Because the vast majority of people who will heed MindCrafts advice (big corps) are running a Windows of some form on the desktop.
It'll be much easier to get Linux into the server closet if it speaks the same protocols as existing servers, making the transition invisible to the end users and network.
Maybe one day if Linux is on 90% of the desktops, then it'll be worth while to test performance of NT workstations connecting to Linux servers via NFS vs. Linux workstations connecting to Linux servers via NFS. Not today though.
Why is it everyone's all bent out of shape about RSA's patents??? They did discover their algorithm.
IF someone else had first, then they couldn't be awarded the patent.
IF someone else had devised a suitable alternative, then you'd be free to use that implementation as well or instead of.
The truth is they spent a lot of time in developing and testing (read: INVENTING) their algorithm. That time could have been spent in a more risk-free setting, working on already "proven" technologies. Would we be better off? Would their technology ever have made it past the intellegence community and to us? Doubtfully.
Patents are here to protect the inventors. Some companies abuse them, by letting their implentations be subject to widespread use prior to notifying users of their intent to collect royalties, like Unisys and LZW. RSA has always charged fees to use their products.
If patents hadn't been around to protect theirs and countless other inventions, I doubt that even computers as they are today would have been possible. Why would someone want to take the risk of spending huge amounts of time and money on a project only to allow others to profit from it?
By the way, isn't Diffie-Hellman considered equivilant? Why don't you people simply use that? Apache's opensource, Netscape fully documents their API's, and Microsoft provides enough access to theirs so that you could make plug-ins for all the major servers. Likewise for browsers. Or is it that RSA's implentation is more proven?
You're not an "insider". Just a programmer. If may be a different case if you were working for Redhat on some secretive project. But you're not. Even then, you'd probably be in the clear, because a software project on it's own is not going to have a DEFINITE impact on a single companies stock price. The work you're doing is presumably in the open, and even if it's not, you have no guarentees that Redhat or any other company is going to adopt whatever you've done.
Insider trading is mainly enforced when: 1 - Someone (CEO, CFO, buddy of a guy in accounting) finds that the company is going to produce a larger than expected loss and sells their stock before that information is disclosed to the rest of the investing public.
2 - Someone again involved with the company in some way, finds that they're about to take over another company, and buys up stock in the second company knowing that it's about to be bought out, but prior to it becoming general knowledge.
Phil probably signed all the code with his key, so as to make it harder for the code to be tampered with on its journey from him to you. Get PGP, which should come with Phil's key, and then verify all the packages.
At that point the.as will go away (are you sure its not.asc?) and you can be happy...
Yes, I do see a lot of entries from Intel, which means to me probably Pentium Pro's.
Then there's IBM, which seems to be using PowerPC 604e's.
Next, SGI uses MIPS
SGI/Cray - have they moved to MIPS, or are they still using Alpha's? (I'm not 100% sure that's what they used before, but i'm 95% sure it is).
My main puzzler here is NEC. WHAT ARE THEY USING??? If you go down to #73 on the list, there's a machine that was deployed in 1999 with just 16 processors? Okay, it's performance is 1/19th that of Intel's #1 offering, but it uses just 1/602 the amount of CPU's??? That's not a standard processor that i've ever heard of?
NEC has a bunch of listing below that, too. Some use just 5 processors (though, those are all in the high 400's). What chips is it using? Can anyone explain what this machine is?
Oh, and i need to add, that these 25 VAX users who want to watch DVD on their systems have to have no other means avaiable (no x86 systems laying around) to do so.
This isn't a necessity we're talking about like food or water. This is simply recreation/entertainment...
Band together a lot of people and present that thesis to Oracle, IBM, Sun, Sybase, Informix, Corel, Netscape/AOL and the legions of others who have ported their products to Linux. If you get enough support, they might abide by your wishes and stop releasing their software for Linux. Wouldn't that be swell?
You could even make a list of everything else you'd like to see available for Linux and write a letter on behalf of your "foundation" encouraging those companies (such as Apple with QuickTime) not to even consider porting their Software to Linux, because that's just bad (for some unknown reason).
