What I just don't understand is that Macromedia licenses the flash specs on the condition that it is used by other products (such as Ming) to create content. Apparently, it is not permitted to use the specs to develop an alternative open-source plugin.
So why is that? It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the plugins, and besides: the more compatible plugins are out there, the larger the userbase for Flash, right?
It's great that we have another high-quality codec has become available under an open-source license right now (the more the better, I'd say), but does anybody here know if this codec is completely free of patents, just like Ogg Vorbis?
I see absolutely no reason for Macromedia not to open-source their plugin.
It would solve numerous problems relating to performance, stability and platform support.
It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the player. As a matter of fact, they need to invest in the development en distribution of a free player in order to sell their content creation tools!
And even if Macromedia would still not open-source their player, I still can't understand why nobody is working on an open-source Flash 7 compatible alternative.
I'm afraid telcos are letting their legal departments burn the midnight oil in patenting anything obvious and even remotely related to this.
The combination of two obvious technologies (telephony and TCP/IP) should not be patentable.
We'll see how this turn out.
The various Linux telephony projects being mentioned left and right are hopeful developments.
Now that (soon to be "legacy") regelar phone networks are being migrated to TCP/IP, I think the time has really come to finally seriously start making the switch to ipv6.
What I'd like to know is why nobody seems to be working on an alternative (open-source) Flash plugin for Mozilla and Firebird at the moment.
Let's face it, Macromedia's binary-only plugin sucks, both performance-wise, stability-wise and compatibility-wise, and it's also still a major version behind.
I know, there should be a closed beta program for a Flash 7 plugin for Linux going on around this time, but given the fact that Macromedia made the specs available, why hasn't anyone been working on an open-source alternative?
An open-source plugin would have many advantages: it could be distributed with browsers and distros by default, it could make use of new X features, such as XV, XRandr, Damage, Cairo, XFT, and what not to maximise performance and compatibility, it could be made to work with newer and better sound API's (ALSA, JACK, OpenAL) and (with enough developers) it could be kept up-to-date more quickly.
So tell me: why hasn't anyone tried to improve the old open-source flash implementation, which currently is still stuck at the equivalency of Flash 4?
And if people are counting on SVG/SMIL to become an open alternative: why the hell is SVG compatibility still disabled in Mozilla by default, then? It will never become a vialble alternative if it doesn't work out of the box!
In case any hard working developers are offended by the above rant: I meant no offense and do respect the hard and excellent work you've all been doing, but it's the stupid decisions in some projects that frustrate me.
"Rusty was well received and it seems we have some support from opposition (Labour and Democrat) Senators (FYI Oz currently has a Liberal government)."
For the American readers:
In many European countries, many conservative parties label themselves as "liberal", in order to deceive the voters. Apparently, it's the same in Australia.
Hey, the binary players support then 3gpp format as well! Finally a Linux player that can fully play movies I made with my phone!
Yes, mplayer can be made to play back the video in that format, but as far as I know, it still doesn't support the format's sound stream codec yet. I'm sure Real's new player does.
That phone already contains an older version of Realplayer, but according to the site, you can simply install this version on top.:)
People, stop bitching about Real and remember the fact that they are still the only one of the big three media player providers (Mediaplayer, Quicktime, Realplayer) who have ever taken the Linux platform seriously.
Even with opening a major part of the source (though not the GPL), they went a lot further in openness than the others ever did.
Also, A recent remark from someone working at Real (in response to Apple's Itunes patent) pleased me: "In the ten years that we've been developing and offering Realplayer, we never patented any part of our GUI".:)
Of course, that doesn't mean they never patented anything else in their software, but at least they've thrown their full weight behind open patent free codecs such as Vorbis and Theora in addition to their own technology!
Real, you are hereby forgiven for all your previous adware/nagware crimes!:)
Download this player and help to maintain Real's (still considerable) market share to keep Microsoft at bay! Real has seriously reached out to our community and we need all the allies we can get. We would be fools not to accept them on our side.
