Episodes of original ("G1") Transformers, Beast Wars, and Beast Machines (including the second season, which is airing in Canada but not in the US 'til September) can be found via TF Archive, and the BM eps can also be found at TF Extreme (hosted on Telefragged, no less).
And don't count Robotech 3000 out yet; it's looking like production is indeed proceeding on it...
Ummm, no, people who like DVDs but think Linux is another brand of Kleenex are why the MPAA will win, because they don't know or care and just buy DVDs anyway.
I mean, come on, even if you leave out the people who use standalone players instead of DVDROM drives, and thus have no reason to boycott...well over 90% of the computer people will have Windows. And you can bet they won't be boycotting for Linux.
If I thought it would work, sure I'd boycott. But if I boycott something, it's because I think I'll get results, not out of RMSish idealism. (By the way, it's apathetic.)
In fairness to the company, the NS2K is a commercial-quality product, not consumer-quality; it's actually meant for use in video kiosks and other applications where video is to be streamed over a network. It does a whole bunch of things no consumer would ever need it to do, which is why it costs so much.
Presumably, once they have the drivers ready, they'll come out with more feature-light cards based on the same chipset that can use the same drivers--equivalent to their Hollywood Plus. But I imagine it's easier to write a driver for a card with everything and then take stuff out for subsequent cards than it is to write a driver and then add stuff. So wait a while, maybe they'll make something cheaper. In the mean time, there's always LinDVD...
The problem with this is, the people who want open Linux support for DVDs are only a teeny tiny fraction of the people buying DVDs out there. If maybe 1% (if that) of their entire market stops buying DVDs, are the big firms going to care? Are they even going to notice?
I like movies a lot; I'd like DVDs to be free, but even so, I'm not going to perform nasal reduction surgery to spite my face. If you want to, be my guest, but I'd rather enjoy the movies now than engage in a fruitless boycott whose only effect would be to deprive me of the moviewatching experience I so enjoy.
And so, I'll keep watching movies in Windows, or in Linux when a commercial solution comes out, or when the open source drivers mature, and I'm going to put my faith in the courts and the legislatures to do the right thing, misguided though that may be.
Well, Sigma Designs has been asked for help, on the Linux newsgroup on their NNTP message forum. They've politely but firmly stated repeatedly that they have no plans to release Linux drivers for the H+, nor have they plans to assist in an effort to create them. Apparently, what with deCSS floating around, they're afraid it would violate their contract with the DVDCCA, or someone else they had to license from.
One of the sites I regularly visit, the Kevin and Kell online comic strip, asks people not to link or inline directly to the comic strip--they've had some trouble with people doing that in the past. I had some concern that this linking decision threw open the door to people to do just that--but from the NYTimes article, I see that it's still open to debate (and legal action).
Re:I think this is illegal in Finland
on
Sega Dreamcast: $0
·
· Score: 2
They'll probably use those magic words oft-read by TV and radio announcers, "This offer void where prohibited."
Well, I'd say something in the middle, like a 33.6 or 56K modem, would be most likely. Fast enough you'd believe someone would try to DL over it, slow enough that you wouldn't want to try to DL from them. And even then, ping time may prove a dead giveaway.
I don't know about that. When I'm running Napster on a high-speed line, the servers that say 14.4 modem speed and have low pings are often the first ones I try--and ofttimes I'm rewarded with a 20-30K per second download. Damn, those are some fast 14.4 modems--I'd love to have the compression technology they must be using.:)
Re:What's with the Linus quote?
on
More on LinDVD
·
· Score: 4
Fluffhead wrote...
Does anyone else think that quote from Linus at the end of the piece sounded more like a market-droid than the real Linus talking? "Their digital video and audio products will greatly enhance the Linux multimedia experience" ??? Let's hope Transmeta doesn't have him so insulated from reality now with quote-spewing PR flacks, that he ends up completely out of touch with reality, like Bill Gates....
And I'm mildly annoyed, I'd like to note--I mentioned the very Wired News article linked to in the/. submission, in a post I made in response to the original LinDVD article. Even quoted the last paragraph. Nobody replied or moderated me up.