Come on... We live (or at least I do) in the real world. Companies need to have proprietary advantages in order to compete and differentiate themselves. If so and so doesn't want you to know how their spellchecker runs so fast, that's their business.
Or rather than that, they simply need to document all the features used in their file formats.
Requiring them to adhere only to open standards would be another horrible situation. You would in essense bar them from "innovating". I know, they don't innovate now, but one day, a new idea might percolate up from the coffee room, and then they'ed be prohibitted from using it because it was a new way of doing things.
Let them control their softwre, but require them to publish, document every tidbit. Make them hire staff just to answer questions about how something works (the MS Access file format, as a hypothetical example) on a timely basis.
Well, the moneys a moot point. Surely, if enough users wrote in, Redhat could use some of it's billion dollar net worth to aquire all the needed licenses and programmers in order to create a binary that allowed the playback of DVD movies on Linux.
As for the movie industry dictating what platform you can play back on. I think they can. They can say that they want to feel reasonably sure that the products that play their movies do just that and nothing else. It would be concievable for them to be especially opposed to open-source playback software, for the reason once that's completed, it'd probably be trivial to redirect it's output from the TV to the hard drive...
By charging $5K / $10Kfor the specs (which is really pocketchange to most companies that would want to pursue this) they can feel assured that Joe Cracker wouldn't spend the $5000 and then post them on the internet.
In all honesty, if all you want to do is WATCH THE MOVIE WHILE RUNNING LINUX, why would it matter if it was a freely obtainable, freely distributable binary as opposed to an opensource one that was allowing the viewing of the movie? That'd probably appease a lot of people out there, and everybody (except RMS) wins...
It's only really a library everyone needs, isn't it? And once it's done, there's no real point to enhancing it, because it's not going to make more frames in the movie or anything like that... And other people could write their own interfaces and controllers.
I vote we ask Redhat for the financial help. They've got the clout to do it.
Splitting Microsoft at this point would create one company with a monopoly on operating systems, one company with a monopoly on office suites, and one company with... well, a lot of internet real-estate. That wouldn't be an ideal solution, because they could strike deals with each other, or at least continue what they've been doing. At one point, when this whole thing began, I heard a rumor that they were already setting up "lines of communication" betweent the OS department and Office, in case of a breakup.
Splitting MS into a bunch of identical companies would probably be ideal in the short term, as they duke it out with lower prices, etc, but in the long term, we'd end up with just one large company all over again.
Forcing them to release the source to their operating systems is probably the most brutal and unlikely thing that could happen. Open source is a pop phenomenon. There's no proof anywhere that it's a sustainable business idea. Yes, Redhat's doing great, as is Cobalt, and everyone else is lining up to get in on the IPO's, but there's no reason to believe that in the long term, it will be sustainable (not trying to bash anyone here, but opensource has only been in the mainstream for a year or two now).
My impression is that the penalties will try to level the playing field for the future, and shift the balance of power in the short term, but forcing them to go open-source would be akin to saying: "You got too big, acted to bad, so we're shutting you down." That wouldn't be right, i don't think.
I'm really in favor of Scott McNealy's opinion. 1 - Force them to divest their holdings in other companies, 2 - prevent them from investing in or aquiring other companies for 5 or 10 years, 3 3 - disallow any restrictive agreements, and 4 - force them to open up their prices, so everyon pays the same thing with the only discounts avaialable being those strictly based on volume. 5 - And drop those market development agreements.
Lastly, fine them a few billion. Not much, because there has to be some left for the rest of the lawsuits that are bound to follow...
This is in reply to the first 5 people who've posted...
The movie industry isn't forcing you to buy or use windows. You can purchase a DVD player for your TV and bypass the whole computer thing. It is a convienence that player-back software exists. It's made it to the Mac and Wintel so far, and will probably not come to Linux anytime soon.
For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
For three, all the mainstream press talks about Linux's use in the server arena. Servers don't need to play DVD movies. So, why would the movie industry want to create a player for a server?
Also for three, there players available for Solaris, *BSD, Openserver, Unixware, Netware, BeOS, Irix, AIX, or HP-UX? I'm guessing not. And for them to create a *nix port solely to serve this market would be a huge waste of resources given the potential returns.
