I agree, but it's totally irrelevant in this situation. This is a homebrew TiVo, and you just don't get nice quality video in a TV signal.
That's not an accurate viewpoint, though, because the analog artifacts you get from a TV signal translate into even worse artifacts in the VCD.
Digital satellite CAN be very high quality, but it frequently isn't. You can tell the difference by comparing DirectTV, Cable and Dish Network side by side.
I don't know about VCD. To me, the quality just isn't there compared to a well-kept VCR. SVCD can compete with it's higher (and variable) bitrate, but then you suffer from 35minutes of video (for top quality) per disc. If you get a DVD player that can play out of spec (S)VCDs, this can sort of change. You can up the bitrate of VCDs, and/or make them VBR to increase qulaity. You can also check out the CVD standard, which is 352x480, VBR, mpeg-2. It's a real standard, and it's only a bit off from SVCD. You save a bit ont he bits (giving you a bit more time per disc) and better yet, the valid CVD streams are completely compatible with the DVD spec, meaning if you ever get a DVD burner, the same streams will can be burned as a DVD-Video.
Well likely it's something simple like an xor substitution. He's claiming it's derived from a one-time pad, which can use an xor of the key (the pad) on the cleartext to produce the ciphertext. That's a very simple algorithm, but incredibly effective assuming you can get past the one-time pad's drawbacks (most notably, transmission of the key)/and/ assuming that the one-time pad was generated with a non-reproducable algorithm (there are plenty of ways to do this).
But I use Kazaa to find songs from my favorite bands that/allow/ their songs to be shared. I'm using it legitimately. And they're stealing money that I pay amazon for the CDs of music I/don't/ steal!
It's not a standards problem, though. It's a problem with the end manufacturer not using the best quality lasers and readers (wrt burned DVDs) and not including a certain amount of flexibility in the decoder (wrt SVCDs and VCDs). The video discs you write with DVD-R is standards compliant. The laser your DVD player uses to read the disc is the issue.
Part of the problem is that Lindows isn't free. The original poster wasn't just talking about Linux, but Lindows (which was, of course, the topic of the article).
The interesting thing about all this is the concept of making the punishment fit the crime. 33 months is close to 2.5 eternities in software. All the software he distributed will probably go through two major versions in that time. How absurd is it, then, to make him serve that length of time for it?
One thing I've never been able to understand is how Buffy can provoke such a negative response from people here. Your quote: "buffy sucks, the movie sucked, the WB is the sole reason for the downfall of America" is tame compared to some of the flaming that goes on when someone even suggests that they might enjoy Buffy.
As for rights vs mod points... well Slashdot isn't a democracy. Slashdot doesn't claim to let you say anything you want. The moderation system itself should tell you that....
It sucks that other assclowns have modded a completely valid complaint as "flamebait". The headline of the story being a spoiler is the thing that does it. If the headline had been "Buffy Spoiler" or "Season 7 Information" that would be one thing. You can easily avoid the information by skipping the story.
The backlash during the Lone Gunmen debacle should have taught them a lesson. Don't post spoilers in the headline. Obviously they didn't learn.
Want to fight back? Email OSDN and tell them that you will stop viewing Slashdot because they constantly post spoilers for television shows that haven't aired yet. Hit them in their pocketbook.
She did indeed sign for two more seasons....last season. So Season 6 was her first, and 7 will be her second. Of course, unless Joss is a dumbass who can't look a cash-cow in the mouth, he'll beg her to sign for another.
You're absolutely right. But there are also a huge number of Buffy converts... people who hated it solely based on the premise, but ended up loving the show after watching it awhile. I think the original poster was just talking about those people.
encryption can be linked to unique hardware identifiers and such. I'm no expert, but there are some that believe that this could be very tough.
That's not very likely, since we're not talking smart cards like one of the more recent stories, the "unique hardware" approach would not be feasible in the least.
Ah, but the point of having the APIs documented is for compatibility. You're suggesting that people write their own software, which is something the Linux community would love--if all their favorite software was ported to Linux. As is, we have to live with interoperability, which currently is still developmental code (the Wine project, for example).
And anyway, Microsoft/wants/ people to link to the DLLs and use the APIs. And then they incorrectly document. It's...absurd:)
I hate the current practices as much as you do, but I have to disagree with the following statement: I hate being whored out to Coca-Cola without my consent. By going to the theater, you're consenting. If you don't like it, stop going.
Which people are you referring to? The studios who want to outlaw commercial skip? If so, you're missing/neglecting a vital piece of copyright history. Sony sold Betamax VCRs. Disney and MCA sued Sony for copyright infringement. Sony won, establishing that time-shifting was legal. Here are the important points from that article:
Universal City Studios and Disney felt that the introduction of VTR's (VCR's) were infringing on copyright laws by allowing consumers to record copyrighted material off the television, and allowing new companies to rent out copyrighted material. The plaintiffs (Universal City Studios and Disney Productions) had to prove that the alleged infringements caused economic harm to their industry, or would in the future. The plaintiffs felt that by allowing consumers to record television shows it would cause the royalty prices on re-runs to fall drastically. The court felt that taping off air for entertainment or "time shifting" (recording a program in the present to view at a later date, shifting time) constituted as FAIR USE. Plaintiffs also argued that allowing rental use of video cassettes would cause box office prices to fall. The court allowed this practice to stand on the basis of the First Sale Doctrine of the 1976 Copyright Act, which states: the first purchaser of a copyrighted work (a film on video cassette) could use it in any way the purchaser saw fit as long as copyright was not violated by illegal duplication. (ibid.) In other words you are allowed to rent out the original copy that you bought from the studio, but cannot make copies of the original to rent out. It is rumored that another reason Universal City Studios brought the suit against Sony was because Universal sought to prevent Betamax from capturing a significant part of the home video market before Universals' parent company, MCA, could introduce it's DiscoVision Laserdisc system that was scheduled for release in 1977. The decision handed down in October 1979, by the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Sony. They court felt that set manufacturers could profit from the sale of VCR's, and that the plaintiffs did not prove that any of the above practices constituted economic harm to the motion picture industry.
In other words, people/were/ yelling and screaming, and they were struck down. Now, however, we live in a digital world, and the people doing the suing have a lot more money, and we're going through the same sort of thing. It's looking like the battleground is congress this time, rather than the courts. Time-shifting is considered Fair Use, however the television studios and MPAA are trying to stop that.
People would probably hate this as it takes up space that could be used for the show. As it is, I refuse to watch stations with huge and sometimes loud station logos in the corner of the screen. Not too long ago I watched E! for a story on a movie I was interested in (I don't remember what the movie was) and every 3-5 minutes a loud smacking sound could be heard and the Anna Nicole logo at the bottom of the screen would kiss the screen. The logo itself took up about 1/9th of the screen, and the added sound effects were too much. I turned it off, and haven't watched E! since.
The most obvious alternative is to send your favorite shows to you via broadband and have you pay by the show. But would you pay to watch Buffy, The News, Star Trek? Would you prefer pay by the show, subscribe to a show/network or be forced to watch commercials?
I would gladly pay by the show for the programs I watch, but only if they were commercial and DRM free. However paying by the show would absolutely subvert the point of this article, because the television studios wouldn't want you recording it. And forget about sharing television shows, that would amount to DVD and music piracy (i.e. vehemently gone after and prosecuted, unlike TV shows now[1]).
No, right now the best solution for the consumer and the producers is the ad in the middle of the show. Clearly it does work to some extent, just getting the name out there. And for those who don't care/don't want to watch the commercials, they can "steal" the content by going to the kitchen/bathroom/whatever until the commercials are over.
Sancho
[1] Yes, sites that distribute TV content are still shut down, but not with the force and money that's thrown at the various music and movie sites.
I agree with the grandparent post, but in addition to ONE stable, flexible, powerful and good looking GUI, we need the choice of changing GUIs without sacrificing program functionality or choice. Have a default UI that's easy to use and an advanced UI for the advanced user that's more customizable. No one wants to take away your choice, they just want to make it easier for the novice.
Re:choice / customization is a *GOOD* thing
on
KDE Gets The Hat
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's fine, if that's what you want to do. Don't use Redhat, then. Everyone who said "Open source is about choice" is right. Redhat chooses to make these changes to the source, something they have every right to do. You can choose to reverse these changes, if you want to use Redhat. You can choose to use Suse if you want a more "default install" distribution. You can choose to use Debian if you want even more control, or you can Roll your own Linux.
