Yes, this is true, and he was officially arrested on drug charges, but the media widely reported his past training in an "spy school", in particualr, his perfect command of Russian.
I don't think his release had anything to do with the Sklyarov case - more likely it was related to a spy case that was going on in the US at the same time (an Americal FBI officer who was found to be spying for Russia).
So "spy war" is similar to the Cold War "mutual destruction doctrine" - each country knows about spies of the other one, but does not arrest them, assuming that the other country will do the same with their spies (presumably also trying to feed false information to them at the same time).
The US has lately been intentionally making the relationship with Russia worse, feels like it's going towards a new Cold War.
Examples: the farce of "negotiations" over the 1972 missle defence treaty, the capture of a fishing boat crew by Canadians, the recent incident with the US Ambassador in Moscow.
What Bush wants is to push Putin, irritate him, as a show of strength and just to see how far he (Bush) can go and how Putin will respond.
The Sklyraov incident falls into the same pattern.
Here is a nicely written counter-attack by Chris Nelson, which gives some very interesting counter points. Don't let the WaSP get you down Mozilla, just keep on rolling.
This response is utter rubbish. It says that Netscape lost market share not because of Mozilla not being available, but because of MS's marketing tactics. Simple point: There is only so much Netscape / AOL can do in marketing Mozilla *if it's not available*!!!! Not having a product makes successfull marketing impossible. Simple as that. Of course this is only true if you define marketing success as "getting the product into the customer's hands"... one could also define it as "raising awareness that Mozilla's specification is better than IE's implementation":)
Allow me to disagree with your point about sound performance. Go look on AnandTech and other sites. One of standard benchmark tests for sound cards is to see how much the game rendering speed drops (if it does) when sound is enabled. This can vary -- depending game, drivers, API, and hardware -- from 0% (no slowdown) to as much as 10-15%. This _is_ significant.
Regarding MS claim that this vulnerabilty does not affect FP2000 extensions - I'm wondering, why? Did they fix the problem? If so, this means that they found it, but were quiet about its existence!
Of course, I could also be wrong and maybe this entire DLL and its code became obsolete in FP2000 code base and were simply discarded without inspecting the code.
As someone else already pointed out, Real never opened up their file format. This means that they control the server and _also_ the content creation tools.
The tools is what ultimately matters, because otherwise we are at the mercy of Real and their corporate partners when it comes to video creation tools for Linux. And we want those, oh yes!
I think it's much better for Linux if we (the people) put our support behind QuickTime format. Yes, the best codecs are proprietary, but the file format is open, so someone can create an good open-source codec.
And Apple already gave us the Darwin Streaming Server, which is the open source release of their exellent QuickTime Streaming Server.
I have started work on enhancing and maintaining the source. Take a look at:
If you are willing to stick to the content of the official RedHat CD (to use this as an example), you get all the software in one format -- RPM -- that works with the _built in_ "installer / uninstaller".
This is the more typical experience for an end-user (e.g. not a programmer).
If, OTOH, you are going to download.tar.gz files and build, you are most likely a programmer, and can figure things out.
I have a build of the 0.3 release (with some enhancements) available at:
http://www.pobox.com/~kostya/videod
It has binary and source RPMs, some tools, etc.
Currently looking to host the project somewhere (CVS, mailing lists, etc.).
RealPlayer can use RTSP, and so it should be possible to add support for RealVideo to this code. It is not neceessary to figure out the actual encoding -- just the high-level file format so that the server can find frames.
I agree that the codec and player problems are harder ones, but let's not forget the server. With some work, we could have a great streaming server for Linux based on these sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is true, and he was officially arrested on drug charges, but the media widely reported his past training in an "spy school", in particualr, his perfect command of Russian.
I don't think his release had anything to do with the Sklyarov case - more likely it was related to a spy case that was going on in the US at the same time (an Americal FBI officer who was found to be spying for Russia).
So "spy war" is similar to the Cold War "mutual destruction doctrine" - each country knows about spies of the other one, but does not arrest them, assuming that the other country will do the same with their spies (presumably also trying to feed false information to them at the same time).
-- Kostya
The US has lately been intentionally making the relationship with Russia worse, feels like it's going towards a new Cold War.
Examples: the farce of "negotiations" over the 1972 missle defence treaty, the capture of a fishing boat crew by Canadians, the recent incident with the US Ambassador in Moscow.
What Bush wants is to push Putin, irritate him, as a show of strength and just to see how far he (Bush) can go and how Putin will respond.
The Sklyraov incident falls into the same pattern.
-- Kostya
Allow me to disagree with your point about sound performance. Go look on AnandTech and other sites. One of standard benchmark tests for sound cards is to see how much the game rendering speed drops (if it does) when sound is enabled. This can vary -- depending game, drivers, API, and hardware -- from 0% (no slowdown) to as much as 10-15%. This _is_ significant.
Regarding MS claim that this vulnerabilty does not affect FP2000 extensions - I'm wondering, why? Did they fix the problem? If so, this means that they found it, but were quiet about its existence!
Of course, I could also be wrong and maybe this entire DLL and its code became obsolete in FP2000 code base and were simply discarded without inspecting the code.
-- Kostya
>> With e-mail, AIM, Web sites, and mailings, they're no longer dependent on the goodwill of parents and teachers for the tools to connect with. <<
:-)
So there was nothing else before the Internet? No phones, no snail-mail? Did women even know how to speak before the Net?
As someone else already pointed out, Real never opened up their file format. This means that they control the server and _also_ the content creation tools.
The tools is what ultimately matters, because otherwise we are at the mercy of Real and their corporate partners when it comes to video creation tools for Linux. And we want those, oh yes!
I think it's much better for Linux if we (the people) put our support behind QuickTime format. Yes, the best codecs are proprietary, but the file format is open, so someone can create an good open-source codec.
And Apple already gave us the Darwin Streaming Server, which is the open source release of their exellent QuickTime Streaming Server.
I have started work on enhancing and maintaining the source. Take a look at:
http://www.pobox.com/~kostya/videod
It all depends on the distro.
.tar.gz files and build, you are most likely a programmer, and can figure things out.
If you are willing to stick to the content of the official RedHat CD (to use this as an example), you get all the software in one format -- RPM -- that works with the _built in_ "installer / uninstaller".
This is the more typical experience for an end-user (e.g. not a programmer).
If, OTOH, you are going to download
I have a build of the 0.3 release (with some enhancements) available at:
http://www.pobox.com/~kostya/videod
It has binary and source RPMs, some tools, etc.
Currently looking to host the project somewhere (CVS, mailing lists, etc.).
RealPlayer can use RTSP, and so it should be possible to add support for RealVideo to this code. It is not neceessary to figure out the actual encoding -- just the high-level file format so that the server can find frames.
I agree that the codec and player problems are harder ones, but let's not forget the server. With some work, we could have a great streaming server for Linux based on these sources.
-- Kostya Vasilyev