(Still stuck on 3...) Rather than just running ahead and writing that program, was this brought up in a more political sense, such as letter-writing, email, phone calls, etc? I doubt it was, to any extent, maybe one or two here or there. Maybe some programmers could have done the movie-watching community a favor by signing a NDA, and created binaries for the said platforms, with the industries okay. Was that tried?
Four, you can do whatever you want with the disc itself. Burn it. Use it as a frisbee. microwave it. It's the IP on the disk (the movie) that you need to show some restraint about...:)
Now for five. DVD playback probably will take longer to make it to Linux than it would have before. Why? Because of this. More and more, I notice around here (not singling anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thign for free" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries okay on releasing spec's (and liablility for implementing a playback mechanism) for DVD. They can easily view those two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, too."
You really have to watch yourself when stepping around the giants of any industry... you may not realize that you've stepped on their toes until it's much too late.
Well for one, you own nothing aside from the right to view the movie in your home. It's encoded on the shiny little disk you purchased, but so far as your rights go, it's the same as goes for commercial software.
While i don't understand why the movie industry insists on this, I do understand that it's their right to determine proper usage, because they paid for it's creation and hence, it's their property.
If you don't like their terms, you can.
1 - Use that Windows partition for something. 2 - Buy a regular DVD Player. 3 - Boycott DVD and stick with the inferior, yet more open VHS.
That's probably not what you want to hear, but, you know, lifes not always fair. Perhaps this'll cause a "GNUMS" (GNU Movie Studio) to spring to life? Doubt it!
PS
Moderators: I'm only stating it the way i see it. Please don't relegate me to troll-dom because of that.
I just checked out your site for the first time in quite some time, and I had to wonder something. First off, I'd think that a security related site would value privacy of it's visitors. But then, when i came across the LinuxPPC box that you adopted, you've posted hackers IP addresses and Host Names. I recall you doing that with a "hack attempts" page logging all the alleged hack attempts against your site.
This one puzzles me because the "attackers" aren't doing anything wrong. You've invited them to "attack" that computer. Yet you treat them with the same level of respect as you do any other "cracker"...
--------------
I tried to keep this nice and just address the issue at hand. Please, nobody start lecturing the difference between hacker and cracker! It's just he's got all this info posted here and, though it's one thing to make alleged attacks public, I feel it's another thing entirely to reveal the identies of people whom he's invited to attack his site.
The way you describe it, I don't see a point. They can press all the DVD's at once and then ship them to different areas at different times to correspond to your release codes, and that's once pressing.
If they have to press one set for the US and then one other set for everywhere but the US regardless of release codes, that's now 2 smaller runs (40 bit & 128 bit) vs. one larger run. The cost of warehousing the DVD's as they're waiting for the release date is negligible.
I don't recall any mention of Linux in the article on wired that was posted yesterday.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't be suprised if the "group" broke DVD for whatever reason and then just brought up Linux to deflect the argument somewhat. I hope that doesn't make me a troll.
I can probably count to 999 quadrillion (I'm not sure if the next set is quintillions?, if so, i can get that far too) but I think people have a right to patent algorythms. It's intellectual property. It lets a company reap the benefits of spending all that money on R&D.
Is the issue at hand the fact that the industry created their own 40-bit crypto algorthym and someone reverse engineered it, or is it that they're upset that someone released a program that essentially allows the duplication of their CD.
Reverse engineering in order to create a playback mechanism in Linux is one thing, and they probably wouldn't even mind that. Piracy/copyright violations are not.
It's THEIR movie. They own it. They paid the actors to make it. They risked millions of dollars in marketing. They deserve the rewards it brings.
It would have cost us, the consumer, more money if they had decided to release 128 bit encrypted titles in the US and 40-bit encrypted titles to the rest of the world. That's two smaller runs rather htan one larger run. Sure you can yell about the export laws but they're a different subject.
If you don't agree with the law, don't be and ass and break it just because you can. Write your congressman. How many outraged slashdotters do that? Or do you just preach to the quire here? I stand in favor of patents, I just think that the system needs to be revised in the computer age. Just shortening their lives would be a good thing.
