On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Scott Dier wrote: > I don't think these people are uneducated hackers. The lead programmer > at least has some graduate school, and perhaps finished that, I cant > seem to find out easily for now. > > Heres a nifty interview: > http://www.advogato.org/article/56.html That is a good interview. I file Chris Montgomery (lead programmer) under "clueful" -- he makes the comment that can't just be "Free and as good as MPEG. I have to be Free and clearly better." I think that's spot on. He also says he doesn't want too much attention damaging their credibility because of something that isn't ready. Clearly, he does know the CODEC field. However, as he says, "There are pieces of the distribution (the psychoacoustics, signal processing, etc) that are deep wizardry... only a very few people would be able to help. Thankfully, there are many more pieces that any good hacker could wrap their mind around and make magic with." The thing I'm curious about is, can Open Source development compete against the *HEAVILY* funded corporate deep wizardry? We're not talking about a couple of guys somewhere. The 40 year old papers he was looking at and the 80 years of history is funded, published, and owned largely by AT&T Research. Look at http://www.research.att.com/info/jj to see just one of the guys (the one who invented MP3) he's competing against. Then realize that he worked in the Acoustic Research Dept., the Signal Processing Research Dept., the Speech Processing Software Technology Development Dept. This really is David and Goliath. I'd like to see Vorbis do it (open things up) -- jj's not allowed to tell even his friends some of the details of how he does what he does, and I'd like to know more about their perceptual model. *That's* the deep wizardry that I think this is going to come down to, and I don't think Vorbis has the resources to improve upon it. Worse yet, that's not the best AT&T has. The AAC coder is quite a bit better, and even more CPU efficient in encoding. Enough jabber. This isn't the perceptual coding list, I forgot I came here to talk about linux... Pardon the bandwidth, Phil M -- "To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous