Indeed but what I find hugely amusing is how much clone war episod are inspired by meditation / buddhist precepts (e.g. Padme = passion) It's almost a rip off. So all this Jedi stuff might lead some people to study serious stuff for greater good.
For those who are interested, the notion of "Force" is probably a rip off of Irina Rockwell and Chögyam Trungpa about Shambala:
Bla bla bla... the French... bla bla Slashdot... bla bla surrender... bla bla bla unrelated. Pffff
The fact is that two execs from a powerful public utility got jail sentence. So it is not "unlike the rainbow warrior case" but it is rather very good sign on how justice worked in France for this particular cases regardless of the past and despite the fact the French govt would have more interest in supporting nuclear business.
this alternative history of the Internet is sooooo american that it becomes exotic. I especially like the idea that the FCC would mandate the French minitel to fix bob. Eh eh ! Microsoft protocol fixed by a French (socialist) govenment mandated cheese carrying protocol. Bob must be VERY BAD.
Joke aside, although it is a good thing that Minitel has been superseeded by the Internet in France, it WAS a success and brought millions of people online way before the Internet was widespread. It also enabled a generation of French telecommunication engineer to have a market outside the telecommunication adminsitration (France Telecom was still public at that time). I do not share at all the view of some of my compatriotes that it slew down the rollout of Internet in France.
Finally, it haf this kiosk feature that would enable users to be charged of service usage on their phone bill without hassle. Apple store and iTune replicate this in a much shinier and user friendly way but which one is more 'neutral'? A market operated by a single company or by a public administration?
The answer would probably different on both sides of the atlantic.
Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.
The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.
Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.
The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.
The policemen had the good idea to seize the device and review the recorded video and just found 65 counts of infraction to the road regulations. One of them was a HUGE speed excess and the guy even recorded the speed indicator just to "prove" it to his friends. Bad idea... Of course the difference is that this material was not posted on the Internet. The video was directly extracted from the camera mounted on the bike. So the driver could not really deny that it did not happen in real life.
All this article is pretty unclear about the attack method described.
All it says is that they supposedly find ways to tap in APIs that associate GSM phone numbers with names. I am not sure that such API are standardized.
Then they say that IF you have direct access to SS7 network and you are able to query the HLR, you are able to track down people (because you are able to get the attachement MSC and possibily the Cell ID using the MAP protocol).
This IF is a big IF. They did not demonstre haw you may break in to the SS7 network from outside of it.
Guys, you have to understand that SS7 network are not exactly working like a IP network. Most of the time, routing is statick and a peer to peer trust relationship must be established between your host and the network before you can eventhing of querying an HLR like this. So this "attack" supposes that the attacked network would basically allow you in.
Unless, they come up with something very new, this is pretty weak. The attack on GSM encryption for conversation was much more significant.
I wonder why using H.264 is such a big fuss in Opera and Firefox.
- modern operating systems have embedded H.264 codecs in it (through Direct Show API on Windows and through Quicktime on Mackintosh). - more and more video GPU are embedding an H.264 decoder nowadays.
So apart from the "philosofic" approach, one could take advantage of these available H.264 decoders to perform video playback and decoding without having to pay any fee or breaking any licence. What remains to be agreed upon in the container file format. MP4 / 3GPP are covered by patents. I can support MPEG-LA for licencing codecs but I never understood anybody patenting a file format. Where is the innovation in a file format?
I my view, everybody should have H.264 as baseline for video (this does not exclude the support for Theora) and agree on a patent free file format or at least advocate the gvt to have these format freed from their patents.
So all this can be seen as a new way to "organise the Internet information" according to them.
In other word inviding again your privacy silently.
If this was to be implemented, one could associate the IP sub network with a web site names without any need to use a search engine. Great for profiling. If performance was the issue, a better set of regional DNS caches would be more relevant here.
I cannot help but suspect some hidden motives here.
SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:
- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant? - what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header? - what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the "Via" headers? - what is the need for "from tags" and 'to tags".