Well, it's been a year and a half, and there is no progess in terms of a shippable product. The reviews i've read all say that it's coming along quite smoothly, has a lightning fast page rendering engine, etc...
So, if it can:
bookmark sites understand plain HTML (even without CSS) handle GIF, JPEG, and PNG graphics use at least 40-bit SSL connections and not crash very often
I'd say make a usable GUI, ship it, and start adding the parts that didn't make it into the first release. That's all. If it's completely unstable and unusable, then no, don't ship it yet. But from what I've heard, there have been some fairly solid releases.
Before i was very concerned with making websites that were only viewable in one browser or another. There wasn't that much diffentiation in terms of developing for one browser would making my life that much easier. With Cascading Style Sheets, that's all changed.
Let me warn you that I haven't upgraded my Netscape past 4.5, figuring they're all "dot" releases and will probably not have CSS support. If I'm wrong let me know ASAP!
But the fact remains that these days I develop sites primarily with IE in mind, because CSS is easier to develop, and produces much cleaner HTML, in my opinion. I don't know, or care, if MS has extended the CSS standard, but what i do know is that I can't seem to get equivilant functionality from Netscape.
Mozilla really needs to get it's act together, in terms of releasing a reference release, in my eyes. Just bolt on a usuable GUI and call it 1.0. Then start adding features and call that 1.5. Netscape is withering away because of the lack or percieved development. If we wait til Mozilla is perfect, it'll never come. The world changes, and just as Mozilla catches up to it, someone, somewhere, adds something new...
Right... The original poster of the thread said something to the effect of "Well, since they used WordPerfect, obviously there's not a monopoly there.
90% (what you say Standard Oil had once, and what MS has in both OS's and Office Suites) is monopoly power, even though "competition" (that other 10% everyone fights over) exists.
But i don't remember how Linux is getting dragged into this argument. I don't recall hearing the the hackers were breaking the DVD's codes simply to be able to watch DVD's in Linux. They were doing it in order to show the futility of DVD's copy-protection scheme.
All of you that are dragging Linux into this are really doing something bad for Linux. You need to be careful, lest if become regarded as the "renegade" OS... "Linux users don't respect intellectual property, look what they did to DVD." I'm not saying that, but it could be said in a boardroom somewhere.
I really don't think that the movie industry singled out Linux when thinking of copy-protection schemes... They were just more concerned with Windows users, because, face it, that's where the primary market is. Most industry publications have Linux relegated to the server closet, and just recently has it's head started to pop out. It would have happened had more and more people started using Linux on the client side.
But that's a separate argument. The fact remains (in me view) that Linux was not involved, it was simply people demonstrating that after all their hard work, the copyprotection scheme used by the movie people was flawed.
A monoploy does not mean 100% control. It just means having a huge amount of influence. Competitors can exist. Monopolies are okay too, so long as they don't abuse their power.
I don't know history too well, but I think AT&T didn't have any competition, but Standard Oil did.. They would have ended up owning the oil market if no one had stepped in, or at least they would have been in a position to dictate costs, as Microsoft clearly is today.
If they came out and said they were doubling MS Office's price, surely home users would start to look elsewhere, but many corporations, I believe, would look around and see that there's nothing completely comparable, wince, and pay the price. Same goes for Windows. They can essentially charge whatever they feel like, and people WILL buy it. Linux is not there yet. When MS releases office for linux, it will be, but that won't happen because then they'll lose their Windows monopoly
If you're just capturing what's appearing on the screen, you're copying the movie, but not the DVD. That's a different issue. No one can dream of stopping someone from taking a VCR to a DVD deck and recording their favorite movie to VHS. What you won't get are the choice of aspect ration's, alternate languages, etc...
no one needs to write an unfuck.exe for DVD's, so long as VCR's have an input connector.
Indeed. That's why I love the Mac. It lets me get my work done without worrying about what's happening under the hood... But the MacOS is not meant for the embedded market. At least here, Apple's done something right!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Because the vast majority of people who will heed MindCrafts advice (big corps) are running a Windows of some form on the desktop.
