasionally turn up to a lecture. Weekends get booked up pretty quickly. People now have kids to look after.
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I just don't see the point in reinventing the wheel. It would take so long just to get to 1.3 functionality that we'd be going backwards to do this. If we're serious about an opensource movement, maybe it'd be best to see what "empeg 4" Hugo has up his sleeve and work on an open source player for that.
The new thing wouldn't be open enough to be able to write 3rd party code for I'm afraid - the reality of supporting DRM means that's not on the menu. It'd be more functional than v3, though.
As for players - open source does have the advantage that if you don't like something (or it's broken) you fix it yourself, and this will be possible forever. I suspect that somewhere out there is an open source project that is going in vaguely the right direction which could be used as a base - maybe one of the open source receiver clients? That'd have an audio path and some sort of UI at least.
Hugo
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#244997 - 03/01/2005 09:45
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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I suspect that somewhere out there is an open source project that is going in vaguely the right direction which could be used as a base - maybe one of the open source receiver clients?
It might be useful at this point to generate a list of the software components in the MK2A, including whether they are open or closed and if the later, whether they are still considered as important intellectual property.
In particular, would it be feasible to, say, release the source for a really old version of the actual player program (before stuff like gapless playback was added)?
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#244998 - 03/01/2005 10:55
Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: bonzi]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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the fact that all nice add-ons we have have been single-developer efforts (I think that only Hijack got some patches by somebody other than 'lead developer'). We simply don't have very good 'bazaar' development track record
I think there are a number of reasons for this, and they would all need to be addressed for the record to be changed:
- the source release from Empeg (as it was then) and the sources to hijack and jemplode aren't in a public CVS repository
- we don't have a wiki or similar collaborative way to document stuff and collect documentation together
- we don't have a big enough community - bazaars follow the 10% rule*
- it is way more difficult to build a development community around a product that is partly closed-source (and thus could be halted at any time) than a product that is open-source.**
- the community doesn't have access to the issue tracking tool used by the developers
- the feedback loop hasn't been closed - the developers don't use public mailing lists, bug track tools, cvs and wiki to the exclusion of internal alternatives. Simply put, they don't wash their laundry in public.
The lack of the above makes it hard for community members to make tiny contributions (which is how new committers get hooked on open source) and makes it virtually impossible for the community to help the developers in any meaningful way.
Back when Empeg started, a closed source product made sense. Empeg was first to market and so keeping the barriers to entry high was a sound strategic move. But the market has moved on now. There are masses of car, home and portable digital audio products on the market from loads of manufacturers. Making a Rio Karma or an Apple iPod isn't considered particularly hard any more.
The thing is, most of the organizations in this market already have products and in typical corporate mentality, most of them think their product is best. Hugo has already indicated that there is no one person in DNNA that knows how the software works anymore and that RobS would need help in understanding it - this is a key reason why companies do release their code as open-source: they realise that their biggest competitors would either simply ignore the code, or waste lots of man-hours trying to understand the code and always be playing catch-up.
By using an appropriate license, DNNA could force competitors to carry an indeliable "powered by RIO Engine" or similar mark on the outside of the product (and even feature the mark in their adverts). The really big boys might choose to take a risk in stealthily using the code (but see the previous paragraph), and the tiny companies may do the same, but most will play ball: your smaller competitors now have a similar feature set to your own products, but carry your brand.
Of course, we know most of the benefits of open source: better quality product with better testing, improved user acceptance and market applicability. So, it really comes down to a simple choice over priorities: revenue from direct sales or improved visibility, ubiquity and the opportunities those might bring.
DNNA seem to be loosing the ubiquity game at the moment. It may be that creating a licensing programme and opening the source to the player would be a far more effective way to win market share from Apple than spending money on TV adverts.
--
Michael
* 4000 users generates 400 active BBS or mailing list lurkers, 40 regular contributors, 4 hackers and 0.4 lead developers or community leaders on average. This community probably does rather better than the average but still has a very long way to go to get to a healthy development community.
** In places where a community has succeeded, it is invariably because they have organised around one or more independent open-source components of the larger project.
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#244999 - 03/01/2005 13:53
Re: Money
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
It might be useful at this point to generate a list of the software components in the MK2A, including whether they are open or closed and if the later, whether they are still considered as important intellectual property.
In particular, would it be feasible to, say, release the source for a really old version of the actual player program (before stuff like gapless playback was added)?
None of the source is going to be released at all I'm afraid; this has been gone over many times before. Everything is proprietary apart from the kernel, basically, which provides your hardware drivers.
The player is monolithic (for various reasons) and is built on top of a number of libraries which are used on current and future products - hence it's still all commercially important. Remember that even the v1 carplayer software is better at lots of things than a lot of mp3 players you can buy today.
Hugo
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#245000 - 03/01/2005 14:43
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Has the environment changed in such a way that even if some key people wanted to stay after a few weekends (after being enticed by us owners) that they would not even have the permission to do this work - not on company time?
No car-player work after the Sonicblue takeover was done on company time. Much as I like the spirit of Rob Schofield's suggestion, I can't see it being either politically or financially feasible. The only scenarios as I see them are:
- The most likely outcome: v3alpha8 is the final, summit release of the car-player firmware. Don't forget that this is itself a good result, as there was widespread fear that the D&M takeover would halt all firmware development (at 2.00).
- Next most likely: a new v3 alpha is released following spare-time work by Rio employees, like the previous ones -- but this time, as a bug-fix-only release from the v3alpha8 branch. This would have to happen at the right sort of time in Rio's commercial development cycle, which is not right now, and possibly not until the autumn (or winter). That would then almost certainly be the summit release.
- Least likely outcome: a new player is written as open-source by "the community". This is appealing to me as a car-player user, as it would put car-player development beyond the whims of a commodity flash-player company and the developers it has jaded. In a sense, a lot of the hard bits are done: madplay, tremor, vfdlib, libdaap. But you still get to rewrite the UI, the database, the cache, the USB client code (hint: 2.6 has USB mass-storage target support built-in), and, unless you can live without them, the visuals. It's a lot of work for a tiny hardware population (at least two orders of magnitude smaller than RiscOS).
But what keeps at least this jaded developer hanging around in this commodity flash-player company is the thought that one day we might get to do our H4. That will only make sense to those of you who know about John Harrison's marine chronometers (or have read Longitude), but after having built the amazing pieces of engineering that were the car-player and Rio Central, and despite none of it having the success we'd hoped, there is still honour in building the same thing all over again but this time the size of a pocket-watch. Karma could've been the H4, but never quite measured up (not least because we didn't do the 40Gb one).
If Rio succeed in giving you a car-player the size of a big pocket-watch -- and in 2005 Rio just might -- then all of a sudden you might not feel you need your bulky old marine chronometers.
Peter
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#245001 - 03/01/2005 14:49
Re: Money
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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No car-player work after the Sonicblue takeover was done on company time.
You mean D&M, not SB? Plenty of work after the SB takeover as that was when the mk2a came out...
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If Rio succeed in giving you a car-player the size of a big pocket-watch -- and in 2005 Rio just might -- then all of a sudden you might not feel you need your bulky old marine chronometers.
You may have to shrink your fingers, though
Hugo
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#245002 - 03/01/2005 14:54
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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I would like to see addition of Latin2
Version 3alpha8 supports ISO 8859-1, -2, -3, -4, -5, -7, -9, -10, -13, -15 and -16 (except possibly in the search screens).
Peter
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#245003 - 03/01/2005 15:03
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Give me one example of a product that is a market leader that is currently based on opened-source (in a category that is at least as mass-market as a portable MP3 player). Now how about oen that turned around their market position by moving from closed to open?
I can't think of any. I believe having an open-source player on the empeg would be a wonderful thing. Generally, I think an open-source foundation never establishes a market leader and can't see any good reason for trying to come to market with anything that's open. Unless making any money isn't your goal.
Bruno
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#245004 - 03/01/2005 15:04
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
You mean D&M, not SB? Plenty of work after the SB takeover as that was when the mk2a came out...
Oops, you're right about the 2a, of course; I'd forgotten about that. But the car-player had already become a skunkworks project a long time before the D&M takeover. The v2final firmware wasn't, in any real sense, done on company time.
