I think that the lawyers involved were not technically oriented. DVD copying does not involve decoding or violating the DMCA in any way. For example, you can copy a DVD with a simple:
dd if=/dev/sr0 of=mydvd.iso
I think they were referring to the decoding of the content, which occurs on transcoding or playback. The copy itself does not involve any decoding of CSS.
You know that people drive motorcycles, right? The only thing between you and the road is the clothes on your back.
The largest SUV on the market still turns into a pancake when it's involved in an accident with an 18-wheeler. Car and truck traffic is not separated. A light vehicle that "bounces" and has airbags is likely to offer higher survival than one with more mass. These vehicles generally don't have a problem passing crash testing as a result.
This is what I came here to say. I used to blog, mostly as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family that we aren't physically near. Some of them reciprocated with their own blogs.
Now, everyone that I used to interact with is on Facebook, so that's where I (and they) post. In addition, many of the blogs I might have followed (e.g. celebrities, causes, technology, entertainment) are now on Facebook as well.
It's not that blogs have gone away, it's that they and their audiences have transitioned to social networking.
When the "next big thing" comes along - like Google Wave - people will be lamenting that social networking has gone away. Change happens, and communications improves. It doesn't go away, it gets better.
This is the 11th revision of the HDMI specification in the less-than 7 year life of HDMI. Meanwhile, the 22-year old VGA connection still works fine, at full HDTV resolution, and with none of the incompatibility or usage restrictions (DRM) that HDMI brings to the table. Um, progress?
I agree that the content still needs to be created, but I think that funding that content creation can change.
I'm a retired software developer, and the idea of giving away software and still making money was kind of hard to get my head around initially. Shifting the value to the support side was a unique concept (to me).
Less than 10% of their revenue comes from the content side of the house (Sony Pictures). Two-thirds of their revenue comes from their Electronics division. The purpose of their Electronics division is to make hardware that plays, records and manipulates content.
While we can postulate that copyright infringement harms the content side of the business, I'd wager that it benefits the hardware side of the business. You need PCs, DVD burners, MP3 players, LCDs, media, etc. for all that infringed content, after all.
It's like Linux to the electronics industry in general. Why do Intel, Dell, HP, Nokia, Motorola, IBM, etc. *pay* people to develop Linux? It sells hardware, the part of their business they really care about.
Music, movies, books - they are the software of the applicable hardware. Just as Sony funds the content creation, other profiting manufacturers need to do the same (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.). That's the paradigm shift that needs to happen. The content isn't their business anymore. It's the only way they will survive.
I'm old too, but I think I understand. Time for a car analogy:
If you're strolling down the street, and you come upon a car dealership that is offering free cars, would you accept one? You may not be in the market for a car, but... it's free!
Then you discover that the dealer is actually creating duplicates with a "Star Trek"-type duplicator. He buys one car from a manufacturer, and duplicates them. Is that illegal? The manufacturer says yes. The law says the duplication infringes on the manufacturer's intellectual property, but there's no case law on you accepting the free duplicate (yet). As long as you're not making cars for other people, it *might* not be illegal to accept one. It's all unclear.
So, do you take the free car? Most people would, I think.
They're not going to see the movie, but if it arrives at their home for no additional charge... Why not? If you're not uploading, you're not infringing (maybe).
Then there's the whole illegal doesn't always mean right. It was illegal for women to vote, or for non-whites to be treated equally; should people not have opposed that because it was the law? Is it right for copyright holders to have a life-long control over their creations, when they were built on the creative efforts of their predecessors? Why is "borrowing" creative content illegal now, when it was legal before? That's how the current content owners got their ideas, why can't another generation do the same?
This is all a very muddy issue to me, legally, ethically and morally. The content industries are trying very hard to make it a clear cut issue, but you just have to do a little reading on the subject to see that it's not the case.
In fact, the entire U.S. movie industry got its start infringing on the copyrights and patents of the time. It seems like a pretty unethical stance to say it was OK for them, but it's not for anyone else.
I can't wait for this voluntary blocking to come to the USA. My ISP supports third party candidates, so they'll happily block the web sites of both the republican and democratic parties candidates. This will be great for the general population, because they will no longer have to be exposed to the criminal activities, sexual misadventures, and immoral actions of the candidates and their families.
