DVD region codings were designed to avoid leakage of Hollywood movies to Europe and Asia.
Yes, it's the reason usually given -- together with the practicalities of spreading promotion over time. I realize that. But as an interesting side effect, it could further lock out non-Hollywood culture from this country -- despite cheaper communications that should give it another chance.
I'm sure that this `unintended consequence' (cultural protectionism) is not entirely unwelcome.
'We have long said that the DMCA's potential use as an anti-competitive tool has been great,' Cohn said. 'Now we're seeing it happen.'
Actually it's been happening since day one, and was one of the chief reasons for introducing Region Codes and the ensuing DRM arsenal.
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows, etc., over the internet, for absolutely no good reason?
From: Don Melton @apple.com Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800
Hi,
I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.
The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance as you can see reflected in the data at http://www.apple.com/safari/.
How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent. The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ (and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KHTML and KJS.
Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They should be available at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore / very soon. Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list. Please advise us on which one to use.
We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this purpose.
Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.
Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.
-- Don Melton Safari Engineering Manager Apple Computer
From: Dirk Mueller @kde.org Subject: Re: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer To: Don Melton @apple.com [......] Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:18:19 +0100
On Die, 07 Jan 2003, Don Melton wrote:
> I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser > built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for > making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my > development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your > excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to > open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back > to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue > among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
I hope so too. I'm deeply impressed by your detailed changelog and by the changes. A few of the changes have already happened in "our" developing version and many of them were on our TODOs. For example just about this weekend I was working on improving the kjs garbage collector and now I read that you apparently already fixed the issues I had with it. Seems to me like a huge christmas gift. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Especially I'd like to hope that we could set up a mailing list where we could exchange ideas, patches and bug reports. Also a common testsuite for regressions would be nice and probably help us a lot in developing KHTML and KJS further. Ideally the plan should be, and I hope you agree, to use a common codebase for the backend.
> Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.
So now there is Mail.app, and Safari. (Taking a page from
the O'Reilly bookshelf...?)
Both great ideas, but... it's not like we'd lack mailers/browsers
anyway, is it? What I'd really like to see them (or someone) do is an
integrated mail+news reader. Like (pine, emacs, the good'uns...) but
graphical too. ("For my woman";-)
So you can keep one library for mail and news articles, and
search/move stuff around there to your heart's content.
It only makes sense, since the format is basically
the same, and news traffic often intermingles with mail anyway. People
sending you private answers, etc.
Right now, Mozilla is the only one that comes close -- afaik, it's
the only integrated mail+news reader in Aqua. The bliss of saving a news post
onto your imap box, drag & drop.
But why, oh why, does it
have to keep also the browser in the same process? This soon
gets humongous (nearly 100 Mb at the moment), and why should your mailer
crash at the whim of any miscoded javascript site? That doesn't make
sense.
``The future of digital delivery has been on hold ever since this case first came," said Doherty, head of The Envisioneering Group. ``They need to know it's going to be protected, it's not going to be ripped off seven seconds after being put on the Internet."
Then don't put it on the Internet. I'm perfectly happy getting my (non region-encoded) DVDs at $5.95 from oldies.com -- who I surmise, are perfectly happy selling them to me. And believe it or not, at that price the idea of going to the trouble of copying them doesn't even cross my mind.
Why should we change the Internet so you can better peddle your wares on it, Mr Doherty? It wasn't meant for this. And please, stop this straw man that your fight is to enable the "future of digital delivery". It's not, for it's obviously independant of any plans in that direction.
French DMCA on the way
on
Euro DMCA Fails
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As others have written, the headline is vastly overoptimistic. If the editors had read the following, they'd know that France, for instance, seems in the process of adopting a DMCA-like bill:
2002-12-04 15:16:13 France to introduce own DMCA (articles,news)
(rejected)
Today's Libé previews a new bill introduced by the French government to, in one stroke and all too familiar terms, not only legalize anticopy media , but also prohibit everyone from diffusing, advertising and even making known any means of circumvention. (Google translation.) Meanwhile, no plans to end a 56 tax on blank CDs, which brought the industry 95.3 million in 2001. Sad news from a country which, in more enlightened times, pioneered copyright reduction (to 50 years) and thus enabled such wonderful reissue programs as ChronologicalClassics.
I'm all for tracking people's CD usage. That allows companies to market more targetable CD's. Instead of producing CD's that people buy because they "heard" they were good, and then listened to only a few times before getting disgusted with it, it lets them find out what music people listen to over and over again.
Hmmm... Overlooked here is that their idea is to sell you many disposable CDs, not a few that you'll listen to over and over again.
Lightbulbs aren't calibrated to maximize lifetime, but to make it as short as the market will bear.
there are two style sheets that can be instantaneously switched, not
Special sources to deal with different client configuartions. Why don't you try it, since you obviously have a lower resolution than 800x600? Would you prefer it had some sort of bogus Javascript automatic screen resolution detection
Maybe you'll explain me how two style sheets don't make more than one source? Regardless, any system that has to devote half of the useful area to explaining how to get around its shortcomings is badly laid out.
Oh, and I just did try it (Mozilla 1.2+), and guess what, AC, it doesn't work unless I especially enable javascript. And when I do, the menu covers part of the text. What was your point?
Just take a look at the (unoffical) Phoenix FAQ [texturizer.net].
It's in strict XHTML & CSS... and it looks wonderfull!
