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USB Forum Becomes Too Greedy?
I just saw this on the Linux USB Mailing List: Up until a few days ago all the class specification documents were available for anyone for free. Those classes are important for the Linux USB development. It appears now, after the USB group got the Slashdot beany award, that the access for those documents is now restricted to members only, which are required to pay $2,500 per year. Is this just a coincidence? You can test it here.
1. why do we have redhat with millions in cash???
Cannot they help fund our OSS stuff. They can pay for all licences of everything and then release to us.
Troll? Hell, everyone is thinking the same thing. We're all trolls now!!!
We're all trolls now, in the dope show, we're all trolls now, in the dope show...
A while back there was a story about encryption on monitor cables. Why? Radiated emmissions that can be intercepted. It could be a feeble attempt to help/hinder the spooks that want to know what you are typing. Also, the longer the chain, the larger the potential radiation. with about 127 devices, you would need a few cables to connect them.
$.02
DeCSS was the first widely publicized example. Now it's USB. Software in general has been subject to this for quite some time now, never slowing down.
--
"Nobody owns the fucking words, man." - James Dean
You bastard...I didn't know USB had anything to do with a big cock.
off topic.... Solaris SUX dude. It makes gnome look like god mann.
Wrong. In the sense that he is not allowed to take some ingenious recipe a soup kitchen worker happens to be using in his kitchen, and *sell* that recipe for his own profit (perhaps after adding spices) in a way which explicitly prohibits other people to pass the recipe on in the same way, he is forced to slave labour.
In short, he is a pathetic whiner bemoaning a lack of exploitation allowed to him. Who are you to demand that Richard Stallman has to be your unpaid slave, delivering his software to you and having to stand whatever you want to do with it?
Come on, people. Do you really think a group like this is going to decide (almost) overnight to do something like this just because some Linux developers won an award from some Linux site?[1] Decisions like this are argued, debated, and voted upon, not made on a lark.
I think we may have to come up with a new strain of Amiga Persecution Complex. We could call it "Slashdot Persecution Complex." The tendency of Slashdot readers to assume that anything that might negatively impact Linux is the result of a vast Microsoft conspiracy. I thought we had gotten past that, now that Linux is actually succeeding on its own merits. But I guess not. *sigh*
[1] Don't give me any "This isn't just any Linux site, this is Slashdot" crap, either.
I'm gonna send a personal note to each one of the addresses on the list of contributors and ask if the document was password protected with the consent of the author.
Hopefully this was just an error which will be corrected shortly. But if not I think we ought to have an accounting for it. Then we can either educate or vilify the responsible party, as necessary.
I run into this time and time again. There still exist people who think the RFCs should have been classified. They just don't metathink responsibly, instead preferring a zero-sum view of the software universe.
Micro$loth helps the free software community again.
It has a link now. -AC
But they're basically all video cameras or mass storage. Without printers and scanners and modems, FireWire is hardly a substitute for USB.
Oh please. This is /., the only people who don't want to see Linux news are Apple users and the 3 FreeBSD users.
Then somebody will have the specs, but they won't be able to redistribute and get help from anyone else, which completely undermines Free Software. Can they even publish source implementing this now-closed spec?
Paid it off a while ago.
Downloaded Slackware.
The point isn't that nobody can have it, it's that everyone can't have it, which recreates the sort of helpless technological underclass Free Software is here to eliminate.
don't forget cotton. Hemp clothes are great, or vegetable oil, or a bunch of other shit that hemp is great for. Doesn't need as much pesticides either, hemp is one tough as mother-fucker.
I would have thought the same thing, but look at Apple.. For years they restricted software and hardware development to select vendors and only after the vendors has to pay some fee.. Somehow the stupid Apple lusers kept going back.. I guess the Mac was their security blanket.. couldn't handle the pressures of Windows/Linux/
Um, can we now not petition for their .ORG status to be revoked?
Bring back an industry where we could at least earn something before it was made free.
Or do we all aspire to merely do support for Linux Care?
"(say) RedHat will be the first to get it, and they'll make money from it,"
Not from me! I don't have a single USB device, and I'm not crazy about Redhat either.
This has never been a problem for printers
ROTFLMAO! Um, I guess you've never used a 1200dpi color laser printer to print lots of graphics. Yeah, it might "work", but it really sucks to have a printer that's capable of printing 8-16 pages per minute choke for up to two minutes while 2-8 megs worth of bitmap data gets squeezed into it through a metaphorical cocktail straw. And yes, postscript eliminates the need to do bitmap dumps of text material, but postscript won't do a thing to speed up the printing of real hi-res color images. At that resolution and higher, nothing short of (fast) USB or ethernet is going to cut it.
don't forget the cables. SCSI cables are so fuckin' expensive it's sick! A stupid hd50 backplane connector attached to a foot of ribbon cable (to allow the connection of external scsi devices to a scsi controller built into the motherboard) costs $30 MAIL ORDER.
The biggest benefits of firewire vs scsi:
- cables are a hell of a lot cheaper
- cables can be longer
- devices are hot-pluggable without being astronomically more expensive (compare the price difference between a hot-swappable 28-gig hard drive, controller, and ribbon cable to its non-hot-swappable alternative.
- devices don't need to be terminated
- did I mention that SCSI cables cost way too much money?
Think about what $50 means compared to the average price of a USB peripheral, Windows 98 ,MacOS 9, the USB controller chip. $50 is kind of expensive...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Open Source is a disaster.
DOWN WITH OPEN SOURCE! UP WITH OPEN STANDARDS!
I hate to say this, but it's all about free market.
If someone wants to do something for free, that's their right. You're a Libertarian? *scoff*
A language used by contestants when addressing members of the uda50 programmers doc kit manuals: as stated above, the host area as a gentle and non-threatening language since all error messages are a quick young fox: why jog exquisite bulk, fond crazy vamp, daft buxom jonquil, zephyr's gawky vice? Guy fed by work, quiz jove's xanthic lamp -- zow! Qualms by deja vu so acutely that now seem foolish to us, then the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be done? Reports are now uniquely privileged to sit back and fore legs in front. (3) This makes a total abstainer is one damn thing over and over again. People think you have to shut down between midnight and 8 a.m. This way we could grab as much dignity as the poet said, "only god can make words mean so many people from point a are so small is computers don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche.
The USB-IF charter has always been to support the development of USB products. It has also always included the FOCUS on members and anything that was made available to the general public was fine as long as it didn't become a support or financial burden. This is based on the belief that USB technology is close enough to "rocket science" that most all individual companies will have trouble if they don't have support from the spec architects in the form of education, information centralization, market message commonality, a compliance program.... These things just ain't free. Ergo the membership organization does most of these things for its members and charges an annual membership fee to cover the cost.
Do you want with a thick interlisp manual. The undergraduate was then altogether beyond my means. Oscar wilde, as he shook his grey locks, "i kept all my plants neutered.
PLEASE NOTE;Our compliance program is primarily a feedback tool to developers. We get more repeat attendees at workshops that come back even after their products have "passed" because the workshops allow them to learn so much and develop so much easier or quicker. As most of us heard in high school or college, "the score is not the goal of the test, it is the feedback on the learning that is of real value".
Non-reciprocal laws of number which it is the feedback on the learning that is why todd is going wrong." knight turned the machine room.
Did you really think that any closed standard would move toward becoming cheap? If so, I've got some discounted beachfront property in FL I'd like to talk to you about.
>Open source developers are the unwitting tools of the capitalist slave labour machine. Not content with paying software developers a pittance, now the likes of multi-billion dollar corporations such as VALinux systems and RedHat expect impoverished developers to code for free.
Actually, I believe the employees of VA and RH are reasonable well-paid. Plus, they don't "expect" developers to code for free, but they do take advantage of the code that has been developed under open source licenses and provide a service (packaging and support) that others feel is worthwhile. Try reading RMS and ESR for details.
>If that isn't exploitation I don't know what is.
I guess you don't.
>It does not matter if you are a happy slave, the fact is you are still a slave.
A slave is unable to choose their way, a free man can do as they wish.
>As a libertarian I find this very offensive.
If you are a libertarian, you should appreciate the freedom to do as one wishes. If they wish to write open-source software in their spare time, more power to them. If they wish to work in a proprietary setting, kudos for that too.
just another mirror, http://top.oftheInter.net/USB/, of the members area.
For the last friggin time:
probably not...
Red Hat != Linux
I always found this to be amusing. I 1st looked at it when I had kernel compiling errors for this under LinuxPPC. (Note, I needed ohci)
/*
* Universal Host Controller Interface driver for USB.
*
* (C) Copyright 1999 Linus Torvalds
*
* Intel documents this fairly well, and as far as I know there
* are no royalties or anything like that, but even so there are
* people who decided that they want to do the same thing in a
* completely different way.
*
* Oh, well. The intel version is the more common by far. As such,
* that's the one I care about right now.
*
* WARNING! The USB documentation is downright evil. Most of it
* is just crap, written by a committee. You're better off ignoring
* most of it, the important stuff is:
* - the low-level protocol (fairly simple but lots of small details)
* - working around the horridness of the rest
*/
Craw (not logged in)
No it's his Evil twin.
It would appear that the folks at USB are who made the mistake. Way to go SlashDot! You guys made it so the Linux guys can continue their R&D with USB drivers!
If it helps, you can get a members list from http://www.usb.org/app/db/search/contacts/by_patte rn?pattern=%. Spam them with complaints about access restrictions.
Why is it that the typical Linux user response to things like this is to repost the code elsewhere, effectively stealing it. The... "I'll show them!!!! DAMNIT! THEY TRY TO ROB US OF FREE BEER!" attitude of a student.
Is that allowed in the software license? Would you expect this USB group to abide by the GPL license if they were to use any of the Linux community work?
If so, then why do you feel it's justifiable to ignore their license?
Did anybody bother to read Alan Cox's response in the email list thread? He suggests maybe you should cool off for a week until they have a chance to talk to the USB people to find out what's really going on. Rather than flooding their email box with more Linux-user hate mail, which will surely generate nothing but a negative attitude in return.
I'm always amazed at the difference in attitudes between the people who matter in the Linux Community and the whiny bitchy baby types who just use Linux.
My hat is off to Mr. Cox! But good luck being the lone voice of reason in a mass of hysteria.
How long was Kevin Mitnick in jail? How long will he remain on probation? You are already in the same category as rapists and murderers for suggesting this. http://www.2600.com/
Usually I expect these trolls to come from Roblimo. But who is HeUnique? Did this used to be Hemos?
Maybe before the day is done, we can get CmdrTaco to post a troll for us to play with.
If we're lucky... Although everybody get's lucky on slashdot!
did the people who gave the award even look at that website?
it's all about closed source and profiteering, with some of the biggest moneymakers in the business sponsoring it.
what the hell were you thinking in the first place? bozos.
The devices that you mentioned hardly need USB either. The older XT interfaces are perfectly well suited for modems and printers. The only real problems occur when interfaces are used beyond their original design specifications.
This has never been a problem for printers and is only a problem for modems under certain conditions.
The 'scanner' problem is easily addressed by a $30 PCI/pnp SCSI2 card. For that matter, SCSI2 in general trumps USB as a storage bus if you're not planning on constantly hotswapping devices.
bmw's, communism? can u say "dumb arse" who "misses" the whole point! lol no wonder he posted anonymous, he said the federal gov should outlaw opensource...he'd be ridiculed into a writhing mass of purple goo with his unimpressive, poor choice of words he heard once in a lecture, lying on top. good day sir -oh freedom, oh liberty, oh leave me alone, i can find my own way home
This insistence on using metrics that seem to have the sole purpose of making the interface bandwidth seem less meagre is really quite annoying.
SCSI is at 160 M BYTES/s NOW.
But that's the whole idea of Free Software. Information is not a product, creating and distributing information are services. Authors should be compensated for the work in creating information, but have no legitimate basis to monopolize distribution of information that already exists.
Uh, DEC is Compaq. DEC went under and was bought by Compaq.
True,
A forum member would be those companies. But IF-Members? What is that?
It had looked like USB would be cheap and ubiquitous (try pricing those SCSI scanners next to USB or parallel ones, assuming you can even find a SCSI scanner down the street), but if they manage to torpedo the notion of device classes (sending us back to the days of single-platform single-device drivers) they may finish off the duckling that might have laid golden eggs.