There's Dutch party running in the elections for the European Parliament, called Europa Transparant.
It was founded by Paul van Buitenen, the well-known whistleblower who exposed large scale corruption in the European Commission, leading to its collective resignation.
Frustrated with the fact that things have hardly improved, he founded a party solely meant to strive for more transparency and democracy within the European government. Politically, the party has presented itself as neutral, as in "neither left nor right".
I'm not sure if Europeans outside of the Netherlands can vote for Dutch europarties.
But it's possible that there are similar single-issue europarties in other EU member states.
Otherwise, the Greens are indeed your best bet. The Green Parties have consistently taken a stance against software patents in every EU member state, as far as I know.
This afternoon, 5 of us officially presented a petition against software patents to Dutch MP's responsible for Economic Affairs.
We were rather lucky, since one of us had good contacts with one of those MP's, who was sympathetic to us and had considerable influence, resulting in a quick arrangement to hand over the petition. Normally, the procedure would have taken weeks.
Many MP's were quite interested in our information, and were particularly concerned about the fact that our minister of Economic Affairs, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, who was to vote in the EU council on our country's behalf, had apparently misinformed our national parlement.
They even announced they would be holding an extra debate, probably tomorrow.
During the day, we were kept informed through our mobile phones. It was nerve wreckening. We kept receiving conflicting reports about wether we would be getting a majority against or not. Near the end, we even heard that the Netherlands would probably have the deciding vote! You can understand that nearly drove us crazy.:)
Eventually, the news broke...
And again, mister Bolkestein seems to have played a crucial role on the side of the software patent supporters.:(
On behalf of all the people in the Netherlands, I would like to apologize to all the people of Europe for mister Bolkestein. He makes me ashamed to be Dutch.:(
The fight is not over, however! It will be more difficult now, but the European Parlement seems to be really pissed, and most Eastern members that are joining the EU now (and will be part of the parliament after the next elections in June) appear to be opposed against software patents.
Also, it amazed me how easy it can be to get in touch with influential people, as long as YOU KNOW THE RIGHT PERSONS that have the relevant connections!
In spite of the defeat, I'm still impressed with the difference we managed to make today. At least more people in our government are informed now. And we won't be giving up the fight! We made a few mistakes the last few days (hey, we were new at this), but we also accomplished a lot and also learned A LOT of lessons.
I would like to end this post with two pieces of advice:
1) I'm calling upon ALL European Citizens to VOTE IN THE NEXT EUROPEAN ELECTIONS! Even though there is much wrong in European politics, not using your vote and at least applying that little influence you do would be insanely foolish!
2) Let's all coordinate our lobbying efforts! If you have even just one or two hours a week available to help out, spend it by contacting certain EP's (preferably try to start a dialogue with one or two specific EP's, so you can concentrate on them and build up more personal relations) and contact FFII to notify them of your efforts and inform them who you are in contact with. There were only five of us, and look how far we have come in only 5 days time!
Let's get to work! Autumn will be upon us before we know it! And the elections are even less than a month away!
If so, then a native AMD64 port of this emulator, taking advantage of the higher number of available general purpose registers (combined with the fact that AMD64 CPU's are quite fast to begin with) would make this emulator run considerably faster, right?
Not only the NVIDIA drivers, but also the closed-source ATI drivers (the fglrx module, to be exact) will not function when 4k stacks are enabled.
So ATI will have to update their drivers for Fedora and other new distributions as well.
The NVIDIA Nforce2 APIC patches work perfectly with kernel 2.6.6-rc3 (which still seems to be using 8k stacks by default and is therefore still compatible with the binary drivers).:)
You might want to check out the Virtualdub project.
The main developer was contacted by Microsoft's legal department with an official request to remove ASF-compatibility from Virtualdub.
Even though the Microsoft representatives requested this politely, they also made it quite clear that they would be taking action if he didn't comply to their "request".
Man, I've been reading about his debt on the Gentoo Forum. I didn't know he sacrificed so much to get Gentoo where it is today!
And then to think how many people have happily been using this superb distro without having to pay a cent.
I've never made a Paypal-donation before, but I'm simply compelled to make a donation this time. Since I've been enjoying Gentoo as my main OS for so many months (only rarely booting into Windows XP anymore), I simply owe him. Until I tried Gentoo, I had never encountered a distro that was so flexible that I could keep it up-to-date without having to cleanly reinstall every new major release.
Fortunately, I'm not alone in this: I am particularly impressed by the level of appreciation and solidarity expressed by so many people on the forum so far.:)
Daniel, hang in there! Help is on the way:D
And if enough people contribute, I hope you'll reconsider your departure from Gentoo. Although we absolutely respect the fact that your familie will always remain your number one priority, as it should be!:)
The Windows Media codecs for Linux will be available for download for $64, the complete TurboLinux OS will cost $150 in Japan and the United States.
64 dollars for the codecs?! That's two third of a Windows XP Home OEM license!
And what I don't understand is why I would have to pay for these codecs, if the WMP9 codecs are offered on Microsoft's web site at the same time, for free!
But of couse, that's Microsoft's trick. Increase the Linux TCO for end users by charging ridiculous amounts of money for increasingly important components for Linux, while bundling them with Windows XP with no extra charge.
Please, People! In spite of their horrible adware-ridden previous software versions, RealNetworks has redeemed itself considerably, lately. Both with their RealPlayer 10 for Windows and as well as with their partly open-source Helix framework for Linux. Their codecs are pretty good and they've been the only one of the big three streaming media players (WMP, Real, Quicktime) that have consistently taken Linux seriously over the years, by supporting it as an official platform.
Don't let Microsoft obtain yet another desktop monopoly!
When given the option on media streaming websites, I always select Real- or Quicktime-format.
I currently have the WMP9 codecs installed on my Gentoo system, but I have them only in case I encounter a website with streaming media content that provides its content exclusively in WMP-format. Unfortunately, I've been encountering more and more of those lately. We need to turn back the tide, if we still can.
And there'd be nothing wrong that, as long as developers simply kept using the alias instead of the real function name.
But what if suddenly the function would have to be modified (which would be quite likely, since this "black list" will probably continue to grow as time goes by)? You start reading the implementation, while you're still used to working with the alias, which is in fact is the inverse of this function, which itself has been implemented a double negative... Aaaaaargh!
I noticed the patch adding a static inline function called "license_author_is_not_blacklisted".
Now please excuse me for never having done any kernel hacking before (although I would be interested in trying it some day, as I've been telling myself for years).
But wasn't it considered "a bad thing" (as in: potentially confusing) to use double negatives in one's source code?
Wouldn't it be a lot clearer to name the function "author_is_blacklisted" and having it simply return the result of the string comparison?
Ah, but the problem is the fact that certain optimization settings that are optimal for one piece of code can be very bad for other code. To make things worse: the target architecture is also part of the equation.
To sum it up: there is no single set of optimal compiler flags that result in the best performance in every situation. (If there was, then it would most certainly have been made the default setting).
It would be really cool if this technology could somehow be integrated into the Gentoo project.
Of course it would be unreasonable to have the each single ebuild compile and get benchmarked several times on each user's PC, but these genetical algorithms could be used to predetermine the optimal compiler settings for each architecture/ebuild-combination, store this information in a central database and have portage automatically select the optimal compiler setting from that database, each time it compiles an ebuild.
No more figuring out what the best compiler options are: the ebuild maintainers will take on that job for you!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Any relation?
What I just don't understand is that Macromedia licenses the flash specs on the condition that it is used by other products (such as Ming) to create content. Apparently, it is not permitted to use the specs to develop an alternative open-source plugin.
So why is that? It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the plugins, and besides: the more compatible plugins are out there, the larger the userbase for Flash, right?
Can someone here explain this to me?
It's great that we have another high-quality codec has become available under an open-source license right now (the more the better, I'd say), but does anybody here know if this codec is completely free of patents, just like Ogg Vorbis?