It'll be much easier to get Linux into the server closet if it speaks the same protocols as existing servers, making the transition invisible to the end users and network.
Maybe one day if Linux is on 90% of the desktops, then it'll be worth while to test performance of NT workstations connecting to Linux servers via NFS vs. Linux workstations connecting to Linux servers via NFS. Not today though.
just because it's gnu something-or-other does not mean it's linux... get a clue.
Why is it everyone's all bent out of shape about RSA's patents??? They did discover their algorithm.
IF someone else had first, then they couldn't be awarded the patent.
IF someone else had devised a suitable alternative, then you'd be free to use that implementation as well or instead of.
The truth is they spent a lot of time in developing and testing (read: INVENTING) their algorithm. That time could have been spent in a more risk-free setting, working on already "proven" technologies. Would we be better off? Would their technology ever have made it past the intellegence community and to us? Doubtfully.
Patents are here to protect the inventors. Some companies abuse them, by letting their implentations be subject to widespread use prior to notifying users of their intent to collect royalties, like Unisys and LZW. RSA has always charged fees to use their products.
If patents hadn't been around to protect theirs and countless other inventions, I doubt that even computers as they are today would have been possible. Why would someone want to take the risk of spending huge amounts of time and money on a project only to allow others to profit from it?
By the way, isn't Diffie-Hellman considered equivilant? Why don't you people simply use that? Apache's opensource, Netscape fully documents their API's, and Microsoft provides enough access to theirs so that you could make plug-ins for all the major servers. Likewise for browsers. Or is it that RSA's implentation is more proven?
You're not an "insider". Just a programmer. If may be a different case if you were working for Redhat on some secretive project. But you're not. Even then, you'd probably be in the clear, because a software project on it's own is not going to have a DEFINITE impact on a single companies stock price. The work you're doing is presumably in the open, and even if it's not, you have no guarentees that Redhat or any other company is going to adopt whatever you've done.
Insider trading is mainly enforced when:
1 - Someone (CEO, CFO, buddy of a guy in accounting) finds that the company is going to produce a larger than expected loss and sells their stock before that information is disclosed to the rest of the investing public.
2 - Someone again involved with the company in some way, finds that they're about to take over another company, and buys up stock in the second company knowing that it's about to be bought out, but prior to it becoming general knowledge.
Phil probably signed all the code with his key, so as to make it harder for the code to be tampered with on its journey from him to you. Get PGP, which should come with Phil's key, and then verify all the packages.
.as will go away (are you sure its not .asc?) and you can be happy...
At that point the
My hunch.
Yes, I do see a lot of entries from Intel, which means to me probably Pentium Pro's.
Then there's IBM, which seems to be using PowerPC 604e's.
Next, SGI uses MIPS
SGI/Cray - have they moved to MIPS, or are they still using Alpha's? (I'm not 100% sure that's what they used before, but i'm 95% sure it is).
My main puzzler here is NEC. WHAT ARE THEY USING??? If you go down to #73 on the list, there's a machine that was deployed in 1999 with just 16 processors? Okay, it's performance is 1/19th that of Intel's #1 offering, but it uses just 1/602 the amount of CPU's??? That's not a standard processor that i've ever heard of?
NEC has a bunch of listing below that, too. Some use just 5 processors (though, those are all in the high 400's). What chips is it using? Can anyone explain what this machine is?
Oh, and i need to add, that these 25 VAX users who want to watch DVD on their systems have to have no other means avaiable (no x86 systems laying around) to do so.
This isn't a necessity we're talking about like food or water. This is simply recreation/entertainment...
Find me 25 users for me who'll watch DVD's on VAX's and I'll consider myself without a clue.
Band together a lot of people and present that thesis to Oracle, IBM, Sun, Sybase, Informix, Corel, Netscape/AOL and the legions of others who have ported their products to Linux. If you get enough support, they might abide by your wishes and stop releasing their software for Linux. Wouldn't that be swell?
You could even make a list of everything else you'd like to see available for Linux and write a letter on behalf of your "foundation" encouraging those companies (such as Apple with QuickTime) not to even consider porting their Software to Linux, because that's just bad (for some unknown reason).