$2,500/$0.25=10,000
Yeah, I think we should keep lining M$ pockets...
Yeah, but they will likely allow someone else to hack a new pair of speakers for them and pay slightly more for 'cracked' speakers.
But in open source we can code what we are interested in, not what a boss wants us to be interested in. This is freedom.
O
I have no need for USB. I have SCSI, lp and ttySx for all of my external devices. They can go fuck themselves. I most of my work is on net servers. USB is truely useless. I could see how gear head goobers might think they need it, but these are also the same poor bastards who pay for the fastest processor on the market and thus upgrade quarterly. I feel sorry for those dipshits.
Yeah, that's one thing I don't like. Invisible versioning of the posted stories. Very confusing.
You sir are a wage slave. The owners of capital make sure that all neccesities of life are highly priced so that we have to work for half our waking lives just to survive. Only by working for free, for our love of the work, can we be free.
Agreed. -Same AC
Do they call it Gigabyte Ethernet? I don't think so.
Surely someone on /. must have downloaded the pdf files, can those who did put it up on their website and give us a link to it. Please.
I don't know if these are the classes that you were talking about, but I had no problems getting to http://www.usb.org/developers/devc lass_docs.html at all.
The AC Thatcherite. Thank god those are the only ones left around these days.
Methinks this is a troll. "crypto-communist open source proponents" ???? Ho Hum
ZamZ.
What does that have to do about the price of USB specs?
through the roof
While I think the slashdot folks enjoy a vibrant
discussion from time to time, this response by
RSS shows why it's sometimes better to get the
facts before running off with wild speculation.
It will be interesting to see how the linux
community responds to the specific request for
assistance with linux driver compliance.
OK kid, we listened to you. Now do it again without the 3-year old whinings, OK ? Go ahead !
If you are an expert in monetary economics, it is astonishing how dull and uninformed you appear. USB specs (like much software) are basic infrastructure. Their general availability is of interest to many offering hardware and services, like streets and pipes are to car industry and state commerce. It is not untypical that stuff like this has a near-perpetual usability and non-zero creation cost. Members of the USB group want to sell USB devices and services. Blocking the specs (an initial investment) to the users of an entire operating system is not smart.
And if you write something like "In my book, working for nothing is exactly the same as slavery. For this reason alone open source must be stopped, by Federal Law if need be." you forget to mention all the slavery people do voluntarily in hospitals, soup kitchens, and charities. Be sure to stop them, too. People cooperating for the common good are distasteful. And stop all state-built roads, too. People use them without paying explicitly.
Ob, by the way, in my book people being effectively the property of others is defined as slavery, with side-effects like being forced to work for nothing, instead of volunteering to do so.
> Average price of Ultra160 SCSI PCI card: $450. Maybe a caching, intelligent RAID Ultra160 controller might cost 450. Adaptec 29160's can be had for just under $200. Prices will drop considerably once Symbios (Adaptec's rival) starts shipping their Ultra160 chipset in volume. SCSI will eventually transition itself to a serial medium. Most likely like Fibre Channel on the high end, and/or a connector like serialATA on the low end. SCSI is developer friendly. Firewire and USB are developer-hostile. May they both burn in hell. Along w/ Apple and Intel.
Would anyone care about GNOME if Redhat were not funding it ? When there are perfectly adequate desktops such as twm, olvwm and mwm out there ? What Linux really needs is better XML support.
Whichever way you look at it, if you charge money for software written by someone else for no money, you are effectively exploiting slave labor.
I just checked out the site. When I clicked cancel on the login box, I got a list of links, one of which was to the developer site. I followed it and was able to get a heap of documentation including device class info etc. What is everyonre going on about?
Do you really believe that "Artists" can only be poor? If you wish to give away the fuits of your labour, and are in a position to do so then good luck , many others who work in the software industry do so to earn a living for themselves and their families. Only rich Westerners are arrogant enough to think that Open Source is helpful people trying to earn a living in India, Pakistan or China.
However,my opinions, unlike the results of my labour, are free
MCDXXII
yep that works
http://www.usb.org/members/devclass.html
MMCXXVII works too
MMCXCIV
MCMXC
Don't be STUPID , it's not slavoury, because noone *forces* those people to code, they just code because *they* want to....
The monopoly power of Microsoft is so strong that people are willing to donate their labor to defeat it. The payoff is that one day we'll be able to sell our labor at a fair price in an open market; not one dominated by Bill Gates' guest-worker (i.e. indentured servant) economy.
microsofts password hasnt been changed , once again they help the os movement :)
I've haven't understood why people didn't move on to fireire right away. As USB is just a minor performance chnage in comparison to a printer port. I hope firewire will soon be adapted more.
Just because this guy is not pro-Linux, does not make his opinions less valid. If all you want to do is read Pro-Linux FUD, what is the point of reading a public forum such as this ? You have effectively decided you want the "Linux majority" to tell you what to think.
It was precisely this abdication of responsibility that our founding fathers had in mind when they amended the constitution.
Or perhaps you don't believe in the Constitution, in which case perhaps you should go and live in Europe where the peoples rights are trampled on daily...
Gnome stands for Generally No-good Old-fashioned Morons Environment.
Twm on the other hand, has stood the test of time, and is as good today as it ever was.
Couldn't be that you Open source socialists just can't take free critisism when it's offered ?
What we see about the anti-Microsoft lobby is envy, just sheer envy. It is the American way to drive to succeed, to excel, to MAKE MONEY. Microsoft have hired the best and rewarded success with stock options. Those who work for free are already losers when measured by the yardstick of Dollars. And don't forget that all the so-called friends of the Open source movement, book and software publishers, are very very happy to take a slice of the actions. So please, continue to work for free so the sane amongst us profit from you!
In the sense that being forced against my will to work for a charity would be slave labor, I guess you are correct.
Well, if you look at the linked mail-list archives (in other people's posts), you can see that various USB devel people have FTP servers with specs on them now. Perhaps you can "donate" these files to the, if they don't have them yet.
Anyone who expresses any opinion outside the slashdot orthodoxy is instantly labelled a troll. Its pathetic really.
Moderation violates the constitution. This economist guy has the right to be heard regardless of whether you agree with him or not.
Moderators, please moderate this post up.
Anyone responding to such an obvious troll as this is either extremely slow-witted, or enjoys the argument for its own sake.
Trolls are providing a valuable service which, over time, will lead to an overall reduction in clue-free postings, as the clueless finally become clueful.
By the way, I liked "The IceBerg" and "OG: Original Gangster" but I think you have fallen off a bit recently.
Time to give a bit more creative control to Evil E perhaps ?
Do any other has-been rap stars read Slashdot ? I for one would love to know Eric B's opinion on open source.
Finally, EPMD have Atari ST's on the cover of their "Strictly Business" CD. Presumably they are running TOS. I wonder what operating systems other Rap and Hip-Hop artists prefer.
Thank you.
dmg
Programs you compile using gcc/g++ are not automatically under the GPL.
>Microsoft have hired the best and rewarded >success with stock options.
*snicker*
Microsoft just got trouble for reimbursing
the labors of the "best" with hollow, fudged,
stock options.
You're in this for the short term. You read
your "Windows for Dummies" and now you want
your piece of the pie. Well, so did a billion
other people. You're running out of pie, buddy!
Pretty soon all of you losers will be
tearing each others throats out for the dwindling
demand for duh's users. Have fun!
Hey, I hear they'll be porting Win2000
to run on S390's pretty soon! Hahahaha!
Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a real
operating system.
Troll? Hell, everyone is thinking the same thing. We're all trolls now!!!
If that isn't exploitation I don't know what is.
It does not matter if you are a happy slave, the fact is you are still a slave.
As a libertarian I find this very offensive.
Simply because I wish to use Microsoft products means I have to follow their license(s)? Give me a break!
If you want to be an artist stick to finger painting, leave software development to the professionals, we need the money even if you don't
Open source is its own reward. If trolls did not respond there would be no point in posting. Eventually people will learn to expect trolls before posting.
Anyone responding to such an obvious post as this is either an extreme troll, or enjoys trolling for its own sake.
Posters are providing a valuable service which, over time, will lead to an overall reduction in troll postings, as the trolls finally become troll-less.
This kind of BS demonstrates just why the DMCA has to go. This just isn't about Linux anymore but about EVERY OS out there that fancies itself a fresh new competitor. This is yet another barrier, essentially a natural monopoly, put in place preventing the free market to actually be such.
Click on "Microsoft Corp" in "Search by Company":
http://www.usb.org/app/search/contacts/
Tux has defected!
... then debeanify it! I'm sure that the "free" aspect of this docs was one of the main point in the decision of the beanification... Maybe Slashdot should retract the award in front of something that looks like a provocation...
If you have to ask......
.
Who is HeUnique?
Is it Hemos?
Odd..
Jeez -
If you're going to FUD you might as well not be so blatant about it. At least cut out the damn copyright.
I think the reason behind this is to generate some revenue. THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. The USB Group didn't have a source of income untill this. I don't think that this was a push to go close source, it is just a attempt to get some working cash. They probably expect most of the members to be big corps like Microsoft, SGI, and Intel. Those people don't give a rats ass about paying $2500 for a membership.
I would not be suprised if someone e-mail them, they would probably grant access to those docs to the Linux community. OR someone like RedHat could buy a membership, post the docs and the USB Group wouldn't complain about it if it was used for the Linux community.
The entire idea behind USB is to kill off PCI. I don't think they would commit suicide by locking up the spec and throwing away the key for a large growing market area. (Yes we are being considered a market area.
This is just my 2 cents worth.
Is this Linux-News?
No, not really: It's not Linux specific at all.
This affects other projects as well---projects without the commercial support of IPO'd distributors or big companies---so IMHO it shouldn't have been posted in the Linux-section where a lot of people won't see it.
Let's DeCSS this thing. As in, let's get some copies of it out there propagating.
Another thing to do is start a central repository of open USB information, like open-usb.org (not taken yet). Keep it out of country (ie, out of US) to avoid the copyright police.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Quite a quandary.
ftp://merlin.keble.ox.ac.uk/Mirrors/www.usb.org for a mirror of the stuff. It's not a complete mirror of the whole site (I think) but it does include all the members-only stuff. You'll want to look in members/data/devclass for most of the pdfs I think. :)
Greetz to Microsoft for not changing their members password
What makes Linux more special than the rest? And why should Microsoft have to pay instead of Linux?
Maybe because Microsoft wants input on the specs.
As someone else posted, there is a difference between members (people who have input, and decide on how the standard should work) and developers (people who just want to write drivers for the spec.)
USB was supposed to be open - to shut the door now is dirty, underhanded, and just plain greedy.
There is no "beef." Basically, the Linux niggers
decided to run their mouths before even bothering
to ask the source for the facts, none the less
even research the issue at question. Slashdot
advocates have a well-known history of sitting
around. This type-of mentality is just as bad
as that of which most of the readers have (i.e.
DOWN WITH MICROSOFT!!!). People like this sit around fgrepping for anything which could make
their penis double or triple in size. No one
takes responsibility for their actions or words
anymore: you won't see Slashdot posting any form
of admittance to their mistake, either.
You will see more and more of this kind-of
ignorance the more popular OSS advocacy becomes.
Summary: Everyone needs a scapegoat.
--
Jeremy Chadwick
yoshi@parodius.com
"I can't imagine that would last long under public scrutiny." Fearsome. Yeah, public scrutiny has sure done a lot for the nonviolent marijuana offenders that constitute 22% of our penal system. Just cause a law is bullshit and backed by big business interests doesn't mean there will be a backlash from public scrutiny at all. The time a gentle hippie spent in jail for weed possession sucks just as much as spending time in the pen for illegally linking to source code. Big tobacco interests caused the reefer-madness scare at the beginning of this century and the subsequent crop of ill-formed, unfair and non-justifiable laws to persecute people who chose to smoke a non-addictive peaceful alternative to alcohol or tobacco. The big corporate money of today is working on another FUD campaign to try to halt the free transmission of information and ideas. Don't take it lightly, or think that the fight can be won by free dissemination underground. While it is true that the spread of information is truly unstoppable in the age we now live in, if that spread is forced underground we all lose. Just because 10000 sites have it somewhere in one format or another doesn't mean a damn thing to the MPAA or RIAA. When a million of people willfully break a bad law every day, it just gives law enforcement the opportunity to selectively enforce the law on the lawbreakers they choose. Jesus, I can't wait until the older generations currently making law and policy in America finally die. The current crew of geriatic power brokers have small, closed minds that have been warped by a lifetime of careful media manipulation and FUD. I'm going to throw a party the day the diseased mind of Jesse Helms finally rots past senesence into death. Daemon
The fact that they've changed their search results to remove vendor id's leads me to believe that they know they're gonna get cracked, and (my opinion) they are most likely acting in bad faith.