Now, the article's suddenly been noticed as if it's Hot Headline News, Stop The Presses, and considered hot news, and everyone's commenting on the quote in the last paragraph as if they never saw it before. Oh well.
My take on Linus's quote: Well, Linus isn't RMS. He's never claimed to be. He's not the die-hard ideologue Stallman is--and he's no dummy, either.
Open-source or not, a Linux DVD player app is something that will nonetheless improve the viability of Linux as an alternate operating system. Like the similarly closed-source apps WordPerfect, StarOffice, and so forth, it provides yet another thing that Linux doesn't yet have--and presumably provides it in such a way that people like me, who never could manage to get the DeCSS player apps to work, will have something user-friendly that we can drop the DVD into and go. And that's a good thing for getting more people to use Linux rather than Windows.
Anyway, for all we know the Wired flacks could have cut Linus's quote, or reworded it, to leave out any mention of "I'd rather it be open source, but..." We all know how movie posters and boxes mangle quotes from film reviews to suit their purposes...
You can also check out the Linux group on their NNTP news server, REALmagic.linux.
Not only is it not completely open source (just the "unclassified" parts, which they expect the Linux community in general to write for them), you'll have to buy a whole new card (which, due to being aimed primarily at the server/kiosk market rather than the home video market, is currently MSRP at $200) to use it! They're not going to release Linux drivers for their Hollywood Plus, for no really good reason that they'll explain (something about being afraid it could be cracked and/or would violate their DVDCCA agreement or something).
Not only that, but they estimate it to be several months until it's ready.
The fact that it's not 100% open source I can deal with...but wanting me to buy a whole new $200 card just goes right out the window. (Or should that be the (MS) Windows?:) That it's being used in the fight against DeCSS is just the icing on an already bad-tasting cake.
Someone has announced they'll be trying to reverse-engineer the H+ drivers...I wish them all the best of luck and hope, if they're successful, that people mirror what they come out with before the company gets it shut down.
Actually, I think that idea of long distance with ads was really kicked around. i think it's a GREAT idea
Actually, it exists right now, though only for Windows users. It's called Dialpad. Free long distance, paid for by banner ads. Works great even over a 33.6 modem line.
One of my pet peeves is that in the stories here, and the recent SalonMag piece on ebooks (March 29; I don't feel like the effort of finding the hyperlink but if you go to SalonMag and search, you should find it easily enough), all the attention goes to the big folks, the ones who can afford to leak money like a sieve (ie, Fatbrain) or the ones who use all these forms of copy protection. In fact, the Steven King Can't Read His Own E-Book piece had a quote from some guy who said that he'd never seen an e-book without copy-protective encryption.
Even leaving aside Project Gutenberg, there are still many ebookeries that don't go in for this sort of encryption. For instance, Alexandria Digital Literature and Mind's Eye Press have been selling shorter works by reknowned SF authors (Vonda McIntire, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, etc.) in open formats (ASCII, HTML, Palm/AportisDoc, etc.) for quite some time, have never had problems with piracy, and seem to be doing well enough to stay afloat. (And Alexlit even has a nifty collaborative filtering book recommender that is worth visiting the site for all by itself.)
And yet these sites are never mentioned in any of these articles. It's just the flashy newcomers like King and the big spenders like Fatbooks who get the publicity, while these high-quality smaller providers languish in obscurity. Feh.
Well, there's also the Netstream card that Sigma Designs, maker of the Hollywood Plus, is going to be coming out with for Linux. It will allow DVD hardware decoding & decryption. Sadly, it's primarily meant for use in things like video kiosks and servers, and its MSRP is $200.
According to the Wired News article on LinDVD, they'll be opening as much of it as they legally can, including the APIs and things.
And of particular interest, I think, to the Linux community is the last paragraph of that article:
"This is another exciting day for the Linux community," said Linus Torvald, creator of the Linux operating system. "[Linux] continues to attract industry-leading software companies like InterVideo. Their digital video and audio products will greatly enhance the Linux multimedia experience."
It's all very well and good to say, "Hey! MP3s promote the band! I buy CDs by people whose MP3s I like! I don't want to pay for the whole thing if I just want one song off of it!"