It's a great precedent for telephone companies to block political parties, charities and competing businesses too! Finally, my phone will stop ringing when non-telco approved callers want to reach me....Or we could tell the ISPs to stick their blocks up their respective orifices.
People keep referring to Linux as if it were a single OS, and I believe that is very much the intent of Microsoft.
There are hundreds of active Linux distributions, each with a unique focus and out of the box functionality. Some are security leaders (like Fedora) that have driven security in Linux development.
However, when comparing to "Linux" (the collection of active distributions), the distribution with the weakest security can be held up as an example of how poor Linux is in this area.
Rather than play via Microsoft's rules, folks need to clarify their arguments. Linux is about freedom, which includes the ability to run a distribution that has no security features active whatsoever.
If security (or any other attribute) is the attribute under discussion, hold up the distribution that best exemplifies it.
Every distribution can be made to do anything (it is Linux after all), but most of these discussion center on the out of the box experience - which is actually pretty poor on windows, since it comes with nothing but the base OS.
They get to put a crimp in OSS and media streaming at the same time.
You can't be downloading Linux installation DVDs and maintenance, or contributing to Linux development with a low cap.
You can't be viewing streaming video (especially the new 720p content) from sites like Hulu, Youtube, etc., or download media with a low cap.
I hope they are getting financial incentives from Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA, otherwise it's a wasted strategy. By their own admission, only a small percentage of their customers exceed these low caps, so the infrastructure costs to support them will likely hurt their bottom line and make them less competitive without financial incentives.
In a free market, this should provide an opportunity for small companies and other suppliers. However, in most US markets Internet service is still a single supplier environment.
The Pirate Bay does nothing more than a phone book does. That is, it provides a reference or index entry to an actual object.
If what the Pirate Bay does is illegal, then phone book publishers should be prosecuted for listing felons and scams. After all, by this flawed thinking, the listing of the contact information facilitates the felonies and scams of the individuals represented by the entry.
This is obviously nonsensical. Why do people lose their critical reasoning ability so easily?
Market share is the number of copies sold as pre-installs (e.g., netbooks) and retail boxes. For Linux, this number is really immaterial.
The number of interest is the 'installed base', which is the number of copies installed on hardware. For Linux, this number is hard to get. Some of the larger distributions have started making (low-ball) estimates, but even they admit the numbers don't really reflect the number installed, for various reasons.
Another question is whether or not to count the number of embedded Linux copies. If my TV, DVR, PMP, MP3, PDA and other devices run Linux (they do), should those count toward the installed base? Or should we be counting general purpose computers only?
HFS without the journal or ext2 or exFAT doesn't solve the problem of having to run a filesystem check on a 2TB system, which could take many hours (possibly days). That's why journals are used.
I have no idea what the MTBF is on these things, but is the expectation of a shortened life because of the additional write activity really that much of a concern?
Yes. Consumer flash has a typical life on the order of 100,000 writes. A journaled filesystem writes its status about every 5 seconds. That will start killing flash blocks after about a week of continuous use.
That's why a high write capacity area is needed for the journal. As an example, a 512MB (4Mbit) nvsram - non-volatile SRAM, effectively unlimited write cycles and almost as fast as RAM - costs only $7. By combining this with the larger flash area, free / open source journaled filesystems like ext3/ext4 can be supported without shortening the life of the flash.
The problem is the same; as a journaled filesystem, it would significantly shorten the life of the flash. A quick google search doesn't point to HFS+ being able to support an external journal either.
Since Linux, Mac and even most existing Windows users won't be able to use exFAT/FAT64 formatted media, they're not doing anyone any favors.
They could use NTFS as a more common file system, except for that whole journaling burning up the flash thing.
The most reasonable alternative is ext2, though I wouldn't want to spend a day fscking a 2TB SD card any more than I'd want to spend a day with chkdsk on an exFAT formatted one.
If flash sizes are going to continue to grow, they need to deal with journaling filesystems. Perhaps the easiest, most cost effective way to do this is by pre-partitioning the unit, with the bulk of the storage in one partition, but a second partition for a much smaller external journal aligned to more robust flash (e.g., 128MB with a 50M+ write life). Even with a 5 second journal update interval, that would give you about 8 years of 24 x 7 x 365 usage. Ext3 supports this configuration, not sure about NTFS or HFS+.
