You're getting your information from a PR person. I'm getting mine from the licensing page [mp3licensing.com]. I see no such exception for free decoders.
The page you linked to states explicitly that MP3 decoders are not necessarily subject to per-unit royalties: either pay a per-unit fee ($0.75) or a one-time royalty of $50 000. Pay the latter, and you're covered for any number of decoders shipped. For any software company (Nullsoft/Winamp, Apple, whoever) this is small change - less than the cost of one man-year of coding.
Granted, this is an issue if you're trying to run a non-commercial project on the cheap, and a big issue if you want to distribute free encoder software (no flat-rate option there - $2.50 per unit), but this shouldn't rip the MP3 players out of RedHat or Mandrake's distros any time soon. I imagine it's the encoder issue which caused this move?
Well, for starters, Solaris boxes are rather expensive,
Really? Apart from Solaris on x86, you can get Sun hardware for $1k now - OK, you can buy cheaper x86 systems, but by the time you factor in the usual MS stuff (Win2k, Office, support costs for another Windows box) Solaris could well be a better option.
I'd suggest a fire wall, and disabling the autoinstallers.
I'd suggest the obvious approach. Think: what exactly does your database system need Internet access for? Just don't plug it into the Net: keep it sitting on a desk, offline (or at least LAN only). That way, it cannot be compromised except locally, which isn't usually an issue (just lock the door!)
It's quite depressing how many people assume computer=networked=on-Internet-without-firewall these days. Despite all the dot-com style hype about online domestic appliances, your refrigerator, toaster and medical records server do not need (or even benefit from!) an Internet connection!
Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.
You mean like:
Mac vs Windows vs Linux?
Yep. The biggest hurdle for Linux and the Mac is Windows compatibility - hence SoftWindows/SoftPC, Wine, VMWare, Bochs, Win4Lin - not to mention cross-platform systems like Java, HTML etc, all designed to circumvent this problem.
Remember what (almost) killed Unix in the first place? Fragmentation. Each Unix vendor adding their own little "features", making cross-platform support a little harder each time. If they'd been able to agree on a single "Unix" rather than each going their own way, we could all be using commodity Unix boxes interchangeably.
Or maybe:
Gnome vs KDE vs Motif?
Yes, another case in point: this is a big PITA for developers - and, again, something the original Unix people avoided like the plague. You were supposed to have "a window manager" - it doesn't matter which, they all use the same protocol, and are all interchangeable. Now, we have a nightmare of rival libraries, doing the same thing in different ways.
One of the greatest advantages Windows has is uniformity - for users and developers alike. With very few exceptions, a 7 year-old Windows 95 (Win32) application will run perfectly happily on Windows XP; even old DOS applications from 20 years ago will usually run, unless they access low-level things directly. Meanwhile, adding items to the Programs menu hasn't even remained consistent within Gnome, let alone between Gnome, KDE and others; as I type this, CodeWeavers are still trying to update Crossover to support Gnome 2's new approach.
Or how about:
rpm vs apt-get vs pkg?
apt-get and rpm work very nicely as a team, so that's hardly a good example...
Haven't you ever wondered why so much effort goes into standards - the IETF with RFCs, the Single Unix Spec, POSIX, W3C, Linux Standards Base...?
This technology has proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform. At this point we have no plans for supporting the Unix platform.
Uhh... this is server-side technology, unless they're doing something very dumb (like streaming the raw audio, ads and all, along with a replacement set of ads to be inserted instead?!). All they need to do is send the same audio stream they send to WMP clients, but encoding in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio or whatever. Hell, you could even do it by piping the Line Out from a Windows client into a Real/Darwin/whatever streaming server for rebroadcast!
I don't know what the problem really is, but this "explanation" certainly doesn't hold water - either they're talking BS, or the PHBs have taken over the asylum and fallen for some really dumb FUD!
By your logic, we should have no recourse against an cyber-terrorist attack launched from foreign soil, if the laws that the attack originate from do not forbid this type of action. So, when Al Queda version 2.0 tries to take a shot at disabling half of San Francisco, you're pretty much screwed, because, hey, they don't have to accept your laws.
Wrong - not "no recourse", it just wouldn't be a criminal matter, it would be an act of war (if the foreign country in question permitted it). Pearl Harbour wasn't illegal, but the US had a great deal of recourse there...
