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Slashback: IPO, Protest, Ripping
This has nothing to do with "slacking." Xpilot writes "The Slack people have decided to discontinue support for the SPARC architecture (boo hoo), read about it here."
In other words, they're putting their efforts elsewhere -- which is not to say that someone else can't build on the GPL'd SPARC codebase already assembled up to now. I've never heard a Slackware user complaining, so Patrick and company clearly know what they're about.
Even for you U.S. persons! From the announcement I posted on Mandrake's upcoming IPO on a French stock exchange (and from the announcement it pointed to), many people got the impression that Americans were legally excluded from buying shares in the offering. Actually, it's MandrakeSoft which is not allowed to advertise the offering outside of France.
As one correspondent points out, "Everybody can use an online broker that accepts orders for European markets from U.S. people ( for instance) or use their broker if they can take orders for 'Euronext Marche Libre.'" Your regular broker may be able to handle this.
This isn't investment advice, though. Buy (or do not) at your own risk and pleasure, and pay attention to the various complications and liabilities ;) Either way, you may be interested in an informative article at Freezer-Burn about the process.
Additionally, a semi-anonymous reader wrote with a few figures about the offering: "After the IPO there will be a total of 3 395 269 shares. Which will do a valuation (market capitalization) after IPO of 21 millions Euros (18,3 millions USD). Redhat is currently at 577 Millions USD - so it's 1/30th Redhat size, about 3% of Redhat."
Too bad Adobe isn't a music publisher. You read recently about the quiet introduction of rip-resistant CDs into U.S. stores; now fadden writes: "I've posted an update to the CD-Recordable FAQ that explains my understanding of how (and, more importantly, why) the Macrovision technology works, why it won't prevent you from playing CDs in your car or on your computer, why it will be effective at making it difficult to "rip" or copy CDs, and where hopes lie for defeating it."
Of course, they can go the DMCA route, that would be a natural. But there's another route.
It turns out Macrovision has been patenting not only the techniques that they use, but techniques for defeating them! By patenting ways around their copy protection before its even released, they can legally prevent circumvention devices through civil patent infringement lawsuits.
Here are some of their patents on circumvention of their earlier video stuff:
SBLive cannot make a perfect digital copy because it always resamples the digital input.
burris
5) Did they even consider that anyone with a recent Mac or with USB speakers doesn't have an analog link from their CD-ROM and must use DAE to play CDs?
It looks like someone has already taken over maintaining an unofficial slack-like distribution for SPARC. http://splack.org
Unfortunately, it isn't possible for the 'ripper' software to error-correct the audio samples itself - not because the hardware does something that its impossible for software to emulate, but because the hardware gets more information than the software.
The hardware of CD players reads special error-correction bits off of the CD to determine if the other data it is reading is valid or not. These bits are intentionally scrambled in parts of a Macrovision protected recording, while static is inserted into the music. When extracting analog audio, the CD player skips over the static because the error-correction bits are invalid, which normally indicates a scratched disk or something. The player interpolates the missing samples and everything sounds all right (mostly). However, when the CD player is extracting the audio data digitally, it ignores the error-correction bits (it doesn't even send them on, it just discards them) due to some brain-deadness on the part of CD-player designers. Since the error-correcting bits aren't passed on to the software, the software can't know where the Macrovision static is.
Those guys at Macrovision sure are clever.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}