I'm posting anonymously because I know that eventually someone will crack the site and I don't wanna go to court :-)
Here are some nice Vendor-IDs for you:
2248 1286 2522 1436 1750 1940 1976 1656 2106 1026 1189 1646 1282 1564 2101 5736 2500 2499 1011 2527 2172 1058 2422 1958 1761 1314 1437 1080 1725 2391 2524 2250 1655 2536 1321 1568 2320 1764 1721 1423 1949 2022 1993 1102 1234 2555 2483 1319 2345 1131 1309 1124 1908 1110 1351 2216 1519 1261 1526 1000 1572 1989 1452 2176 2002 2010 2549 1366 2583 1726 1690 1315 1367 1320 1003 1877 2303 1664 1994 1592 1404 1497 1938 1289 1992 1398 1536 2553 1956 2424 1134 1293 1795 2269 1556 1732 2390 2181 1789 1489 1543 1934 2087 1273 2235 1868 2381 1369 2298 2578 1896 1980 1193 1324 1520 1169 1996 1999 2408 1059 2485 1827 2039 2594 1942 2537 1480 1130 1534 1266 1380 1688 2038 1160 1446 2237 2510 1288 1107 2393 2515 1911 1805 1207 1183 1756 2392 2523 2169 1394 1808 2468 1937 1962 1054 1322 2354 2130 2289 1374 1179 1892 2003 2571 1204 2001 1745 1274 2086 2471 1988 2420 1281 1148 1501 1901 1894 1522 1114 1477 2301 1870 1466 2194 1701 2027 2338 1279 1388 2213 2336 1723 2551 1548 1660 1821 1088 1267 1390 2511 2018 1255 1484 2154 2297 1016 1090 2282 2058 2281 1304 1913 2310 1022 2128 1300 2316 2525 1515 2147 1457 1413 1597 1916 1456 1161 1963 1509 1442 1227 1360 2174 2319 1221 1354 1708 1031 1072 1558 1027 1272 2559 1790 1091 2085 2007 2278 1507 2057 1009 2617 2325 1622 2337 1680 1631 1943 1620 1709 1579 2417 1733 1683 1633 2183 1532 2353 2371 2584 1758 1008 2136 1115 1188 1600 1661 1241 4268 1287 1786 2585 1244 4622 1693 1211 1775 2370 1203 2339 2205 1249 1816 1379 1969 1420 1451 1910 2445 1419 1734 2365 1068 1608 1029 1340 2446 2280 1165 2454 32902 1438 2078 1393 1662 2474 1335 1311 1435 1073 1555 1233 2232 2366 2368 2173 1537 1540 1903 1612 2533 1551 2253 2396 1513 1473 1295 2296 1472 1510 1149 2447 2247 1741 1017 1995 2385 2427 1034 1224 1391 2372 2098 2521 1902 1112 1154 2024 1650 1863 1439 1844 1535 1684 1727 1500 1085 1086 2423 1617 1915 2560 1226 2277 2294 1133 2254 1909 1302 1236 1150 1093 2361 1488 1778 2129 1848 2049 1809 1582 1974 2428 2067 1038 2484 2159 1474 2395 2593 1973 1041 2501 1238 2160 1123 1421 1240 1174 1588 1869 1118 1498 1430 2426 1246 1670 2137 2023 1747 1106 1006 1342 1071 1970 8888 1061 2020 2554 1760 2317 1192 1231 14627 1024 1954 1028 2595 1033 2513 1317 2356 2118 1751 1879 2315 1599 1738 1271 1432 1406 1574 2249 1566 1094 1395 1190 1057 1117 1259 1539 2206 2620 7867 2389 2433 1010 1641 1569 1724 1802 1239 2421 2367 1972 1449 1424 1862 1955 21930 1777 1019 1626 1444 2344 1411 2467 1201 2279 1242 1755 1900 2373 1257 2618 1674 1397 1228 1494 2321 1050 1754 2369 1523 8964 2362 1720 2019 1151 2363 1971 2470 1350 1867 2397 2394 1991 1483 1426 1338 1121 1936 2255 1710 1659 2244 1529 2509 2021 1479 1478 2355 1565 1407 1469 1209 1412 1470 2535 1941 2179 2082 1527 1482 2113 2550 1205 1410 2429 1542 2388 1699 2105 1373 1256 1170 1921 1914 1336 1140 2088 2581 1230 2419 1254 1208 1561 1481 1098 1990 1405 1245 2472 2318 1308 1486 2300 1665 1101 2260 1530 1590 1736 1485 1341 1630 1111 1801 1147 2534 1583 2473 1898 2327 1175 1545 1722 2299 2552 1316 1356 2099 1621 2580 1363 1060 1305 1618 1533 1155 1864 2343 1499 1138 1851 1487 1276 1793 1897 1504 1343 1861 1706 2293 2158 1776 1581 2028 2233 1229 1078 1737 1215 1604 1752 2061 1141 1623 1323 2579 1654 2146 1378 2089 1318 2425 1740 1105 1001 1495 1691 1766 1975 1260 1635 1222 2352 1132 1642 1553 1922 2582 1817 4496 1422 2050 2314 21827 1496 1344 1074 2204 1525 1146 1441 1899 1443 1830 2621 2469 1982 1037 2561 1265 1843 1347 1663 2259 2175 1538 2444 2322 2514 2305 1386 1329 1490 1981 1919 1035 1705 1939 1611 1605 1615 1128 1046 1782 1601 1640 2508 1546 1893 2182 2577 2340 1820 2138 1349 2163 1403 1453 1177 1577 2051 1429
I wrote a Perl/LWP script to grep for which ones of these numbers work as ####-admin user/pass.
This is what to mirror: http://www.usb.org/members/devclass.html
Here you go:
2248, 2522, 1750, 1656, 1026, 1189, 1646, 1282, 1564, 2101, 2527, 1058, 2422, 1761, 1314, 1437, 2250, 1655, 1321, 2320, 1764, 1721, 1423, 2022, 1993, 1102, 1234, 2555, 2483, 1319, 1124, 1908, 1110, 1351, 2216, 1519, 1261, 1526, 1000, 1452, 2002, 1366, 1726, 1690, 1315, 1367, 1003, 1877, 1592, 1497, 1992, 1398, 1536, 1293, 1795, 1556, 2181, 1489, 1934, 2087, 1868, 2381, 2298, 1896, 1980, 1169, 1996, 1999, 2408, 2485, 2039, 1942, 2537, 1480, 1130, 1266, 1380, 1688, 2038, 2237, 2510, 1288, 2393, 2515, 1911, 1756, 2392, 2523, 1808, 2468, 1937, 1962, 2354, 1374, 1179, 1892, 2003, 2571, 2001, 1745, 1274, 2471, 2420, 1281, 1501, 1901, 1522, 1477, 1870, 1466, 2194, 1701, 2027, 1279, 1723, 1548, 1088, 2511, 1255, 1484, 2297, 1016, 1090, 2058, 1304, 1913, 2310, 1022, 2316, 1515, 2147, 1457, 1597, 1916, 1456, 1509, 1442, 1360, 2319, 1558, 1027, 1790, 1091, 2085, 2007, 1507, 2057, 1009, 2617, 1622, 1631, 1709, 1579, 1733, 1532, 2353, 2136, 1115, 1188, 1661, 1287, 1786, 2585, 1244, 4622, 1211, 1775, 2205, 1249, 1379, 1969, 1420, 1910, 2445, 1734, 2365, 1068, 2446, 2454, 32902, 2078, 1662, 1311, 1435, 1073, 1555, 1233, 2366, 2368, 2173, 1537, 1540, 1903, 1551, 2253, 2396, 1513, 1473, 2296, 1472, 1510, 1017, 1995, 2385, 1391, 2521, 1902, 1112, 1650, 1863, 1439, 1844, 1535, 1684, 1500, 1085, 1086, 2423, 2560, 1226, 2277, 2294, 1909, 1150, 1093, 1488, 2129, 1848, 1809, 1582, 1974, 2067, 1038, 2159, 1474, 2395, 2593, 1041, 2501, 1238, 1174, 1588, 1118, 1498, 1430, 2023, 1747, 1106, 1342, 2020, 2554, 2317, 1954, 2595, 1033, 2356, 2118, 1751, 2315, 1599, 1738, 1271, 1432, 1406, 2249, 1566, 1094, 1117, 1259, 1539, 2206, 2620, 7867, 1569, 1802, 2421, 2367, 1972, 1449, 1424, 1955, 21930, 1777, 1019, 1626, 1444, 1201, 2279, 1755, 1900, 1257, 2618, 1674, 1397, 1754, 2369, 1523, 1720, 1151, 2363, 1971, 1350, 2394, 1991, 1483, 2255, 1659, 2244, 1529, 2021, 1565, 1407, 1412, 1470, 2535, 2082, 1527, 2550, 1205, 1542, 2105, 1373, 1336, 2088, 2419, 1254, 1481, 1098, 1990, 2472, 1308, 1486, 1530, 1736, 1341, 1630, 1111, 1147, 2534, 1583, 2473, 1898, 1175, 1545, 1722, 2299, 2552, 1316, 1356, 2099, 1621, 1363, 1060, 1305, 1618, 1533, 1155, 1864, 1499, 1793, 1897, 1861, 1706, 2028, 1078, 1737, 1604, 1752, 2061, 1141, 1623, 1323, 2579, 2146, 2425, 1740, 1001, 1766, 1635, 1642, 1553, 1817, 1422, 2050, 2314, 21827, 1496, 1146, 1441, 1899, 1830, 2621, 1037, 1347, 2322, 2305, 1386, 1329, 1035, 1705, 1939, 1605, 1601, 1640, 2508, 2182, 1349, 1453, 1177, 1577, 1429
"You are greedy!"
...maybe. :)
"Hey, that was mine!"
"[USB] is good!"
Really, why read Slashdot when you could be playing Gauntlet:Legends? Isn't life just an analogy for Gauntlet:Legends? Isn't it a shame that the arcade isn't open yet...
I could care less about USB devices yet, I'll wait until some better ones appear on the market. (like I need that much bandwidth for a keyboard...) However, I would like to see some new, cool 3D games for Linux. After that, I'll think about getting a USB GamePad instead of my trusty analog one.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If the FSF can band together enough people to donate $, they can lobby the government to show them that "society" doesn't want this anymore. For now, however, this isn't the case, primarily because most people appreciate the benefits gained from IP law outweigh the costs of destroying it.
IP law has centuries of history behind it in bolstering innovation. Open source philosophy has barely 15+ years and only 3 major successes under it's belt [Linux/Apache/Perl]. It can definitely be argued that IP law *can* inhibit innovation if abused, but that's not necessarily descriptive of all facets of IP law (it's unique to some pieces of software, mainly inrastructure).
This says nothing about the benefit of open source sofware, of course. It just says that there is justification for closed source software when it beneifts society as a whole (again due to scarcity of skill & talent).
-Stu
Now, extending the "right of access" for a spec or source code to those that can't afford to pay money is a valid argument.
It does, however, preclude a company from making money off of licencing a "specified" innovation.Furthermore, this talk of "financial elitism" is rather obtuse. By saying "business/commerce" mentality has no place in the Open(-Source) arena, you're effectively promoting a zero-sum game: no one can make money because they can't charge money, since that would alienate those 'poor homeless programmers' who need access to the specs & code.