We've seen this question raised a few times now - from Yahoo! being censored by the French government, to criminal cases like this. My feeling is you should be subject only to the laws of the country you are physically in: for one thing, it's much simpler and more reliable to determine, as well as reducing the inter-jurisdictional mess you could get into otherwise (a host in the UK is broken into from an IP in Canada, so the UK police investigate, then contact the Canadians - who go round and raid the "cracker", only to find it was being used by someone in Mexico as a relay) - rather than extraditing to 10 different countries, you just pass evidence on to the Mexican police, who bust the guy for X counts of computer cracking.
The alternative (the one the Russian FSB [Federal Security Bureau], formerly known as KGB [Committee for State Security]) and certain French censorship judges want is that you are somehow subject to all laws combined - which is a horrible mess. Is this post subject to UK law? (I'm in the UK ATM) Or US? (US server) Or Canadian (accessable from Canada) - in which case it should probably be translated into French as well?
This seems simple to me: when in country X, you are subject to the laws of country X. Everybody else should STFU: I will not accept French, Russian or for that matter Taleban laws as applicable in any way except on their own soil. Hell, if the former KGB considers the FBI's investigation illegal, imagine how illegal the CIA spying on the USSR is - or those spy satellites Boeing and Lockheed make?
How does putting an interop chip in your PS1, writing a program on your PC, compiling it with GCC, burning it to a CD, and putting it in the PS1's drive violate Sony's copyright?
Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware). According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission - at least, they say linking against other code requires that code's author's permission. (That's how the GPL bans non-GPL code calling GPLed libraries, unlike the LGPL...)
I had thought that one hour of CD quality music is about 600Mb, so how does he get over five hours of CD-quality music?
One word: compression. Five hours in 500 Mb is 800 Mbits/hr, or just over 220 Kbit/sec. A well encoded MP3 at 320VBR averages less than that, and I can't tell the difference between that and the original CD.
Even truly lossless (bit-for-bit reproduction) can be achieved with better than 2:1 compression, which would make 5 hours of CD music (just under 1.5 Mbit/sec bitrate) take 1.5 Gb, so reaching 6:1 shouldn't be a huge problem IMO.
Obsolescence will remain forever a problem, Hase warns, as long as companies continue to take proprietary approaches to home networking and automation.
Somehow, I can't quite see that quote coming from the average corporate suit, where "proprietary" is regarded as a feature not a flaw...
I saw one of these at the weekend
on
Self-Heating Can
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Quite neat really: a cup of coffee (two versions: white, and white+sugar), with a little capsule on the bottom. Press the button (filled with red gel), wait a couple of minutes, then drink!
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function! Good for camping trips, perhaps, but not in the roadside service station where they were selling it: you can buy normal fresh coffee for the same price and get a seat and newspaper to go with it...
(yes, I turned it into Microsoft's attempt at HTML in Word - then fixed it with Tidy and Emacs:P) It does look rather better than the one linked in the article, though...
One point the reviewer missed is that Ross put a few chapters of the book on his home page here. There's a page about the book itself here with links to a couple of chapters.
From what I've seen of it so far, it's a good book (Disclaimer: yes, he was my project supervisor last year!). A few funny typos etc in the errata, which is well worth a look, too, especially anyone wondering who the hell this "Prince Schneier" guy on p 113 is;-)
Additionally, it means you cant use a copy of w2k licensed for 2 cpus on a 2 cpu box if each cpu features hyperthreading, since it will look like a 4 cpu box.
According to a recent post on linux-kernel, there's a BIOS-level hack to work around this: the "real" CPUs are always listed before the "virtual" CPUs. So, if you boot a copy of XP licensed for 4 CPUs on a machine with 4 hyperthreaded CPUs, it will use all four real CPUs, and ignore the hyperthreaded element. (The downside is that processor IDs aren't as obvious under Linux; you'd expect CPU#1 to be the "second half" of CPU#0, but it isn't...)
"Here I am throwing mail with an MBA" ...Cavazos, who has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University and a master's of business administration from Pfeiffer University
OK, he's not a coder, but he does have a technical degree too...
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager"
She is versed in programming,
So SHE *IS* a coder! (Of course, with a name like that, you'll never get a tech job; people will associate you with the other Katz;)
The QA guy did software QA, which I'd say is fairly technical (or the company's doing something wrong...)
OK, the soap opera script writer wasn't a techie, but the others all were. I wonder how many of the unemployed/underemployed people have MCSEs?:-)
Re:VERY dangerous, but don't forget the benefits
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
(alot like existing systems that have a magnetic tag, but these ones you cant "sneak" around the scanners, cause they run on RF.)
In fact, a lot of the current anti-theft tags DO work on RF already - they just resonate at a particular frequency. The detectors on the doors emit that frequency, and detect an "echo" which sounds the alarm. To deactivate the tag, when an item goes through the barcode scanner a much stronger pulse at the same frequency burns out the little tag, so it no longer echoes.