Peter
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#245005 - 03/01/2005 15:10
Re: Money
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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If Rio succeed in giving you a car-player the size of a big pocket-watch -- and in 2005 Rio just might -- then all of a sudden you might not feel you need your bulky old marine chronometers.
After all the effort I went to installing my Mk.2, it is *not* coming out again!
I'd buy a connected portable though, if that's what you have in mind. Is there an ex-staff discount?
Rob
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#245006 - 03/01/2005 15:16
Re: Money
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
Quote:
You mean D&M, not SB? Plenty of work after the SB takeover as that was when the mk2a came out...
Oops, you're right about the 2a, of course; I'd forgotten about that. But the car-player had already become a skunkworks project a long time before the D&M takeover. The v2final firmware wasn't, in any real sense, done on company time.
ISTR 1.03 was the one that had mk2a support in it (ie a few kernel mods and 16MB support in the player), and the one that the SB-branded manuals documented.
v2 wasn't really done on company time though, as you say, and though most of v3's meat came from the work on the Karma, none of the carplayer targetting was on company time.
The biggest issue with v3 for me is the memory usage - I wish we'd left the pads for the 2nd and 3rd ram banks on the board when deciding what was going on the mk2a... all that strife from stacking ram chips could have been avoided. Sigh. So speaks a mk2 owner
You can never have enough memory. Never.
Hugo
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#245007 - 03/01/2005 15:32
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Quote:
You can never have enough memory. Never.
..so that's one order for Patrick's memory board?
Rob
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#245009 - 03/01/2005 15:39
Re: Money
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
Quote:
You can never have enough memory. Never.
..so that's one order for Patrick's memory board?
Rather possibly, though I can't remember if what was worked out as a solution would work well on mk2s (ISTR it may require desoldering some of the 16MBit DRAMs so those banks would be remapped as 64MBit banks). It was a lot cleaner for mk2a's....
Hugo
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#245010 - 03/01/2005 15:44
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
With the amount of money being suggested by some of the owners here, I'm beginning to think the best solution would be to use that money to buy some of the developers at Rio a few RioCars! Who wants to spend time developing software or firmware for a product you'll never get to use?
They get them for free if they want them - most developers have at least one empeg-car/rio-car. eg, Neil, who started here after the D&M purchase, already has a rio-car fitted in his Golf along with a bargain-of-the-century Genesis Profile Two amp that I spotted in cash converters (for £29!)
We still have a few units about for giving to insiders - including management, if it helps
Hugo
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#245011 - 03/01/2005 16:03
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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addict
Registered: 29/06/2002
Posts: 531
Loc: Triangle, VA
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Man it would be nice to be an insider Free Empeg/Rio-Cars
_________________________
-D
Modifying and Tweaking is a journey,
not a destination................................
MKIIa : 60gig - 040103286 - Blue - v2 + PCATS tuner
MKIIa : 20gig - 040103260 - Blue - v3a8 + Mark Lord Special Edition Cherry Dock
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#245012 - 03/01/2005 16:13
Re: Money
[Re: SonicSnoop]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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...and free fixing if you blow them up, too... within reason, at least Hugo
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#245013 - 03/01/2005 16:47
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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Quote:
Give me one example of a product that is a market leader that is currently based on opened-source (in a category that is at least as mass-market as a portable MP3 player).
NetBeans (#1 platform independent IDE framework)
Apache WebServer (66% market share, 53% of secure installations).
Sendmail (#1, 42% share over Exchange 18%)
BIND (over 95% of reverse DNS lookups)
PHP (#1 server-side scripting language)
Quote:
Now how about one that turned around their market position by moving from closed to open?
Mozilla webclient. OpenOffice/StarOffice productivity suite.
I'm not claiming that simply opening the source will launch a product into a market leader position, but it certainly can work as a strategy to reverse a downwards trend: it can improve visibility and ubiquity especially when there are no other open-source products in the same space or the company considering opening the source already has a well-known brand.
The source for NetBeans and OpenOffice were both opened with the primary goal of image management (consisting of four sub-goals: improving ubiquity, visibility, corporate image and relations with developers).
NetBeans suffered a setback when IBM later put their PR machine into overdrive to get massive coverage for their open-source announcement for the Eclipse IDE, but continues to claw market share from Eclipse (in large part because it is technically better).
There is one overriding reason to do open-source: to level the playing field, to get the entire market to play on your terms. DNNA probably can't win against Apple using a closed source model because Apple has more money available to spend on advertising than DNNA does. By going open-source, DNNA force Apple (and everyone else) to focus on technical features, pre-sales and after-sales service, and price (rather than who can get the most marketing coverage). Plus, DNNA get to talk to lots of companies about collaborating on products that they probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Now, I'm not saying that DNNA should definately open-source their player - I'm simply suggesting that the original reason for not opening it is no longer valid and so the question should be re-evaluated. Now, it may be that DNNA have done this, came to the same conclusion for a different reason, and simply chosen not to tell us* - it doesn't really matter because my original post wasn't intended for Hugo and Co. but rather to try to get the community to think about what strategy is best for DNNA rather than what strategy is best for the community.
--
Michael
* heck, it may even be somthing they are constanly re-evaluating - and we certainly don't have any rights to be told the outcome of internal business decicions.
Edited by mdavey (03/01/2005 16:57)
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#245014 - 03/01/2005 17:01
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
NetBeans (#1 platform independent IDE framework)
Apache WebServer (66% market share, 53% of secure installations).
Sendmail (#1, 42% share over Exchange 18%)
BIND (over 95% of reverse DNS lookups)
PHP (#1 server-side scripting language)
But of course you can't describe any of those as being mass market in the same way as a hardware MP3 player. In the grand scheme of things very few people ever buy a webserver, email server, name server or programming language. These could just as easily be considered niche market products.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#245015 - 03/01/2005 17:01
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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#245016 - 03/01/2005 17:52
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: andy]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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Quote:
But of course you can't describe any of those as being mass market in the same way as a hardware MP3 player. In the grand scheme of things very few people ever buy a webserver, email server, name server or programming language. These could just as easily be considered niche market products.
You are kidding, right? There are an order of magnitude more servers running Apache than there are MP3 players. Heck, you are using Apache right now. If you want examples of things that consumers buy, try Mark's suggestion or Symbian (an OS used in mobile 'phones and PDAs).
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#245017 - 03/01/2005 17:52
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Linksys routers is about the best example I've been able to think about as well. But I wouldn't say they're the market leader because of the Linux-based firmware.
I just can't see this model being applied to Apple's iPod at this time for instance. Nor can I see it working for Rio. I don't think it would buy them even a single percentage point of market share.
The server software example is completely invalid - those installations are available for free. I'd also hardly call Star Office a leader at anything. In any case, those are software solutions that can be, but aren't generally the vital core of a specific product. At least not a consumer nor mass-market good. Sure, company X's server comes with all this built in. But it could have been built with something else. And company X may have had nothing to do with contributing to any of the software on said machine. Too far out to left field.
So we have one valid example right now: Linksys Routers
The reason I see an open player working well for the empeg is specifically because it's EOL. This is from a consumer perspective. I see it as good for us. I don't see it as good for Rio.
Bruno
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#245018 - 03/01/2005 17:55
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: andy]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/02/2002
Posts: 1904
Loc: Leeds, UK
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Quote:
But of course you can't describe any of those as being mass market in the same way as a hardware MP3 player. In the grand scheme of things very few people ever buy a webserver, email server, name server or programming language. These could just as easily be considered niche market products.
LOL
I think there are more Webservers in the world than In-Car mp3 players, now that is what I can niche! Even in todays iPod world I still have problems getting people to understand what the empeg does, and why I want it in the car!!!
Edit - DOH! Beaten to the point again
Cheers
Cris.
Edited by Cris (03/01/2005 17:56)
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#245020 - 03/01/2005 19:02
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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I've changed the order a bit to keep the flow...
Quote:
I'd also hardly call Star Office a leader at anything.
It isn't the market leader productivity suite yet, but that is Sun's hope and part of their motivation for opening the source.
Quote:
In any case, those are software solutions that can be, but aren't generally the vital core of a specific product.