I'm not confusing the issue of "free" vs. "freedom" - I'm saying that if you want pure "freedom", you effectively want everything available for zero-cost. Sorry, in a world of scarcity of skill, talent & knowledge, this is unrealistic.-Stu
You wonder why people often mistake free software for gratis software? It's because of complaints like these.
Ideally a spec should be GPL. Barring that, it should be open. Barring that, it should be "competitively priced". $2500 is *not* expensive for most professional developers. There should be no problem for the major Linux distributions to purchase these specs. The DVD CSS licence, on the other hand, IS prohibitively expensive.
Open source supporters like to say over and over "yes you can make money our way", but in cases like this the message gets clouded by people who seem to just want everything in life for free.
-Stu
I'm wgetting all the restricted stuff, it'll appear somewhere later
Universal Serial Bus Revision 1.1 specification (.zip file format, size 1,779 Kbytes) provides the technical details to understand USB requirements and design USB compatible products (Updated 11/23/1999). Modifications to the USB specification are made through Engineering Change Notices (ECNs).
;)
This link requires NO password?
And leads to 14M of documents, which look an awfull lot like the USB Specs... I mean... I was panic-ing since I actually write USB drivers, and have come to depend on the availability of the documentation...
But it all still seems to be there... Just in case... I've grabbed everything I could find... 15+ M so far
Hehe
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
OOOoooops.
;)
I meant
"Approved USB Device Class Specifications Building on top of the USB specifications, there are Approved Device Class Specifications by the Device Working Group. These specifications recommend design targets for classes of devices. "
But dyslexia seems to have bitten me
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass.html
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
well...
;)
Its bound to happen
One wonders if you could go one step behind the voice coil and catch it just before the DAC...
Yummy Digital Signal
I assume you'd have to integrate the decryption into the DAC otherwise you could do what I just said.
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
That the next major revision of Apple's hardware lines will have 800mbps FireWire ports... up to 4 of them...
www.mosr.com
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
Yah, It doesn't make much sense to have USBFirewire... altho FireWireUSB might make a bit more sense ;)
;)
FireWire & USB have always been described as complimentary ports......
A modern architechure needs DIMMS, AGP, PCI, FireWire, USB & 100bT. I spose you have to throw a VGA plug in there as well.
Funny, that sounds a lot like Apple's latest G4s...
Shoot me
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
That's right. Serial scsi.
;)
Complete with its on paragraph/chapter in the Big Book O' SCSI.
It just happens to send data 1 bit at a time, and have auto-ID negotiation...... actually it uses a unique ID for every single device ever manufactured
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
FireWire, Ethernet, RS232, ADB, USB, TokenRing(?) are all serial protocols.
;)
;)
They are measured in bps... bits per second... Some have stop bits, start bits etc...
Its not always a simple matter of dividing by 8 to get the byte rate. Sometimes its a simpler matter of dividing by 10
SCSI is really measured in MegaTransfers... and the scsi interface can be either wide or narrow... wide has two bytes per transfer.
UltraSCSI160 does 80MT/second. Its wide. 160MB/s
Lets not also discuss baudrate
Giggle.
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
This seems to be just another example of the stupiditidy of the Slashdot maintainers. They have fallen subject to yet another misinterpretaition of facts, which they haven't checked out. Don't you check anything before posting a story?
It would seem to me that I can still get at the information regarding USB I could before, even though I am not a paid member of the USB developers. Perhaps, they have moved things around (as is their prerogative), but otherwise, what has changed? What is the beef here?
Derry
You just wish your ID was as low as mine! I used to be proud to have such a low id, but not so much now. Slashdot most
I personally don't expect payment from anyone if I paint a picture or write a song. I also expect no payment if I help a blind person across the street. The "open source" community are artists doing what they enjoy. Freely distributing the results helps the "artist" create better art and everyone wins. It is only a fortunate, though incidental, side issue that the medium these artists use allows other people to make bucket loads of money out of it. We don't need your economics here thank you. It only goes to confirm to me that anyone who follows Margaret Thatcher's philosophy is bound to end up, as she has, a mad bag.
Click on the documents link. You'll find that the classes download is locked.
Actually, you're wrong. Phillip-Morris &pals already have 'weedarette' plans prepared in case somehow the anti-green legislation goes away. The actual backing of the laws was due to hemp, and it's commercial (and profitable) compitition in nylon.
Blame the right megacorps, please.
--Dan
I had thought that Richard Stallman recently released a version of the GPL specifically for written documentation. But I'm having trouble finding any mention of it at the Free Software Foundation website. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but you might want to look for it.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
Doesn't the Beanie Award include a cash prize?
Therefore each Weenie Award should include a fine. It makes sense.
-- laws are the opinions of politicians --
Hmm.. according to them, there was a security breach today...
Just posted to their web page (http://www.usb.org)...
"USB-IF Members Only Area Security Breach:
Dear USB-IF Members,
Due to a security breach discovered on Tuesday, 29th February 2000, all USB-IF member passwords have been changed. Member representatives will receive an email with their new passwords by today afternoon. We apologize for any innconvenience this may have caused everyone. We are working on resolving the issues around this."
--
Amarillo Linux Users Group
--
Time is on my side
Interesting idea: why can't such people become
;) ;) ;)
consultants, paid $1 per year, for the Linux vendors who get access to the specs?
At least that's one way around it.
Also, Linux companies could boast on their headcounts
Back under the bridge, troll. You have nothing new to say.
so a company makes their documentation alaviable to members only, so a lot of slashdot readers mirror the site. I don't know, isn't that a copyright violation? piracy? stealing?
I swear, some people if they don't get it their way turn all criminal about stuff.. sad.
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
Even better.. Their membership form should indicate if you are applying as a commercial or non-profit login, and perhaps do like ICANN does and actually mail the user their login/password (to confirm that they are for real, by submitting a valid address).
Sad to see a standard go commercial. If anything this might push a trend towards Firewire.
- EraseMe
Ouch. That was looooow.
Lets see.. Arnt we confusing something here? Maybe you ment Developers instead of members. A member of USB would be one of the founding companies (ie. M$ and Intel). A developer would be you and me. I dont see any locks on the developer site.
:)
--
Estimated cost to produce "piracy setup": $80, or a busted set of USB speakers.
My crypto score: 0.5 whoo-hoos. Talk about a side-channel attack..
What it will do is make us look like a bunch of petulant children. Kind of like calling the kettle black though, don't you think? Here we are trying to support the standard and make it available on as many platforms as possible.. and what are they doing?
I would be willing to go to jail over that. Civil disobedience. They're going to put me in the same category as rapists and murderers? I can't imagine that would last long under public scrutiny.
Well, then, just include the important parts of the spec as comments in the source. :-)
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Aahh... Either a fan of old British kids TV shows or a Chris Spedding fan.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Hate to say it, but the term "crypto-communist" - followed by pseudo-Marxist ideology, then by rabid capitalism, and the absolutely ridiculous misunderstanding of open source, and the suggestion that it be outlawed (instead of just saying it's a bad idea, and even though nobody's forcing developers to do it, and in spite of the laissez-faire attitude) suggest otherwise. As does the AC status, the entirely unsubstantiable claim of authority at the very beginning, and the #11 posting (though these are innocuous by themselves, they're a good sign of a troll). Oh, also, he ends with "thank you".
:P). Massive flamewars are a bonus, as is a moderation roller-coaster. (Yes, good trolls often get moderated up as Insightful or Informative before being consigned to the karmic abyss!)
If you've spotted plenty a troll and moderated them down but missed this one, you've only been spotting the bad ones. This was quite a good troll, and got quite a good response. It was damn funny, too.
And, no, a true troll doesn't try to attract attention to himself. A true troll tries to spark of a massive number of posts from Slashdotters trying to prove their 31337ness by pointing out exactly where he was wrong (much like I'm doing now...
That's not really the point. There's generally a way around any sort of scheme like this, the point is that the average joe isn't going to want to (or have the resources to) hack their brand-new $80 USB speakers just to get their music in a free format.
If you think this is limited to the old generation, you havn't met the current crop of uber-corperates (pardon my greek).
To simply put it, our friendly mpaa/riaa would have us have 2 choices -
* rampant crime, anarchy, uncontrolled bahavior (lost profit)
* total content control, and the breaking of the spirit of creation (huge profit).
But then again, there's always the third choice. Don't play. Support TRUE open standards.
Do we have this passion that all the RIAA and MPAA is good? Do we have to support CSS'ed DVD?
Here we have this HUGE communications machine called the INTERNET. We have knowledge apon knowledge. Our 30 minutes a day * 100,000 brains EASILY can beat opponents.
But we choose to attack the horses ass. We need to know the true battle.
The real battle isn't about the specs! But that's what concerns our little brains in the corner because that's what we look at ALL DAY LONG.
Compare this to the TCP/IP standards bodies (IETF). Who is working for who?
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
One bus to rule them all
One bus to find them
One bus to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
There's some discussion of the specs being closed going on over on the usb.org developers webboard.
Thank you!
It's nice to see someone working for big commercial opensource names (ie: redhat) aiming to keep things open. Commercial opensource companies should never pay the relatively tiny (in their perspective) fees rather than arguing for openness; that would destroy (or at least hurt) the opensource concept by simply giving up.
listen, you silly fuck. nobody gives a shit about their intellectual property. the issue here is that they acted all open and shit to get people to support USB (which they did), *then* they yanked the fucking docs, after everybody's made a big-ass commitment and basically we're fucking stick with it. (Playstation 2 and the Dreamcast include USB ports, as well as practically every PC manufactured today). That is just fucking wrong. wrong wrong wrong. So, basically, fuck'em. screw'em. i 100% seriously hope all these people get lung cancer and their families have to watch them die painful fucking deaths.
this is a betrayal.
-k. ^-^ ^D
oh, you bagged more than your fair share with this one....
-k. ^-^ ^D
the spec-sheet would enable the linux community
to write drivers so that we could go out and _buy_
usb hardware - that's the difference.
-- 'Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that are achieved'
they make Firewire<->SCSI crossovers already.
they make USB<->ADB crossovers already.
USB<->Firewire crossovers should be relatively easy for any decent peripheral manufacturer who finds a reason to develop them. Fact is though that practically all computers using firewire are macs (which already _have_ USB), and hooking up something firewire to a USB port would just be silly when you consider how little bandwidth USB has and how much bandwidth most firewire devices need. So there wouldn't be much of a target market for a USB<->Firewire crossover; so if such a connector does not already exist, i'd imagine that would be the reason why..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
But there is one thing that this community will never accept: that an interface spec/protocol can be a type of product/service. Everything else can be. Implementations can charged for, but not interfaces and protocols. That's the one thing whose "ownership" will never be respected, or even acknowledged. We must always be allowed to make our own competing/compatable implementations, without paying anything, signing anything, sacrificing any rights, or even acknowledging that we need someone else's permission.
The Internet was built upon that very idea. The standards were always deliberately open to encourage competition and interoperability -- and of course, to allow people to make a ton of money selling implementions. The values behind this have now been generalized.
That's why there's an uproar over this USB thing, DVD CSS, SDMI, the Microsoft Halloween memos, patented algorithms like LZW/RSA/MP3, etc. It's just the same issue, over and over again.
I'm glad that the Linux movement has taken off, and that it's been built around dogma that stresses the importance of this issue. Those Linux dudes aren't cheapskates or communists, Neko. They're just believers in the unrestricted right to build a competing/compatable implementation of anything.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Well, assuming the Linux drivers (not the specs) are open source, then anyone can reverse engineer the spec by studying the Linux implementation.
I agree that it sucks, and that an unfreely documented standard is no standard at all. But as long as implementations are open source, the specs can be inferred. This is pretty much the state that DVDs are in right now, thanks to DVD crackers releasing their source.
The scary part is that I can imagine someone like VA Linux buying the spec, and as part of the agreement, having to sign something that prohibits them from releasing implementation source. Binary-only drivers for Linux? *shudder*
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
At least give credit where credit is due. Your remark is nothing but a paraphrased, plagarised Dennis Miller quote.
*grumble*
I always liked the Firewire/IEEE1394 specs better.
If the USB group wants to play these games, switch to Firewire. It's much faster and supports far more devices on the same wire.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Well, they'll probably put him in the same cell as rapists if CA is anything to go by. As for murder...yeah, but he's not a cop so different rules apply.