This system could be used in a similar way: as you walk through a detector arch, the computer identifies and deactivates each tag it senses. Once there are no more tags present, everything you're carrying has been scanned and charged for - and you aren't carrying any working tags any more, so there are no privacy concerns: once you've paid for the items, the tag is deactivated.
...the protection system Content Scrambling System (CSS), that protects the content of DVD-disks from copying.
Does it hell! Will someone please explain to these reporters that encryption has no effect on copying whatsoever?
An encrypted block of data is exactly as easy to copy as the plaintext it was made from. All the CSS encryption system does is force those wanting to play a DVD to agree to a license from the DVD CCA (the licensing outfit controlling the encryption keys). Ultimately, I think this is what the MPAA and co want: control. Bit by bit, they build up their control; Macrovision, no skipping the FBI warning, region coding - maybe next you won't be able to skip the trailers, either? Then some sort of pay-per-view version (DiVX tried, but was too early - then. Will it return in another guise?)
I think id should have provided some sort of cryptographic signature to give people, who are downloading the file from mirrors, the option to check whether their file has been tampered with. An executable which will be installed on so many servers certainly is a great vehicle if someone wanted to distribute a backdoor.
Which is why most Linux distros ship with MD5s of the ISO, CPAN (the Perl packaging system) ships MD5s of all the tarballs, etc...
Speaking of which:
9f7d2b07aec562c4c685e3d628e95c4d wolfmp-linux-1.0.b2.x86.run
Oddly enough, the tarball DOES have hooks inside itself for an MD5 self-check - but they aren't used. Of course, this doesn't guard against malicious tampering (just change the checksum when you change the binary!), but would detect corrupt downloads. It does seem to do a CRC check though...
(This would not work with sites that rely on HTTP1.1 to tell them the name of the site, so that many sites can be hosted on a single IP, but that is less widely used than it might be.)
Also, you can put the IP address in the hosts file; then, everything will work fine. Or just run your own DNS daemon locally (djbdns is good for this), which is easy on *nix platforms, and you won't even notice the site being "censored":-)
Of course, if too many people do this, the govt might grow a brain and try a more effect means of censorship; on the plus side, one-way air tickets are quite cheap these days...
"Anyone carrying a purse or fanny-pack will be asked to go through a security check"
Nothing wrong with that, IMO; in Houston this summer, I was helping with the Ballunar festival, and there were bag searches on the gate there. (Not by us volunteer security people; searches were done by the State Guard military police, for some reason.) A nice event, and I didn't see anyone objecting to the bag checks while I was on...
PDF (thanks to ps2pdf.com) available at http://homer.artificialcheese.com/fccm01_pilchard. pdf (I'm not putting an HTML link in for a reason, I don't want everyont to get it from me)
PLEASE MIRROR! I dont have nearly enough bandwidth to withstand the/. effect!
Done - mirror here Should be enough bandwidth - couple of megabits available - if not, I'll move it to a bigger box next door...
If microsquish could get over the embarrassment of admitting that NT will never be able to do the job, they could redeploy hotmail on IBM equipment, and make it worth using.
The back-end already lives on Sun boxen (Enterprise 4500) - not quite the big-iron of IBM's zSeries/S/390, but a far cry from an NT system... Only the front end - the WWW servers and CGIs - run on NT, on the PC hardware which ran FreeBSD earlier.
So, a FS conversion tool would be really nice, like that DOS to NTFS thingy.
I'm sure the group (IBM, Reiser, SGI, Ext3) that comes up with the first will have a first-mover advantage and more users.
ext3 does this already. All the new features which have been retrofitted to ext2 recently - not just journalling, but directory indexes (to speed up file access using a tree instead of a linear search), tail-merging and a few other nice things - are backwards compatible. To use them, mount the file system with the right driver and mount option; mount under an older driver, and the FS still works, just without journalling etc. You don't even need a conversion utility: it just does it all at mount time!
Slashdot Mirror
The page you linked to states explicitly that MP3 decoders are not necessarily subject to per-unit royalties: either pay a per-unit fee ($0.75) or a one-time royalty of $50 000. Pay the latter, and you're covered for any number of decoders shipped. For any software company (Nullsoft/Winamp, Apple, whoever) this is small change - less than the cost of one man-year of coding.
Granted, this is an issue if you're trying to run a non-commercial project on the cheap, and a big issue if you want to distribute free encoder software (no flat-rate option there - $2.50 per unit), but this shouldn't rip the MP3 players out of RedHat or Mandrake's distros any time soon. I imagine it's the encoder issue which caused this move?