OpenOffice is the core of StarOffice and StarOffice is offered as a individual product by Sun. More importantly, Microsoft Office is the single product that generates the most revenue for Microsoft - more than any other product including the OS itself. A 10% loss of market share of the office productivity suite market would not go unnoticed at Redmond.
Quote:
Linksys routers is about the best example I've been able to think about as well. But I wouldn't say they're the market leader because of the Linux-based firmware.
Neither would I. However, the enthusiasts have clearly helped the sales of both the NSLU2 and the WRT54G. Also, it clearly influenced Buffalo - who saw a market opportunity to get rid of old circuit boards while building rapport with expert customers (the same group that were being stonewalled by Linksys).
Quote:
I just can't see this model being applied to Apple's iPod at this time for instance.
Absolutely. The market leader only has something to gain by going open-source if they are hemorrhaging market share (and even then you have to first answer the question of why are they loosing market share). That is why Sun doesn't open-source Java.
Quote:
Nor can I see it working for Rio. I don't think it would buy them even a single percentage point of market share.
Not significantly on its own*, but if done as part of a licensing programme. The mobile 'phone and digital radio manufacturers seem to be particularly eager to incorporate iPOD-like features into their products.
Sooner or later, someone will open-source their digital-audio player (it almost certainly won't be Apple - see above) and whoever it is, will likely take a nice chunk of the market leaders' segment and pretty much kill off all the other niche companies. From the C|Net article, it would seem to be a straight gun duel between Creative and DNNA. Fastest hand wins.
--
Michael
* DNNA would likely get many of the expert customers (who currently buy iPOD because they like Apple Macs) - but that is a tiny market as we know all too well.
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#245021 - 03/01/2005 21:17
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Symbian? By that example, Rio is already there, using Linux as its OS on a number of devices. However, neither Rio nor the partner companies using the Symbian OS created that software from scratch. They're both open platforms chosen by those companies to develop on. This isn't what we're discussing here. We're talking about a company with valuable IP built on whatever OS, deciding to open everything up. I don't see how that will have any meaningful effect on their market share. In some industries and with some partnerships, perhaps (or at least closed licencing), but most sectors have a lot more variables involved. Not Rio nor Creative will topple Apple's market lead, even if they sold their (comparable) players at HALF the cost of an iPod. As a developer I also don't see the incentive to develop something I will open source as a marketing strategy. I can see plenty of reasons for building on existing open source platforms, but if I'm planning to differentiate my product, the best way to do that is through software. And you don't give that away is you plan to make money. Hardware is complicated if you're not into hardware. But most designs can be replicated quite easily. Now try duplicating the software. That's where we are with the empeg (and Rio's other products). The software, not the hardware, is just about the most valuable asset. DNNA know this. Sun have nothing to lose with OpenOffice. It's just a loss-leader to try and chip away at MS Office. Same goes for Netscape/Mozilla. Just trying to chip a little away at MS while trying to cross-promote other goods/services. Funny that MS practically wiped NS off the face of the Earth with closed-source software just by giving it away. If I was independently weathly I'd offer DNNA to pay for a contractor to work on new player software. Or pay a couple of other people to develop a new player application. Money isn't a solution for everything, but in this case it seems to be the only solution. Hey, here's $500,000, get to work. Bruno
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#245022 - 03/01/2005 22:28
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
Quote:
But of course you can't describe any of those as being mass market in the same way as a hardware MP3 player. In the grand scheme of things very few people ever buy a webserver, email server, name server or programming language. These could just as easily be considered niche market products.
You are kidding, right? There are an order of magnitude more servers running Apache than there are MP3 players.
I don't think you can define mass market is just being about how many "products" are "sold" though.
I would be willing to bet that well over 90% of the installations of Apache, Sendmail and BIND were not due to someone deciding on the particular server in question. They are in use because someone installed a Linux distibution or Unix/BSD product that used the server in question by default. These people no more chose to use Apache than 99% of Windows administrators chose to use IIS.
I my eyes for something to be mass market it has to be purchased in large numbers by consumers.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#245023 - 03/01/2005 22:32
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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Quote:
Symbian (an OS used in mobile 'phones and PDAs)
Symbian isn't open source. It might be licenced to a whole bunch of people, but you or I can't go and download the source code.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#245024 - 03/01/2005 23:17
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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Quote:
Not Rio nor Creative will topple Apple's market lead, even if they sold their (comparable) players at HALF the cost of an iPod.
Not by playing by Apple's rules. Why did Apple get where it did? They weren't first to market. DNNA aren't gaining market share from Apple - in fact, the opposite continues to happen (in spite of Carbon). The way to get market share is to get the next big entrant to the market using your technology at the heart of their device. To get your technology into mobile 'phones and PDAs.
Quote:
As a developer I also don't see the incentive to develop something I will open source as a marketing strategy.
Never been asked in a job interview if any of your code is used in commercially available products? When I worked at NetProducts, I rewrote a piece of IR driver code (back when such things were rarely to be found outside TV firmware) and got management to agree to give the source to Acorn (easily done back then). To the best of my knowledge, that code is still used in every Pace set-top-box and E-Note mail client that is made. Unless the other candidate used to maintain the Linux IDE driver or made some other contribution to a large OpenSource project, that point will be mine!
Quote:
Now try duplicating the software.
How precisely does it need to be duplicated? There is nothing technical stopping a competitor duplicating the hardware, then putting the binaries on it. What stops them is the legal framework that Rio has put in place. A very similar framework could be put in place for the sourcecode. We have already said that Creative and Apple have products that approximately duplicate the software.
Quote:
That's where we are with the empeg (and Rio's other products). The software, not the hardware, is just about the most valuable asset.
Market share is more valuable. (not intended as a cheap shot, read on...)
Quote:
...a company with valuable IP built on whatever OS, deciding to open everything up. I don't see how that will have any meaningful effect on their market share.
Why is the IP valuable? Because competitors would like to get their hands on it and use it in their own products. But I think we are agreed that Apple wouldn't touch it, so that just leaves everyone else. If DNNA technology is being OEM'd to other parties and direct sales don't fall (or fall by less than the OEM segment rises), then overall the DNNA market share has gone up.
<scenario>
Let us just for agument's sake assume that DNNA has only one competitor (other than Apple, with 92.1%), called C and they have 4.7% of the market and DNNA has 3.2%. All three companies regularly introduce new products and their market shares remain stable. Then DNNA opens their player and a short time later, C dumps their player module in favour of the DNNA OpenPlayer.
Now, to save embarrassment (because both companies know that C's player module is rubbish and the license requires C to carry the RIO logo on C's products and TV advertising), C makes a big play of the fact that they have entered a strategic partnership with DNNA: using the RIOengine in new C products and licensing C's advanced battery technology to DNNA. This is good for DNNA - they got masses of publicity when they decided to open their player and now have a new round as the analysts try to predict how the market might change and whether this will threaten iPOD sales. Plus improved battery life in their next generation products.
DNNA get a revenue stream from providing an engineer to help them integrate the player into C's firmware - at top consultancy rates.
It takes C 3 months to do the work, but C used the stable branch which is 3 months behind the development branch and DNNA only commit their latest features to the public CVS when the product begins to ship. C will always be playing catch-up with DNNA if they rely upon DNNA to do the new product development, but will always find it more difficult than DNNA to implement any given feature. DNNA still has 3.2% direct market share, but analysts start counting the number of RIOengine powered units: 7.9%. Plus DNNA has that consultancy revenue stream.
Then the market begins to change. New entrants take advantage of the lower barrier to entry by choosing to use the RIOengine in their products. Individually, they are niche players but replace 0.2% of DNNAs market and 1.8% of the iPOD market share. DNNA are actually selling more players as the market has grown. Total market share: 9.9%
A large Japanese electronics manufacturer enters the market with a RIOengine powered player and a huge TV advertising campaign. Every advert ends with the RIOengine logo and a little jingle. They take 30% of the market almost overnight - mostly from iPOD. Forbes reports that the RIOengine brand is as strong among the average consumer as the Java brand. Unfortionately, also like the Java brand, only 25% of respondents could correctly identify the owner. Total market share: 39.9%
DNNA continue to sell their own players, but their main business is now the design and consultancy for digital audio products (home, car and portables) - their technology powers 91.2% of consumer digital audio devices.
