Personally, I'm anti-DVHS. It's proprietary. It was basically invented as a means to restrict freedom now that DVDs have been cracked. It is linear, NOT random-access. It can't be used in computers without specialized, expensive equipment.
Trust me this has nothing whatever to do with the cracking of DVDs, it was developed a long time ago by JVC. This is JVCs technology, their player is already available, Phillips only have a preliminary spec. The Phillips preliminary spec looks identical to the JVC spec.
Everyone who makes a DVD player licences the technology from the DVD consortium who own the patents. Everybody who makes a VHS player licences the technology from JVC, they developed it, they own the rights.
JVCs patents are about to expire, so this is an update that they hope will become as popular as "vanilla" VHS and make them as much money.
If you're interested, the picture quality is stunnning almost indistinguishible from broadcast quality. It also has the advantages of being backwardly compatible with standard VHS and SHVS, it can record in those modes, so you can exchange tapes with family friends etc. It is also has vastly greater storage capacity than DVD.
The only drawback that I can see is that there is no way to extract MPEG data from the player. It always converts to to a video signal:-(
This may well be the video archive media of the future, when it drops from it's rediculously overpriced "early adopter" price, I'll probably buy one:-)
Ok Sorry about the second post, but the priview button really is too close to the submit one:-(
That last sentance of mine should read "IP is lower level than TCP". IP handles the routing of a packet over the hardware, TCP handles splitting the message into transmittable chunks (packets), error correction and higher level stuff like that.
CSS is not about restricting discs to a certain region, it is copy protection. The reason it's copy protection is that standard DVD players will not play a disc copied bit by bit to another DVD. They wont play them because they are designed not to. The keys for the content scrambling system (CSS) are on a section of the disc that the writers you can buy will not write to. You can copy the information but your DVD player will not play it for you and if you try to play it on your computer you will find that approx 10% of the picture is scrambled (i.e. just enough to ruin anyones enjoyment of it). The regional coding is a totally separate issue. I live in Europe and everyone I know who owns a DVD player has had it modified to play discs from all regions, they have not disabled CSS. CSS is a totally different system designed for a different purpose.
Is there such thing as 'open' encryption? There most certainly is such a thing as 'open encryption', any encryption can only be reasonably expected to be secure when it has been "peer reviewed" by the finest minds in encryption science. Anything else is "security through obscurity" and thats just rubbish. A prime example of this is CSS, although their main problem was key size (their key sizes were nowhere near large enough to protect their data), they relied on no-one knowing the encryptin method and once it was known it was easy to crack. Contrast this with GPG or PGP encryption where the algorithms are totally open yet the content is extreemly secure.
Even if they really must lock it down, at least they should do it right and implement an algorithm that is not as half-baked as it is!
Be careful what you wish for!
The DVD forum has decided to delay the introduction of DVD audio for six months in order to improve the access security system. My source for this is Home Cimena choice magazine.
note: since this is in their February issue you won't find it on their web site http://www.homecinemachoice.com/ this month.
The person quoted in the news item is a Technics' DVD guru (according to the magazine anyway) Ted Abe.
Apparently they have lots of players already manufactured and ready to ship, but the DeCSS action has caused them to think again. The players already manufactured will either have a hardware modification or they will be scrapped.
Actually, if you have a more disagreement with copyrights, you shouldn't waste your time GPLing anything. And you shouldn't complain if XYZ corporation takes Linux, embraces and extends it, and puts any number of companies like Red Hat out of business. Because if you don't agree that copyrights should exist, you don't believe in the copyright protection that the GPL provides.
Actually the GPL doesn't protect Red hat from a company (or anybody else) that wants to put them out of business by enhancing Linux. It allows anyone to modify, enhance, redistribute and basically do anything they damn well like to it (except restrict your right to redistribute it). The only proviso is they have to tell you what they did i.e. give you the changes to the source. I'm afraid your argument doesn't hold.
Also from what the canadian readers are saying about this (rebroadcasting free to air channels), it appears to be perfectly legal. If it's legal in Canada, and that's where this company is based, there isn't anything the original producers of the material can do.
It should be pointed out that copyright is a law just like any other. This is not a basic human right, it is a Law created by the legislators in order to promote what they believed to be the good of society. If a foreign state decides that a different set of copyright conditions exist within their borders then there's nothing you can do about it.
Well actually on second thoughts just about the only thing the content providers can do is stop selling their programmes to Canada.
So, I honestly wonder: What's the driving force behind people having kids only to ignore their upbringing? Family pressure? That babies are cute? The need for some form of immortality? By accident (hey, using a condom is a really hard thing to remember, ya know)? Because society demands it?
It's a hard wired biological urge.
Fundamentally religious people would tell you that "God designed us that way", people who believe in evolution of some kind will tell you that natural selection has brought it about. People who want to have kids have more kids and hence leave more offspring, i.e. natural selection favours life's "randy buggers".;-)
The term "open source" really doesn't mean much anymore...
In the short term, I suggest people stop getting excited just because a company announces releasing something "open source". We should wait until the sources and the license are available for everybody to look at.