But I see it as being like fansubbed anime...some people see it just as a temporary alternative until they can find a commercial version or learn to speak Japanese, but others see it as a nice way to build up a free tape library without having to pay quasi-exorbitant prices. The artists should be paid for their work. (And I admit I'm guilty in this respect...) Will this happen? I doubt it--not until there's some sort of a workable micropayment system in place that will let, say, a penny or some fraction thereupon be charged for each MP3, and directed to the right place. And even then people who don't like that will find backdoor sources...
The genie is out of the bottle. I think the next few years will be fairly turbulent on both sides before things settle out.
They did have to do it, according to an article in Wired News today. It wasn't that they were P.O.'d people might be modifying it--earlier press releases suggest that they didn't really object because their target audience is the sort of person who would think a Phillips Screwdriver is what you get when you combine vodka with Milk of Magnesia.:)
However, the stock market didn't see it that way, and their stock had fallen way way down. This is an IPO--a crucial timeframe for them. It's make or break time, and they have to do everything they can to guarantee success and look good to the stockholders and the potential investors (ie, People Who Would Be Prone To Throw Money At Them). After the IPO is over, they'll probably relax a bit. For all we know, it might be some easily-bypassable hack that they just throw in for the sake of being able to say they could.
I pay online via my bank, Commerce Bank. It was free to set up, don't need any special software, and it costs me something like $6/mo, or so I'm told.
What interest me more are the online friend-to-friend payment services, like PayPal...absolutely free, and you can send money to anyone anywhere--including many eBay auctioneers. And they even pay you for signing up...
What I don't understand is why they haven't been going after utilities such as Remote Selector that allow people with DVD-ROM drives to play movies from any region. After all, those would seem to do the same thing, right?
This is very true. As the sigfile of one fellow on SFFnet says, "Thanks to the world-wide-web, anyone can be a slushpile reader."
If anybody can publish anything, then nobody will want to read it. Which is why the future lies with ebook concerns like Alexlit, Mind's Eye, and others. Forget FatBrain...I don't have the time or money to spend on someone else's vanity e-press.
(As a side note, Alexlit also offers a very nice collaborative-searching literature recommender engine, which I believe is the first of its kind on the 'net. Which is sort of an instant peer suggestion device.)
The problem is that PDF is mainly designed to be printed, not read off the screen. Which is okay if you're going to print the book out...but when I buy an e-book, I buy it to read, not to print and then read--if I wanted that, I might as well buy a physical book instead of an e-book. Besides, there's no Adobe reader for the Palm, and my Visor is my e-book reader of choice.
My two favorite e-book sites, Alexlit and Mind's Eye, both offer e-books for download in a variety of formats--text, HTML, Rocketbook, Palm(Aportis)Doc, and so forth. My third-favorite, Peanut Press, is closed-format, Palm-only, but my Visor is easy enough to read it from. I've read whole novels that way--including A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of the longest novels you can find these days.
Gutenberg is a nice thing, yes...but how many of you have considered contributing back to Gutenberg in return for what it's given you?
Go out to an old bookstore, or Bookfinder and dig up some musty old tomes that were published back before 1923 or so and aren't yet in Project Gutenberg. Original editions, not re-translations or re-issues, so there can be no doubt about their public domain-ness. Check with P.G. to determine their eligibility. Then scan 'em in.
I have a couple of old translated Arsene Lupin novels by Maurice Leblanc that I intend to scan in when I have the time. God knows they need more; they only have one, The Glass Stopper.
Umm...so? Requesting your files under the Freedom of Information Act is not, in itself, illegal, and furthermore, if you're not doing anything illegal anyway, what does it matter if they pay closer attention to you?
(Oh, and FYI, if you have a bank account, you usually have a good means of getting papers notarized either for free or inexpensively...banks maintain their own notaries for the use of their customers and such.)
Stick it on your Palm? Doubtful. As far as I know, nobody's come out with a PDF reader for the Palm yet. I've looked.
Your best bet would be to buy it from Peanut Press. $2.50 isn't a bad price, especially considering that some of the books on there are selling for hardcover pricing. Or better yet, wait 'til their next email newsletter comes out (bearing a $1 off per book promo code) and get it for $1.50. The Peanut Reader's not a bad little program.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't count Robotech 3000 out yet; it's looking like production is indeed proceeding on it...