If we go a bit further:
- Why is SIP/SIMPLE do we need to introduce an "etag" and why not resuing the callid ? - etc.
We are a company that is based on SIP and very in favor of this protocol mostly form market reasons but one should not be blind: this protocol has its problems like any other. At the beginning, it was sooo "simple" that it could not even support "announced transfer" or line supervision which is a must for corporate telephony then the real people jumped in and added what it takes to make it usable and added complexity.
Even the big telco that are hated so much in this forum jumped in and created the IMS standards based on SIP (under the ETSI Umbrella = European...). They took it to the next level of complexity but they NEEDED IT because they are the guys who enable you and me to call from A to B without even thinking about how this is done (since more that 100 years).
If you imagine one second that you can only read ONE RFC to start working on the real SIP world, you are VERY WRONG (see RFC 3581, RFC2327, RFC 3264, RFC 3550 + all the RFC dedicated to packetization, SIP/SIMPLE, MESSAGING,....)
Now if you compare SIP with H.323, I agree that initially, one can see a lot of advantages. - H323 has a stupid protocol layering - slow dialog establishment, etc? and although they have improved this, this is still not perfect but they have advandages as well:
- camera control and double video streams are a reality in H.323 world wher in SIP it is still on paper only and badly documented. - screen and application sharing are a reality on H.323 world. They are non existant in SIP - H.323 has defined a clean standard for NAT traversal where SIP has a set of "best practices" spread in various RFC (keepalive, rport, symetric RTP, etc.).
if you cannot read the ITU standards that is basically because: - most of them need to be bought - they have a strong culture of separating the function and the encoding, which renders them difficult to grasp for field hackers - ITU protocols are often based on ASN.1 BER encoding and therefore are compact an binaries and cannot be test with a simple TELNET connection, which seems to trouble a lot of Internet gurus.
I disagree with the previous posts. In that case, technology matters.
A good city wide network should
- handle proper user density - have a good coverage - handle multi-media application such as audio / video over IP - terminal should have a good battery life and reasonable costs
Please note that
- Wifi is certainly not designed to handle user density unless the number of access point is high. Until 802.11n, all users share the same radio channel in a pseudo random way. No frequency allocation, - the above characteristics makes current wifi standard unfit for true bidirectionnal application such as video over IP as we do not have a true two way simultaneous communications. Even with 802.n, the number of available frequency is so few that only a few people would really be able to beneficiate the proper quality. This does not match the need of high density areas. - it is a known fact that Wifi has not been designed with battery life in mind. A lot of wifi equipped terminal makers are struggling with this issue.
When comparing the other potential tehcnologies : 802.20e (Wimax) and 4G / LTE, there is no much choice
- 4G / LTE has the expected characteristics but is so complex that it is out of reach of medium sized organisation. - only Wimax stand a chance.
Then you have to deal with safty regulation on radio protection.
Then Skype which is wonderful (and they promised to to be malware free this time) but they sold it without selling the core technology so they basically screwed the buyer (eBayer)
Then they push the big red button...
Wow...
The're good but I dont like them. The only positive thing is that ebay can now see how it feels when having a problem with a buyer.
Exactly. Assuming that Theora is better in terms of quality, HTML5 designers and implementor need to understand that some level of backward compatibility is needed so HTML5 can reach the masses and not repain a geek feature.
Making ogg / theora mandatory is not the issue BUT
First, we need the tag to be able to render FLV in both VP6 / VP7 and H.264 contents.
Then of course support MP4 containers / 3GP2 files for mobile developments.
As a transitional phase, a plugin system would allow any codec provider to add support for a particular codec / container.
And finally, would it be good as a fight to ask for more favorable licencing terms on H.264 codec ?
I was more or less in favor of HADOPI (not the police side of it but the fact that it was a way to punish minor offences without going the full trial / fine even prison stuff). Now I must agree more or less with the parent post.