In the long term, I think we need to replace the term "open source" with something more self-descriptive.
We already have a "more self-descriptive" term - free software. There would be less of this ambiguity if we all just called a spade a spade. As you rightly point out Open source software is not necessarily the same as free (speech not beer) software.
Just like x86's better than Alpha or Power PC, or IDE's better than SCSI, or anything else... It's the lowest common denominator factor. Yes it's cheaper. But is it nearly as good? no! but you'll settle for it anyways, because of the percieved value of the dollar.... dollars come and go you know... no like star wars is spiritual... TPM was aweful in my opinion... but still.
Yes you're probably right, I have not bought any VHS since I got my DVD player and will not be buying any more. It's a quality thing. This is the same reason I could not believe people brought TPM (the The Phantom Menace? I dont think so) VCD into work to watch about 2 weeks before it was released here (Northern Ireland). TPM is a cinema experience, it really is one of those films that's really going to suffer for being on a small screen.
You're sick. That's the entire reason I disagree with opensource... NOt creating anything new, just reinventing the old for cheaper. Yay!
Now you're just being silly, quite a lot of computer technlogy is developed in the free software community and replcated by the comercial software distributors.
Lets talk about Internet standards, lets talk about Perl (do they even have any thing this good?), Hell lets talk abut Unix which AFAIK was developed free and became proprietary later on (if I'm wrong about Unix no doubt someone will put me right).
Sorry for the second comment on this same post, but I forgot this; All the conflict checking/ installation ordering etc. stuff is implemented as a library in order to allow multiple forms of access to it. What this means is that "dselect" is not a layer on top of "apt-get", they both link into the same low level libraries. Apt-get is the first of the interfaces to the "replacement for deselect" to be implemented.
apt-get is a low level tool that runs on top of dpkg. Dselect is a higher level tool that runs on top of apt-get and dpkg (you can speciy apt as your access method from dselect) dselect allows you to do much more things than apt-get and usually easier
I'm aware that you can use "apt" functionality from within dselect. I think this is a horrible way to use it, I haven't used dselect at all since I found apt-get.
The stated aim of the "deity" group (who changed the name of their tool after a lot of agro from what I remember) was to replace dselect. There are other front ends being written for the apt functionality, console based, gnome based whatever; if they are better and easier to use than apt-get I'll probably use one of them. As things stand IMO apt-get is a lot better than deselect.
I hope that they help create a better interface to dselect so that it is much friendlier. If that obstacle were overcome, I think more would switch to debian.
This is already being worked on and to a large extent has already been improved. The new interface to a Debian system is called apt. It has some absolutely wonderful features and is not particularly hard to use.
you can just say
apt-get install [some_package]
and apt will figure out if you need any other packages installed to run this one and install them all together. If a package needs another package installed and configured before it can be installed, apt sorts that out too. if packages can't be used together and you ask it to install a "conflicting" package, it will suggest removing the conflicting package, or cancelling the operation. NICE:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me this has nothing whatever to do with the cracking of DVDs, it was developed a long time ago by JVC. This is JVCs technology, their player is already available, Phillips only have a preliminary spec. The Phillips preliminary spec looks identical to the JVC spec.
Everyone who makes a DVD player licences the technology from the DVD consortium who own the patents. Everybody who makes a VHS player licences the technology from JVC, they developed it, they own the rights.
JVCs patents are about to expire, so this is an update that they hope will become as popular as "vanilla" VHS and make them as much money.
If you're interested, the picture quality is stunnning almost indistinguishible from broadcast quality. It also has the advantages of being backwardly compatible with standard VHS and SHVS, it can record in those modes, so you can exchange tapes with family friends etc. It is also has vastly greater storage capacity than DVD.
The only drawback that I can see is that there is no way to extract MPEG data from the player. It always converts to to a video signal :-(
This may well be the video archive media of the future, when it drops from it's rediculously overpriced "early adopter" price, I'll probably buy one :-)
That last sentance of mine should read "IP is lower level than TCP". IP handles the routing of a packet over the hardware, TCP handles splitting the message into transmittable chunks (packets), error correction and higher level stuff like that.
Ethernet (or other networking hardware)
TCP
IP
Software
Actually it goes
Ethernet (or other networking hardware)
IP
TCP
Software
TCP runs over IP as does UDP. TCP is lower level than IP
TSR do more than D & D. They are still involved in Dragon Dice, which is an absolutely wonderful little game.
CSS is not about restricting discs to a certain region, it is copy protection. The reason it's copy protection is that standard DVD players will not play a disc copied bit by bit to another DVD. They wont play them because they are designed not to. The keys for the content scrambling system (CSS) are on a section of the disc that the writers you can buy will not write to. You can copy the information but your DVD player will not play it for you and if you try to play it on your computer you will find that approx 10% of the picture is scrambled (i.e. just enough to ruin anyones enjoyment of it). The regional coding is a totally separate issue. I live in Europe and everyone I know who owns a DVD player has had it modified to play discs from all regions, they have not disabled CSS. CSS is a totally different system designed for a different purpose.