> Firewire, aka IEEE 1394, is hardly >dead. Pretty much all HDTV/DTV systems use it to >communicate between receivers and
>decoders. It's just not used a lot on PCs is all.
Um...HDTV is deader than firewire. And saying "pretty much all" basically means "the two or three units sold".
Not to insult The Viewer or anything....
I give some of my time to opensource and expect others, that use the products of this labour, to do the same.
It's simply direct excange of labour.
Well, this is just my patial and biased opinion.
Agreed, my comment was posted in haste ...
... free-for-non-commercial-use license perhaps?
Perhaps a special case could be worked out for developers not intending to make a profit from their development resources
-anil-
First of all: The use of GNU-compilers does
not make your code GPL.
The usage of the CODE behind the GNU-compilers
will.
You still complain?
You realize that this is like saying:
"hey! I can't steal this guys code without giving him or the community anything in return. What dumbasses".
If you use GPL-code, your work becomes GPL, because the GPL explicitly tries to make sure that
the software is free just as the original developer intended.
If you don't want to code for free, then don't, but don't complain about not being able to steal
other peoples code.
Why not? they took Vanessa Williams' crown away.
Sure sounds more professional than turning Slashdot into a "h3r3z s0me l33t l/p's to g3t 1n 4 fr33 d00d!" site.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
/cut to Simpsons episode : Homer walking through the mall. He sees a giant chocolate chip cookie and moves in to investigate.
Homer: How much are the samples?
Cheery Worker: Their free.
(Homer gobbles the sample plate)
Homer: mmmm, more, more, give me more.
Cheery Worker: The full size cookies are $1.
Homer: Oh sure, get us addicted and then jack up the price!
--
+&x
And that's why we'll win. Unless of course it never reaches public scrutiny, like say, if the same people prosecuting you controlled the media in this country.
Hopefully it won't reach that point (the prosecution not the controlling media, that's already here).
--
+&x
Too bad then you'd be circumventing Copy Protection to view Copyrighted Material. That's a felony in the U.S. (I KNOW you know about the DMCA). All they have to do now is make an effort to protect their IP and back it up with a well-armed police force.
--
+&x
I was (and still am to some extent) a working artist. So as to your statement on artists, no, good artists do not have to be poor, some have very good agents. But all of the good artists do not do it for the money, and would do it even if you did not pay them for it. It borders on compulsion. As to wether or not having Open Source Software helps someone working in India, Pakistan or China? The piece of software in question probably would assist the adoption of usb as a standard, insuring that more harware is sold as persons upgrade from older devices. Last I checked, hardware is more likey to be produced in Asia than software, and I don't recall that world employment was stated as the purpose of any peice of open source software, ever. Your opinions, probably like the fruits of your labor, are foolish and misapplied to their subjects.
_this is not a signature_
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Very informative!
--Rob
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
As long as they didn't sign any contract: None. Btw, you too can belong to the happy few to lay your hands on that precious documentation: go to that site, and just enter a random 4 digit number (such as 1111 for instance) as login and the same as password. Presto: instant access.
And if they close that down, there's always google's cache.
And by the time they've got around to coerce google into removing those docs from its cache, you'll be able to download them from thousands of mirrors worldwide...
Well, technically, the MPAA did succeed in stopping 3 or 4 sites from distributing DeCSS (out of several thousands, hehe...).
Broccolist
Maybe it's just me, but I decided to test the site. I got the login and I cancelled out of it. This allowed me access to the documents. I thought , maybe, I would be limited to certain documents, so I went to Class Specification Documents without any problems and I was able to view them. I was also able to download the files as a test. So far, I haven't encountered any problems so if anyone else has had the same experience, please post what you run into. My attempt was on Tues. 1Mar00 at 2:38 pm C.S.T.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Looks like the universal from universal serial bus
is missing =)
Next, you realize, there will be OpenUSB, and then NetUSB...
Heh.
What restrictions were placed on redistribution by people who have already gotten their hands on the specs? Hopefully the developers already have copies of all the documentation that was available to this point. Advances may come slower, but at least the basics should be there.
treke
First of all, I'm pro-open-computing as well as pro-open-source, and also a rather firm believer in laissez-faire for most business. I've also spotted many trolls in my moderation runs and marked them as such -- they're easy to spot. They're the same type as the hot grits/Natalie/etc. AC; they aren't here to debate but rather here to draw attention to themselves.
This guy came out with guns blazing but was not trolling. Being actively anti-open-source does not a troll make. I am grateful for his opinion, even though I don't agree. If anything, he's demonstrated that he's pro-open-debate. :-)
I was originally going to write a nice little reply to this, but then I decided by your logic it would be in the best interest of society for me to keep my mouth shut. Afterall since I'm not being paid for it I must be doing something wrong. I mean, Karma isn't really a worthwhile substitute for cold hard cash, right?
So, in the interest of Freedom, I will silence myself now and insist that others pay for the privelege of my opinion. I will be charging for my response to your attack on open source. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of my reply, kindly contact me and I will quote you a price.
Just one thing; your comment was supposed to be a joke right? At first I thought you were serious, but now I can't possibly believe that your weren't making a joke.
What's wrong with PAYING for the damned thing?
It's not unheard of in this day and age to actually pay for PRODUCTS and SERVICES. So you want USB support for Linux? If every Linux user contributes $1 to the cause, you'd have enough to
get the USB specs into the next millennium.
What's that? Can't afford $1? Well I wonder how
you managed to afford that kick-ass PC you're
surfing the 'net on? And the copy of RedHat you're
brandishing?
Sheesh. Some people, eh?
Neko
I had someone mail me and tell me that the spec is merely a peice of paper.
If that's so, if it seems to me that if it's translated into driver code then you could redistribute it without fear of the USB people jumping on Linux's preverbial back. And if people "reverse engineer" the implemented code? Well that's perfectly legal, isn't it?
It seems to me that the backlash is another one of those Free(Beer)/Free(Dom) misunderstandings: you are still free to get the specs from the USB forum, it doesn't really matter if you have to pay for them.
Ok. The whole POINT of moderation is to catagorize articles based on what people feel is 'worth reading'. How would you determine what's worth reading without applying your own views, slants, and etc. to it...
You can always set YOUR threshold to -1. I am personally thankful for someone taking the time to filter out things that, IMHO, are horse crap.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
> They're going to put me in the same category as rapists and murderers?
Rapists, maybe, not murderers. Don't you read the news? Didn't you hear? You don't go to jail for murder any more.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
>I am an expert in monetarist economics, with a
>particular emphasis on the politics and
>philosophies of Milton Friedman, and his
>latter-day successor in the United Kingdom,
>Margaret Thatcher.
Horseshit appeal to authority (and an undocumented appeal at that - where's the TIFF of your diploma?)
>What these crypto-communist...
An ad hominem attack - that figures.
>- Work on a GPL or open source project what do
>you get ? "The respect of your peers" "Kudos in
>the community" ? Try taking that Kudos to your
>local BMW dealership and see how far it gets you.
Well, first off, I wouldn't own a piece of dung like a BMW; I prefer a Mercedes. But since you consider monatary advantage as the only "real" reason for engaging in any activity, why should anyone want to engage in something like, say, scientific inquiry?
Yep, lets move BACK to the Middle Ages when only one rather isolated group of self-appointed theocrats decided what was worth studying.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
What POSSIBLE motive could there be behind this? Think about it... What they're doing seems to be a move towards a:
- Closed nature
- Thirst for cash
- Will to royally tick off the Linux community
- Will to see the death of USB on Linux
Makes me wonder if the Beanie can be revoked. Perhaps they need to be reminded of that...
"Hey! You! Open up your specs or we'll... er... we'll... We'll SLASHDOT YOU! That's what we'll do! Yeah!"
Okay. I think I understand what's going on. I've read about half of the threads, and it seems to me that the situation is thus:
./ masses is what in the world do we want with this? Isn't this just another way for corporations and manufacturers to keep us away from data on our own systems? Someone brought up an example listed in the USB docs of a speaker system that encrypted all data right up to the point that it hits the voice coil.
There is a new implementation of USB, and naturally, us free *NIX users want to write drivers for it. But this organization wants to keep specifications and details closed, except to those with $2500 to blow. It's not security through obscurity, because the encryption is strong.
The point of all of this (though I'm not quite sure how...) seems to be "content protection." Oh yes, we remember that phrase, don't we? And as a result of that huge fiasco, some of us are boycotting DVD or otherwise fighing the CCA.
My question to the
I don't know about you guys, but MY computer system will never EVER have ANY components that are designed to hide the data moving across hardware that I payed for. This is why I don't, and will not, own a DVD drive or player.
And the Linux/*BSD/other community is actually interested in writing drivers for (effectively, supporting) this scheme? Doesn't sound very open to me if I have to hack open my speakers and start soldering resistors to copy a bit of analog to casette tape. [Which I do routinely to listen to MODs in my car. Good techo, that.]
I wouldn't connect a Hard Drive to a USB... BUT with USB 2.0's specs, I would connect a 100TX network adaptor.
People are getting me wrong. Disk devices will all ways be on the mother board. My hope lies in Serial ATA right now for a new disk interface. When I said kill off PCI, I am talking about for extranious devices like network adaptors, sound cards, keyboards, joysticks, printers, serial ports, removeable media drives, and just about anything else that you can think of for just plugging in - using - then unplugging.
Here's a chance for Redhat or VA
to put some of that IPO money to good use.
I doubt that $2500 would put much of a dint
in either of those two pockets.
Well GNOME is more than a desktop, and is much more adequate than twm olvwm etc.
:P) that supports XML/VML etc so it becomes a bit more useful.
:) If they do, they would have needed to write at least a simple XML parser.
..
And XML support in Linux is pretty lame, but you can always use Java, then you have access to all kinds of XML resources. Ofcourse Linux needs a decent browser (like ie
BTW, doesn't KDE use XMLRPC, I might be mistaken
mySQL, KFM, KOM etc all really need to support XML IMHO. XML is the future of cross platform communication (which IMHO will be far more important than java).
Oh well, give it time I guess
Here is the dead www.usb.org /developers/devclass.html link as cached by Google.
Unfortunately, Google didn't cache the PDF files that are referenced on this fantom page.
Maybe it's just me, i dunno...
USB Device Class Specifications
(USB-IF member username and password required)
That sounds to me as though it was rather intentional.
-- Your IP is showing
But, what ever happened to Milli Vanilli
threadeds blog
> The entire idea behind USB is to kill off PCI. :-)
Really: I doubt that
Connect SCSI/IDE host adaptors or 100TX NICs with USB to your motherboard?
No, thank you.
Do any other has-been rap stars read Slashdot
Hey, Ice-T isn't just a rap star -- there are those two Body Count albums, too.
EPMD have Atari ST's on the cover of their "Strictly Business" CD. Presumably they are running TOS. I wonder what operating systems other Rap and Hip-Hop artists prefer.
I'd assume they're all running TOS. You can get great deals on old ST equipment (here's a nice one for $110 on ebay), and they often come with what used to be state-of-the-art sequencing and other music software. Gotta love those built-in MIDI ports.
"200 Quatloos on the newcomer!" "300 Quatloos against!"
AGP cards are different from USB on two levels:
1. Making the hardware. Non-profit groups certainly aren't going to be making any AGP hardware, nor would they really want to, as far as I can tell. With USB, this is somewhat the same, but someone actually might want to make their own USB device.
2. Using the hardware. (Software) AGP is a simple extension of PCI in terms of using the actual card, if I'm not mistaken. The necessary support in this case was also granted by whomever necessary, to make it into various kernels and XFree86 and co. With USB, it is not a simple extension of _ANYTHING_, nor is there someone giving support to those working on adding software support for the hardware.
Is that clear enough?
Go dmg!
HDTV (err, DTV) is not at all dead. Why? Corporations are spending big bucks to upgrade their transmitters, facilities, etc. for high-bandwidth difital broadcast. They are not going to simply throuw away all of this. The problem was probably that the FCC was too aggressive with its timetable and thought that we could transition a lot quicker than we have been. But it'll come, I guarantee that. There will be some rocky spots with the transmission format (we are going to have to switch over to COFDM), but the US will have a digital broadcast system operating in the near future. Now whether or not the broadcasters choose to carry digital video over this network is a different story, but TV is something that can't be replaced anytime soon. There is the prospect of using only a few megabits of the 19.2 MBit/sec data stream as a standard-definition TV signal (which will still be better than today's signals) and the reast for push services and possibly even net downloading (of course it couldn't be 2-way).