What you must realize, though, is that if you want Linux to be widely accepted, supported, and user friendly, a common user interface is a must. Red Hat is taking a step in that direction, and this probably also cuts support costs (as someone in the article mentioned). Red Hat isn't taking away your right to customize, they're just providing a different default customization. You can still make the choice, rather than some committee. Remember, some committee made the original Gnome/KDE default choices.
I'm more inclined to think that they're doing this because of the huge backlash they got. This story got published all over the place, both before and after Slashdot. They knew they screwed up, and probably they knew that they were in legally questionable waters. In any case, they saw a bunch of people saying, "I'll stop buying from Sigma," and all this combined probably contributed to their current course of action.
Plus I had some self encoded TV episodes using DivX 5, and they had a VBR MP3 audio stream, the XCard plays the audio, and the video is completely out of sync (speeding up, slowing down - as though it is using the VBR timings)... and the player crashes after 5 mins.
While all your other points on the card may or may not be valid (I'm not going to dispute them, in other words), I will take a moment to dispute this one. VBR MP3 audio streams in a DivX file is a complete and utter hack. Anyone who knows about the internals of AVI files will recognize this instantly. That it was made to work and play back correctly in Windows is actually due to a bug in the decoder itself, and should Microsoft ever fix this bug, all VBR MP3 audio interleaved in AVI files will suddenly either lose sync or perform exactly as the XCard.
References: Can't find it on the new (redesigned) website, but here's the google cache.
Check this thread out , though: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=& threadid= 32015
Specifically: I spoke to a manager at Sigma Designs over the phone a couple weeks ago, and he basically verified the accusation - a programmer "mistakenly" based their MPEG-4 codec around XviD, added a few patches, changed the interface (but not by much), then released it as their own. We were informed that they were replacing all GPL'ed code with their own, to avoid a licensing problem (even though copyright infringement had already occurred, of course).
After that, version 1.1 came out, which was a complete slap in the face. Supposedly "rewritten", it was nothing but a different checkout of XviD with a few registers changed and some code reordered.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but it's totally irrelevant in this situation. This is a homebrew TiVo, and you just don't get nice quality video in a TV signal.
That's not an accurate viewpoint, though, because the analog artifacts you get from a TV signal translate into even worse artifacts in the VCD.
Digital satellite CAN be very high quality, but it frequently isn't. You can tell the difference by comparing DirectTV, Cable and Dish Network side by side.
I don't know about VCD. To me, the quality just isn't there compared to a well-kept VCR. SVCD can compete with it's higher (and variable) bitrate, but then you suffer from 35minutes of video (for top quality) per disc.
If you get a DVD player that can play out of spec (S)VCDs, this can sort of change. You can up the bitrate of VCDs, and/or make them VBR to increase qulaity. You can also check out the CVD standard, which is 352x480, VBR, mpeg-2. It's a real standard, and it's only a bit off from SVCD. You save a bit ont he bits (giving you a bit more time per disc) and better yet, the valid CVD streams are completely compatible with the DVD spec, meaning if you ever get a DVD burner, the same streams will can be burned as a DVD-Video.
Well likely it's something simple like an xor substitution. He's claiming it's derived from a one-time pad, which can use an xor of the key (the pad) on the cleartext to produce the ciphertext. That's a very simple algorithm, but incredibly effective assuming you can get past the one-time pad's drawbacks (most notably, transmission of the key) /and/ assuming that the one-time pad was generated with a non-reproducable algorithm (there are plenty of ways to do this).
But I use Kazaa to find songs from my favorite bands that /allow/ their songs to be shared. I'm using it legitimately. And they're stealing money that I pay amazon for the CDs of music I /don't/ steal!
This is the problem.
It's not a standards problem, though. It's a problem with the end manufacturer not using the best quality lasers and readers (wrt burned DVDs) and not including a certain amount of flexibility in the decoder (wrt SVCDs and VCDs). The video discs you write with DVD-R is standards compliant. The laser your DVD player uses to read the disc is the issue.
Part of the problem is that Lindows isn't free. The original poster wasn't just talking about Linux, but Lindows (which was, of course, the topic of the article).
The interesting thing about all this is the concept of making the punishment fit the crime.
33 months is close to 2.5 eternities in software. All the software he distributed will probably go through two major versions in that time. How absurd is it, then, to make him serve that length of time for it?