</scenario>
Okay, a somewhat improbable and tounge-firmly-in-cheek scenario, but I hope it makes you think about the possible ways that an open-source player could lead to stronger market and brand share for DNNA without loss of revenue. I didn't even touch upon mobiles and PDAs.
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#245025 - 03/01/2005 23:31
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Since Rio have already successfully licensed their code to a number of (fairly major) companies I don't think their executives are likely to consider open source as an attractive option. Indeed, right or wrong, I believe they will see it as a way of handing their IP to anonymous Asian ODM's (who will *not* respect the open source license) while simultaneously cutting off their NRE and license revenue from larger customers (who will not be at all happy that something they paid for is now "free" to their competitors). That said, I now work for one of those customers and I'd *love* to get my hands on an open source empeg codebase - I figure it would save me about £500,000 Rob
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#245026 - 04/01/2005 00:27
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: rob]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 31/08/1999
Posts: 1649
Loc: San Carlos, CA
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Quote:
I figure it would save me about £500,000
And we have a solution. We get Rob's new company to bankroll an open source rio software clone
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#245027 - 04/01/2005 00:49
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: andy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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Quote:
I would be willing to bet that well over 90% of the installations of Apache, Sendmail and BIND were not due to someone deciding on the particular server in question. They are in use because someone installed a Linux distibution or Unix/BSD product that used the server in question by default. These people no more chose to use Apache than 99% of Windows administrators chose to use IIS.
Well, I'm sure those servers had a large factor in what OS was chosen for a Web/mail/DNS server. People know Apache runs well, Bind runs well, and well, something here about sendmail. For example, I initially had an NT server at home ages ago doing file sharing to my network. I wanted to start tinkering with web development, and looked into replacing the server as IIS and ASP wern't my first choice. So, I looked at Apache for Windows, and found it ran decently. Next, I wanted to do internet sharing from the server, and I began looking into Linux a bit. Over time, that look turned into deciding a mail server would be nice too.
Now I have a Linux box in the basement running Samba and ATalkd for file sharing, Apache 2 for web with PHP, Postfix for mail, Courier for tossing it to clients, and Bind for local DNS caching and resolution of DHCP clients. I hold no true attachment to Linux specificially, it just happens to be the one that comes with the most products I want to use. I could install Windows variants, and as long as Microsoft makes them do so at no cost currently. But I still choose to keep that server box Linux. Not because it is Linux, but because it is a good platform for Apache, Postfix and so on.
Any more, distributions are either moving to Postfix as a default, or asking what should be installed (Sendmail/postfix/qmail). Sendmail will probably hold the majority for a while longer until more servers out there are upgraded and migrations done away from it, like what I did in 2001.
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#245028 - 04/01/2005 01:08
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
Funny that MS practically wiped NS off the face of the Earth with closed-source software just by giving it away.
Giving it away isn't accurate. Netscape was given away as well. The main reason was that IE was bundled as part of Windows. Why would the average user bother to download a browser if they already had one built into their OS? The whole bundling issue was part of the lawsuits against Microsoft where they claimed IE and WMP were integral parts and couldn't be removed.
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#245029 - 04/01/2005 01:18
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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Moving back to some older strains of the topic: mdavey: Quote:
think about what strategy is best for DNNA rather than what strategy is best for the community.
Brilliant, as are Bruno's and others' counterpoints. The community doesn't have the money for the project, but if DNNA buys in, it may just work. But RobV reasonably justified why it wouldn't work. We can't help the Rio brand but we can help our car players. So, moving backward some more.
RobV:
Quote:
To make [3.0 functionality] a reality in an open source world it would be necessary to attract more developers with time on their hands than we're likely to find in the empeg community
I don't know the open-source scene, but *aren't* there developers with time on their hands... somewhere in the wilds of the Internet? Could we dig into the open-source community and find the handfull of developers who've never heard of the empeg but would love to work for it once they see it and own one? Yes, they are a rare breed, but they must be out there.
Ha, I'd launch my typical "all out recruitment assault" on the open-source community if I knew where to start. But isn't there an old military rule that "a devoted contributor will do the work of 50 recruits"? Can we recruit devoted contributors? (am I even spelling "recruit" correctly?) If DNNA won't make the killer open source MP3 app, maybe we can assemble an army to do it.
_________________________
- FireFox31 110gig MKIIa (30+80), Eutronix lights, 32 meg stacked RAM, Filener orange gel lens, Greenlights Lit Buttons green set
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#245030 - 04/01/2005 01:30
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 23/09/2000
Posts: 3608
Loc: Minnetonka, MN
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Quote:
Giving it away isn't accurate. Netscape was given away as well. The main reason was that IE was bundled as part of Windows. Why would the average user bother to download a browser if they already had one built into their OS? The whole bundling issue was part of the lawsuits against Microsoft where they claimed IE and WMP were integral parts and couldn't be removed.
I disagree with that. I was a netscape user then when IE4 came out I just thought it worked better. Now I'm back to using Firefox because that works better than IE6.
_________________________
Matt
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#245031 - 04/01/2005 02:19
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Netscape was dead bbefore Windows came impregnated with IE. I did a complete switch when IE 3 came out. Though, on Mac OS I have switched to Firefox, based on Mozilla, which is as good as it is because of active (in this case open somewhat) development.
But these are still two different worlds. The guys working on Firefox aren't soon to get rich doing it. There's no insentive for DNNA or any other company with stock holders to be Santa Claus.
Also a big disparity is comparing a software company tgo a hardware company. DNNA, and Rio, are hardware companies. The software exists to sell the hardware (as important as it is - as I've stated, I believe it's the most important piece when it comes down to it). Same goes for the company I work at. We're a hardware company. We employ a bucket-load of software engineers, but when it comes down to it, it's all to sell hardware. To consumers and to OEMs. That's why we don't sell software upgrades. Why we don't bundle software as nice as some third-party solutions for PVR, etc. The reality (to the people that run the joint) is it's all about the hardware. There's obviously money to be made with software as well, but that's someone else's bag.
Bruno
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#245032 - 04/01/2005 02:40
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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I stuck with Netscape for a while actually. It was only IE4 when I switched over because Netscape 6 was so unbelievably bloated and slow. IMO Mozilla wasn't much better. It's only since Firefox came out did I switch away from IE. Quote:
The software exists to sell the hardware
This is why it's still refreshing to see some companies actually support older products. A lot of users have complained about Apple not releasing updated firmware with all the new features for old generation iPods. Releasing firmware for all the old iPods with all the latest and greatest features will mean that people will be less inclined upgrade so it's pretty understandable that they do this.
Here's a question. Is Apple a hardware or a software company?
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#245033 - 04/01/2005 05:57
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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Quote:
Here's a question. Is Apple a hardware or a software company?
Apple quite often openly admits to being a hardware company. They killed the clone market because of this, and it's rumored this is also why they never released OS X for Intel as well. (Though I think the more accurate theory is that OS X for intel only exists as an emergancy plan, and if done, would still require Apple hardware).
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#245034 - 04/01/2005 08:20
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: rob]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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Quote:
Since Rio have already successfully licensed their code to a number of (fairly major) companies I don't think their executives are likely to consider open source as an attractive option. Indeed, right or wrong, I believe they will see it as a way of handing their IP to anonymous Asian ODM's [...] while simultaneously cutting off their NRE and license revenue from larger customers (who will not be at all happy that something they paid for is now "free" to their competitors).
DNNA could use the open-source OEM model. This is what NetBeans, OpenOffice and Smoothwall does. You have a proprietary version with all the latest features and an open-source OEM version (under a different brand name) which is a bit older.
You pre-announce that you are working on an open-source version and let all your licensors know. You reassure them that the open-source version will be a cut-down version, based on code in (what will be) the two-year old product and that in the future they will be able to choose between the latest proprietary engine or the older open-source engine on a product by product basis. The vast majority will see the added value of the proprietary product as a differentiator and choose to continue along that path for their products.
Quote:
...anonymous Asian ODM's (who will *not* respect the open source license)...
This is always a risk, however if they don't account for a large market share you could choose to ignore them and if they do account for a large market share there is a good chance they won't be particularly anonymous.