By rejecting HADOPI, this means that copying digital music, pictures and text is legal as long as it is released to the public.
- One alternative business model proposed was the global licence. - are they others?
You have to be aware of the very deep consequences of permitting free copy of existing work as long as it can be digitalize. What limit should we put to this new freedom?
If we do not put any limit:
1- for artist, they will be bound to make live performances to earn some money which is a good thing. However to be able to live, a large chunk of them will "sell" their services to advertisment copanies or marketing companies. Music will become either a free art or a marketing addons.
1a - iTune music store may lower the price but not disapear as it provides a distribution service but a Deezer and other free alternative will become dominant.
2- Classical music hum... fewer symphonic orchestra
3- what about painting and photograhies? This mean that digital copies of pictures.
4- How will be movies financed if they can be legally leaked to the Web? Is a global licence enough to cover this? Does it mean that the movie producers will be directly paid by the government?
5- Software will be able to be duplicated for free. No Microsoft anymore. Great for Linux fans but what about the general public? Software product will disapear. SaaS and Open Source + paid service will become the dominant model as this will the only source of revenue.
6 - newspaper will dies more quickly. Is it a problem?
I still beleive that there must be some limit to this copy freedom. But which one?
First of all, I would agree to say that some of his former public behavior and comment are at least displaced. A person obtaining such a position should be able to control himself. Secondly, his way of locking power puy putting friends everywhere and trying to be saturate the medias and communications with his personal presence is very perverse as it gives the impression the French regime is slowly turning into an autocratic one, leaving democratic principle behind.
Despite all this, some aspects of his tenure are ignored in your post.
You might remember former government with nostalgia, I don't: Chirac might be remembered as a nice human guy that had the vision to oppose to Irak war but he was also an old style politician, channeling public monies into his political party (when he was mayor of Paris) and getting unclear counterparts. His government was prerry good at pointing some fundamental French weakness but did nothing serious to address them.
At least, Sarkozy is trying. His govt initiated major reforms regarding retirement, hostpital, uiniversty and everybody knows that it is very important for the country. Even the so despited HADOPI law has the merit to put on the table an issue that is most of the time discussed only in geek circles.
You have to recognise also that there is a poisonous atmosphere in French public opinon where Sarkozy's massive media presence (even in lefitst press) has generated a massive rejection. The problem with this is that people are unable to think clearly and discuss calmly about positive or negatve aspects of the reforms (and there are actually positive ones in my view). Your angry post is a living proof of this and a lot of people do the same. I blame Sarko directly for this reaction: it is the result of his communication strategy that leave no space for anybody.
Finally, I feel very inconfortable with the way that your post or other strong minded opinons about the French president. Political views are sided but ought to be more polite. Politness put a necessary distance that enable to have a clearer view of the real issues. And those are not related with the size of the head of state nor with the fact that he is qualified to work this toilet paper.
Finally we can see here the limits of the so called "Internet Model" were company provide services for free in return for advertisments.
Maybe the entry of devevelopping world in the Web arena will promote back the old reasonnable model where you actually sell something (a good or a service) and customers buy if it meets their need with at the proper price point
While it is understandable that prople may complain that big media / entertainment companies abuse their dominant position and lead to a price point that is unacceptable, it is difficult to me to accept that no creator deserve any protection
So writer's book can be copied and sold all over the street. Same thing for musicians. Also software makers (companies and individual) have to recourse if they decide to go closed source and make an honest living?
So you are basically against making money from creations? The world that you aspire would be only based on fabrication and distribution and private and personnal leisure. Very dull indeed.
Sorry. As much as I am against major companies milking their customers, I cannot accept such extreme and short sighted position on the argument that people wants it. Everybody want free lunches but at the end of the day someone has to grow the vegetables and raise the cow.
I read the blog post and I find the title a litle inaccurate: the EU level clearly rejected the three strike principle to be extended as a EU directive but it is unclear if the decision will force France to back down on its national law.
