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lkcl writes The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarized all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

lkcl writes: In an open letter to the core developers behind OpenLDAP (Howard Chu) and Python-LMDB (David Wilson) is a story of a successful creation of a high-performance task scheduling engine written (perplexingly) in Python. With only partial optimization allowing tasks to be executed in parallel at a phenomenal rate of 240,000 per second, the choice to use Python-LMDB for the per-task database store based on its benchmarks, as well as its well-researched design criteria, turned out to be the right decision. Part of the success was also due to earlier architectural advice gratefully received here on Slashdot. What is puzzling, though, is that LMDB on Wikipedia is being constantly deleted, despite its "notability" by way of being used in a seriously-long list of prominent software libre projects, which has been, in part, motivated by the Oracle-driven BerkeleyDB license change. It would appear that the original complaint about notability came from an Oracle employee as well.

lkcl writes "After the reports on SSD reliability and after experiencing a costly 50% failure rate on over 200 remote-deployed OCZ Vertex SSDs, a degree of paranoia set in where I work. I was asked to carry out SSD analysis with some very specific criteria: budget below £100, size greater than 16Gbytes and Power-loss protection mandatory. This was almost an impossible task: after months of searching the shortlist was very short indeed. There was only one drive that survived the torturing: the Intel S3500. After more than 6,500 power-cycles over several days of heavy sustained random writes, not a single byte of data was lost. Crucial M4: failed. Toshiba THNSNH060GCS: failed. Innodisk 3MP SATA Slim: failed. OCZ: failed hard. Only the end-of-lifed Intel 320 and its newer replacement, the S3500, survived unscathed. The conclusion: if you care about data even when power could be unreliable, only buy Intel SSDs." Relatedly, don't expect SSDs to become cheaper than HDDs any time soon.

I've been really, really excited about digital video distribution lately: first Netflix greenlights jms's return to science fiction TV, and then Amazon announces their new pilots. Perhaps the decade long dearth of any good television is nearing its end! So, with that in mind, I finished up editing Slashdot for the day and sat down to watch some of these new pilots. Only to discover that Amazon has taken away my ability to watch entirely in the name of Digital Restrictions Management.

For ages now, Amazon Instant Video has worked with Android devices supporting Flash and, more importantly to many people (and me) it seems, through an unofficial XBMC plugin. It seemed like Amazon was happily using RTMPE to prevent casual stream interception, at least for content funded by others. But with the release of their new pilots, they enabled "Flash Access," Adobe's DRM that (for now) is actually effective.

This effectively kills access for everyone using GNU/Linux, even with the (officially unsupported) Adobe Flash plugin! The Adobe plugin relies on HAL for some DRM magic, but HAL is unmaintained, deprecated, and was removed from most major distros ages ago. You can't even install it by hand thanks to udev removing a few features HAL relied upon. Naturally, the Adobe Flash plugin is equally unmaintained so there is little hope even for people willing to install a piece of unmaintained software with a history of remotely exploitable security holes, instability, and poor performance.

But it seems the loss of access from XBMC is more widely felt: RMS cultists and pragmatic Windows users alike now suffer equally. And the folks who aren't GNU/Hippies with an anti-cloud-chip-on-their-shoulder might even be suffering more: they've lost access to shows and movies that they purchased.

There are a dozen pages on the XBMC forum of people pretty pissed, hundreds of angry posts on their Facebook wall, lengthy threads on Amazon's official forums. But so far the response from Amazon has simply been: it was never supposed to work, and we've fixed it.

In the absence of a clear response from Amazon, wild speculations as to why they decided to institute DRM abound: it's not intentional, piracy is a problem for them after all, Jeff Bezos personally wants to eat every XBMC user's cat, or it has something to do with those pilots.

I'd wager it had something to do with the pilots, or was somewhat unintentional (maybe they only meant to restrict HD content).

An XBMC forum member claims to have chatted with a support representative and gotten a suggestive answer:

Amazon Support: Okay, for Android devices we unfortunately don't support them except for the Kindle Fires so it was really lucky your phone was able to play our instant videos before. As to why they aren't working now, we just recently updated our Flash video playback support which is more than likely why it won't play now. I'm really sorry for any inconvenience this will cause you!
Me: I see. Was the flash video playback updated because of the new Amazon Original Pilots that was released recently?
Amazon Support:I'm honestly not sure if it was due to the pilots that came out, though the timing with the pilots and the update can't be coincidental :-)

Assuming it's not just a technical glitch (it happened once before, and Amazon turned the harder-to-break DRM off) and related to the pilots, why only now have they enabled proper DRM? Surely if content they fund is worth restricting then all content is worth restricting? After all, the party line has always been that DRM is imposed by those evil card carrying MPAA members, and not by enlightened tech companies who are just doing what has to be done to free us from the tyranny of broadcast television.

Is it that the content they already provide is widely available through piracy that they haven't cared before? Perhaps; stream ripping from Amazon/Netflix/Hulu and transforming it into a shareable form is not something a normal person would do if only because the video is streamed in mostly real-time. But there are entire groups dedicated to capturing television and uploading it, so someone out there would probably do it.