Really? Apart from Solaris on x86, you can get Sun hardware for $1k now - OK, you can buy cheaper x86 systems, but by the time you factor in the usual MS stuff (Win2k, Office, support costs for another Windows box) Solaris could well be a better option.
I'd suggest the obvious approach. Think: what exactly does your database system need Internet access for? Just don't plug it into the Net: keep it sitting on a desk, offline (or at least LAN only). That way, it cannot be compromised except locally, which isn't usually an issue (just lock the door!)
It's quite depressing how many people assume computer=networked=on-Internet-without-firewall these days. Despite all the dot-com style hype about online domestic appliances, your refrigerator, toaster and medical records server do not need (or even benefit from!) an Internet connection!
Remember what (almost) killed Unix in the first place? Fragmentation. Each Unix vendor adding their own little "features", making cross-platform support a little harder each time. If they'd been able to agree on a single "Unix" rather than each going their own way, we could all be using commodity Unix boxes interchangeably.
Yes, another case in point: this is a big PITA for developers - and, again, something the original Unix people avoided like the plague. You were supposed to have "a window manager" - it doesn't matter which, they all use the same protocol, and are all interchangeable. Now, we have a nightmare of rival libraries, doing the same thing in different ways.
One of the greatest advantages Windows has is uniformity - for users and developers alike. With very few exceptions, a 7 year-old Windows 95 (Win32) application will run perfectly happily on Windows XP; even old DOS applications from 20 years ago will usually run, unless they access low-level things directly. Meanwhile, adding items to the Programs menu hasn't even remained consistent within Gnome, let alone between Gnome, KDE and others; as I type this, CodeWeavers are still trying to update Crossover to support Gnome 2's new approach.
apt-get and rpm work very nicely as a team, so that's hardly a good example...
Haven't you ever wondered why so much effort goes into standards - the IETF with RFCs, the Single Unix Spec, POSIX, W3C, Linux Standards Base...?
Uhh... this is server-side technology, unless they're doing something very dumb (like streaming the raw audio, ads and all, along with a replacement set of ads to be inserted instead?!). All they need to do is send the same audio stream they send to WMP clients, but encoding in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio or whatever. Hell, you could even do it by piping the Line Out from a Windows client into a Real/Darwin/whatever streaming server for rebroadcast!
I don't know what the problem really is, but this "explanation" certainly doesn't hold water - either they're talking BS, or the PHBs have taken over the asylum and fallen for some really dumb FUD!
Wrong - not "no recourse", it just wouldn't be a criminal matter, it would be an act of war (if the foreign country in question permitted it). Pearl Harbour wasn't illegal, but the US had a great deal of recourse there...
The alternative (the one the Russian FSB [Federal Security Bureau], formerly known as KGB [Committee for State Security]) and certain French censorship judges want is that you are somehow subject to all laws combined - which is a horrible mess. Is this post subject to UK law? (I'm in the UK ATM) Or US? (US server) Or Canadian (accessable from Canada) - in which case it should probably be translated into French as well?
This seems simple to me: when in country X, you are subject to the laws of country X. Everybody else should STFU: I will not accept French, Russian or for that matter Taleban laws as applicable in any way except on their own soil. Hell, if the former KGB considers the FBI's investigation illegal, imagine how illegal the CIA spying on the USSR is - or those spy satellites Boeing and Lockheed make?
I don't know about ASCII-art ads, but these guys certainly think there's a market for plain old ASCII ads!
Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware). According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission - at least, they say linking against other code requires that code's author's permission. (That's how the GPL bans non-GPL code calling GPLed libraries, unlike the LGPL...)
One word: compression. Five hours in 500 Mb is 800 Mbits/hr, or just over 220 Kbit/sec. A well encoded MP3 at 320VBR averages less than that, and I can't tell the difference between that and the original CD.
Even truly lossless (bit-for-bit reproduction) can be achieved with better than 2:1 compression, which would make 5 hours of CD music (just under 1.5 Mbit/sec bitrate) take 1.5 Gb, so reaching 6:1 shouldn't be a huge problem IMO.
Somehow, I can't quite see that quote coming from the average corporate suit, where "proprietary" is regarded as a feature not a flaw...
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function! Good for camping trips, perhaps, but not in the roadside service station where they were selling it: you can buy normal fresh coffee for the same price and get a seat and newspaper to go with it...
I thought the DMCA was an idiot clause? :-)
Here it is in proper HTML :-)
http://dax.joh.cam.ac.uk/~james/ntc24.html
(yes, I turned it into Microsoft's attempt at HTML in Word - then fixed it with Tidy and Emacs :P) It does look rather better than the one linked in the article, though...