The parent is at least partly right:
I see absolutely no reason for Macromedia not to open-source their plugin.
It would solve numerous problems relating to performance, stability and platform support.
It's not like Macromedia is making any money on the player. As a matter of fact, they need to invest in the development en distribution of a free player in order to sell their content creation tools!
And even if Macromedia would still not open-source their player, I still can't understand why nobody is working on an open-source Flash 7 compatible alternative.
The specifications are available, right?
"Yes, Squat. I think it would be safe to say that failing to destroy that asteroid in time would fit NICELY INTO THE BAD THINGS CATEGORY!"
I'm afraid telcos are letting their legal departments burn the midnight oil in patenting anything obvious and even remotely related to this.
The combination of two obvious technologies (telephony and TCP/IP) should not be patentable.
We'll see how this turn out.
The various Linux telephony projects being mentioned left and right are hopeful developments.
Now that (soon to be "legacy") regelar phone networks are being migrated to TCP/IP, I think the time has really come to finally seriously start making the switch to ipv6.
What I'd like to know is why nobody seems to be working on an alternative (open-source) Flash plugin for Mozilla and Firebird at the moment.
Let's face it, Macromedia's binary-only plugin sucks, both performance-wise, stability-wise and compatibility-wise, and it's also still a major version behind.
I know, there should be a closed beta program for a Flash 7 plugin for Linux going on around this time, but given the fact that Macromedia made the specs available, why hasn't anyone been working on an open-source alternative?
An open-source plugin would have many advantages: it could be distributed with browsers and distros by default, it could make use of new X features, such as XV, XRandr, Damage, Cairo, XFT, and what not to maximise performance and compatibility, it could be made to work with newer and better sound API's (ALSA, JACK, OpenAL) and (with enough developers) it could be kept up-to-date more quickly.
So tell me: why hasn't anyone tried to improve the old open-source flash implementation, which currently is still stuck at the equivalency of Flash 4?
And if people are counting on SVG/SMIL to become an open alternative: why the hell is SVG compatibility still disabled in Mozilla by default, then? It will never become a vialble alternative if it doesn't work out of the box!
In case any hard working developers are offended by the above rant: I meant no offense and do respect the hard and excellent work you've all been doing, but it's the stupid decisions in some projects that frustrate me.
Sheesh,
:(
Why are they giving me such a hard time?
All I want to do is simply download a binary release. Why am I being forced to register for that?
Screw that.
I'll wait until it's finally publicly available.
"Rusty was well received and it seems we have some support from opposition (Labour and Democrat) Senators (FYI Oz currently has a Liberal government)."
For the American readers:
In many European countries, many conservative parties label themselves as "liberal", in order to deceive the voters. Apparently, it's the same in Australia.
The Howard administration "liberal"? Ha!
Hey, the binary players support then 3gpp format as well! Finally a Linux player that can fully play movies I made with my phone!
Yes, mplayer can be made to play back the video in that format, but as far as I know, it still doesn't support the format's sound stream codec yet. I'm sure Real's new player does.
Very nice.
I'm going to try this out on my Nokia 6600. :)
:)
:)
:)
That phone already contains an older version of Realplayer, but according to the site, you can simply install this version on top.
People, stop bitching about Real and remember the fact that they are still the only one of the big three media player providers (Mediaplayer, Quicktime, Realplayer) who have ever taken the Linux platform seriously.
Even with opening a major part of the source (though not the GPL), they went a lot further in openness than the others ever did.
Also, A recent remark from someone working at Real (in response to Apple's Itunes patent) pleased me: "In the ten years that we've been developing and offering Realplayer, we never patented any part of our GUI".
Of course, that doesn't mean they never patented anything else in their software, but at least they've thrown their full weight behind open patent free codecs such as Vorbis and Theora in addition to their own technology!
Real, you are hereby forgiven for all your previous adware/nagware crimes!
Download this player and help to maintain Real's (still considerable) market share to keep Microsoft at bay! Real has seriously reached out to our community and we need all the allies we can get. We would be fools not to accept them on our side.