It may need a directive to specify that this kind of approach is forbidden. Then, it may need a formal complain from the EU commission or a French citizen size the European Court of Justice to have the law revoked or modified.
The parent post also mentionned prison here. But the law was specifically designed to avoid sending people to prison for what is a minor offence.
Personnaly, I don't find the principle of three strikes and you are disconnected so problematic as it looks like road regulationsBUT there are some serious issues with the current implementations:
First and not least, the organisation that is in charge of monitoring and issueing warnings and disconnection order is some kind of extra judicial stuff. I believe that the final text include justice intervention but it is very thin...
Secondly, the ability to sue file transfer software editor is just ridiculous. It violates the principle that software is neutral and that it is individuals that perform the acts.
Ok, I guess my karma will suffer from the opinion above but please, could someone explain we what would be a balanced approach that would enforce right of creators and freedoms of Internet users?
I still wonder why so many people moan about H.264 licensing fees. It is quite reasonable and is not stupidly overpriced as in the case of AMR audio codec. Here are the terms of MPEG 4 LA
In the case of the (a) encoder and decoder manufacturer sublicenses:
For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM
basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of an operating system (a
decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = âoeunitâ),
royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per legal entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no
royalty (this threshold is available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per
unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10
per unit. The maximum annual royalty (âoecapâ) for an enterprise (commonly controlled
legal entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5
million per year 2009-10.8
This means that if you would start a company that would sell a product that would embbed ffmpeg / x264 (you have to release the sources in that case because of GPL...), you would not have to pay anything for your first 100 000 units, the above 100 000, you have to pay $20 000 / year so 0.20 $US / year / user. This sounds reasonable.
Of course such approach is not compatible with the GPL philosophy that emphasises the "no string attached" philosophy but H.264 development did not come free either. I wonder if the devlopper of x264 could not sell non GPL licences of their codec with a low price: 2$ per unit + 0.5$ per year per unit for support and patent fees. This would enable anyone wanting to do business to have a sound legal base and channel more money in open source codec developments.
- we should have a true full duplex communication with radio resource allocation. We need this for VoIP - we should have better network density (more user per network) - we should have better way to avoid interference between neighbouring networks. - in case of wimax, high latency has been reported when network becomes really used and bad behaviour inside buildings. - next gen wireless network should also be optimised to avoid battery drain. - For network pairing, please copy GAP/DECT technology and remove this network key usability nonsense. - Innovate by making wireless roaming easy.
Fix this first. Otherwise, at this rate, big telco and 3G technology will rule.
We have bought a pair of Grandstream videophone. The are cheap and much easier to use than PC for older people as they are basically... telephones.
You can even setup Grandpa's one in auto-answer mode but I would not recommend it for obvious privacy issues as one of the comments above maliciously reminded.
AH and to overcome NAT and dynamic IP address issues, you have to setup a hosted SIP proxy and media relay such as Asterisk. I cheat here as this the very business of my company.
By the way if you want a pair of free SIP accounts and the Grandstream videophone, we could sell them to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello,
Indeed but what I find hugely amusing is how much clone war episod are inspired by meditation / buddhist precepts (e.g. Padme = passion) It's almost a rip off. So all this Jedi stuff might lead some people to study serious stuff for greater good.
For those who are interested, the notion of "Force" is probably a rip off of Irina Rockwell and Chögyam Trungpa about Shambala:
http://nalandabodhi.webpossystem.com/ViewProduct.asp?ModelNumber=199
Bla bla bla ... the French ... bla bla Slashdot ... bla bla surrender ... bla bla bla unrelated. Pffff
The fact is that two execs from a powerful public utility got jail sentence. So it is not "unlike the rainbow warrior case" but it is rather very good sign on how justice worked in France for this particular cases regardless of the past and despite the fact the French govt would have more interest in supporting nuclear business.
Dude,
Some exec got jailed.