One thing I've never been able to understand is how Buffy can provoke such a negative response from people here. Your quote: "buffy sucks, the movie sucked, the WB is the sole reason for the downfall of America" is tame compared to some of the flaming that goes on when someone even suggests that they might enjoy Buffy.
As for rights vs mod points... well Slashdot isn't a democracy. Slashdot doesn't claim to let you say anything you want. The moderation system itself should tell you that....
It sucks that other assclowns have modded a completely valid complaint as "flamebait". The headline of the story being a spoiler is the thing that does it. If the headline had been "Buffy Spoiler" or "Season 7 Information" that would be one thing. You can easily avoid the information by skipping the story.
The backlash during the Lone Gunmen debacle should have taught them a lesson. Don't post spoilers in the headline. Obviously they didn't learn.
Want to fight back? Email OSDN and tell them that you will stop viewing Slashdot because they constantly post spoilers for television shows that haven't aired yet. Hit them in their pocketbook.
And yet, you seem to have no problem talking about it or telling others how they should run their lives. Heh.
I fell into a burning ring of Karma...
She did indeed sign for two more seasons....last season. So Season 6 was her first, and 7 will be her second. Of course, unless Joss is a dumbass who can't look a cash-cow in the mouth, he'll beg her to sign for another.
You're absolutely right. But there are also a huge number of Buffy converts... people who hated it solely based on the premise, but ended up loving the show after watching it awhile. I think the original poster was just talking about those people.
My lord, some of us don't want to know anything about the upcoming season. It's getting to where you can't read Slashdot anymore....
encryption can be linked to unique hardware identifiers and such. I'm no expert, but there are some that believe that this could be very tough.
That's not very likely, since we're not talking smart cards like one of the more recent stories, the "unique hardware" approach would not be feasible in the least.
Ah, but the point of having the APIs documented is for compatibility. You're suggesting that people write their own software, which is something the Linux community would love--if all their favorite software was ported to Linux. As is, we have to live with interoperability, which currently is still developmental code (the Wine project, for example).
/wants/ people to link to the DLLs and use the APIs. And then they incorrectly document. It's...absurd :)
And anyway, Microsoft
Except that they're using Congress instead of the courts. Congress is much more easily bought.
I hate the current practices as much as you do, but I have to disagree with the following statement:
I hate being whored out to Coca-Cola without my consent.
By going to the theater, you're consenting. If you don't like it, stop going.
Which people are you referring to? The studios who want to outlaw commercial skip? If so, you're missing/neglecting a vital piece of copyright history. Sony sold Betamax VCRs. Disney and MCA sued Sony for copyright infringement. Sony won, establishing that time-shifting was legal. Here are the important points from that article:
/were/ yelling and screaming, and they were struck down. Now, however, we live in a digital world, and the people doing the suing have a lot more money, and we're going through the same sort of thing. It's looking like the battleground is congress this time, rather than the courts. Time-shifting is considered Fair Use, however the television studios and MPAA are trying to stop that.
Universal City Studios and Disney felt that the introduction of VTR's (VCR's) were infringing on copyright laws by allowing consumers to record copyrighted material off the television, and allowing new companies to rent out copyrighted material. The plaintiffs (Universal City Studios and Disney Productions) had to prove that the alleged infringements caused economic harm to their industry, or would in the future. The plaintiffs felt that by allowing consumers to record television shows it would cause the royalty prices on re-runs to fall drastically. The court felt that taping off air for entertainment or "time shifting" (recording a program in the present to view at a later date, shifting time) constituted as FAIR USE. Plaintiffs also argued that allowing rental use of video cassettes would cause box office prices to fall. The court allowed this practice to stand on the basis of the First Sale Doctrine of the 1976 Copyright Act, which states: the first purchaser of a copyrighted work (a film on video cassette) could use it in any way the purchaser saw fit as long as copyright was not violated by illegal duplication. (ibid.) In other words you are allowed to rent out the original copy that you bought from the studio, but cannot make copies of the original to rent out. It is rumored that another reason Universal City Studios brought the suit against Sony was because Universal sought to prevent Betamax from capturing a significant part of the home video market before Universals' parent company, MCA, could introduce it's DiscoVision Laserdisc system that was scheduled for release in 1977. The decision handed down in October 1979, by the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Sony. They court felt that set manufacturers could profit from the sale of VCR's, and that the plaintiffs did not prove that any of the above practices constituted economic harm to the motion picture industry.