Hey, shithead! you stole my fucking joke, dickweed! ;)
There's Dutch party running in the elections for the European Parliament, called Europa Transparant.
It was founded by Paul van Buitenen, the well-known whistleblower who exposed large scale corruption in the European Commission, leading to its collective resignation.
Frustrated with the fact that things have hardly improved, he founded a party solely meant to strive for more transparency and democracy within the European government. Politically, the party has presented itself as neutral, as in "neither left nor right".
I'm not sure if Europeans outside of the Netherlands can vote for Dutch europarties.
But it's possible that there are similar single-issue europarties in other EU member states.
Otherwise, the Greens are indeed your best bet. The Green Parties have consistently taken a stance against software patents in every EU member state, as far as I know.
The first thing you should do is to contact FFII:
http://swpat.ffii.org
We need to set up a wiki to start this specific initiative, though. How can I get in touch with you?
This afternoon, 5 of us officially presented a petition against software patents to Dutch MP's responsible for Economic Affairs.
:)
:(
:(
We were rather lucky, since one of us had good contacts with one of those MP's, who was sympathetic to us and had considerable influence, resulting in a quick arrangement to hand over the petition. Normally, the procedure would have taken weeks.
Many MP's were quite interested in our information, and were particularly concerned about the fact that our minister of Economic Affairs, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, who was to vote in the EU council on our country's behalf, had apparently misinformed our national parlement.
They even announced they would be holding an extra debate, probably tomorrow.
During the day, we were kept informed through our mobile phones. It was nerve wreckening. We kept receiving conflicting reports about wether we would be getting a majority against or not. Near the end, we even heard that the Netherlands would probably have the deciding vote! You can understand that nearly drove us crazy.
Eventually, the news broke...
And again, mister Bolkestein seems to have played a crucial role on the side of the software patent supporters.
On behalf of all the people in the Netherlands, I would like to apologize to all the people of Europe for mister Bolkestein. He makes me ashamed to be Dutch.
The fight is not over, however! It will be more difficult now, but the European Parlement seems to be really pissed, and most Eastern members that are joining the EU now (and will be part of the parliament after the next elections in June) appear to be opposed against software patents.
Also, it amazed me how easy it can be to get in touch with influential people, as long as YOU KNOW THE RIGHT PERSONS that have the relevant connections!
In spite of the defeat, I'm still impressed with the difference we managed to make today. At least more people in our government are informed now. And we won't be giving up the fight! We made a few mistakes the last few days (hey, we were new at this), but we also accomplished a lot and also learned A LOT of lessons.
I would like to end this post with two pieces of advice:
1) I'm calling upon ALL European Citizens to VOTE IN THE NEXT EUROPEAN ELECTIONS! Even though there is much wrong in European politics, not using your vote and at least applying that little influence you do would be insanely foolish!
2) Let's all coordinate our lobbying efforts! If you have even just one or two hours a week available to help out, spend it by contacting certain EP's (preferably try to start a dialogue with one or two specific EP's, so you can concentrate on them and build up more personal relations) and contact FFII to notify them of your efforts and inform them who you are in contact with. There were only five of us, and look how far we have come in only 5 days time!
Let's get to work! Autumn will be upon us before we know it! And the elections are even less than a month away!
"Toqueville"? Sounds familiar...
:)
Wasn't that the mental condition were people have a compulsion to express themselves frequently and loudly with profanity?
That would make sense...
If so, then a native AMD64 port of this emulator, taking advantage of the higher number of available general purpose registers (combined with the fact that AMD64 CPU's are quite fast to begin with) would make this emulator run considerably faster, right?
Or did I disregard something?
Not only the NVIDIA drivers, but also the closed-source ATI drivers (the fglrx module, to be exact) will not function when 4k stacks are enabled.
:)
:)
So ATI will have to update their drivers for Fedora and other new distributions as well.
The NVIDIA Nforce2 APIC patches work perfectly with kernel 2.6.6-rc3 (which still seems to be using 8k stacks by default and is therefore still compatible with the binary drivers).
