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Mount Rainier for Linux
Cpyder writes: "Seems like Philips is getting the "patents are bad"-picture, as they have decided to let Linux support the Mount Rainier next-generation file device system. Seems like the end of floppies+zips+cdrw+whatever is finally in sight. Check it out at The Reg."
This probably has more to do with IBMs incredible support for Linux and the momemntum that Linux is gathering than any enlightenment on the part of Phillips. Phillips, for example, did a crackdown on all CD pressing plants to make sure that all artwork on CDS carried the "Compact Disc Audio" logo. After this, it was impossible to press CDs at DFI in France, for example, without the CD logo. Thats more like the behaviour of the Phillips that we know.
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Due to the opening up these standards, it's very easy for competitors to create compatible devices without license fees. So the initial inventors don't get very much money from their inventions like they could make initially. This is very bad because it will force other companies do the very same. You might say: good for open source community. But in fact it's very bad: it restricts the profit inventors get from their invention. Look for example at IBM, they nearly died from getting not enough money from their invention of the IBM PC. So nobody will do any more inventions, because they look at IBM and say: "Look, they nearly died from getting not enough money from their invention. Let's rather sell old, cheap stuff and get rich !" So, no more inventions will be done and there will be no enconomical and scientific advancement. So, you see that treaties like this are in fact very bad and might destroy our economy.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
"...for now the working groups punningly refer to "CD-MRW". "
I can't wait to tell people about this. "Theres this great new super easy cd format!" "oh yeah? whats it called?" "CD-MRW!" "CD-huh?"
heh
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Remember that it's not patents themselves that are bad. They allow you to ensure that you'll get a return on the huge amount of money you spend doing research on algorithms, processes, etc. Then, unlike copyright, they ensure that your invention is released into the public domain before several generations of people have come and gone.
Patents are only bad when abused. By abuse I mean obtaining overly broad patents purposely, forming companies whose sole purpose is to sue everyone that does anything remotely related to patents they purchased from others, or similar. It's perfectly fine to use a patent to charge people to use your legitimate invention, however.
Also remember that Free Software, no matter how obscure, can cut into your profits if people use it instead of your own software. Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing just because you were too nice to demand a licensing fee from "free" projects?
Don't worry, if the technology is that good, someone will find a way around it. Look at Ogg Vorbis, for example, which implements an intelligent audio codec without anyone else's IP.
Someone has seen sense and realised the only way to have a mass-market storage device is to make it easy to develop for. Ever wondered why the Floppy/CD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW are each successful?
;)
But I think its the only way that Phillips can hope to compete with DVD-R, DVD-RW or whatever
The Mount Rainier standard sounds nifty, even if the technology is still a couple of years out of wide consumer usage. But my only beef is this: does current CD-R(W) burning software for any platform have to be more complicated than the average computer user can handle?
Enter Apple's little-known Disc Burner software, and the Authoring Support software located under the hood in the system folder. The basic premise? Put a blank CD in and Disc Burner asks for a format (either hybrid ISO/HFS, Audio, or just plain vanilla ISO), and voila, on your desktop, is an icon of your CD. Drag-n-Drop to your heart's content, and then select "Burn CD" from the Special menu (or drag the CD to the trash, then asking you to burn the CD. Even I never have understood the user interface issues with dragging a disk to the trash to eject it). Done. Simple. My cat can even burn CDs now.
The moral of the story? Mount Rainier will be an easily applied standard across all platforms. But who said the current technology's software had to be difficult? Granted, Disc Burner is not Mount Rainier, but it definitely is a current and usable facsimile of the technology.
For more info on what Mt. Rainier (CD-MRW) is all about, check out their mt-rainier web site
Hey, atleast we didn't have to fight for it this time.
No illegal code for people to wear on shirts...
No annoying hassels between Ac3 and dts...(why the hell doesn't sound work...why the hell can I get sound, but the video is only half decoded...)
Of course, this means that the chances of success are asimtonically close to n.
Where "n" is a low number.
-=fshalor
-=fshalor
I, for one, am really glad to see that Linux is supporting our national parks. Heaven knows that we geeks need to get outdoors once and a while.
Why doesn't the Linux/OSS community come up with an embedded, tiny-ass Linux hard drive like the iPod
Yes, why don't you?
