Hopefully people will glom onto this information, as it’s sorely lacking. Here’s the upshot - DiVX and XViD are dead. H.264, more commonly known as MPEG-4/AVC is the new champion of compressed video. And yet, most media files are still released using DiVX and XViD, chiefly because people are not totally familiar with how to create H.264 files. What’s worse, many people simply use graphical frontends to encoding engines, which don’t provide them the newest options for H.

Microsoft’s next-generation Vista promises to deliver radically improved graphics for end-users, promising 3D-accelerated user interfaces and special effects that will dramatically improve the way a user relates to the computing experience, similar to what current owners of Apple Macintosh systems enjoy. Meanwhile on the Linux front, Red Hat and Novell have been spearheading the development of their own next-generation display subsystems, and Red Hat is among the first to include it in a freely released operating system: Fedora Core 6.

I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to easily set up Evolution 2.8 with an Exchange 2003 account with its associated version of Evolution Connector. This marks the first time in seven months that a current version of Evolution has succeeded in working with Microsoft Exchange. If you’re a user of Evolution and you require Exchange compatibility, here’s some advice: Stick with a compatible version at all cost. DO NOT UPGRADE.

Three, perhaps four years ago I began looking to replace FreeBSD with Gentoo Linux. The reason was simple. FreeBSD had become mired in politics, members of the core team were leaving, and their next major release was behind Linux 2.6 in functionality and performance. What was once an icon of stable and elegant operating system development was quickly deteriorating. Gentoo presented itself to me at the time as a young, fresh approach to a ports system.

If you’re using phpSysInfo and finding it telling you to build PHP with the ‘xml’ module, add ’expat’ to your USE flags. Fixes it right up.

Around the early to mid-nineties I had heard a song on the radio, and like many, it got stuck in my head. I began listening to specific stations because I knew they would play it at least once a day. Then, as quickly as it appeared on the air, it went away never to be heard again. I spent a great deal of time combing through record stores and search engines trying to find this song.

Reading OSnews is an amusing pastime for me. It’s replete with comedic gems like this one: Why Apple snubs its open source geeks For over a month the claim has been made that MacOS X is now a proprietary operating system when it was once an open-source panacea, and many in the open source world have rattled their sabers and had a lot to say about how evil and draconian Apple is for having done so.

H.264, MPEG-4’s advanced codec featured in the iPod, the Sony PSP, and both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, as well as future broadcast video standards, has a lot of skeptics. Many say H.264 doesn’t have a lot to offer people when videos are compressed at the higher bitrates required for HD content (self-contradictory, as H.264 is accepted as the standard MPEG-4 codec for High Definition). To them I just want to say: This is your brain,

Having just seen the movie ‘The Da Vinci Code’, I must say I’m a bit surprised. I’m surprised because I found the book to be childishly written and the screenplay worked out better, which never happens. Also, while the story has clearly been sensationalized to the point of a number of people believing it to be true, or at least worthy of discussion as a serious, non-fictional topic, some of the ideas expressed are distorted realities.

I ran across this keynote speech on Chris Blizzard’s blog, and I think it deserves passing around. This is a keynote speech by Corey Doctorow, who used to be with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This organisation basically fights for the preservation of the end-user’s rights in a world where the law is still being firmly established on the Internet. In this keynote he’s detailing a lot of the negative things that are happening to our rights to use the things we buy.