Come on... We live (or at least I do) in the real world. Companies need to have proprietary advantages in order to compete and differentiate themselves. If so and so doesn't want you to know how their spellchecker runs so fast, that's their business.
Or rather than that, they simply need to document all the features used in their file formats.
Requiring them to adhere only to open standards would be another horrible situation. You would in essense bar them from "innovating". I know, they don't innovate now, but one day, a new idea might percolate up from the coffee room, and then they'ed be prohibitted from using it because it was a new way of doing things.
Let them control their softwre, but require them to publish, document every tidbit. Make them hire staff just to answer questions about how something works (the MS Access file format, as a hypothetical example) on a timely basis.
Well, the moneys a moot point. Surely, if enough users wrote in, Redhat could use some of it's billion dollar net worth to aquire all the needed licenses and programmers in order to create a binary that allowed the playback of DVD movies on Linux.
As for the movie industry dictating what platform you can play back on. I think they can. They can say that they want to feel reasonably sure that the products that play their movies do just that and nothing else. It would be concievable for them to be especially opposed to open-source playback software, for the reason once that's completed, it'd probably be trivial to redirect it's output from the TV to the hard drive...
By charging $5K / $10Kfor the specs (which is really pocketchange to most companies that would want to pursue this) they can feel assured that Joe Cracker wouldn't spend the $5000 and then post them on the internet.
In all honesty, if all you want to do is WATCH THE MOVIE WHILE RUNNING LINUX, why would it matter if it was a freely obtainable, freely distributable binary as opposed to an opensource one that was allowing the viewing of the movie? That'd probably appease a lot of people out there, and everybody (except RMS) wins...
It's only really a library everyone needs, isn't it? And once it's done, there's no real point to enhancing it, because it's not going to make more frames in the movie or anything like that... And other people could write their own interfaces and controllers.
I vote we ask Redhat for the financial help. They've got the clout to do it.
Splitting Microsoft at this point would create one company with a monopoly on operating systems, one company with a monopoly on office suites, and one company with... well, a lot of internet real-estate. That wouldn't be an ideal solution, because they could strike deals with each other, or at least continue what they've been doing. At one point, when this whole thing began, I heard a rumor that they were already setting up "lines of communication" betweent the OS department and Office, in case of a breakup.
Splitting MS into a bunch of identical companies would probably be ideal in the short term, as they duke it out with lower prices, etc, but in the long term, we'd end up with just one large company all over again.
Forcing them to release the source to their operating systems is probably the most brutal and unlikely thing that could happen. Open source is a pop phenomenon. There's no proof anywhere that it's a sustainable business idea. Yes, Redhat's doing great, as is Cobalt, and everyone else is lining up to get in on the IPO's, but there's no reason to believe that in the long term, it will be sustainable (not trying to bash anyone here, but opensource has only been in the mainstream for a year or two now).
My impression is that the penalties will try to level the playing field for the future, and shift the balance of power in the short term, but forcing them to go open-source would be akin to saying: "You got too big, acted to bad, so we're shutting you down." That wouldn't be right, i don't think.
I'm really in favor of Scott McNealy's opinion.
1 - Force them to divest their holdings in other companies,
2 - prevent them from investing in or aquiring other companies for 5 or 10 years, 3
3 - disallow any restrictive agreements, and
4 - force them to open up their prices, so everyon pays the same thing with the only discounts avaialable being those strictly based on volume.
5 - And drop those market development agreements.
Lastly, fine them a few billion. Not much, because there has to be some left for the rest of the lawsuits that are bound to follow...
This is in reply to the first 5 people who've posted...
:)
The movie industry isn't forcing you to buy or use windows. You can purchase a DVD player for your TV and bypass the whole computer thing. It is a convienence that player-back software exists. It's made it to the Mac and Wintel so far, and will probably not come to Linux anytime soon.
For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
For three, all the mainstream press talks about Linux's use in the server arena. Servers don't need to play DVD movies. So, why would the movie industry want to create a player for a server?
Also for three, there players available for Solaris, *BSD, Openserver, Unixware, Netware, BeOS, Irix, AIX, or HP-UX? I'm guessing not. And for them to create a *nix port solely to serve this market would be a huge waste of resources given the potential returns.