The Free Software Foundation has had a lot of success in encouraging Asian manufacturers to comply with the GPL - partly because it doesn't actually cost much money to comply. Again, there is not much stopping Asian manufacturers from making clone RIO products and putting your binaries on them right now.
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#245035 - 04/01/2005 17:15
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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Your arguments are still destined to help US, the consumers, but not Rio, the corporation. Open Source = NO MONEY. NO MONEY = pissed off shareholders.
Licensing their software IP is a worthwhile pursuit to make money. Open Source is suicide. However, there's no way they could become market leader by licensing software alone. This is a HARDWARE game.
To bring back a previous example, TiVo are not market leaders for instance. They barely move any hardware. In fact, their licensors barely move any hardware.
Bruno
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#245036 - 05/01/2005 06:24
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Quote:
Open Source = NO MONEY. NO MONEY = pissed off shareholders.
Licensing their software IP is a worthwhile pursuit to make money. Open Source is suicide. However, there's no way they could become market leader by licensing software alone. This is a HARDWARE game.
Unqualified "Open Source is suicide" is buying MS/SCO etc propaganda. Look at IBM: market share of their mainframes stopped plunging because of Linux running on them, not in spite of that.
I am not sure whether one of creative ways of using OS as a tool to improve visibility, then market share, then ultimately profitability outlined by people here would actually work for DNNA, but they should not be dismissed out of hand. I guess DNNA honchos are evaluating them (but, sadly, conclude that the net impact would be negative).
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#245037 - 05/01/2005 11:37
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: hybrid8]
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enthusiast
Registered: 06/03/2003
Posts: 269
Loc: Wellingborough, UK
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Bruno (hybrid8):
Quote:
...if I'm planning to differentiate my product, the best way to do that is through software. And you don't give that away i[f] you plan to make money. ...most [hardware] designs can be replicated quite easily. Now try duplicating the software. That's where we are with the empeg (and Rio's other products). The software, not the hardware, is just about the most valuable asset.
Quote:
Licensing their software IP is a worthwhile pursuit to make money. Open Source is suicide. However, there's no way they could become market leader by licensing software alone. This is a HARDWARE game.
No, it is a systems game. Products like the Rio or the Empeg are solutions or systems. How many of DNNAs licensors took only the software or only the hardware reference design? I don't know, but I'd bet it isn't a significant number.
Just as 99% of customers wouldn't buy a modern car with the on-board computer missing and wouldn't buy just the on-board computer - so the same applies to the DNNA products. The systems are pretty much interchangable. One car works pretty much the same way as the next - just like with digital audio products. It should be that features (price, performance, automatic windows, gapless playback) would determine the winner, but it actually comes down to ubiquity, visibility and who has the bigger marketing budget.
You also seem to have the impression that opening the source means that DNNA no longer owns it. DNNA still own the copyright and it is still intellectual property (in a similar way, patents are an important IP for many companies). The license grants others certain rights to examine and use the source code (but only providing they adhere to the license).
There are plenty of people on this BBS (and in Asia) would would find it trivial to take the Rio or Empeg binary and replace all references to "Rio" with "ABC" (or whatever), then ship a clone player. Perhaps some anonymous Asian company is doing that right now? Making copies of binaries is just as inexpensive as making copies of source.
By carefully choosing which license to use or even creating one of their own and carefully controlling which features are present in the open source version (and after what timeframe) many, if not all of the IP and licensor concerns could be addressed.
Trevor (tman):
Quote:
Is Apple a hardware or a software company?
I'd say that the desktop division behaves like Apple is a systems company. Virtually every other non-x86 computer manufacturer has shifted its business model away from non-x86 hardware or disappeared: SGI, Digital, Tandem, IBM, Compaq, RM.
HP have their printer cartridges business model as well as being x86 box-shifters.
The only other one I can think of is Sun - they seem to have survived so far because of their mix of software and hardware product lines. They are struggling and are moving more towards a services (professional ~, proactive ~, support ~) focus, just like IBM.
Apple iPod is interesting. I wonder what generates more profit right now: iPod sales or iTunes sales. I'd say that iPod+iTunes is a clear indication of Apple starting to move to a services business model, too.
We seem to have moved away from my original question a little, so to recap:
Quote:
So, it really comes down to a simple choice over priorities: revenue from direct sales or improved visibility, ubiquity and the opportunities those might bring.
DNNA seem to be loosing the ubiquity game at the moment. It may be that creating a licensing programme and opening the source to the player would be a far more effective way to win market share from Apple than spending money on TV adverts.
Would trying to increase brand visibility and market ubiquity by moving to a professional services & licensing business model and by using a carefully crafted open-source license be good for DNNA? Edit: and if so, when should they make the move - how long should they wait?
Edited by mdavey (05/01/2005 14:09)
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#245038 - 05/01/2005 15:47
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Quote:
No, it is a systems game. Products like the Rio or the Empeg are solutions or systems. How many of DNNAs licensors took only the software or only the hardware reference design? I don't know, but I'd bet it isn't a significant number.
I can't reveal any details of Rio's licensing deals, however it is fairly obvious to anyone in the industry that most of the licensing value is in the software. The hardware for any of Rio's players could be designed from scratch at minimal cost.
Any given hardware design might cost in the region of a few tens of thousands of dollars to produce. The Rio software has cost many millions over the last several years - it would take a brave executive to hand over the source. I can't even begin to imagine what value Rio executives might perceive in doing so.
Rob
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#245039 - 05/01/2005 20:46
Re: Money vs Ubiquity
[Re: mdavey]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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Quote:
Apple iPod is interesting. I wonder what generates more profit right now: iPod sales or iTunes sales. I'd say that iPod+iTunes is a clear indication of Apple starting to move to a services business model, too.
iPod sales do. In every financial release they do, the iTunes music store earns them very little noticible profit, as most of the money from the tracks goes to the RIAA or the publisher. The small Apple share is enough to cover server costs and other related costs to keep the store running. The store mostly exists to push iPod sales. And now with the popularity of iTunes player, AAC is also now helping to drive iPod sales, with not only Apple shipping it, but also the #1 PC maker, HP. Apple has the only hard drive player I am aware of that supports AAC (non encrypted).
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#245041 - 06/01/2005 11:37
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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I'd consider that a bulky wrist watch... how about you?
... Nah... That is tiny...
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#245042 - 06/01/2005 16:59
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 2858
Loc: Atlanta, GA
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FWIW, if funding were the only issue for making progress with the empeg, I'd contribute something (or would be willing to give a smaller, monthly contribution toward ongoing development).
Personally, though, I'm happy with what I've got in 2.0. I haven't run the alphas for a while.
As for improvements, there are really only two concerns I have with the current product: one day it will really be difficult to replace in case it ever is stolen or broken, and the lack of drm suport. Neither of these issues can be addressed short of starting a new compnay to create a new car player, and that would take some signficant investment indeed (with perhaps the chance of a nice payoff if a marketable product were produced).
_________________________
-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
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#245043 - 07/01/2005 01:17
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 12/11/2001
Posts: 7738
Loc: Toronto, CANADA
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So, I'm here at CES... What's good to see? I haven't been by the Rio booth/area yet - probably try to do that tomorrow. The show is just bloody enormous.
I've seen about a million MP3 players from about three dozen (or more) companies I've never heard of. Some good industrial design, but far too many players using 128-256MB of memory. Yuck. But some just barely bigger than two thumbs.
Anyone know if there's anything interesting at the Visteon outdoor pavilion thing?
Bruno
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#245044 - 07/01/2005 04:54
Re: Money
[Re: altman]
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addict
Registered: 03/08/1999
Posts: 451
Loc: Canberra, Australia
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Well, that was one of the most interesting half hours I've had reading one thread!
1) I'll put $100 USD or $100 AUD, whichever is greater at the time, in the tin towards having a stable 3.0 release. Don't forget us Mark 1 users!
2) I'm incredibly intrigued by Hugo's references to some new ultra-secret, ultra-small product that's going to be an advance on the Rio Car (although from the little I've read it could also be a LCD postage stamp.) If it's the former, then I'm all ears!