Is there such thing as 'open' encryption? There most certainly is such a thing as 'open encryption', any encryption can only be reasonably expected to be secure when it has been "peer reviewed" by the finest minds in encryption science. Anything else is "security through obscurity" and thats just rubbish. A prime example of this is CSS, although their main problem was key size (their key sizes were nowhere near large enough to protect their data), they relied on no-one knowing the encryptin method and once it was known it was easy to crack. Contrast this with GPG or PGP encryption where the algorithms are totally open yet the content is extreemly secure.
Shame about the OS. I wonder if we could hack it and put a version of Linux on it. :-)
Be careful what you wish for!
The DVD forum has decided to delay the introduction of DVD audio for six months in order to improve the access security system. My source for this is Home Cimena choice magazine.
note: since this is in their February issue you won't find it on their web site http://www.homecinemachoice.com/ this month.
The person quoted in the news item is a Technics' DVD guru (according to the magazine anyway) Ted Abe.
Apparently they have lots of players already manufactured and ready to ship, but the DeCSS action has caused them to think again. The players already manufactured will either have a hardware modification or they will be scrapped.
Actually the GPL doesn't protect Red hat from a company (or anybody else) that wants to put them out of business by enhancing Linux. It allows anyone to modify, enhance, redistribute and basically do anything they damn well like to it (except restrict your right to redistribute it). The only proviso is they have to tell you what they did i.e. give you the changes to the source. I'm afraid your argument doesn't hold.
Also from what the canadian readers are saying about this (rebroadcasting free to air channels), it appears to be perfectly legal. If it's legal in Canada, and that's where this company is based, there isn't anything the original producers of the material can do.
It should be pointed out that copyright is a law just like any other. This is not a basic human right, it is a Law created by the legislators in order to promote what they believed to be the good of society. If a foreign state decides that a different set of copyright conditions exist within their borders then there's nothing you can do about it.
Well actually on second thoughts just about the only thing the content providers can do is stop selling their programmes to Canada.
It's a hard wired biological urge.
Fundamentally religious people would tell you that "God designed us that way", people who believe in evolution of some kind will tell you that natural selection has brought it about. People who want to have kids have more kids and hence leave more offspring, i.e. natural selection favours life's "randy buggers". ;-)
In the short term, I suggest people stop getting excited just because a company announces releasing something "open source". We should wait until the sources and the license are available for everybody to look at.
In the long term, I think we need to replace the term "open source" with something more self-descriptive.
We already have a "more self-descriptive" term - free software. There would be less of this ambiguity if we all just called a spade a spade. As you rightly point out Open source software is not necessarily the same as free (speech not beer) software.
I think a return to out "roots" is long overdue.
Yes you're probably right, I have not bought any VHS since I got my DVD player and will not be buying any more. It's a quality thing. This is the same reason I could not believe people brought TPM (the The Phantom Menace? I dont think so) VCD into work to watch about 2 weeks before it was released here (Northern Ireland). TPM is a cinema experience, it really is one of those films that's really going to suffer for being on a small screen.
You're sick. That's the entire reason I disagree with opensource... NOt creating anything new, just reinventing the old for cheaper. Yay!
Now you're just being silly, quite a lot of computer technlogy is developed in the free software community and replcated by the comercial software distributors.
Lets talk about Internet standards, lets talk about Perl (do they even have any thing this good?), Hell lets talk abut Unix which AFAIK was developed free and became proprietary later on (if I'm wrong about Unix no doubt someone will put me right).
Sorry for the second comment on this same post, but I forgot this; All the conflict checking/ installation ordering etc. stuff is implemented as a library in order to allow multiple forms of access to it. What this means is that "dselect" is not a layer on top of "apt-get", they both link into the same low level libraries. Apt-get is the first of the interfaces to the "replacement for deselect" to be implemented.
That would be your opinion, not one that I share.
apt-get is a low level tool that runs on top of dpkg. Dselect is a higher level tool that runs on top of apt-get and dpkg (you can speciy apt as your access method from dselect) dselect allows you to do much more things than apt-get and usually easier
I'm aware that you can use "apt" functionality from within dselect. I think this is a horrible way to use it, I haven't used dselect at all since I found apt-get.
The stated aim of the "deity" group (who changed the name of their tool after a lot of agro from what I remember) was to replace dselect. There are other front ends being written for the apt functionality, console based, gnome based whatever; if they are better and easier to use than apt-get I'll probably use one of them. As things stand IMO apt-get is a lot better than deselect.
YMMV :-)
This is already being worked on and to a large extent has already been improved. The new interface to a Debian system is called apt. It has some absolutely wonderful features and is not particularly hard to use.
you can just say
:-)
apt-get install [some_package]
and apt will figure out if you need any other packages installed to run this one and install them all together. If a package needs another package installed and configured before it can be installed, apt sorts that out too. if packages can't be used together and you ask it to install a "conflicting" package, it will suggest removing the conflicting package, or cancelling the operation. NICE
Give it a try, you just might like it.