Don't forget that you (and I, and my buddy down the street...) are the "open source community". The way open source works is that when someone develops an itch for something, they build it and publish the code/plans/design for all.
Sorry for this mini-rant, but I get tired of people who sit around complaining about the things that the open source community hasn't done for them.
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TiVos are linux based, definitely consumer-oriented, and probably have one of the best user interfaces I've ever come across. They're also getting close to critical mass in terms of users, I figure.
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Is Mount Rainier just a disc format (like ISO9660, UDF, etc)? There's mention of hardware recorders, but it sounds like they use ordinary CD-RW media. Will normal CD-RW drives be able to use this format? I think that consumers expected to have this drag-n-drop ability in the first place. Nobody's going to buy a new drive just to do that, are they?
Besides, how do writable DVDs fit into this picture?
Mod me down if you like but Windows XP has this basic capability built in and every one thinks its a bad thing....
Here is what happens when i insert a blank CDR in the disc drive.
Windows can perform the same action each time you insert a disk or connect a device with this kind of file:
blank CD
What do you want windows to do
1 Open writable CD folder using Windows explorer
2 take no action
Select if you want a default action to occur
Personally I dont use the built in software because I have other hapits but just to see if it could work I created a shortcut to the CDDRIVE and placed the shortcut on the desktop then dragged and dropped music files to the shortcut and lo and behold they were waiting to be burned. To do the actual burning I opened the shortcut and selected write these files to CD.
bobs your uncle
Now on to CDRW if the media costs come down and preformatted disks are cheap and they dont damage easily then I would probably use more of them. My own experience is they dont hold up as well to general everyday use...
ymmv
The point about Mt. Rainier is that it move defect management and other things into the hardware, rather than having software handle it. It essentially turns the CD-RW into a kind of harddisk, which also does its own defect mgmt.
Alex
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I can already "drag and drop" files to a CDRW that will be read in Windows, MacOS, and Linux, with DirectCD, or packet-cd on Linux. Microsoft even wants to include CD writing tools in Windows, so I guess soon you will not even need DirectCD. The same goes to Apple. So why is this "revolutionary" new format necessary?
This type of CD-R/RW usage has been available (in Windows) for years via third-party software like Adaptec/Roxio's DirectCD or the NTI's FileCD and so on. CD players already support packet writing! Why is Microsoft, IBM et. al. taking about reengineering the CD from at such a low level? Doesn't it just require someone to write a Linux version of DirectCD/FileCD? Why can't we just format CD-R/RW discs with the UDF file system that DVD's already use instead of inventing a brand new one?
Also, I'm not sure I even like the idea of this becoming the "default" behavior for CD writers. I strongly dislike the overhead involved in formatting. I find that a packet writing CD-R/RW hold about 100MB less. I'd rather have the full capacity. I mean, if you are using this thing for business backup (which seems to be the primary argument for needing Linux support) then you are only going to be burning once a day, so why not just burn a full 650/700MB worth of data as a single data track?
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I can't agree with this more. While I agree with your general sentiment WRT the U.S. patent office policy, I find the statement "US government is more interested in floating the stock market than in supporting economic fair play" to be particularly insightful.
:) )
.sig.
With average Dow P/E ratios hovering at 23 and, a flood of cheap money coming out of the Fed (just *look* at M3 since 9/11!), and the Treasury's recent decision to end the 30 year long bond in an effort to push down long term interest and mortgage rates, it's pretty clear that the policy is to squeeze out real estate equity inflationary (and illusory) gains through refinancing in order to float consumer spending and stock market speculation. The frightening thing about this is that it doesn't in the least promote healthy economic activity through increased productivity, it's entirely speculative -- as evidenced by the stock market continuing to rise even with ridiculous P/E ratios making stocks such an obvious bad long term bet. Which makes your analogy of the patent office creating a new "gold rush" all the more relevant: patenting obvious mathematical algorithms doesn't increase productivity as much as it creates exclusive monopolies for the big players. Sure, they get to claim the gains on their balance sheet, but it's a net loss for the economy as a whole.