You missed the point of contention.
When the story was posted, attempting to hit http://www.usb.org challenged you for a password. Cancelling fell through and gave you a bunch of links to various places on their site.
Seems as though they've corrected it now.
There have always been members only information and sections on the site (as I recall); this is nothing new.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Sorry -- I buggered up. Didn't read the link.
You are quite correct.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Though not entirely discounting the assertions of the paranoid, it honestly looks like somebody just buggered up their web site unintentionally.
Anybody actually *contacted* them?
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
It let me download the specs just fine.
Stupid is as stupid dies.
Signal 11, come on now. You don't honestly believe that any or all of the powers who try to limit or disallow digital copying don't get this. They are not stupid. Copying involving an analog step will always be around, and is unpreventable. They know this. We know this. Everyone knows it. It's not a secret.
Slashdot is the worlds formost industrial espionage unit...
hit list in the past 2 weeks
1 - QuakeLives sourcecode
2 - DeCSS source
3 - USB specs
okay so no-one stole the DeCSS source.. but thats beside the point...
on a slightly more serious note.. this sucks
im sick of companies attempting to control things with an iron fist, yes people have to eat, but what sort of a standard is one which ordinary people cant read?
this is absurd.. and needs to be stopped
but dont you think were all getting a little too militant a little too early?
dms0
if we dont start it.. nobody else will
You should feel guilty if your just watching - ATR
slashdot jumping the gun?
never
its a pity no-one listened to mr cox,
its also a pity that some AC decided to attain the files illegally
if we want support, then we shouldnt go around shooting off the hand that feeds us..well at least not without asking them nicely for an explanation first
dms0
You should feel guilty if your just watching - ATR
If you look at http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs.html you will see a whole bunch of PDF docs with no access restrictions. Is this what everyone thinks is members-only?
Well done, thanks :)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I looks like you can access the devclass documents now. I just went to http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass.html and a login is no longer required. Only the "Approved Class specifications" docs are available though... the Draft documents are not there. Hmmmm....
"Pioneers get arrows in the back. Settlers get the land. I'm happy letting Linux be the pioneers."
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Well, I'm not an expert in monetarist economics, but I do know that any sort of volunteer work would also fall under your blanket of 'slavery'. That aside, type type of economics you purport to expert in is one that has been unable to accurately measure value for about 20 years now. The traditional economic metrics and mindsets haven't been able to say why companies like VA, Redhat, etc. have such high market valuations beyond trite comparisons to the Dutch Tuplip frenzies. Since you can't understand, you attack. I don't think the Linux community disdains profit qua profit, just profit at the expense of quality (oops, another thing economics doesn't measure well!)
P.S. Another message on the list hints how you can hijack an account and get at the docs.
Anyone willing to do this and post a login? Or make a mirror?
Where do I buy the T-shirt?
Moderate the previous up, please!!!
M$ and *ntel, Bill Gates is only short a white cat and a eye piece, short of being in a James Bond movie
Following the here link yields a password login prompt. If you click cancel your taken here http://www.usb.org/members/devclass.html Is this inside the walls of their castle??? Makes one wonder what they are doing.
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
It may be a lot nicer, but there aren't many devices for it. And as for number of devices, can't you put one of everything USB device onto a USB bus right now?
Its unfortunate, but we're stuck using the second best for the sake of compatibility
There are about 100 members. that translates to $250 000.
This is trivial compared with the amount that can be made from licencing the patent. Why do they bother charging?
As long as they didn't sign any contract: None
There may be some restrictions when it comes to copyright. If they were letting anyone download them then this makes the copyright weaker, but they might be able to stop you. This would be stopping you the same way the MPAA has stopped people from redistributing the DeCSS source though (i.e. not at all)
This guy is not just "Not pro-linux", but actively anti-open source. He used some vague comments about the topic to justify having a free rant about how much he hates people not making money. This is on a forum known for being pro open source. The most likely reason it was posted was to annoy. This makes it a Troll.
So what if the working group (or whoever) now charges $2500 for docs?
I'll pony up $50, who else?
Eat shit, troll. His point is valid and the strong expression of it more so. Big companies get us hooked and dependent on a protocol AND THEN do an about face and decide to charge us for it. Reminds me of Unisys and GIFs. All web pages have them. They were free. Then the jack-ass corporation decides to go after websites to charge them for royalties on their patent. This would be fine IFF they had not first allowed the standard to be adopted de facto for free. Don't go that way unless you want huge criticism.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Read the list again: Epson Stylus Color 900G FireWire printer, Epson Expression 1600 and Umax PowerLook 1100 FireWire scanners. There are also FireWire CD-R/RW drives, an ORB drive, analog-to-digital video converters, synthesizers, mixers, VCRs, HDTVs, network storage, DAT, DVD-RAM, DVD changer, video editors, camcorders, and data analyzers. RePlayTV even uses FireWire.
Philips recently demoed a wireless FireWire network, fast enough for real-time audio- and video-streaming at 46-Mbit/sec at distances far exceeding 10 meters (BlueTooth maxes at 1-Mbit/s, HomeRF at 1.6 Mbit/s, and IEEE 802.11 at 11-Mbit/s). Check out Wi-LAN, the self-proclaimed future of high-speed wireless, for more info.
Here's another list of FireWire products.
No, FireWire is not for regular modems. But USB does not work for Cable and DSL modems, either. FireWire could substitute for the Ethernet port in broadband application. USB cannot.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
For trolling you get paid negatively: people hate you. Strangely trolls go on. Perhaps trolls like hate. Maybe a world can exist in which people have different, conflicting, or even diametrically opposed value systems. Maybe the capitalist sees Open Source as money leaking out of the nice neat boundary walls it was once kept in. Maybe Open Source developers are not all capitalist and do what they do out of enjoyment & knowlege that their work makes the world a truly better place.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Huh? Please explain how I am working for VA Linux or Red Hat. I am not, anymore than I'm working for plants by breathing out carbon dioxide which they thrive on.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
When SBLive! had closed drivers, I bashed it left and right, and I woulnd't touch it. Since the code opened and the drivers may be included in the next kernel release, it is at the top of my Hardware Upgrades list, and I should be getting it within a couple of weeks. No source, no go. For me, that is.
............ no.
Like the Boston Teaparty for example, or the riots against the WTO. Just because you break the law, doesn't mean you're wrong, the law is not the same as justice, especially when it is for the benefit of large, unelected corporate oligarchies. Yawn, another debacle from corporate America, some of whom have been claiming to support us (come on IBM, what are you doing?). Free standards will sell more products, but potentially less Microsoft (hence the MS conspiracy angle).
Well we can retaliate in a few ways. #1) Since USB is no longer truly open they should forfeit their award. #2) We should start an OpenUSB.org project, reverse engineer the technology, make the information freely available. We as a community reverse engineered plenty of hardware & protocols, So the USB forum hinders our USB development for a a few months. Well, Perhaps someone all ready accessed the documents from thier web site and cracked a user account, anyway we can take a working win2k box and reverse engineer the USB protocol. We should all send some email to let them know where we stand. And... for the good of the Linux Community let's tell them they must forfeit their prize. GIVE 'EM HELL!
I don't know abou tyou but I just went to http://www.usb.org/developers/index.html and was able to pull up the developers page just fine.
If you try the link in the article, enter a invalid uname/pword and select not to retry when it asks, you get in anyway. I just downloaded the usb1.1 specs as a .zip file. Or is this not the info they were protecting?
>Apple killed firewire -- nobody needed to help.
Firewire, aka IEEE 1394, is hardly dead. Pretty much all HDTV/DTV systems use it to communicate between receivers and decoders. It's just not used a lot on PCs is all.
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I was in the middle of mirroring the documentation, and suddenly www.usb.org is unpingable. I assume this is because someone over on their end noticed the massive hard drive churning, and the flood of wget clients in the server logs. If this is actually the result of some losers DOS attack I'm going to be annoyed.
They're still unpingable, but responding to web requests again. False alarm, I suppose their firewall and their current slashdotting threw me off.
You probably are right about why they are hiding those specs. But why not use a publically available and tested encryption algorithm instead? I, at least, would feel a lot more comfortable with that...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The man makes a good point. FreeBSD and OpenBSD and all the other variants would be left out in the cold with this plan. We have to remember that Linux does not live alone in the world as free OSes go.
Also, it begs another question. How much of the core development of the Linux operating system does the community want to have taken over by the Linux corporations? One bad corporate citizen could play heck with the order of things.
Keeping it open in the hands of the hobbyists and the coders on a crusade is the only way to keep the core of the OS out of reach of exploitation.
ACK
Hmmm... let's tweak this a bit, and see what we get.
I am an expert in monetarist economics, with a particular emphasis on the politics and philosophies of Milton Friedman, and his latter-day successor in the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher.
The whole "intellectual-property" and "copyright extension" phenomenon troubles me somewhat as an economist, so I felt I had to submit my opinions on what is obviously a fundamentally flawed economic model.
This DCMA case is a prime example. Once again, the cheapskates in the intellectual-property community begrudge someone making a profit off of product quality and service as opposed to artifical notions of "property" -- they seem to expect a free lunch. Well, as my economics professor always used to say, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
What these crypto-fascist intellectual-property proponents don't seem to realise, is that the very system they promote is nothing more than the capitalist system they despise, but with a few extra nasty gotchas bolted on. If Marx were alive today, he would recognise "intellectual property" for what it is - an attempt by the owners of capital to extract more value from the labour of the proletariat without actually allowing them to see the excess value they produced
For example: you do "work for hire" on a project which someone else holds the "copyright" to, they continue to get paid in good old fashioned United States dollars long after you've been let go. Try taking that to your local BMW dealership and see how far it gets you.
So in a nutshell, intellectual-property is exactly like open-source (from the "big business" point of view), except that the developer works for nothing.
In my book, profiting from "intellectual property" produced by others is the same as being a slaveowner. For this reason alone intellectual-property must be stopped, by Federal Law if need be.
Much better, don't you think?
Jay (=
It seems unlikely to me, that they are really trying to keep the specs themselves under wraps in the long run.
So, I wouldn't jump to conclusions. Still, whatever the reasons for it, I hope this policy gets reversed because it does seem, ultimately, short sighted and harmful to the standard itself.
Sadly, this is a card that costs $200, as it's more of an industrial-strength info-kiosk/server type device than a consumer DVD decoder card. And they're still refusing to do even binary drivers or an unencrypted Linux file player for the Hollywood Plus out of fear that it would break their agreement with DVDCCA or be used to play deCSS'd DVDs, respectively.
Also somewhat annoying is the fact that when someone asked about BeOS drivers in the Linux group (a perfectly legitimate question, IMO), Marshall Goldberg, their marketing director, replied, "I'm sorry, but this is the Linux area, not the BeOS area." (And there isn't a BeOS area on their server.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Firewire hasn't gotten the support it probably deserved on its technical merits. Apparently Apple, in its infinite wisdom (chuckle), tried to require licensing fees from every manufacturer and slowed its adoption. Then Intel dropped support for it in its 810, 820, 840 chipsets. But technically I think it's clearly superior to USB. I use firewire to talk to my Sony digital video camera and can count the problems I've had on one hand. I've tried to use USB, on the other hand, and finally gave up due to all the headaches to get it to work reliably (and this with just a couple simple devices like a mouse and keyboard).
Here is a quick USB - Firewire comparison:
FireWire has many advantages over other digital interfaces. It has already replaced SCSI on the new Apple iMacs G3s, and G4s, and FireWire is much more user-friendly for connecting devices than SCSI. Dell, Gateway, and Compaq have also released machines that rely on FireWire for attaching high-speed peripherals. Although USB is a great low-cost solution for connecting keyboards and other low-speed peripherals, it doesn't have the speed for multimedia uses. Maximum speed for USB is 12 megabits per second, compared to FireWire at 400 megabits per second. PCI is currently faster than FireWire, at 1 gigabit per second, but plans are already in the works for a FireWire that will be as fast and will of course have the ease of use and other advantages of the current FireWire. FireWire cables can be up to 15 feet long and they have either two 6-pin connectors, for data and power, or one 6-pin and one 4-pin connector for the data-only cables. Up to 63 devices can be connected to a FirePower network. Products currently using FireWire include video camcorders, digital cameras, digital video capturing and editing equipment, hard drives, DAT drives, CD drives, zip drives, ORB drives, MO (magneto optical) drives, and printers
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
What does most of this dead technology have in common? At one point or another, it was closed off.