I mean, come on, even if you leave out the people who use standalone players instead of DVDROM drives, and thus have no reason to boycott...well over 90% of the computer people will have Windows. And you can bet they won't be boycotting for Linux.
If I thought it would work, sure I'd boycott. But if I boycott something, it's because I think I'll get results, not out of RMSish idealism. (By the way, it's apathetic.)
Presumably, once they have the drivers ready, they'll come out with more feature-light cards based on the same chipset that can use the same drivers--equivalent to their Hollywood Plus. But I imagine it's easier to write a driver for a card with everything and then take stuff out for subsequent cards than it is to write a driver and then add stuff. So wait a while, maybe they'll make something cheaper. In the mean time, there's always LinDVD...
I like movies a lot; I'd like DVDs to be free, but even so, I'm not going to perform nasal reduction surgery to spite my face. If you want to, be my guest, but I'd rather enjoy the movies now than engage in a fruitless boycott whose only effect would be to deprive me of the moviewatching experience I so enjoy.
And so, I'll keep watching movies in Windows, or in Linux when a commercial solution comes out, or when the open source drivers mature, and I'm going to put my faith in the courts and the legislatures to do the right thing, misguided though that may be.
Well, Sigma Designs has been asked for help, on the Linux newsgroup on their NNTP message forum. They've politely but firmly stated repeatedly that they have no plans to release Linux drivers for the H+, nor have they plans to assist in an effort to create them. Apparently, what with deCSS floating around, they're afraid it would violate their contract with the DVDCCA, or someone else they had to license from.
One of the sites I regularly visit, the Kevin and Kell online comic strip, asks people not to link or inline directly to the comic strip--they've had some trouble with people doing that in the past. I had some concern that this linking decision threw open the door to people to do just that--but from the NYTimes article, I see that it's still open to debate (and legal action).
They'll probably use those magic words oft-read by TV and radio announcers, "This offer void where prohibited."
Well, I'd say something in the middle, like a 33.6 or 56K modem, would be most likely. Fast enough you'd believe someone would try to DL over it, slow enough that you wouldn't want to try to DL from them. And even then, ping time may prove a dead giveaway.
I don't know about that. When I'm running Napster on a high-speed line, the servers that say 14.4 modem speed and have low pings are often the first ones I try--and ofttimes I'm rewarded with a 20-30K per second download. Damn, those are some fast 14.4 modems--I'd love to have the compression technology they must be using. :)
Now, the article's suddenly been noticed as if it's Hot Headline News, Stop The Presses, and considered hot news, and everyone's commenting on the quote in the last paragraph as if they never saw it before. Oh well.
My take on Linus's quote: Well, Linus isn't RMS. He's never claimed to be. He's not the die-hard ideologue Stallman is--and he's no dummy, either.
Open-source or not, a Linux DVD player app is something that will nonetheless improve the viability of Linux as an alternate operating system. Like the similarly closed-source apps WordPerfect, StarOffice, and so forth, it provides yet another thing that Linux doesn't yet have--and presumably provides it in such a way that people like me, who never could manage to get the DeCSS player apps to work, will have something user-friendly that we can drop the DVD into and go. And that's a good thing for getting more people to use Linux rather than Windows.
Anyway, for all we know the Wired flacks could have cut Linus's quote, or reworded it, to leave out any mention of "I'd rather it be open source, but..." We all know how movie posters and boxes mangle quotes from film reviews to suit their purposes...
Not only is it not completely open source (just the "unclassified" parts, which they expect the Linux community in general to write for them), you'll have to buy a whole new card (which, due to being aimed primarily at the server/kiosk market rather than the home video market, is currently MSRP at $200 ) to use it! They're not going to release Linux drivers for their Hollywood Plus, for no really good reason that they'll explain (something about being afraid it could be cracked and/or would violate their DVDCCA agreement or something).
Not only that, but they estimate it to be several months until it's ready.
The fact that it's not 100% open source I can deal with...but wanting me to buy a whole new $200 card just goes right out the window. (Or should that be the (MS) Windows? :) That it's being used in the fight against DeCSS is just the icing on an already bad-tasting cake.