I'm worried that the Fed won't be able to maintain and prop up the credit bubble as rising unemployment creates a certain rise in consumer bankruptcies. With increasing unemployment, huge consumer credit and mortgage debt (backed by unreasonably inflated property values) defaults, I fear an unraveling from the banking system through the stock market. Never mind all the crazy derivative hedging going on making many major banks and financial institutions leveraged beyond belief. I fear a recession like we haven't seen since 1929. It could get bad.
Of course, I could be wrong... (hope so -- I just bought a house!
Cheers,
--Maynard
ps - like your
This sounds a lot like the basic concepts behind Flash Translation Layer - you take a pile of sectors that are slow to erase, and insert a layer that allows you to map logical sectors to physical sectors any way you want. Thus, when you need to "erase" or "re-write" a logical sector, you just change the mapping to a physical sector that hasn't been written to. You then do a background process of taking physical sectors that are "dirty" (written to) but unused and erase them.
Funny how this idea comes around - FTL, LVM, and now Mt. Rainier. Similar concepts, different applications.
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I just set up my Linux boxes to do UDF packet writing on my CD-RW drives. It seems to work great, and is a truly handy storage format.
Could somebody clarify for me why I would replace my apparently perfectly good CD-RW drives with CD-MRW capable ones? I guess there must be some technical advantage to the MRW format. Speed? Reliability? Certainly can't be portability: one of the reasons I chose CD-RW packet is that I can read it on most boxes these days.
I'm obviously missing something here...
Too bad that feature consumes 1.4 GB of disk space and takes 20 minutes to burn a CD (with a 16X drive). Maybe my PowerBook's hard drive is just slow, though.
It sounds nice, but if the media doesn't fit in my shirt pocket, then it's no Zip replacement.
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I don't think Mount Rainer can be patented. This format is declared "next-generation" because it allows you to treat CD-Rs and CD-RWs as regular media with drag-and-drop capabilities for burning data. But I'm pretty sure the latest version of Mac OS X already does that. I run Mac OS X but don't have a burner, so I haven't been able to try it myself, but after reading a recent review on C|NET, it appears you can drag-and-drop onto DVDs, CD-Rs, and CD-RWs to burn data. Prior art, right there.
And since the main purpose of this format appears to be the functional benefits of treating CD-Rs and CD-RWs as regular removable media (floppies, JAZ disks, etc.), the only thing left to patent would be the physical disk. But, that's not possible because there's nothing special or different about "MRW" disks: they are just regular CD-RWs. The real support for MRW comes from the OS and software, not from hardware.
So don't get your hopes up that Philips decided to forego the royalties in favor of widespread adoption. It's entirely possible that someone who works for Philips actually has a Mac OS X system and discovered that the project they've been working on for two years was just shown up by Apple.
In my opinion, however, Philips is more interested in making money by selling lots of disks marked "MRW" at a premium instead of selling CD-RWs. Having support for MRW everywhere then makes more sense than charging developers for support for the format. I doubt Philips ever intended to close off access to the specification despite what Andre Hendrick says. Perhaps they were just keeping it closed until it was finalized.
What I want to know is how is CD-MRW any different than current Packet Writing tools?
For example, Nero comes with a Packet-Writer program, and the Sony Spressa drives all come with AbCD. These utilities allow the CD to be mounted as a large removable media, and used in a simple drag and drop fashion. As far as I know, AbCD and the Nero one (I can't remember it's name -- help -- someone?) aren't compatible so there is of course this whole compatibility issue that CD-MRW does fix up for us, but my question is this:
If packeting writing DOES the same thing for us already -- then what is preventing CURRENT drives from supporting Mount Rainier?
Logically, if the drives can DO Packet Writing in other formats, then it's only a driver issue that prevents them from doing it Mount Rainier format, right? If not, why not?
By the looks of it -- everyone is going to need whole new drives and media, something I'm not too terribly keen on considering that I've been using a Sony Spressa for a while now and I ALREADY HAVE packeting writing.
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He said "Linux/OSS community". Rather than chiding him for his laziness maybe you could have mentioned that the OSS community is Open Source SOFTWARE. Making devices strikes me as hardware. I am not aware of many consumer devices developed by the OSS community. Does Tivo count? Usually devices are developed by large companies like Apple or even IBM. Yet when the Linux Watch comes out would you say that the DEVICE was developed by the OSS community?
Ok, so maybe I am ranting too. If he had just said Linux community then I would have to shut up.
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