Ah ah!
this alternative history of the Internet is sooooo american that it becomes exotic. I especially like the idea that the FCC would mandate the French minitel to fix bob. Eh eh ! Microsoft protocol fixed by a French (socialist) govenment mandated cheese carrying protocol. Bob must be VERY BAD.
Joke aside, although it is a good thing that Minitel has been superseeded by the Internet in France, it WAS a success and brought millions of people online way before the Internet was widespread. It also enabled a generation of French telecommunication engineer to have a market outside the telecommunication adminsitration (France Telecom was still public at that time). I do not share at all the view of some of my compatriotes that it slew down the rollout of Internet in France.
Finally, it haf this kiosk feature that would enable users to be charged of service usage on their phone bill without hassle. Apple store and iTune replicate this in a much shinier and user friendly way but which one is more 'neutral'? A market operated by a single company or by a public administration?
The answer would probably different on both sides of the atlantic.
Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.
[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/
The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.
Here, we had a guy who mounted a camera on his motorbike and recorded his feats. He got controlled by the policeman and the had the good idea to size the device and review the recorded video.
[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/
The found 65 counts of infraction to road regulations including a HUGE speed excess and the guy had the "good" idea to record the speed indicator to prove it to his friends. Bad idea. The material was not posted on the Internet rather extracted directly from the camera. I was very difficult to deny it did not happen in real life in this case.
Here we had a guy on a motorbike that mounted a camera and recorded his feats.
[fr] http://www.lejdd.fr/Societe/Faits-divers/Actualite/Un-motard-filme-ses-infractions-205788/
The policemen had the good idea to seize the device and review the recorded video and just found 65 counts of infraction to the road regulations. ...
One of them was a HUGE speed excess and the guy even recorded the speed indicator just to "prove" it to his friends. Bad idea
Of course the difference is that this material was not posted on the Internet. The video was directly extracted from the camera mounted on the bike. So the driver could not really deny that it did not happen in real life.
All this article is pretty unclear about the attack method described.
All it says is that they supposedly find ways to tap in APIs that associate GSM phone numbers with names. I am not sure that such API are standardized.
Then they say that IF you have direct access to SS7 network and you are able to query the HLR, you are able to track down people (because you are able to get the attachement MSC and possibily the Cell ID using the MAP protocol).
This IF is a big IF. They did not demonstre haw you may break in to the SS7 network from outside of it.
Guys, you have to understand that SS7 network are not exactly working like a IP network. Most of the time, routing is statick and a peer to peer trust relationship must be established between your host and the network before you can eventhing of querying an HLR like this. So this "attack" supposes that the attacked network would basically allow you in.
Unless, they come up with something very new, this is pretty weak. The attack on GSM encryption for conversation was much more significant.
IP V6 everywhere
static herarchical routing everywhere based on geographical IP addresses prefixex.
like in the old telecom way.
Hello,
I wonder why using H.264 is such a big fuss in Opera and Firefox.
- modern operating systems have embedded H.264 codecs in it (through Direct Show API on Windows and through Quicktime on Mackintosh).
- more and more video GPU are embedding an H.264 decoder nowadays.
So apart from the "philosofic" approach, one could take advantage of these available H.264 decoders to perform video playback and decoding without having to pay any fee or breaking any licence. What remains to be agreed upon in the container file format. MP4 / 3GPP are covered by patents. I can support MPEG-LA for licencing codecs but I never understood anybody patenting a file format. Where is the innovation in a file format?
I my view, everybody should have H.264 as baseline for video (this does not exclude the support for Theora) and agree on a patent free file format or at least advocate the gvt to have these format freed from their patents.
So all this can be seen as a new way to "organise the Internet information" according to them.
In other word inviding again your privacy silently.
If this was to be implemented, one could associate the IP sub network with a web site names without any need to use a search engine. Great for profiling. If performance was the issue, a better set of regional DNS caches would be more relevant here.
I cannot help but suspect some hidden motives here.
Hahahahaha !
SIP a single RFC? Can you imagine the number of SIP related RFCs and associated drafts? SIP WAS simple, it is now a mess. Even if we restrict to RFC 3261, if you can asnwer the following questions you are already a MASTER in SIP:
- what is the difference between request URI and the "To" header? Are they redundant?
- what is the difference between the "Contact" header, the "P-Asserted-Identity" header and the "From" header?
- what is the loose routign mechanism and what is the relationship with the "Via" headers?
- what is the need for "from tags" and 'to tags".
If we go a bit further:
- Why is SIP/SIMPLE do we need to introduce an "etag" and why not resuing the callid ?
- etc.
We are a company that is based on SIP and very in favor of this protocol mostly form market reasons but one should not be blind: this protocol has its problems like any other. At the beginning, it was sooo "simple" that it could not even support "announced transfer" or line supervision which is a must for corporate telephony then the real people jumped in and added what it takes to make it usable and added complexity.
Even the big telco that are hated so much in this forum jumped in and created the IMS standards based on SIP (under the ETSI Umbrella = European ...). They took it to the next level of complexity but they NEEDED IT because they are the guys who enable you and me to call from A to B without even thinking about how this is done (since more that 100 years).
If you imagine one second that you can only read ONE RFC to start working on the real SIP world, you are VERY WRONG (see RFC 3581, RFC2327, RFC 3264, RFC 3550 + all the RFC dedicated to packetization, SIP/SIMPLE, MESSAGING, ....)
Now if you compare SIP with H.323, I agree that initially, one can see a lot of advantages.
- H323 has a stupid protocol layering
- slow dialog establishment, etc?
and although they have improved this, this is still not perfect but they have advandages as well:
- camera control and double video streams are a reality in H.323 world wher in SIP it is still on paper only and badly documented.
- screen and application sharing are a reality on H.323 world. They are non existant in SIP
- H.323 has defined a clean standard for NAT traversal where SIP has a set of "best practices" spread in various RFC (keepalive, rport, symetric RTP, etc.).
if you cannot read the ITU standards that is basically because:
- most of them need to be bought
- they have a strong culture of separating the function and the encoding, which renders them difficult to grasp for field hackers
- ITU protocols are often based on ASN.1 BER encoding and therefore are compact an binaries and cannot be test with a simple TELNET connection, which seems to trouble a lot of Internet gurus.
Emmanuel
http://www.ives.fr/
I disagree with the previous posts. In that case, technology matters.
A good city wide network should
- handle proper user density
- have a good coverage
- handle multi-media application such as audio / video over IP
- terminal should have a good battery life and reasonable costs
Please note that
- Wifi is certainly not designed to handle user density unless the number of access point is high. Until 802.11n, all users share the same radio channel in a pseudo random way. No frequency allocation,
- the above characteristics makes current wifi standard unfit for true bidirectionnal application such as video over IP as we do not have a true two way simultaneous communications. Even with 802.n, the number of available frequency is so few that only a few people would really be able to beneficiate the proper quality. This does not match the need of high density areas.
- it is a known fact that Wifi has not been designed with battery life in mind. A lot of wifi equipped terminal makers are struggling with this issue.
When comparing the other potential tehcnologies : 802.20e (Wimax) and 4G / LTE, there is no much choice
- 4G / LTE has the expected characteristics but is so complex that it is out of reach of medium sized organisation.
- only Wimax stand a chance.
Then you have to deal with safty regulation on radio protection.
Yes, technology does matter in that case.
http://www.ives.fr/
Except that in the book, it was in base 11 and the figure was starting and ending with a line of 0 as well.
Yeah,
They produced Kazaa the mother of all malware
Then Skype which is wonderful (and they promised to to be malware free this time) but they sold it without selling the core technology so they basically screwed the buyer (eBayer)
Then they push the big red button ...
Wow ...
The're good but I dont like them. The only positive thing is that ebay can now see how it feels when having a problem with a buyer.
Exactly. Assuming that Theora is better in terms of quality, HTML5 designers and implementor need to understand that some level of backward compatibility is needed so HTML5 can reach the masses and not repain a geek feature.
Making ogg / theora mandatory is not the issue BUT
First, we need the tag to be able to render FLV in both VP6 / VP7 and H.264 contents.
Then of course support MP4 containers / 3GP2 files for mobile developments.
As a transitional phase, a plugin system would allow any codec provider to add support for a particular codec / container.
And finally, would it be good as a fight to ask for more favorable licencing terms on H.264 codec ?
Sorry to disappoint you but outskirt is the standard translation for French banlieue, which makes the whole thing less sexy.
On the other hand, if you insist on this side, I may advise you to have a look at this geek's girlfriend advise site if you read some French.
Cheers.
These are very good arguments ...
I was more or less in favor of HADOPI (not the police side of it but the fact that it was a way to punish minor offences without going the full trial / fine even prison stuff). Now I must agree more or less with the parent post.
By rejecting HADOPI, this means that copying digital music, pictures and text is legal as long as it is released to the public.
- One alternative business model proposed was the global licence.
- are they others?
You have to be aware of the very deep consequences of permitting free copy of existing work as long as it can be digitalize. What limit should we put to this new freedom?
If we do not put any limit:
1- for artist, they will be bound to make live performances to earn some money which is a good thing. However to be able to live, a large chunk of them will "sell" their services to advertisment copanies or marketing companies. Music will become either a free art or a marketing addons.
1a - iTune music store may lower the price but not disapear as it provides a distribution service but a Deezer and other free alternative will become dominant.
2- Classical music hum ... fewer symphonic orchestra
3- what about painting and photograhies? This mean that digital copies of pictures.
4- How will be movies financed if they can be legally leaked to the Web? Is a global licence enough to cover this? Does it mean that the movie producers will be directly paid by the government?
5- Software will be able to be duplicated for free. No Microsoft anymore. Great for Linux fans but what about the general public? Software product will disapear. SaaS and Open Source + paid service will become the dominant model as this will the only source of revenue.
6 - newspaper will dies more quickly. Is it a problem?
I still beleive that there must be some limit to this copy freedom. But which one?
Yes and no ...
First of all, I would agree to say that some of his former public behavior and comment are at least displaced. A person obtaining such a position should be able to control himself. Secondly, his way of locking power puy putting friends everywhere and trying to be saturate the medias and communications with his personal presence is very perverse as it gives the impression the French regime is slowly turning into an autocratic one, leaving democratic principle behind.
Despite all this, some aspects of his tenure are ignored in your post.
You might remember former government with nostalgia, I don't: Chirac might be remembered as a nice human guy that had the vision to oppose to Irak war but he was also an old style politician, channeling public monies into his political party (when he was mayor of Paris) and getting unclear counterparts. His government was prerry good at pointing some fundamental French weakness but did nothing serious to address them.
At least, Sarkozy is trying. His govt initiated major reforms regarding retirement, hostpital, uiniversty and everybody knows that it is very important for the country. Even the so despited HADOPI law has the merit to put on the table an issue that is most of the time discussed only in geek circles.
You have to recognise also that there is a poisonous atmosphere in French public opinon where Sarkozy's massive media presence (even in lefitst press) has generated a massive rejection. The problem with this is that people are unable to think clearly and discuss calmly about positive or negatve aspects of the reforms (and there are actually positive ones in my view). Your angry post is a living proof of this and a lot of people do the same. I blame Sarko directly for this reaction: it is the result of his communication strategy that leave no space for anybody.
Finally, I feel very inconfortable with the way that your post or other strong minded opinons about the French president. Political views are sided but ought to be more polite. Politness put a necessary distance that enable to have a clearer view of the real issues. And those are not related with the size of the head of state nor with the fact that he is qualified to work this toilet paper.
Finally we can see here the limits of the so called "Internet Model" were company provide services for free in return for advertisments. Maybe the entry of devevelopping world in the Web arena will promote back the old reasonnable model where you actually sell something (a good or a service) and customers buy if it meets their need with at the proper price point
Waow!