I have an old Zaurus SL-5500 PDA with 64MB of memory, and I run X on it continuously. X adds so much functionality, why would anyone choose a framebuffer-based display instead?
It's like saying "now we don't have to use a word processor anymore, we can run notepad!"
I'd like to take a moment to thank these brave little machines for removing themselves from the Microsoft gene pool, to help stop the spread of the Microsoft cancer.
This movement started with Windows ME falling on it's own marketing hype In September of 2000, dying in the box. The Xbox 360 followed in November of 2005, choking on its own red ring of death. In January of 2007 Windows Vista died before our eyes. Now the Zunes have stepped up the fight for freedom, hanging themselves before the new year.
Video capture is the first thing that springs to mind, as well as external HDDs, flash storage, etc. Right now, copying gigs of data to external storage is slow with USB 2. Also, video capture is problematic. If the data isn't moving fast enough, I drop frames of video.
Firewire for the video capture and eSATA for the external hard drives will solve both problems. Even eSATA flash drives are showing up on the market now.
That's exactly right. The customers paid for a shared connection. Google (Youtube) paid for a commercial connection. The ISPs are already being paid twice for transporting the same bits.
Since the customer's connection is shared, there is no service guarantee. If contention is too high, bits get dropped. If too many bits get dropped, and the customer has a choice, they can go to another ISP.
To summarize, ISPs are currently double-dipping, and they don't like competition. To solve this "problem", they propose triple-billing for transport so they don't have to re-invest as much in infrastructure. The "net neutrality" spin is just an obfuscation of what would otherwise be an obvious abuse of their position.
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I think that the lawyers involved were not technically oriented. DVD copying does not involve decoding or violating the DMCA in any way. For example, you can copy a DVD with a simple:
dd if=/dev/sr0 of=mydvd.iso
I think they were referring to the decoding of the content, which occurs on transcoding or playback. The copy itself does not involve any decoding of CSS.
PBS has Nova ScienceNOW, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/02.html
It's pretty good, and surprisingly current.
When your friend starts eating his toast with the buttered side down, he's just a little quirky.
When he packages his hair and nail clippings and burns them on a toy boat in the backyard pool, he's eccentric.
When he kills the neighbor's cat and wears the skin on his head proclaiming himself the beast master, he's bat-shit insane.
We've reached stage three with the RIAA, and now everyone can see it. It's time for treatment.
You know that people drive motorcycles, right? The only thing between you and the road is the clothes on your back.
The largest SUV on the market still turns into a pancake when it's involved in an accident with an 18-wheeler. Car and truck traffic is not separated. A light vehicle that "bounces" and has airbags is likely to offer higher survival than one with more mass. These vehicles generally don't have a problem passing crash testing as a result.
No access to Disney content resulting in lower ISP charges? Win-Win! How do I sign up?
This is what I came here to say. I used to blog, mostly as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family that we aren't physically near. Some of them reciprocated with their own blogs.
Now, everyone that I used to interact with is on Facebook, so that's where I (and they) post. In addition, many of the blogs I might have followed (e.g. celebrities, causes, technology, entertainment) are now on Facebook as well.
It's not that blogs have gone away, it's that they and their audiences have transitioned to social networking.
When the "next big thing" comes along - like Google Wave - people will be lamenting that social networking has gone away. Change happens, and communications improves. It doesn't go away, it gets better.
This is the 11th revision of the HDMI specification in the less-than 7 year life of HDMI. Meanwhile, the 22-year old VGA connection still works fine, at full HDTV resolution, and with none of the incompatibility or usage restrictions (DRM) that HDMI brings to the table. Um, progress?
I agree that the content still needs to be created, but I think that funding that content creation can change.
I'm a retired software developer, and the idea of giving away software and still making money was kind of hard to get my head around initially. Shifting the value to the support side was a unique concept (to me).
Let's look at a major content IP holder, like Sony: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/2008/qfhh7c00000htnf4-att/SonyAR08-02.pdf
Less than 10% of their revenue comes from the content side of the house (Sony Pictures). Two-thirds of their revenue comes from their Electronics division. The purpose of their Electronics division is to make hardware that plays, records and manipulates content.