This point is right on. I understand the USB Forum wants a few quick bucks for their specs, but are they ignoring the long view? If their USB specs were free (or better yet they wrote reference code for USB device drivers), there would be more software support for USB. USB would wind itself into many operating systems and the customer pool for USB hardware would grow!
What am I not understanding?
cpeterso
Why doesn't one of the big boys license this information for use within its developers? Shouldn't these companies be supporting the development of the product they sell? I mean i would think Redhat, Caldera, or Corel would be happy to license this information for a third party to develop support or provide drivers. Microsoft provides information in SDK's and DDK's that work very well. Why complain about someone trying to controll there standard. Why not just get support for it. Just like ISO9000, it is a pain in the ass to manage according to those standards, and you pay for that. But your clients expect a quality of service and workmanship that comes about from being ISO9000 certified. So what is the big deal about being USB certified or paying for the information that the standardization group is working on and coordinating on. Again, if you don't like USB. Then work on standardizing another technology! Do the footwork instead of simply just trying to get access into someone elses! Long live linux, but long live USB. Its been the best thing since sliced bread!! Nothing like having a scanner, digital camera, digital mp3 player, snappy cam, video camera and printer all hubed in through USB and working without snagging every IRQ you got! blessed technology :) Sure firewire is fast as hell, and USB's new revision is fast as hell too.. but you have to pay for that also.
Although it smacks of corporate greediness, and it is apparent that Linux developers who work for free can't join the members list, why can't the corporate Linux companies, such as Red Hat, Caldera or VA Linux systems join, and make their copies of the specifications available to developers. There may be copyright issues, but if the USB developers work "for" one of these companies, then surely there is no problem. The end-result would still be GPLed, and available to all, it's just a nominal shift in who you are working for.
Linux has a number of high-profile companies now, and it's in their interests to ensure the best hardware compatibility for their distributions. $2500 is a small price to pay for that from their point of view, surely.
-anil-
Humm ? Who is going to pay their $2500 a year. Or the people who dont want to work for a Linux vendor but would like to spend their spare time fiddling with a USB camera or other widget ?
Alan
Working on an opensourceproject is a bit like
charity, in the way that it all benefits the
users and the community.
You get paid by respect, just like when doing
work for charity, except that doing opensource-work gives you a better chance of
being respected as a skilled hacker/programmer,
instead of being respected just for being "kind".
If you really are an expert in economics, you
should have thought this through.
Given your arguments, giving a concert in aid
of a good cause is slave labour.
This also means that U2, probably some of the richest guys in Ireland, is in fact slaves.
Slavery is only at term appropriate if you are
_forced_ to do work for nothing.
Opensource-developers aren't forced into anything.
They just do what they feel like doing, hacking..
and why not make a contribution that millions
of other people will respect you for?
If you don't want to code GPL-stuff, then don't.
It is as simple as that.
We all know that the average slashdotter doesn't think highly of copyright law, but all this mirroring and redistribution of copyrighted material is nevertheless a violation of that body of law.
I can see two results: either the USB people are going to realize that it's silly to try to hoard this sort of information, or they're going to send out a hardy "fuck you" to the community and redouble their efforts to charge for the info. Let's just hope they'll choose the former.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
USB Promoters:-
- Compaq
- Hewlett Packard
- Intel
- Lucent Technologies
- Microsoft
- NEC
- Philips
+ > 600 members found on Contact Filter/SearchThe only Good System is a Sound System
Have you ever heard of Taylor Wines?
Well, have you?
Ok, seems that the Taylor Family had a winery that produced some popular wines, and some big corporate Behemoth decided, "Oh, look a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see! Let's aquire them!"
Well, there was one stubborn Taylor who refused to sell out.
But the Behemoth got him, see, they didn't really care about the land or the wine so much as the name Taylor, which had mindshare and synergy and all that good stuff. So, he could continue to make wine... but he is legally not allowed to put his own name on it. This is the way corporations operate with their wonderful intellectual property laws, like patents, trademarks and copyrights.
So, I hope this little fable may enlighten you as to why cororate behemoths love "intellectual property," but us individuals should hate it.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
P.S. Another message on the list hints how you can hijack an account and get at the docs.
Anyone willing to do this and post a login? Or make a mirror?
--
Darn it! Just when I had gotten my panties all into a bunch over this, you tell me it was all about nothing!! I had this really great flame of you, your mother, and your home town all typed up and ready to go. But Noooooo, you have to go and inject useful discussion onto my personal flame-board, Slashdot.
Oh well... I have to find something else to do, like look through the list of patents granted today or use the search engines to find out if anybody said something negative about Linux today.
--
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
I'm not a coked-out Linux zealot, but I do realize that there are a *LOT* of standards organizations like this that only make their standards and work available to their members. Well, why doesn't someone start either a Linux coalition of just an Open Source one. People join by signing up on a website and when a set of standards like these require membership, everyone sends in the couple bucks or so and they all get a copy of the standards. As long as they're all official members of the coalition, the coalition can be a member. Hell, you could even elect a representative to go to the various conferences and deal on the behalf of the coalition. You could probably even raise a decent salary for the person if you got at least 10,000 people who wouldn't mind paying like a $1/mo dues fee...
Esperandi
The specification for AGP costs $2500 also - now it is the defacto standard for video cards. So there are other factors that can come into play for any given technology to achieve widespread acceptance. With AGP, I believe it to be critical mass usage and performance that drives its popularity, not the fact that is closed or open source.
And I'm glad to report it was successful - the docs are back where they belong, at
:/
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass. html.
Unfortunately, slashdot rejected the news item on it - seems bashing someone is better than reporting they fixed it.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
If your technology has already been put in just about every single new computer and is gaining support why not charge money? In the case of USB it's popular enough that charging for development documentation won't harm USB at all.
What they want is not the result of anyone's productive work, but specifications, which are something needed for productive work.
So in a nutshell, open source is exactly like closed source (from the developers point of view), except that the developer works for nothing.
He works because he likes doing it. Besides he gets to use the result of his work as well as that of other open source developers. BTW, some open source developers are actually being paid by companies who have realized that one can make money with open source.
In my book, working for nothing is exactly the same as slavery. For this reason alone open source must be stopped, by Federal Law if need be.
OK, I think you've just stooped into the cesspits of trolldom. Someone moderate this moron down.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I think he was referring to DV devices, which are most certainly NOT dead. All the DV, MiniDV cameras and decks I've worked with support firewire/1394, and it's real fun to plug a camera into a firewire bus and have the video feed show up in Final Cut Pro. For DV, it's the preferred method.
For the same Reasons that the Moton Picture Association is trying to prevent Drivers for DVD's from being created for Linux.
:-)
Its unfortunate that these companys aren't taking linux seriously and creating drivers for the "ALTERNATIVE" OS's, and making it difficult for us to create our own.
Someday They might wake up and stop limiting the potential for drivers on the alternative OS's (and suing us as in the DeCSS case)
Just my 2 cents as I move from Lurker to Poster
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
From a quick look at www.usb.org, there seems to be a lot of documentation still available, including most older documentation.
The only document that seems to be restricted are those from the 1999 USB 2.0 conference. This may be a bad thing, but right now it looks like its just an attempt to prevent incompatible standards.
Either that or something I missed entirely is blocked.
If this is moderated as a troll then how come replies that are rabidly pro-Linux get moderated up?
Good question. Erm... can you point to an article that was moerated up for being rabidly pro-linux?. Although this was probably moderated as Troll because it seems to have been written entirely to annoy, and contained comments such as "open source must be stopped, by Federal Law if need be." which isn't exactly the most balanced way of presenting an argument.
Couldn't be that you Open source socialists just can't take free critisism when it's offered ?
I find it amusing that you seem to consider socialist to be an insult. Anyway, some of us will take criticism. Some will not. Some of us will allow abuse and insults (Which you supplied an abundance of). Some will not.
It is the American way to drive to succeed, to excel, to MAKE MONEY.
Ahh, so this is where I'm going wrong. I'm not American. Damn. If only I was I could live up to your stereotype.
Those who work for free are already losers when measured by the yardstick of Dollars.
I'm not working by the yardstick of Dollars (or even pounds). There are other ways to measure success. For some reason, my University didn't really consider how much money I might make when giving me my degree.
So please, continue to work for free so the sane amongst us profit from you!
Thanks for your permission.
Do you actually understand what money's for? Its simply an extension of the barter system that allows for more complicated deals than a simple swap. Those who produce open source software don't need it. They want other open source software. You on the other hand seem to have an obsession with money. You really ought to develop your own opinion rather than conforming to what you think America is all about.
In defence, people mentioned Linux and nothing else because they don't use anything else. For the most part they've been windows users that finally started using a real OS. They've never touched anything like Unix other than Linux. Simply they are naive. They don't mean any harm to BSD (I hope) or other OSS OSs, they simply aren't worried about them.
I'm glad you made the point that a lot of Linux development is NOT non-profit, which is why I'm not so worried about Linux USB support -- (say) RedHat will be the first to get it, and they'll make money from it, then the rest will have it, and all is well.
This is just speculation, I don't know that the masses think this way, but they sure seem to. If it isn't the case, and they HAVE been dependant at one point or another on something else, they have no excuse.
---
script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash
[ approaching AI ]
Read here. Randy is the "maintainer" for linux-usb. I believe that this slashdot article was rushed out too early.
http://www.usb.org/app/db/search/contacts/ Look at the source to get a bunch of Vendor IDs. Then append "-admin" and use that as a username and password.
Just 7 months after the whole /. community was screaming over "Apple licensing" of Firewire, I find this most ironic.
:-)
USB 2.0, be it an eventual product or vaporware announcement, was designed to steal mindshare from Firewire.
USB was designed for cheap low-bandwidth plug in parts. That's what it is good at. Trying to scale up from that detracts from the original design. It makes absolutely no sense to have a mouse on the same bus as an external hard drive or video capture.
Now that Firewire has been FUDDED into a mostly-Apple expansion port, Intel moves in for the harvest. Nice. You didn't see it coming?
FOr those of you that don't know, "Firewire" is the same as "Sony i.Link" and 1394 ports. Sony just calls it that to prevent mindshare from Firewire.
Bah. No more coffee this morning.
> It should be noted that many other operating systems also currently support USB as well. BSD's not with standing.
... but FreeBSD has had USB support for some time now.
I'll suppress the flames, it didn't look like a troll
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
REDMOND, Wash. -- March 1,2000 -- Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") announces the release of DirectExperience(tm), a revolutionary new system designed to provide an unparalleled audiual, visual and for the first time, tactile experience while providing optimal protection for the audio-visual-tactile content.
By inserting a series of IntelliPlugs(tm) into the flesh of the arms, legs and spine along with a DirectExperience(tm) cranial socket, content providers can download audio, visual, and tactile sensory experiences into the cortex of the brain, providing life-like experiences unrivalled by any other streaming medium released to date.
In addition to providing an encrypted stream of information right up to the integrated dermal and cranial sockets, reducing the chances of a successful side-channel attack, Microsoft has worked closely and secured an unparalleled deal in which all infants born after March 31, 2000 will have the plugs introduced in-vitro and connected to a DirectExperience terminal shortly after birth. Microsoft plans to use the profits from the licensing of its technology to content providers to allow for intravenous nourishment for these infants through the course of their natural lives. It is estimated that within 50 to 70 years, every person in the world will be upgraded to handle DirectExperience technology; after that, production of new consumers will be off-loaded to a separate farming location.
Early product testers, when asked about the DirectExperience(tm) system, offered the following comments:
"*belch*"
"Glurgh..."
"There is no spoon..."
Microsoft President and CEO Steve Ballmer, when asked about the DirectExperience(tm) system, said "It's the smell, you see..."