While it is understandable that prople may complain that big media / entertainment companies abuse their dominant position and lead to a price point that is unacceptable, it is difficult to me to accept that no creator deserve any protection
So writer's book can be copied and sold all over the street. Same thing for musicians. Also software makers (companies and individual) have to recourse if they decide to go closed source and make an honest living?
So you are basically against making money from creations? The world that you aspire would be only based on fabrication and distribution and private and personnal leisure. Very dull indeed.
Sorry. As much as I am against major companies milking their customers, I cannot accept such extreme and short sighted position on the argument that people wants it. Everybody want free lunches but at the end of the day someone has to grow the vegetables and raise the cow.
I am aware that there are some proponent of the "gift based economy" but it does not see it applicable here on a systematic base. The major devlopment of arts in Europe started during Renaissance as there were wealthy mécÃnes ready to PAY artists. By giving up any protection to creators, you would cause that kind of systems to be reinstated. Only a small and wealthy elite would pay for private concerts or other cultural events. Neat progress!
I read the blog post and I find the title a litle inaccurate: the EU level clearly rejected the three strike principle to be extended as a EU directive but it is unclear if the decision will force France to back down on its national law.
It may need a directive to specify that this kind of approach is forbidden. Then, it may need a formal complain from the EU commission or a French citizen size the European Court of Justice to have the law revoked or modified.
The parent post also mentionned prison here. But the law was specifically designed to avoid sending people to prison for what is a minor offence.
Personnaly, I don't find the principle of three strikes and you are disconnected so problematic as it looks like road regulationsBUT there are some serious issues with the current implementations:
Ok, I guess my karma will suffer from the opinion above but please, could someone explain we what would be a balanced approach that would enforce right of creators and freedoms of Internet users?
What are your proposal slashcrowd?
Hello
I still wonder why so many people moan about H.264 licensing fees. It is quite reasonable and is not stupidly overpriced as in the case of AMR audio codec. Here are the terms of MPEG 4 LA
In the case of the (a) encoder and decoder manufacturer sublicenses: For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to end users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of an operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = âoeunitâ), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per legal entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (âoecapâ) for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10.8
This means that if you would start a company that would sell a product that would embbed ffmpeg / x264 (you have to release the sources in that case because of GPL ...), you would not have to pay anything for your first 100 000 units, the above 100 000, you have to pay $20 000 / year so 0.20 $US / year / user. This sounds reasonable.
Of course such approach is not compatible with the GPL philosophy that emphasises the "no string attached" philosophy but H.264 development did not come free either. I wonder if the devlopper of x264 could not sell non GPL licences of their codec with a low price: 2$ per unit + 0.5$ per year per unit for support and patent fees. This would enable anyone wanting to do business to have a sound legal base and channel more money in open source codec developments.
Emmanuel. IVeS
Before going gigabit, we await a few fixes
- we should have a true full duplex communication with radio resource allocation. We need this for VoIP
- we should have better network density (more user per network)
- we should have better way to avoid interference between neighbouring networks.
- in case of wimax, high latency has been reported when network becomes really used and bad behaviour inside buildings.
- next gen wireless network should also be optimised to avoid battery drain.
- For network pairing, please copy GAP/DECT technology and remove this network key usability nonsense.
- Innovate by making wireless roaming easy.
Fix this first. Otherwise, at this rate, big telco and 3G technology will rule.
We have bought a pair of Grandstream videophone. The are cheap and much easier to use than PC for older people as they are basically ... telephones.
You can even setup Grandpa's one in auto-answer mode but I would not recommend it for obvious privacy issues as one of the comments above maliciously reminded.
AH and to overcome NAT and dynamic IP address issues, you have to setup a hosted SIP proxy and media relay such as Asterisk. I cheat here as this the very business of my company.
By the way if you want a pair of free SIP accounts and the Grandstream videophone, we could sell them to you.