While we can postulate that copyright infringement harms the content side of the business, I'd wager that it benefits the hardware side of the business. You need PCs, DVD burners, MP3 players, LCDs, media, etc. for all that infringed content, after all.
It's like Linux to the electronics industry in general. Why do Intel, Dell, HP, Nokia, Motorola, IBM, etc. *pay* people to develop Linux? It sells hardware, the part of their business they really care about.
Music, movies, books - they are the software of the applicable hardware. Just as Sony funds the content creation, other profiting manufacturers need to do the same (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.). That's the paradigm shift that needs to happen. The content isn't their business anymore. It's the only way they will survive.
I'm old too, but I think I understand. Time for a car analogy:
If you're strolling down the street, and you come upon a car dealership that is offering free cars, would you accept one? You may not be in the market for a car, but... it's free!
Then you discover that the dealer is actually creating duplicates with a "Star Trek"-type duplicator. He buys one car from a manufacturer, and duplicates them. Is that illegal? The manufacturer says yes. The law says the duplication infringes on the manufacturer's intellectual property, but there's no case law on you accepting the free duplicate (yet). As long as you're not making cars for other people, it *might* not be illegal to accept one. It's all unclear.
So, do you take the free car? Most people would, I think.
They're not going to see the movie, but if it arrives at their home for no additional charge... Why not? If you're not uploading, you're not infringing (maybe).
Then there's the whole illegal doesn't always mean right. It was illegal for women to vote, or for non-whites to be treated equally; should people not have opposed that because it was the law? Is it right for copyright holders to have a life-long control over their creations, when they were built on the creative efforts of their predecessors? Why is "borrowing" creative content illegal now, when it was legal before? That's how the current content owners got their ideas, why can't another generation do the same?
This is all a very muddy issue to me, legally, ethically and morally. The content industries are trying very hard to make it a clear cut issue, but you just have to do a little reading on the subject to see that it's not the case.
In fact, the entire U.S. movie industry got its start infringing on the copyrights and patents of the time. It seems like a pretty unethical stance to say it was OK for them, but it's not for anyone else.
I can't wait for this voluntary blocking to come to the USA. My ISP supports third party candidates, so they'll happily block the web sites of both the republican and democratic parties candidates. This will be great for the general population, because they will no longer have to be exposed to the criminal activities, sexual misadventures, and immoral actions of the candidates and their families.
It's a great precedent for telephone companies to block political parties, charities and competing businesses too! Finally, my phone will stop ringing when non-telco approved callers want to reach me. ...Or we could tell the ISPs to stick their blocks up their respective orifices.
People keep referring to Linux as if it were a single OS, and I believe that is very much the intent of Microsoft.
There are hundreds of active Linux distributions, each with a unique focus and out of the box functionality. Some are security leaders (like Fedora) that have driven security in Linux development.
However, when comparing to "Linux" (the collection of active distributions), the distribution with the weakest security can be held up as an example of how poor Linux is in this area.
Rather than play via Microsoft's rules, folks need to clarify their arguments. Linux is about freedom, which includes the ability to run a distribution that has no security features active whatsoever.
If security (or any other attribute) is the attribute under discussion, hold up the distribution that best exemplifies it.
Every distribution can be made to do anything (it is Linux after all), but most of these discussion center on the out of the box experience - which is actually pretty poor on windows, since it comes with nothing but the base OS.
They get to put a crimp in OSS and media streaming at the same time.
You can't be downloading Linux installation DVDs and maintenance, or contributing to Linux development with a low cap.
You can't be viewing streaming video (especially the new 720p content) from sites like Hulu, Youtube, etc., or download media with a low cap.
I hope they are getting financial incentives from Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA, otherwise it's a wasted strategy. By their own admission, only a small percentage of their customers exceed these low caps, so the infrastructure costs to support them will likely hurt their bottom line and make them less competitive without financial incentives.
In a free market, this should provide an opportunity for small companies and other suppliers. However, in most US markets Internet service is still a single supplier environment.
The Pirate Bay does nothing more than a phone book does. That is, it provides a reference or index entry to an actual object.