From the nmap output above:
...
25/tcp open smtp
Now, I think that looks a lot like an SMTP service running... just under the SSH service you commented on, in fact!
From what I've seen of it so far, it's a good book (Disclaimer: yes, he was my project supervisor last year!). A few funny typos etc in the errata, which is well worth a look, too, especially anyone wondering who the hell this "Prince Schneier" guy on p 113 is ;-)
According to a recent post on linux-kernel, there's a BIOS-level hack to work around this: the "real" CPUs are always listed before the "virtual" CPUs. So, if you boot a copy of XP licensed for 4 CPUs on a machine with 4 hyperthreaded CPUs, it will use all four real CPUs, and ignore the hyperthreaded element. (The downside is that processor IDs aren't as obvious under Linux; you'd expect CPU#1 to be the "second half" of CPU#0, but it isn't...)
"Here I am throwing mail with an MBA"
...Cavazos, who has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University and a master's of business administration from Pfeiffer University
OK, he's not a coder, but he does have a technical degree too...
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager" ;)
She is versed in programming,
So SHE *IS* a coder! (Of course, with a name like that, you'll never get a tech job; people will associate you with the other Katz
The QA guy did software QA, which I'd say is fairly technical (or the company's doing something wrong...)
OK, the soap opera script writer wasn't a techie, but the others all were. I wonder how many of the unemployed/underemployed people have MCSEs? :-)
In fact, a lot of the current anti-theft tags DO work on RF already - they just resonate at a particular frequency. The detectors on the doors emit that frequency, and detect an "echo" which sounds the alarm. To deactivate the tag, when an item goes through the barcode scanner a much stronger pulse at the same frequency burns out the little tag, so it no longer echoes.
This system could be used in a similar way: as you walk through a detector arch, the computer identifies and deactivates each tag it senses. Once there are no more tags present, everything you're carrying has been scanned and charged for - and you aren't carrying any working tags any more, so there are no privacy concerns: once you've paid for the items, the tag is deactivated.
Does it hell! Will someone please explain to these reporters that encryption has no effect on copying whatsoever?
An encrypted block of data is exactly as easy to copy as the plaintext it was made from. All the CSS encryption system does is force those wanting to play a DVD to agree to a license from the DVD CCA (the licensing outfit controlling the encryption keys). Ultimately, I think this is what the MPAA and co want: control. Bit by bit, they build up their control; Macrovision, no skipping the FBI warning, region coding - maybe next you won't be able to skip the trailers, either? Then some sort of pay-per-view version (DiVX tried, but was too early - then. Will it return in another guise?)
Which is why most Linux distros ship with MD5s of the ISO, CPAN (the Perl packaging system) ships MD5s of all the tarballs, etc...
Speaking of which:
9f7d2b07aec562c4c685e3d628e95c4d wolfmp-linux-1.0.b2.x86.run
Oddly enough, the tarball DOES have hooks inside itself for an MD5 self-check - but they aren't used. Of course, this doesn't guard against malicious tampering (just change the checksum when you change the binary!), but would detect corrupt downloads. It does seem to do a CRC check though...
Also, you can put the IP address in the hosts file; then, everything will work fine. Or just run your own DNS daemon locally (djbdns is good for this), which is easy on *nix platforms, and you won't even notice the site being "censored" :-)
Of course, if too many people do this, the govt might grow a brain and try a more effect means of censorship; on the plus side, one-way air tickets are quite cheap these days...
Nothing wrong with that, IMO; in Houston this summer, I was helping with the Ballunar festival, and there were bag searches on the gate there. (Not by us volunteer security people; searches were done by the State Guard military police, for some reason.) A nice event, and I didn't see anyone objecting to the bag checks while I was on...
Done - mirror here Should be enough bandwidth - couple of megabits available - if not, I'll move it to a bigger box next door...
The back-end already lives on Sun boxen (Enterprise 4500) - not quite the big-iron of IBM's zSeries/S/390, but a far cry from an NT system... Only the front end - the WWW servers and CGIs - run on NT, on the PC hardware which ran FreeBSD earlier.
ext3 does this already. All the new features which have been retrofitted to ext2 recently - not just journalling, but directory indexes (to speed up file access using a tree instead of a linear search), tail-merging and a few other nice things - are backwards compatible. To use them, mount the file system with the right driver and mount option; mount under an older driver, and the FS still works, just without journalling etc. You don't even need a conversion utility: it just does it all at mount time!