Great service guys. I really hope that those who are in the mission field get to use your info.
I'm an old koot that has been using FOSS (free and open source software) since around 1995. I think it would be great to offer FOSS for folks on a tight budget (aka missionaries quite often)a page to orient toward all of the vast resources available in the open source community for Christians.
To start, how about putting the ipod episodes out on ogg format ? :)
Is anyone else interested in ogg
Rob and I discussed ogg formatting the podcast. Is anyone else interested in this format and would actually use it?
We recently started putting out an enhanced podcast for some of our listeners. Are people interested in listening to ogg? We aren't going to put out something that really isn't going to be used. Our time is precious.
But, I do like the idea. Maybe to add a page with a list of FOSS. hrmm....
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
The believers open source
The believers open source community is reflective of the market share of FOSS usage at large. But being the die hard linux and foss user that I am I think open source is THE professional solution for low budget high quality computer productivity for the church and missions. The L4C (Linux 4 Christians) list is fairly active and there is a thriving online effort by believers in the FOSS community. There's even a couple of Linux Christian distributions.
Foss is not cheap even though it is free. The price is learning to use the software in a safe and effective manner.
Drupal is a classic example that I'm sure you can relate to. I'm sure you understand it, otherwise you wouldn't have done the drupal series. That is exactly how the FOSS community model works.
OGG format is used somewhat here in the US. But it shines in third world countries where FOSS is taking off. In time ogg will take the Western World market share like other formats that are non=proprietary. It only makes sense. Otherwise only the wealthy will have your valuable data available and no one else.(Just expanding the borders of your online outreach).
Here's a couple of geeks and God links that you might find useful:
Shalom b'Yeshua haMashiach
thanks for the link
Just a quick shout-out of thanks for linking up my blog. Hopefully I can be of service to your audience.
ogg enhanced podcast preferred over alternatives
I'd prefer to see enhancement podcasts using ogg format.
Though... it seems to me strictly a geek thing right now.
But, I can use it without problem .....and to me, it seems a "good" path for overall future ....philosopically at least.
Sustpect the less geeky will react with...
Ogg???? who's-what's that.
"Might" be OK for this audience though.
Mark
Matt, Here's a little bit on
Matt,
Here's a little bit on Wikipedia's Wikimedia with regard to file formats. Mp3's are not allowed and Ogg is the prefered sound format.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...
Thoughts?
Shalom b'Yeshua haMashiach
Ogg still geekie
Ogg is still a geekie format. If there are other parts of the world where it's getting acceptance I'd love to read about it. To see some statistics that show it's acceptance.
My hesitation in recommending it or even using it comes from everything I read being that it's not widely used. I know there are campaigns to open it's usage. But, Windows doesn't support it out of the box and it was a fight to get them to accept mp3.
Plus people know the term mp3. There is a hesitation is going to acc/m4a because they don't know what it is. That's easier to explain than a transition to ogg.
Again, if there are any statistics or information to show a growth in adoption I'd love to read it. I'd love free as in speech over free as in beer.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
Ogg and Proprietary Media Players
I think one of the big reasons Ogg will never truly become the standard is because the majority of media players (iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc) will never support the open source format. The big companies want control over their users, and they know that if they put Ogg support into their players, they will loose some of that control.
Even though it's a better format (and they know it), they won't support it by default because they want to keep the control.