3) I think the Open Source / Closed Source debate has iterated all the interesting arguments here. Of course it would be better for the car player source to be made available, but since it's incredibly unlikely (from what Rob, Hugo and Roger have implied) I think we can let that idea rest in peace. I don't see any companies making other products that can run the Squeezebox source, but I do see a lot of other companies that are competing in the same market with thier own proprietary player. And if this new wonder product Hugo is hinting about didn't have as good an interface as the Rio Car (and therefore in all likelihood use their own source code to do same), then why would we buy it?
4) If, Hugo, a very small Melbourne empeg meet and a half decent curry means anything to you<*>, then heed the criteria of modularity and upgradeability. As you said, you can never have too much memory; that can also be said for hard disk space, display size, processor speed, connectivity, and whatever else.
Have fun,
Paul
<*> And hopefully they mean a lot to you, which is what they mean to me.
_________________________
Owner of Mark I empeg 00061, now better than ever - (Thanks, Rod!) - and Karma 3930000004550
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#245045 - 07/01/2005 23:24
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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After a fair amount of consideration of all the responses posted here, I have decided, with some regret, to withdraw this proposal. I will not as a result be taking this any further with Hugo to request permission to work on the V3 branch to produce a stable release at Beta quality. My original goals were: - to get a job - pay my bills - do something I would enjoy - provide something of use to the community - remove the load on Hugo and the team All I really wanted to do was to put an end to the endless complaints about bugs, non-functional RDS and tuners that didn't work: to get this off Hugo's (and Peter's, John G's, Toby's, and everyone else's who has part involvement with the car player software) backs and just let them get on with their jobs, whilst giving us a final, stable release with which we could all be content. This was done purely 'cos of my current circumstances and my uniquely protected status regarding IP with the player. It was driven somewhat by seeing the succesful result of a similar effort by Poul Henning-Kamp on the BSD kernel and core distribution which finished recently. I thought: well, why not for empeg? Unforch - and to my great disappointment - it's not going to be possible. There is insufficient interest, motivation, or funding (even at the relatively economical levels I would have been prepared to accept - I did not see one single post asking for an overall expected cost for this proposal) to make this work. Instead of a "Yeah! let's do it!" spirit, there was a rapid sideways diversion into IP and open source. Completely missed the point, people.  Waste of time. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement. This thread has completely disintegrated and lost focus. There has been little real comprehension, or visionary understanding, of what I had intended. I suspect a lot of it came from me not being very clear and up-front about my intentions. I'll have to learn from this. However, it has become apparent from a few strategic postings what is likely to happen in the next few months, and that my proposal would (as like as not) cause problems with this. I would still like to be surprised, but I doubt that I will be. Hence, it's time to (dis)gracefully withdraw. As pessimistic as this all sounds, I have been getting the feeling recently that this community is gradually disintegrating and slipping away. The long time owners and posters are disappearing: the torch is diminishing. The discussions becoming less focussed on the player and more on trivia. There is more and more repetition, and the FAQ is being read less and less. It's a repetition of what I have seen happen on the Dragon scene, the Atari scene, OS-9 (and I will leave you knowledgeable ones to work out which one I mean), Acorn and Archimedes, DOOM, and numerous other things I've been interested in over time that have - gradually - just faded away. Perhaps I always choose the wrong thing to be interested in, I dunno. So what's going to happen to this wonderous beast that has affected all our lives? It will struggle on with perhaps one more (nearly) fixed release, and the number of active users will gradully diminish with more and more players being shelved over time. There will be a gradual loss of interest as the spares pool gets smaller, and catastrophic damage to players will be - just that, irreparable. It's going to die, and it's time we got realistic about it. For myself, I have now started off with something new to keep me interested. I'm not bailing out - the empeg will always hold a place in my heart for the change it has brought to my life - but it is, nonetheless, time to move on. You too....
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#245046 - 07/01/2005 23:56
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Technology gets old - it's pretty amazing that there are still so many people talking about the car player more than three years after it was discontinued. I suspect that the majority of players will remain in use for years to come, at least until something better comes along (which may *never* happen if it's geek appeal you're looking for).
It can be depressing when enthusiast-driven products decline and the communities built around them start to disintegrate, but I hope we'll let the car player grow old with dignity as we await the "next great thing" from Hugo and the chaps. Personally, I have no intention of ever replacing my car player - it's a reminder of one of the most successful periods of my life. If necessary I'll keep a second car just to give it somewhere to live.
Rob
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#245047 - 07/01/2005 23:57
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
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Quote:
I did not see one single post asking for an overall expected cost for this proposal) to make this work.
You missed petteri's post, then.
Quote:
Instead of a "Yeah! let's do it!" spirit, there was a rapid sideways diversion into IP and open source. Completely missed the point, people. Waste of time.
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed in this, as well. How many fricken times has that particular question been asked and answered in the past? Dead horse, meet stick; stick, meet dead horse.
I would have jumped in eanlier, but was off on Christmas vacation. I think your suggestion was an excellent suggestion, and thank you for making it, even if it didn't turn out the way you'd hoped.
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#245048 - 08/01/2005 01:49
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 13/09/1999
Posts: 2401
Loc: Croatia
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Rob,
it saddens me seeing you so disappointed. Once you said you would spend bout six months on the project, there was no need to ask for 'quote': anything less that 10k€ or so would not pay bills. I (and most of others who replied) were willing to part with up to 100€ to make 3B happen - if it cannot be done, we will stick with 2. I didn't see 100 posts, so it would seem, the interest is not sufficient. However, many intereseted owners don't visit this board regularly, so perhaps the idea should have been given more time.
I don't see why rehashing of "commercial advantges of open sourcing" argument upset you so much? Likewise the "let's make one of our own" story.
As for the community disintegrating, it is inevitable, but it will take quite a few years yet, I think. Again, I understand it saddens you (you could safely be voted entusiast of the century, with all those fantastic meets you organize, despite everything that is happening to you personally), but imagine what slow demise of empeg means to, say, Hugo or Rob V...
I won't thank you for all your efforts now, because I believe there will be plenty of opportunity in comming years.
Please, cheer up!
(6809, BTW).
_________________________
Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Q#5196
MkII #080000376, 18GB green
MkIIa #040103247, 60GB blue
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#245049 - 08/01/2005 02:30
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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Quote:
I did not see one single post asking for an overall expected cost for this proposal) to make this work.
I agree that the "open source" discussion was really annoying and a bit disrespectful IMO because it had absolutely nothing to do with what you had proposed. It also went against what everyone close to empeg said was possible. I kept reopening this thread to see what the latest thoughts were on your proposal, only to find people going on and on about stuff that had nothing to do with the subject. I was also bummed out to read people posting "I'll pay a sum that will maybe cover only a week of your groceries, but your work had better give me A, B and C features."
However, that being said, I figured if wanted to share what your "costs" would be, you would have. Either, you didn't feel like sharing what your bills are each month (none of our business) or you want to get a feel for everyone's opinion before crunching the numbers. Someone did actually ask what the rate would be, and I, along with a few others, suggested creating a pool of money we could donate to for paying up-front. The magic number of funds was never up to us.
Also, there were many of us (maybe not as many as you'd like, but considering the light traffic we get nowadays, I thought it was a pretty good ratio) who were very excited about this and wanted to be part of it. I was even emailing and talking to my empeg friends and family (albiet, there are only 4 of them) that have never been members of this BBS. I was even bragging to some of my non-empeg friends about how cool it would be to have you do this. "Remember that cool Alpha 3 I was telling you about? Now I'll finally be able to use it on my main player!"
So I don't blame you for being frustrated by some of the replies and distractions here, but please don't forget about the rest of us who were and still are geeked as hell about the idea.
_________________________
Brad B.
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#245050 - 08/01/2005 03:34
Re: Money
[Re: bonzi]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5549
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
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As for the community disintegrating, it is inevitable, but it will take quite a few years yet, I think
Agreed.
And not because discussion of the empeg player is going to go on forever. Has anybody beside myself been watching the tally of posts in the forums? The Off Topic forum is going to overtake the General forum in about another 30 days as being the forum with the greatest number of posts in it.
Face it, over the past five years of so we've pretty much said about all there is to say about the empeg. What keeps me coming back to this bbs, and will for the forseeaable future, is the opportunity to engage in intelligent conversation on an extraordinarily wide range of topics, with people who are smarter than I am.
We have an incredible community here, perhaps unique on the entire internet, filled with people who are able to discuss anything civilly, articulately, intelligently, and best of all driven by a willingness and desire to do so.
The empeg could become completely obsolete tomorrow (perhaps replaced by an implant in our brains containing every bit of audio ever recorded and controlled solely by thought) and this community would continue because the camaraderie, the intelligence, the spirited give-and-take and depth of knowledge are not to be found anyplace else.
Long live the empeg bbs!
tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
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#245051 - 08/01/2005 03:54
Re: Money
[Re: tanstaafl.]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 14/01/2002
Posts: 2858
Loc: Atlanta, GA
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Quote:
perhaps replaced by an implant in our brains containing every bit of audio ever recorded
Oh man, does that mean "Nothing Compares 2 U" by Sinade O'conner would be stuck in my brain? I think I'd stick with my empeg over that!
More on topic, I thought the deal was kind of killed by a few things that the empeg guys said. They seemed to feel that bringing Rob up to speed would be a prohibitively difficult task.
I agree whole heartedly with Doug, though. This is a great community, and it continues to be great. I rarely find much about the empeg worth writing about these days simply because the darn thing just works for me and does everything I need. I don't need to know much more about it, nor do I have any questions about what I can do with it, but I have friends here and that's what keeps me reading posts.
_________________________
-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
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#245052 - 08/01/2005 05:28
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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Quote:
- to get a job
- pay my bills
- do something I would enjoy
- provide something of use to the community
- remove the load on Hugo and the team
Number one there is a good idea as employment usually takes care of number two. Sadly as you saw, the financial prospects just aren't here to pony up enough money to support a person for 6 months. I think part of that reason is because version 2 of the empeg software is just a plain great release. It added a lot of noticible things over 1. With 3, it adds more, but for some reason just doesn't carry the same value to people here. Auto volume adjusting I think is one of the bigger features, but easially overshadowed by the fact we have had it since version 1 with kernel hacks. Crossfading is interesting, but for me is usually off on any device that supports it, unless it needs to be used for gapless playback. Pitch bend is a fun toy, but nothing that would see use daily (unless you were a non empeg owning friend of mine). Auto EQ is a very compelling feature, but one that works decently now and is usually a one time shot.
So to round that part up, basicially version 3 doesn't add a ton of value to a community measured here probably at under one hundred. (Sadly this new software lacks the statistics of the old one tracking user logins over the past month for an exact number).
So lets see, number 3. I think that once money enters the scene, the fun would decrease a noticible amount. The work turns from a labor of love, to something you start to depend on. It would after all be paying your bills. And due to the money as others hinted, you would probably see a sharp increase in your inbox of "whats the news today on the software?". Look back to the post years ago when 1.1 was being talked about. People were much worse then they were here in this thread, as there was a feeling that it added so much and the just paid $1000 or more should justify having 1.1 sooner. Version 2 eventually came once the community saw the product be killed from the active Rio product line. The response at that time quickly turned to one of thanks, as it came to a discontinued product.
Number 4, you already provide much use to this community. You have a rare gift in being able to rally people from all around the world to show up on your doorstep, then proceed to direct that crowd to many interesting and fun activities. The generous donations from this community still leave me speachless, and the memories I gained due to those donations helping me get to Europe will be with me for the rest of my life. Odds are, had you not put forth the effort to host the meet, I would have never seen some of the parts of Europe that I did. I would really hope that this thread did not somehow degrade the importance you feel you have in this community. And I haven't even touched on the fact that you also offer repair services to this day, 3 years past the discontinuation of the product. One that I hope to utilize here in the near future to keep at least one fully functional player active for years to come.
The last part, I definitely commend you for trying to do so.
As far as the whole off topic discussions, plus the nearly dead horse open source discussion, all I can really say is that it is very typical of the community here, and has been for a long time. Why some are suprised is beyond me about it. I think it is just natural anymore, as one simple sentance said from one person can spawn a full reply. My reply regarding the iPod and such came mostly from my frustration of the success of it. I at least was able to convince several friends to go for the empeg. Sadly that has not been the case on the Karma, and Rio has not helped much. Hugo hints at interesting possibilities, but sadly it is hard to say what the end results will be. I hope some good will come out of them, but I look at the littered path up to here, with discarded technology from Rio's failures. I sit here today with more of a mess of music then I did when I got my Mark 1, even with products like the Central and Receiver and Karma in existance. That also leads to a bit of irritation that is probably visible in my posts.
In any case, don't count the community down and out quite yet. True, many have left and moved on. But the impact it has had on people is still occuring, and I hope it will for many more years through friendships created due to a simple bit of code and a database.
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#245053 - 08/01/2005 13:25
Re: Money
[Re: JeffS]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 21/05/1999
Posts: 5335
Loc: Cambridge UK
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Quote:
More on topic, I thought the deal was kind of killed by a few things that the empeg guys said. They seemed to feel that bringing Rob up to speed would be a prohibitively difficult task.
I think it's probably more accurate to say that there would be a prohibitive lack of motivation to do so. Rio won't spend so much as ten minutes on something that has no clear benefit to them, which isn't entirely unreasonable in the context of corporate politics.
None of the post 2.0 (and even many pre-2.0) releases were worked on with the permission or knowledge of the company. We simply stayed late and got them done. As Hugo has pointed out, the motivation of individuals to do that sort of thing has dwindled away for a variety of reasons (families, social lives, having your creative spirit gradually sucked out of you etc). Almost all 3.0 functionality happened by chance (i.e. it was developed for Karma) and for most of the rest of it we can thank Peter and John G, within whom the empeg flame is not yet fully extinguished.
Rob
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#245055 - 09/01/2005 15:06
Re: Money
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Or, to summarise, everything that wasn't done for the Karma was done for the karma...
Peter
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#245056 - 09/01/2005 16:28
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 06/10/1999
Posts: 2591
Loc: Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
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Quote:
For myself, I have now started off with something new to keep me interested.
Rob,
Well, I hope "something new" is good, but not so good that you are scarce on this BBS. I'm sorry that this proposal/discussion didn't result in something interesting for you and I appreciate your making the effort. I never did chime in that I would kick in $100-$200 (which I probably would) perhaps in part for the reason that I saw the bug-fix project as high-risk -- all money aside, might not be doable with reasonable level of effort even if The Guys could help with a leg up.
My only earlier comment about "planned obsolescence" was just a wisecrack. The Empeg has been very good to me. I don't nurse any hurt feelings about the fate of the product and I have been impressed with the variety of efforts, not all of them successful, to make the Empeg better.
I will say that I would be thrilled to have a stable version 3 software so as to enjoy crossfade, Ogg, AutoEQ, but I have gone back to enoding in VBR MP3 and may go to FLAC and transcoding to hedge my bets now that I have some new big hard drives.
I agree it's too bad the discussion went off track. That must have been very frustrating for you.
Given the huge amount of work already in the existing player, and the absolutely tantalizing alpha features, it would seem a bit bonkers to imagine writing a new player from the ground up. On the other hand, having an unencumbered "Dreamland" player could be the focus of some renewed interest (any reason it would only have to run on the existing base of Empegs?) I can't program C in any real sense, so I can say that I would be thrilled to have a debugged version 3 type player, but am not in the position to contribute in any meaningful way.
If a miracle occurred and the gents in Cambridge stumbled on a forgotten cache of benzedrine and popped out v3RC1 one weekend, well that'd be swell. Truly. But I don't have any reason to expect that of them and I would be content just knowing their realistic estimate of the situation. If the benzedrine solution is a no-hoper, so be it.
If the v3RC1 concept is deemed DOA, then anyone qualified to do more than dream about a replacement player would need to swing into action. Sadly, I expect most of those folks have jobs and families, too, but you never know! One fairly low-risk step would be to form a task force, committee, working group (whatever bureaucratic term fits!) to kick around a scope of work, discuss design, make block diagrams, etc, just so that interested parties would know what would be involved. As a less techno Empeg lover, I don't always use all the features and can have a hard time remembering what is in kernel, what's in Hijack and what's in the player. Would it be possible to contruct a player in stepwise fashion (basic features first) that is feasible, or does the very mention of the word "basic" simply demonstrate my ignorance?