Someone has announced they'll be trying to reverse-engineer the H+ drivers...I wish them all the best of luck and hope, if they're successful, that people mirror what they come out with before the company gets it shut down.
Even leaving aside Project Gutenberg, there are still many ebookeries that don't go in for this sort of encryption. For instance, Alexandria Digital Literature and Mind's Eye Press have been selling shorter works by reknowned SF authors (Vonda McIntire, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, etc.) in open formats (ASCII, HTML, Palm/AportisDoc, etc.) for quite some time, have never had problems with piracy, and seem to be doing well enough to stay afloat. (And Alexlit even has a nifty collaborative filtering book recommender that is worth visiting the site for all by itself.)
And yet these sites are never mentioned in any of these articles. It's just the flashy newcomers like King and the big spenders like Fatbooks who get the publicity, while these high-quality smaller providers languish in obscurity. Feh.
It's discussed, somewhat, in the Linux newsgroup on their NNTP server.
And of particular interest, I think, to the Linux community is the last paragraph of that article:
A DVD-ROM drive and Remote Selector let me do this very thing right now. I don't see as there's so much newsworthy about it...
But I see it as being like fansubbed anime...some people see it just as a temporary alternative until they can find a commercial version or learn to speak Japanese, but others see it as a nice way to build up a free tape library without having to pay quasi-exorbitant prices. The artists should be paid for their work. (And I admit I'm guilty in this respect...) Will this happen? I doubt it--not until there's some sort of a workable micropayment system in place that will let, say, a penny or some fraction thereupon be charged for each MP3, and directed to the right place. And even then people who don't like that will find backdoor sources...
The genie is out of the bottle. I think the next few years will be fairly turbulent on both sides before things settle out.
However, the stock market didn't see it that way, and their stock had fallen way way down. This is an IPO--a crucial timeframe for them. It's make or break time, and they have to do everything they can to guarantee success and look good to the stockholders and the potential investors (ie, People Who Would Be Prone To Throw Money At Them). After the IPO is over, they'll probably relax a bit. For all we know, it might be some easily-bypassable hack that they just throw in for the sake of being able to say they could.
What interest me more are the online friend-to-friend payment services, like PayPal...absolutely free, and you can send money to anyone anywhere--including many eBay auctioneers. And they even pay you for signing up...
What I don't understand is why they haven't been going after utilities such as Remote Selector that allow people with DVD-ROM drives to play movies from any region. After all, those would seem to do the same thing, right?
If anybody can publish anything, then nobody will want to read it. Which is why the future lies with ebook concerns like Alexlit, Mind's Eye, and others. Forget FatBrain...I don't have the time or money to spend on someone else's vanity e-press.
(As a side note, Alexlit also offers a very nice collaborative-searching literature recommender engine, which I believe is the first of its kind on the 'net. Which is sort of an instant peer suggestion device.)
My two favorite e-book sites, Alexlit and Mind's Eye, both offer e-books for download in a variety of formats--text, HTML, Rocketbook, Palm(Aportis)Doc, and so forth. My third-favorite, Peanut Press, is closed-format, Palm-only, but my Visor is easy enough to read it from. I've read whole novels that way--including A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of the longest novels you can find these days.
Go out to an old bookstore, or Bookfinder and dig up some musty old tomes that were published back before 1923 or so and aren't yet in Project Gutenberg. Original editions, not re-translations or re-issues, so there can be no doubt about their public domain-ness. Check with P.G. to determine their eligibility. Then scan 'em in.
I have a couple of old translated Arsene Lupin novels by Maurice Leblanc that I intend to scan in when I have the time. God knows they need more; they only have one, The Glass Stopper.
(Oh, and FYI, if you have a bank account, you usually have a good means of getting papers notarized either for free or inexpensively...banks maintain their own notaries for the use of their customers and such.)
Your best bet would be to buy it from Peanut Press. $2.50 isn't a bad price, especially considering that some of the books on there are selling for hardcover pricing. Or better yet, wait 'til their next email newsletter comes out (bearing a $1 off per book promo code) and get it for $1.50. The Peanut Reader's not a bad little program.