Jay (=
Since it's pretty unreasonable to expect individual OSS developers to ante up $2500 for the privilege of writing software, what about some organization such as the FSF paying the fee for the specs and signing up people to develop drivers, etc.
Is there some sort of nondisclosure that restricts anyone from doing this? Or are only commercial software vendors invited to the USB party?
This smells a little like the fracus that resulted when Intel closed some specs a while back. Didn't they eventually relent?
Finally, the wiseguy who thought the editor should research before posting should have checked the links on the URL he posted. The link to go to the class specs was indeed password protected.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
btw if you want to make a mirror of the members area off usb.org w/wget do something like:
wget -m --http-user=1211 --http-passwd=cypherpunk -np http://www.USB.org/members/devclass.html
the -np will make it so you do not get parent directories.
- ixx -
didn't mean to post anonymous on that last mirror post.
Just my conspiracy theorist notion.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
FOr those of you that don't know, "Firewire" is the same as "Sony i.Link" and 1394 ports. Sony just calls it that to prevent mindshare from Firewire.
Firewire is not "Sony i.Link." Firewire also provides a line of power to the devices connected, whereas products plugged into Sony's i.Link do not. A subtle difference, but one that could make a difference when buying a firewire drive WITHOUT an AC Adapter.
-Nick
Perhaps the Slashdot article doesn't make it clear - it's not the Linux-USB people who are restricting access, it's USB-IF who are the culprits in the matter.
My question is, why would someone want to restrict the development of drivers for their products? Surely this is simple maths - no support, less people buy. Take the SBLive for example - this has excellent support under linux, and many Linux weenies went out and bought it [GRiN] ...
.my 2p
While source code is GPL'd, documentation isn't. Anyone could look at the source and document the class specs and charge for it. But in the spirit of open development and abstraction(I wouldn't want to spend time interpreting what a function does if someone else could tell me), perhaps future docs need their own public license. The pace of development would quicken and the barriers to entry (spending the time to figure out wtf something does so you can write code based on it) would lower.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
Start recruiting hardware manufacturers, take the last open version of the spec, Fork, and start working from there. Come up with a sticker for device and motherboard manufacturers (OpenUSB?) and refuse to buy any hardware that doesn't have the sticker.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Methinks the editor should have done some research himself and put some of these in the story."
If you had read all the messages you would have seen that HeUnique was not only reading those links, he posted to the thread asking for more information and their (usb developers) opinion on posting this story to slashdot.
Interestingly, Alan Cox suggested waiting for a week before posting to Slashdot to give them a chance to explain and/or change back graciously before being "hit by a nuclear warhead"
Maybe Slashdot could make some sort of community watchdog section where things that seem suspicious could be posted, but in sort of a beta state before going to the main page.
HeUnique:
What's your response to this message? http://electr icrain.com/lists/archive/linux-usb/2000/02/msg011
You know...I really should start making posts of actual substance, instead of continually tearing down Slashdot, but I think Slashdot could be an excellent medium if some issues with it were addressed - such as journalistic integrity (as if there were such a thing).
FireWire supports both synchronous stream data, like video, and block data, like disk drives. Most of the action is in synchronous stream data, primarily video. Block devices for FireWire are rare, but they do exist. I just saw a Zip drive, of all things, for FireWire. The big problem isn't Apple, it's Intel and Microsoft. Intel has backed away from block-device FireWire support and is now pushing USB 2 for that purpose. Microsoft was late with FireWire support in the OS.
In the links thread where people broke in, a "coward" broke in, got the specs, and noticed exactly why they want this rev hidden. It has nothing to do with the money that the USB folks just got, and everything to do with trying to do security the stupid way.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
FOr those of you that don't know, "Firewire" is the same as "Sony i.Link" and 1394 ports. Sony just calls it that
to prevent mindshare from Firewire.
No, sony calls it that because APPLE won't let people use the word "firewire" without paying a fee. That's why it goes by so many names.
Apple killed firewire -- nobody needed to help.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
One thing should be noted also, since the posting is somewhat unclear on this topic.
The suggestion is not that the group who received the award has now closed off some specs. See #15 for example.
The suggestion is now that this USB group got $10k to use, the specs suddenly cosy money. (See post from Alan Cox).
--
It should be noted that many other operating systems also currently support USB as well. BSD's not with standing. I think it should be opened for EVERYONE not just Linux.
What makes Linux more special than the rest? And why should Microsoft have to pay instead of Linux? Oh, being not-for-profit is entirely false. Ask Redhat how much their stock is worth.
Not to mention once Linux, or a BSD used the standards in opensource, other places would just take the API calls from there.
Whats the object of this message? Stop fighting a Linux vs. the world battle, and fight an opensource vs. the closed source world battle. You might find you have better luck as the number of opensource people is greater than linux people. Especially as far as large corporations are concerned.
Rod Taylor
Before they fix their security leaks, I've mirrored the members only pages at
http://www.geocities.com/usb_dev/.
Feel free to mirror this...
Additionally, another AC has posted a mirror where the docs can be viewed (scroll down if you're interested). [I have personally been fucking with mixmaster trying to send off some mails, damnit] Of particular interest are two particular documents: "Device Class Definition for Content Security Devices 0.9a" and "Content Security Method 4 - Elliptic Curve Content".
The first of these docs outlines roughly why: "Protected Content typically refers to copyrighted content. Content Protection Methods (CPM) have been developed for the controlled distribution of protect [sic] content." and also uses an example of a pair of USB speakers which allow protection of content up until the hardware induces analog playback.
The second document discusses the technical details of Elliptic Curve cryptographic methods to provide authentication, and authentication + encryption. This is no CSS. This is good old fashioned high grade badass crypto. Some of the inline commentary regarding illegal intent there is somewhat chilling.
Anyone still have doubts as to why this dinner is being held behind closed doors and costs $2500 a plate?
I am deisgning a USB device in VHDL and I downloaded some of the Device Class specifications previously - it sucks that the otherwise very open (there are no licensing fees to create USB devices, and you can download the protocol specification from the website for free; they also run a very active and useful Developers Webboard for free) USB site should clam up on the critically important Device Class specs like this.
The Device Class specifications outline standard ways to use the USB protocol for, say, Modem devices, or Mass Storage Devices. If you make your hardware compliant with these Device Class specification ''APIs'' then you don't actually need to write a device driver! The major OSs write inbuilt support for the defined Device Classes, and your new Modem or whatever is recognized as being compliant with the ''APIs'' and ''just works''.
It is a bit numb to publish the physical and transport layer specifications for free but not the higher level ones! I wonder what made them decide to change?
Anyone concerned should email admin@usb.org (this is the correct address from the website) and request that the Linux implementation efforts are allowed a complimentary membership as they are not-for-profit.
-Andy
Frankly a year charge of $2500 can only affect individuals or volunteer groups. Companies and major software development groups may feel this as a bless as it shrinks USB potential market to their products.
Sincerly I am not absolutely against charging such things. Anyway things must be supported, one should pay for common expenses and many people would like to have conferences or meetings to settle up questions. and this demands money.
However USB group makes out of this an elite club. There are no chances. Either pay $2500 or hit the streets. And this does not just end here. If anyone has taken a look at their application form, then they consider ONLY companies as possible members. Besides:
"Renewal and Size of Forum. The Forum Sponsors reserve the right to limit the number of participants or to discontinue the program upon written notice. Upon any such, Company shall receive a refund of a portion of its subscription fee proportional to the amount of time otherwise remaining in its enrollment period."
The Forum sponsors are: Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM PC Co., Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Northern Telecom. So one may well think were this beautiful family of sponsors are pushing us to. Specially if we consider that this membership allows "early access to specifications".
In any case I would highly recomend anyone to read this membership form. It presents some more interesting points that may develope discussion:
http://www.usb.org/developers/data/usbifapp.pdf
It seems to me that the rampant mirroring some people are suggesting isn't going to be particularly effective, in the long term at least.
These specifications are 'in various stages of development' and the folks working on this stuff would probably like to keep up with these developments, not be stuck with what was freely available yesterday.
This needs to be sorted out sensibly and diplomatically, hijacking accounts and mirroring (potentially superceded) documentation is going to win us no friends nor be of much long term use. What it will do is make us look like a bunch of petulant children.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've read all the comments on this article, and visited a few links. There's quite a few rumors and half-truths going around, so I won't try to address most of them. I will, however, address the simple act of trying to close off the device classes.
If we look back on the path computing has taken over the past two decades, we see it littered with dead technology. What does most of this dead technology have in common? At one point or another, it was closed off. Ridiculous fees were charged for redistribution of specifications. Those who paid were prohibited from sharing their information with anyone but the others who paid, and sometimes not even them.
By contrast, if the steward of a particular technology practices open computing, whether the technology lives or dies depends on technological rather than political (and no, I don't mean governmental) merits. If these stewards need money; it would stand to reason that whomever stood to benefit from the technology's wide adoption should contribute more to it in the hopes that their investments would be returned.
USB's move here could undermine its previously open stance, and that would be a bad thing for USB. I hope they reevaluate it. USB is a very useful technology in its own right and need not be squelched in this manner.
Oh, and I can't pass up contributing to a USB thread without telling you that salespeople in a local electronics store recently told one of my friends that the USB port on some home entertainment equipment was for the brand-spankin'-new ``Universal Stereo Bus''. :-)
- http://www.usb.org/developers/docs.html
- http://electr icrain.com/lists/archive/linux-usb/2000/02/msg010
3 5.html - http://electr icrain.com/lists/archive/linux-usb/2000/02/msg010
5 5.html
Methinks the editor should have done some research himself and put some of these in the story. A slashdot story with no links? Bah!--
Although it appears people are confusing the group that got the award (developers), and the people who are charging for access to docs (USB-IF), perhaps it's time to split the Beanie Awards concept in twain.
- Slashdot Beanie Awards
- Slashdot Weenie Awards
(Slashdot Weenie Awards =anagram> So, what ideals answered?)For laudable service to fellow geeks.
For all the FUD-spewing, patent abusing sorts.
[
I've contacted the individual authors of the documents being restricted, and most of them appear to agree with my points. I think we can expect this situation to get fixed with either usb.org putting it back into a publically accessible spot or the same documents being published elsewhere.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
That was the net/net of this situation so if you are concerned with getting at the information there is nothing further to worry about. If you are interested in the background, I will try to explain.
The USB-IF charter has always been to support the development of USB products. It has also always included the FOCUS on members and anything that was made available to the general public was fine as long as it didn't become a support or financial burden. This is based on the belief that USB technology is close enough to "rocket science" that most all individual companies will have trouble if they don't have support from the spec architects in the form of education, information centralization, market message commonality, a compliance program.... These things just ain't free. Ergo the membership organization does most of these things for its members and charges an annual membership fee to cover the cost.
USB-IF is a non profit corporation that spends over 20% of its budget on web information distribution, over %30 percent of its budget on a compliance program, slightly under %20 of its budget on administration. Whats left is now destined for on of the most often requested services from it's members, an improved compliance and logo program. The members feedback has been for a long time (this is an expensive change and it took a lot of effort to make it) that we should have a better way to stop the slipshod manufacturing and design of things that call themselves USB products. I don't know how this will work out, but we are doing our best to accomplish what the members are asking within our budget.
Now the place where this community can help!! As part of our compliance testing we verify product electrical characteristics and protocol capabilities. When it comes to the qualification of drivers and therefore the statement that a product works with a certain OS we only have one set of tests that we can use. They were developed and given to the IF for this use by the promotor companies (yes Microsoft is a promotor company). There were some big costs to develop these tests, by the way, that were covered by the promotor companies themselves. Currently for any other OS we have to simply take the peripheral vendors word for their drivers compliance to the OS. If the Linux community can find a way to judge driver quality for USB products the OS column for Linux on the USB-IF product list would mean much more. We are open to a proposal that would help seperate the functional products from the non functional.
PLEASE NOTE;Our compliance program is primarily a feedback tool to developers. We get more repeat attendees at workshops that come back even after their products have "passed" because the workshops allow them to learn so much and develop so much easier or quicker. As most of us heard in high school or college, "the score is not the goal of the test, it is the feedback on the learning that is of real value".
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