The problem is that they are going to break the DRM and pirate everything anyway. In fact. they already have (possibly nsfw, because piracy). The same goes for Netflix; their onerous DRM did nothing to stop piracy of House of Cards (finding it is left as an exercise for the reader, but Knuth would rate it 00), and yet they just posted incredible financial results and strong subscriber growth (in utter contrast to this time last year).

The cat's out of the bag: a good chunk of the world population own Infinite Copying Machines and those machines are networked. You cannot stop a determined individual from making a freely copyable version of anything digital unless you ban all output devices (certainly would make Haskell programming nicer) and burn every camera and piece of audio equipment ever built.

It seems that the same toxic thinking about distribution control that pervades the traditional networks has infected the online distributors. It's clear that torrent trackers offer something the traditional channels do not: (mostly) effortless access to content how and when you want it. But these are things that Netflix, Amazon, et al could offer as well... that they do offer. However, instead of liberalizing distribution as time goes on, the New Distributors have fallen into the same clearly failed mentality about restricting distribution that led to the entire media industry becoming a former shell of itself in a mere five years!

This mentality will only lead to failure. Pursuit of it is insanity: we are witnessing the end stages of an industry-wide collapse because of it! And it seems these new distributors have quickly forgotten that it was only the desperation of their predecessors that they were even able to license what they have now.

So, Amazon, why do you insist upon flogging people who are yelling "Shut up and take my money!"?

lkcl writes about his effort to go further than others have, and actually have a processor designed for Free Software manufactured: "A new processor is being put together — one that is FSF Endorseable, contains no proprietary hardware engines, yet an 800MHz 8-core version would, at 38 GFLOPS, be powerful enough on raw GFLOPS performance figures to take on the 3ghz AMD Phenom II x4 940, the 3GHz Intel i7 920 and other respectable mid-range 100 Watt CPUs. The difference is: power consumption in 40nm for an 8-core version would be under 3 watts. The core design has been proven in 65nm, and is based on a hybrid approach, with its general-purpose instruction set being designed from the ground up to help accelerate 3D Graphics and Video Encode and Decode, an 8-core 800mhz version would be capable of 1080p30 H.264 decode, and have peak 3D rates of 320 million triangles/sec and a peak fill rate of 1600 million pixels/sec. The unusual step in the processor world is being taken to solicit input from the Free Software Community at large before going ahead with putting the chip together. So have at it: if given carte blanche, what interfaces and what features would you like an FSF-Endorseable mass-volume processor to have? (Please don't say 'DRM' or 'built-in spyware')." There's some discussion on arm-netbook. This is the guy behind the first EOMA-68 card (currently nearing production). As a heads ups, we'll be interviewing him in a live style similarly to Woz (although intentionally this time) next Tuesday.

lkcl writes "Two independent projects, Skulpt and Pyjamas, are working to bring Python to the web browser (and the JavaScript command-line) the hard way: as JavaScript. Skulpt already has a cool Python prompt demo on its homepage; Pyjamas has a gwtcanvas demo port and a GChart 2.6 demo port. Using the 64-bit version of Google v8 and PyV8, Pyjamas has just recently and successfully run its Python regression tests, converted to JavaScript, at the command-line. (Note: don't try any of the above SVG demos with FF2 or IE6; they will suck.)"

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

lkcl writes "A clean-room RTMPE specification has been created using the source code of rtmpdump-v1.6 for guidance. Adobe recently issued a DMCA take-down notice against SourceForge, resulting in copies of rtmpdump hitting quite a few bittorrent sites worldwide."

lkcl writes "The GitTorrent Protocol (GTP) is a protocol for collaborative git repository distribution across the Internet. Git promises to be a distributed software management tool, where a repository can be distributed. Yet, the mechanisms used to date to actually 'distribute,' such as ssh, are very much still centralized. GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing (an existing feature of git) and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control 'clearing house.' The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom. The playing field is leveled in so many ways, as 'The Web Site' no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. Coming just in time for that all-encompassing Free Software revolution hinted at by The Rebellion Against Vista, this article will explain more fully some of the implications that make this quiet and technically brilliant project, GitTorrent, so important to Software Freedom, from both technical and political perspectives."

lkcl tips his in-depth article up at Advogato on the difficulties for the MVC programming model that are introduced by Javascript and AJAX, and solutions for them. He writes: "This article outlines how the MVC concept is made incredibly awkward by the gradual but necessary introduction of Javascript and AJAX. A solution is found in the form of Javascript Compiler Technology such as GWT or Pyjamas (PyPy's JS backend or Rb2Js could be used, with some additional work). The article outlines how and why the traditional MVC patterns are fragmented by Javascript and AJAX, advocating that if a site is programmed purely in a high-level language that is then compiled to Javascript for the Web Browser sections, the same high-level source code can be executed either client-side on the browser, or server-side, or even both, depending on the requirements. The implications of this approach are discussed in depth."

lkcl writes "The Open Group announced 12th January 2005 that they are releasing DCE/RPC 1.2.2 as a Free Software Project - under the LGPL. This is a major coup for Free Software: the Distributed Computing Environment is known to be involved in some major projects. There is a mirror at opendce.hands.com which runs rsync, ftp, and there is also a dce122.tar.bz2.torrent bittorrent running as well."