If what the Pirate Bay does is illegal, then phone book publishers should be prosecuted for listing felons and scams. After all, by this flawed thinking, the listing of the contact information facilitates the felonies and scams of the individuals represented by the entry.
This is obviously nonsensical. Why do people lose their critical reasoning ability so easily?
Market share is the number of copies sold as pre-installs (e.g., netbooks) and retail boxes. For Linux, this number is really immaterial.
The number of interest is the 'installed base', which is the number of copies installed on hardware. For Linux, this number is hard to get. Some of the larger distributions have started making (low-ball) estimates, but even they admit the numbers don't really reflect the number installed, for various reasons.
Another question is whether or not to count the number of embedded Linux copies. If my TV, DVR, PMP, MP3, PDA and other devices run Linux (they do), should those count toward the installed base? Or should we be counting general purpose computers only?
It's also been found effective against gout.
HFS without the journal or ext2 or exFAT doesn't solve the problem of having to run a filesystem check on a 2TB system, which could take many hours (possibly days). That's why journals are used.
Yes, but without the journal, you have the same problem as exFAT and ext2 - a very length filesystem check on a 2TB filesystem.
Yes. Consumer flash has a typical life on the order of 100,000 writes. A journaled filesystem writes its status about every 5 seconds. That will start killing flash blocks after about a week of continuous use.
That's why a high write capacity area is needed for the journal. As an example, a 512MB (4Mbit) nvsram - non-volatile SRAM, effectively unlimited write cycles and almost as fast as RAM - costs only $7. By combining this with the larger flash area, free / open source journaled filesystems like ext3/ext4 can be supported without shortening the life of the flash.
The problem is the same; as a journaled filesystem, it would significantly shorten the life of the flash. A quick google search doesn't point to HFS+ being able to support an external journal either.
Since Linux, Mac and even most existing Windows users won't be able to use exFAT/FAT64 formatted media, they're not doing anyone any favors.
They could use NTFS as a more common file system, except for that whole journaling burning up the flash thing.
The most reasonable alternative is ext2, though I wouldn't want to spend a day fscking a 2TB SD card any more than I'd want to spend a day with chkdsk on an exFAT formatted one.
If flash sizes are going to continue to grow, they need to deal with journaling filesystems. Perhaps the easiest, most cost effective way to do this is by pre-partitioning the unit, with the bulk of the storage in one partition, but a second partition for a much smaller external journal aligned to more robust flash (e.g., 128MB with a 50M+ write life). Even with a 5 second journal update interval, that would give you about 8 years of 24 x 7 x 365 usage. Ext3 supports this configuration, not sure about NTFS or HFS+.
I have an old Zaurus SL-5500 PDA with 64MB of memory, and I run X on it continuously. X adds so much functionality, why would anyone choose a framebuffer-based display instead?
It's like saying "now we don't have to use a word processor anymore, we can run notepad!"
My Fedora 8 and Fedora 10 machines did not experience any problems. Maybe you had a power glitch, if there's nothing in the logs.
I'd like to take a moment to thank these brave little machines for removing themselves from the Microsoft gene pool, to help stop the spread of the Microsoft cancer.
This movement started with Windows ME falling on it's own marketing hype In September of 2000, dying in the box. The Xbox 360 followed in November of 2005, choking on its own red ring of death. In January of 2007 Windows Vista died before our eyes. Now the Zunes have stepped up the fight for freedom, hanging themselves before the new year.
December 31st, 2008. Never forget.
Firewire for the video capture and eSATA for the external hard drives will solve both problems. Even eSATA flash drives are showing up on the market now.
That's exactly right. The customers paid for a shared connection. Google (Youtube) paid for a commercial connection. The ISPs are already being paid twice for transporting the same bits.
Since the customer's connection is shared, there is no service guarantee. If contention is too high, bits get dropped. If too many bits get dropped, and the customer has a choice, they can go to another ISP.
To summarize, ISPs are currently double-dipping, and they don't like competition. To solve this "problem", they propose triple-billing for transport so they don't have to re-invest as much in infrastructure. The "net neutrality" spin is just an obfuscation of what would otherwise be an obvious abuse of their position.