In other words, people
People would probably hate this as it takes up space that could be used for the show. As it is, I refuse to watch stations with huge and sometimes loud station logos in the corner of the screen. Not too long ago I watched E! for a story on a movie I was interested in (I don't remember what the movie was) and every 3-5 minutes a loud smacking sound could be heard and the Anna Nicole logo at the bottom of the screen would kiss the screen. The logo itself took up about 1/9th of the screen, and the added sound effects were too much. I turned it off, and haven't watched E! since.
The most obvious alternative is to send your favorite shows to you via broadband and have you pay by the show. But would you pay to watch Buffy, The News, Star Trek? Would you prefer pay by the show, subscribe to a show/network or be forced to watch commercials?
I would gladly pay by the show for the programs I watch, but only if they were commercial and DRM free. However paying by the show would absolutely subvert the point of this article, because the television studios wouldn't want you recording it. And forget about sharing television shows, that would amount to DVD and music piracy (i.e. vehemently gone after and prosecuted, unlike TV shows now[1]).
No, right now the best solution for the consumer and the producers is the ad in the middle of the show. Clearly it does work to some extent, just getting the name out there. And for those who don't care/don't want to watch the commercials, they can "steal" the content by going to the kitchen/bathroom/whatever until the commercials are over.
Sancho
[1] Yes, sites that distribute TV content are still shut down, but not with the force and money that's thrown at the various music and movie sites.
I agree with the grandparent post, but in addition to ONE stable, flexible, powerful and good looking GUI, we need the choice of changing GUIs without sacrificing program functionality or choice. Have a default UI that's easy to use and an advanced UI for the advanced user that's more customizable. No one wants to take away your choice, they just want to make it easier for the novice.
That's fine, if that's what you want to do. Don't use Redhat, then.
Everyone who said "Open source is about choice" is right. Redhat chooses to make these changes to the source, something they have every right to do. You can choose to reverse these changes, if you want to use Redhat. You can choose to use Suse if you want a more "default install" distribution. You can choose to use Debian if you want even more control, or you can Roll your own Linux.
What you must realize, though, is that if you want Linux to be widely accepted, supported, and user friendly, a common user interface is a must. Red Hat is taking a step in that direction, and this probably also cuts support costs (as someone in the article mentioned). Red Hat isn't taking away your right to customize, they're just providing a different default customization. You can still make the choice, rather than some committee. Remember, some committee made the original Gnome/KDE default choices.
I'm more inclined to think that they're doing this because of the huge backlash they got. This story got published all over the place, both before and after Slashdot. They knew they screwed up, and probably they knew that they were in legally questionable waters. In any case, they saw a bunch of people saying, "I'll stop buying from Sigma," and all this combined probably contributed to their current course of action.
Plus I had some self encoded TV episodes using DivX 5, and they had a VBR MP3 audio stream, the XCard plays the audio, and the video is completely out of sync (speeding up, slowing down - as though it is using the VBR timings)... and the player crashes after 5 mins.
: www.virtualdub.org/virtualdub_news_old.html+avery+ lee+nandub+hack&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
While all your other points on the card may or may not be valid (I'm not going to dispute them, in other words), I will take a moment to dispute this one. VBR MP3 audio streams in a DivX file is a complete and utter hack. Anyone who knows about the internals of AVI files will recognize this instantly. That it was made to work and play back correctly in Windows is actually due to a bug in the decoder itself, and should Microsoft ever fix this bug, all VBR MP3 audio interleaved in AVI files will suddenly either lose sync or perform exactly as the XCard.
References:
Can't find it on the new (redesigned) website, but here's the google cache.
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:bqcAKNs_G2cC
Check this thread out , though:& threadid= 32015
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=
Specifically:
I spoke to a manager at Sigma Designs over the phone a couple weeks ago, and he basically verified the accusation - a programmer "mistakenly" based their MPEG-4 codec around XviD, added a few patches, changed the interface (but not by much), then released it as their own. We were informed that they were replacing all GPL'ed code with their own, to avoid a licensing problem (even though copyright infringement had already occurred, of course).
After that, version 1.1 came out, which was a complete slap in the face. Supposedly "rewritten", it was nothing but a different checkout of XviD with a few registers changed and some code reordered.
Should be an interesting few days.
-h