(Still stuck on 3...) Rather than just running ahead and writing that program, was this brought up in a more political sense, such as letter-writing, email, phone calls, etc? I doubt it was, to any extent, maybe one or two here or there. Maybe some programmers could have done the movie-watching community a favor by signing a NDA, and created binaries for the said platforms, with the industries okay. Was that tried?
Four, you can do whatever you want with the disc itself. Burn it. Use it as a frisbee. microwave it. It's the IP on the disk (the movie) that you need to show some restraint about...
Now for five. DVD playback probably will take longer to make it to Linux than it would have before. Why? Because of this. More and more, I notice around here (not singling anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thign for free" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries okay on releasing spec's (and liablility for implementing a playback mechanism) for DVD. They can easily view those two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, too."
You really have to watch yourself when stepping around the giants of any industry... you may not realize that you've stepped on their toes until it's much too late.
All done for now.
Well for one, you own nothing aside from the right to view the movie in your home. It's encoded on the shiny little disk you purchased, but so far as your rights go, it's the same as goes for commercial software.
While i don't understand why the movie industry insists on this, I do understand that it's their right to determine proper usage, because they paid for it's creation and hence, it's their property.
If you don't like their terms, you can.
1 - Use that Windows partition for something.
2 - Buy a regular DVD Player.
3 - Boycott DVD and stick with the inferior, yet more open VHS.
That's probably not what you want to hear, but, you know, lifes not always fair. Perhaps this'll cause a "GNUMS" (GNU Movie Studio) to spring to life? Doubt it!
PS
Moderators: I'm only stating it the way i see it. Please don't relegate me to troll-dom because of that.
I just checked out your site for the first time in quite some time, and I had to wonder something. First off, I'd think that a security related site would value privacy of it's visitors. But then, when i came across the LinuxPPC box that you adopted, you've posted hackers IP addresses and Host Names. I recall you doing that with a "hack attempts" page logging all the alleged hack attempts against your site.
This one puzzles me because the "attackers" aren't doing anything wrong. You've invited them to "attack" that computer. Yet you treat them with the same level of respect as you do any other "cracker"...
--------------
I tried to keep this nice and just address the issue at hand. Please, nobody start lecturing the difference between hacker and cracker! It's just he's got all this info posted here and, though it's one thing to make alleged attacks public, I feel it's another thing entirely to reveal the identies of people whom he's invited to attack his site.
That's all.
The way you describe it, I don't see a point. They can press all the DVD's at once and then ship them to different areas at different times to correspond to your release codes, and that's once pressing.
If they have to press one set for the US and then one other set for everywhere but the US regardless of release codes, that's now 2 smaller runs (40 bit & 128 bit) vs. one larger run. The cost of warehousing the DVD's as they're waiting for the release date is negligible.
I don't recall any mention of Linux in the article on wired that was posted yesterday.
Quite frankly, I wouldn't be suprised if the "group" broke DVD for whatever reason and then just brought up Linux to deflect the argument somewhat. I hope that doesn't make me a troll.
I can probably count to 999 quadrillion (I'm not sure if the next set is quintillions?, if so, i can get that far too) but I think people have a right to patent algorythms. It's intellectual property. It lets a company reap the benefits of spending all that money on R&D.
Is the issue at hand the fact that the industry created their own 40-bit crypto algorthym and someone reverse engineered it, or is it that they're upset that someone released a program that essentially allows the duplication of their CD.
Reverse engineering in order to create a playback mechanism in Linux is one thing, and they probably wouldn't even mind that. Piracy/copyright violations are not.
It's THEIR movie. They own it. They paid the actors to make it. They risked millions of dollars in marketing. They deserve the rewards it brings.
It would have cost us, the consumer, more money if they had decided to release 128 bit encrypted titles in the US and 40-bit encrypted titles to the rest of the world. That's two smaller runs rather htan one larger run. Sure you can yell about the export laws but they're a different subject.