Greg Combs worked on a replacement player, did he not? I didn't follow that story all the way. Did/does his experience tell us anything? Was he farsighted with respect to seeing this day coming?
The community? Sure, I see (and contrtribute to) the growing Off-Topic/General tilt and, as others have said, as more Empegs die or get stolen, the base will get smaller. And if no replacement player miracle occurs, then I would say there will be less technical interest to keep people posting. Sure, there are familiar BBS handles that don't seem so familiar anymore.
If this BBS blew up and vanished, I am not sure where I could go to exchange text conversations with such a varied, odd collection of people from many countries (who I might never encounter otherwise). OK, I admit the BBS fills some deep-seated weird need to blabber endlessly (like now!). And people on the BBS have generally been very tolerant of said blabbering and related excesses. I appreciate that. But things always change. We'll see!
_________________________
Jim
'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.
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#245057 - 09/01/2005 17:42
Re: Money
[Re: jimhogan]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/01/2002
Posts: 3937
Loc: Providence, RI
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Quote:
Greg Combs worked on a replacement player, did he not? I didn't follow that story all the way. Did/does his experience tell us anything? Was he farsighted with respect to seeing this day coming?
squash and rioplay both exist as open source players today; For some reason everyone has forgotten rioplay, which predated squash. There is code which is the server side of the emplode protocol which could be reused. Is this anywhere close to the current player? No. If someone decided to make an open source player, could be be reused? Almost certainly.
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#245058 - 09/01/2005 17:46
Re: Money
[Re: rob]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 17/01/2002
Posts: 3996
Loc: Manchester UK
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Quote:
As Hugo has pointed out, the motivation of individuals to do that sort of thing has dwindled away for a variety of reasons (families, social lives, having your creative spirit gradually sucked out of you etc).
It's quite sad to hear that even in empeg towers issues like this still occur. I'd always assumed it was the coolest job to have (if you're into computers and audio and stuff). I thought I was one of the only people on this board that was less than pleased with my job. I've reached the point with my job where the work just isn't interesting anymore. We seem to be just doing the same old crap day in day out. I always used to be keen to work on things outside of work but now I just feel jaded.
_________________________
Cheers,
Andy M
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#245059 - 09/01/2005 18:05
Re: Money
[Re: jimhogan]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 19/09/2002
Posts: 2494
Loc: East Coast, USA
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Quote:
And if no replacement player miracle occurs, then I would say there will be less technical interest to keep people posting.
I don't mean to swing off track again, but this thread is sounding like we're reading the eulogy at the funeral of all things empeg. All of our players still work and give us unrivaled control over our mp3 collections. All of our players still have plenty of cool 3rd party software options, and there is still room to make more; especially with more memory.
But from the current deviation of this thread, it sounds like what we’ve got isn’t good enough. Yes, I understand RobS’s original intent to finalize the software, which is a great effort on his part; but I’m talking about this “without open source player / new software, or our empegs die” feeling that I’m getting from later in the thread.
Are we sharks, who die if they stop moving? Is this Microsoft mentality where we need new new new all the time? Or can we focus working with what we’ve got, like all our 3rd party software contributors do? We’ve got 2.0final for stability and 3a8 for cutting edge fun, and they aren’t facing obsolescence anytime soon, right? If MP4s (AAC?) were suddenly overrunning MP3, then maybe we’d need an open source player that could adapt, but that’s not the case.
I can’t see how lack of an open source player will be the end of the player and the end of the community. We still have 3rd party software and hardware, we still need to discuss troubleshooting, and, like Jim says, we still like to talk to each other in Off Topic. Long live the empeg; we’re still better than anything else out there!
_________________________
- FireFox31 110gig MKIIa (30+80), Eutronix lights, 32 meg stacked RAM, Filener orange gel lens, Greenlights Lit Buttons green set
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#245060 - 09/01/2005 18:12
Re: Money
[Re: FireFox31]
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veteran
Registered: 01/10/2001
Posts: 1307
Loc: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Quote:
I can’t see how lack of an open source player will be the end of the player and the end of the community. We still have 3rd party software and hardware, we still need to discuss troubleshooting, and, like Jim says, we still like to talk to each other in Off Topic. Long live the empeg; we’re still better than anything else out there!
Hear, hear!
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#245061 - 09/01/2005 23:43
Re: Money
[Re: FireFox31]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 05/01/2001
Posts: 4903
Loc: Detroit, MI USA
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Quote:
But from the current deviation of this thread, it sounds like what we’ve got isn’t good enough
Good point. I don't see the point of creating a new player when all I really want is bug fixes for V3. I love my player and all of its software. It was only after seeing how cool Crossfade and AutoEQ were that I wanted "more".
Even today I was marveling at how easy it is to manage my mp3s via emplode compared to Windows Explorer.
_________________________
Brad B.
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#245062 - 10/01/2005 07:22
Re: Money
[Re: SE_Sport_Driver]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Even today I was marveling at how easy it is to manage my mp3s via emplode compared to Windows Explorer.
Rio Music Manager's pretty good, too, even if you don't have a Rio portable...
_________________________
-- roger
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#245063 - 10/01/2005 13:27
Re: Money
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Yup, RMM rocks! Can it talk to empeg players yet?
Cheers
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#245064 - 10/01/2005 14:28
Re: Money
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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Quote:
Yup, RMM rocks! Can it talk to empeg players yet?
No. We were kinda waiting for the car player to support protocol2 and the Karma database format. That hasn't happened. Making RMM talk protocol1 is an evolutionary dead-end, so that's not likely to happen either.
_________________________
-- roger
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#245065 - 10/01/2005 15:10
Re: Money
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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I was under the impression that V3 went over to Karma dB, or am I wrong?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#245066 - 10/01/2005 15:25
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
I was under the impression that V3 went over to Karma dB, or am I wrong?
No. One build of it got done, but it was a long way from fully working. All the released alphas still have the old database. It's now no longer likely that there will ever be, as we once hoped, a protocol2/FTP/MSC, Karma database, UPnP version.
Peter
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#245067 - 10/01/2005 16:06
Re: Money
[Re: peter]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/06/1999
Posts: 2993
Loc: Wareham, Dorset, UK
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Could prot2 ever be released to public domain (in spec form)? How about prot1?
_________________________
One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015
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#245068 - 10/01/2005 19:38
Re: Money
[Re: andym]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/05/1999
Posts: 3457
Loc: Palo Alto, CA
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Quote:
Quote:
As Hugo has pointed out, the motivation of individuals to do that sort of thing has dwindled away for a variety of reasons (families, social lives, having your creative spirit gradually sucked out of you etc).
It's quite sad to hear that even in empeg towers issues like this still occur. I'd always assumed it was the coolest job to have (if you're into computers and audio and stuff). I thought I was one of the only people on this board that was less than pleased with my job. I've reached the point with my job where the work just isn't interesting anymore. We seem to be just doing the same old crap day in day out. I always used to be keen to work on things outside of work but now I just feel jaded.
I'll admit there have been dark times, mostly due to the pain and suffering required to make a decent product with inadequate hardware (a DSP). To say there was no creativity or spirit going into developing for this DSP would be a long way from the mark though - it was a huge technical challenge to make these products as good as they are when given so little to work with. Challenges inspire people to a point, but after a while it can just feel like beating your head against a wall.
Still, this is on its way out. The future holds a damn sight less running like mad just to stand still and a lot more productive effort - partially this is down to new chips being available, partially it's due to using a new common architecture and partially it's a shift in the attitude of the company and more of a focus on quality
Jut my 2c (I am in the US at the moment, otherwise it'd be about 0.9 of a pence)
Hugo
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#245069 - 11/01/2005 11:15
Re: Money
[Re: schofiel]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
Could prot2 ever be released to public domain (in spec form)? How about prot1?
Protocol2 was comprehensively reverse-engineered on the Karma and an open-source client implementation is available, called libkarma. Here's their documentation.
There isn't a protocol1 spec document as such, but our own GPL emptool sources contain a complete implementation of it.
Peter
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