Linux just keeps getting better and better.
You might want to check out the Virtualdub project.
The main developer was contacted by Microsoft's legal department with an official request to remove ASF-compatibility from Virtualdub.
Even though the Microsoft representatives requested this politely, they also made it quite clear that they would be taking action if he didn't comply to their "request".
Man, I've been reading about his debt on the Gentoo Forum. I didn't know he sacrificed so much to get Gentoo where it is today!
:)
:D
:)
And then to think how many people have happily been using this superb distro without having to pay a cent.
I've never made a Paypal-donation before, but I'm simply compelled to make a donation this time. Since I've been enjoying Gentoo as my main OS for so many months (only rarely booting into Windows XP anymore), I simply owe him. Until I tried Gentoo, I had never encountered a distro that was so flexible that I could keep it up-to-date without having to cleanly reinstall every new major release.
Fortunately, I'm not alone in this: I am particularly impressed by the level of appreciation and solidarity expressed by so many people on the forum so far.
Daniel, hang in there! Help is on the way
And if enough people contribute, I hope you'll reconsider your departure from Gentoo. Although we absolutely respect the fact that your familie will always remain your number one priority, as it should be!
The Windows Media codecs for Linux will be available for download for $64, the complete TurboLinux OS will cost $150 in Japan and the United States.
64 dollars for the codecs?! That's two third of a Windows XP Home OEM license!
And what I don't understand is why I would have to pay for these codecs, if the WMP9 codecs are offered on Microsoft's web site at the same time, for free!
But of couse, that's Microsoft's trick. Increase the Linux TCO for end users by charging ridiculous amounts of money for increasingly important components for Linux, while bundling them with Windows XP with no extra charge.
Please, People! In spite of their horrible adware-ridden previous software versions, RealNetworks has redeemed itself considerably, lately. Both with their RealPlayer 10 for Windows and as well as with their partly open-source Helix framework for Linux. Their codecs are pretty good and they've been the only one of the big three streaming media players (WMP, Real, Quicktime) that have consistently taken Linux seriously over the years, by supporting it as an official platform.
Don't let Microsoft obtain yet another desktop monopoly!
When given the option on media streaming websites, I always select Real- or Quicktime-format.
I currently have the WMP9 codecs installed on my Gentoo system, but I have them only in case I encounter a website with streaming media content that provides its content exclusively in WMP-format. Unfortunately, I've been encountering more and more of those lately. We need to turn back the tide, if we still can.
Very cute. ;)
;)
And there'd be nothing wrong that, as long as developers simply kept using the alias instead of the real function name.
But what if suddenly the function would have to be modified (which would be quite likely, since this "black list" will probably continue to grow as time goes by)? You start reading the implementation, while you're still used to working with the alias, which is in fact is the inverse of this function, which itself has been implemented a double negative... Aaaaaargh!
See what I mean?
I noticed the patch adding a static inline function called "license_author_is_not_blacklisted".
Now please excuse me for never having done any kernel hacking before (although I would be interested in trying it some day, as I've been telling myself for years).
But wasn't it considered "a bad thing" (as in: potentially confusing) to use double negatives in one's source code?
Wouldn't it be a lot clearer to name the function "author_is_blacklisted" and having it simply return the result of the string comparison?
Ah, but the problem is the fact that certain optimization settings that are optimal for one piece of code can be very bad for other code. To make things worse: the target architecture is also part of the equation.
To sum it up: there is no single set of optimal compiler flags that result in the best performance in every situation. (If there was, then it would most certainly have been made the default setting).
It would be really cool if this technology could somehow be integrated into the Gentoo project.
:)
Of course it would be unreasonable to have the each single ebuild compile and get benchmarked several times on each user's PC, but these genetical algorithms could be used to predetermine the optimal compiler settings for each architecture/ebuild-combination, store this information in a central database and have portage automatically select the optimal compiler setting from that database, each time it compiles an ebuild.
No more figuring out what the best compiler options are: the ebuild maintainers will take on that job for you!