If you don't agree with the law, don't be and ass and break it just because you can. Write your congressman. How many outraged slashdotters do that? Or do you just preach to the quire here? I stand in favor of patents, I just think that the system needs to be revised in the computer age. Just shortening their lives would be a good thing.
Well, it's been a year and a half, and there is no progess in terms of a shippable product. The reviews i've read all say that it's coming along quite smoothly, has a lightning fast page rendering engine, etc...
So, if it can:
bookmark sites
understand plain HTML (even without CSS)
handle GIF, JPEG, and PNG graphics
use at least 40-bit SSL connections
and
not crash very often
I'd say make a usable GUI, ship it, and start adding the parts that didn't make it into the first release. That's all. If it's completely unstable and unusable, then no, don't ship it yet. But from what I've heard, there have been some fairly solid releases.
Before i was very concerned with making websites that were only viewable in one browser or another. There wasn't that much diffentiation in terms of developing for one browser would making my life that much easier. With Cascading Style Sheets, that's all changed.
Let me warn you that I haven't upgraded my Netscape past 4.5, figuring they're all "dot" releases and will probably not have CSS support. If I'm wrong let me know ASAP!
But the fact remains that these days I develop sites primarily with IE in mind, because CSS is easier to develop, and produces much cleaner HTML, in my opinion. I don't know, or care, if MS has extended the CSS standard, but what i do know is that I can't seem to get equivilant functionality from Netscape.
Mozilla really needs to get it's act together, in terms of releasing a reference release, in my eyes. Just bolt on a usuable GUI and call it 1.0. Then start adding features and call that 1.5. Netscape is withering away because of the lack or percieved development. If we wait til Mozilla is perfect, it'll never come. The world changes, and just as Mozilla catches up to it, someone, somewhere, adds something new...
Right... The original poster of the thread said something to the effect of "Well, since they used WordPerfect, obviously there's not a monopoly there.
90% (what you say Standard Oil had once, and what MS has in both OS's and Office Suites) is monopoly power, even though "competition" (that other 10% everyone fights over) exists.
But i don't remember how Linux is getting dragged into this argument. I don't recall hearing the the hackers were breaking the DVD's codes simply to be able to watch DVD's in Linux. They were doing it in order to show the futility of DVD's copy-protection scheme.
All of you that are dragging Linux into this are really doing something bad for Linux. You need to be careful, lest if become regarded as the "renegade" OS... "Linux users don't respect intellectual property, look what they did to DVD." I'm not saying that, but it could be said in a boardroom somewhere.
I really don't think that the movie industry singled out Linux when thinking of copy-protection schemes... They were just more concerned with Windows users, because, face it, that's where the primary market is. Most industry publications have Linux relegated to the server closet, and just recently has it's head started to pop out. It would have happened had more and more people started using Linux on the client side.
But that's a separate argument. The fact remains (in me view) that Linux was not involved, it was simply people demonstrating that after all their hard work, the copyprotection scheme used by the movie people was flawed.
Ummm yes it does!
A monoploy does not mean 100% control. It just means having a huge amount of influence. Competitors can exist. Monopolies are okay too, so long as they don't abuse their power.
I don't know history too well, but I think AT&T didn't have any competition, but Standard Oil did.. They would have ended up owning the oil market if no one had stepped in, or at least they would have been in a position to dictate costs, as Microsoft clearly is today.
If they came out and said they were doubling MS Office's price, surely home users would start to look elsewhere, but many corporations, I believe, would look around and see that there's nothing completely comparable, wince, and pay the price. Same goes for Windows. They can essentially charge whatever they feel like, and people WILL buy it. Linux is not there yet. When MS releases office for linux, it will be, but that won't happen because then they'll lose their Windows monopoly
If you're just capturing what's appearing on the screen, you're copying the movie, but not the DVD. That's a different issue. No one can dream of stopping someone from taking a VCR to a DVD deck and recording their favorite movie to VHS. What you won't get are the choice of aspect ration's, alternate languages, etc...
no one needs to write an unfuck.exe for DVD's, so long as VCR's have an input connector.
Indeed. That's why I love the Mac. It lets me get my work done without worrying about what's happening under the hood... But the MacOS is not meant for the embedded market. At least here, Apple's done something right! :)