Sorry but it looks rather brain-damaged to me. First thing you notice, part of the menu is hiding below the bottom of the page, and there is no scroller to get to it. Second thing you notice, half of the page's main area is taken by this message:
Problems viewing the menu?
If you're using a low resolution (800x600 or lower), the whole menu may not be displayed when using the default style. To make the text smaller, select Low Resolution below:
Default Style | Low Resolution
Special sources to deal with different client configuartions... that sounds so 1990s...
The great part is that this technology is so transparent, so clean, that I imagine it should be fairly simple to re-implement as OSS. Perhaps this is what the Tapestry project is trying to do...
I myself would favor a system where an application comes with all the dynamic libraries it needs to run (excepting a few monsters like libc and X) which are stored in its application folder.
Yes, this entire system might end up costing several GB for on a 80GB disk. So what?
It would also cost you lots of RAM, when several apps each load their own copy of the same library.
On Mac hardware, there'd be an excellent free alternative: Mac-on-Linux.
(Allows you to tun your Mac OS 9 on top of Linux PPC -- similar to OS X's Classic environment. IIUC, Plex86 would do the same for Wintel... right? Given the potential audience, I never quite understood why there isn't a Win-on-Linux. Is it that much harder?)
Which leaves the question, is there anything like knoppix for the PowerPC?
Only if they show that they have been linked to piracy before. Elsewise, it looks like MS could be fined or sued if they try to do that.
Good upshot! It is concluded that they could be sued (as if they couldn't anyway, in fact as if this wasn't what was suppposed to be being done) and then of course, what? That other suit will conclude yet again that they could be sued.
A glance at Nikitin's publication list will show that he works in Control Theory, and never published in Topology or Geometry journals before... It's a bit as if a statistician announced a proof of Fermat, with a (by math standards) surprisingly short and elementary proof. Hats off if it's right, anyway I guess any mistake would be found pretty soon.
Re:Easy console access, plugins, hacks
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Before 10.2, the API had been reverse engineered and was being widely used by shareware developers. WeatherPop, for example, used it to show the current weather, while Homeland Alert
shows the U.S. government's level of terrorist alert. These utilities were
broken by the Jaguar update.
Thank you, Apple, for ridding the world of the `Homeland Alert' menu item and attendant stock tickers. It's always the same two or three lame things anyway.
Can't tweak the interface? What a joke. For Pete's sake, we have the hooks to put rootless XFree86 on top of Aqua and run every Window manager under the sun.
Once added to the list, there is no way to appeal the blocking or to fight such policies
This is bullshit, and he knows it, but he has to exaggerate and distort the truth in order to highlight his fashionable Bounty idea.
I inadvertedly ran an open relay and quickly ended up on Ordb [ordb.org],
This is out-of-context, selective quoting, and you know it, since right after this he continues with: ``Sometimes, the spam vigilantes offer people a way to appeal, but not always. Spews.org, for example, blocks without any appeal allowed.'' So,
He does nuance his assertions. You `exaggerate and distort' them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that this `unintended consequence' (cultural protectionism) is not entirely unwelcome.
Notice how regioning makes it (for practical purposes) impossible for USians to mail-order e.g. European/region 2 movies, TV shows, etc., over the internet, for absolutely no good reason?
How on earth can they believe that such silliness will not backfire?
He just posted a few comments.
Both great ideas, but... it's not like we'd lack mailers/browsers anyway, is it? What I'd really like to see them (or someone) do is an integrated mail+news reader. Like (pine, emacs, the good'uns...) but graphical too. ("For my woman" ;-)
So you can keep one library for mail and news articles, and search/move stuff around there to your heart's content.
It only makes sense, since the format is basically the same, and news traffic often intermingles with mail anyway. People sending you private answers, etc.
Right now, Mozilla is the only one that comes close -- afaik, it's the only integrated mail+news reader in Aqua. The bliss of saving a news post onto your imap box, drag & drop.
But why, oh why, does it have to keep also the browser in the same process? This soon gets humongous (nearly 100 Mb at the moment), and why should your mailer crash at the whim of any miscoded javascript site? That doesn't make sense.
So here's to Mail+News.app -- or else, a nice Minotaur/Thunderbird.
Now Norway.
Is Massachusetts next? This is scary.
Why should we change the Internet so you can better peddle your wares on it, Mr Doherty? It wasn't meant for this. And please, stop this straw man that your fight is to enable the "future of digital delivery". It's not, for it's obviously independant of any plans in that direction.
Lightbulbs aren't calibrated to maximize lifetime, but to make it as short as the market will bear.
> Hope I finally cleared that up. ;) ;)
Hi :-) I don't dispute the virtues of css in general, at all. All I meant (and maintain) is that this is a rather poor implementation.
Oh, and I just did try it (Mozilla 1.2+), and guess what, AC, it doesn't work unless I especially enable javascript. And when I do, the menu covers part of the text. What was your point?
(The latter even appears to have been backported to OS X.)
Anyone experienced with them?
Surprise. No one as yet seems to have mentioned ibiblio?
Here ya go:
http://www.lowendmac.com/imacs/imac-b.shtml
(Allows you to tun your Mac OS 9 on top of Linux PPC -- similar to OS X's Classic environment. IIUC, Plex86 would do the same for Wintel... right? Given the potential audience, I never quite understood why there isn't a Win-on-Linux. Is it that much harder?)
Which leaves the question, is there anything like knoppix for the PowerPC?
(Also see under: recursion.)
Which government? Sure hope not the one you probably meant. I'll take the United Nations over that any day.
A glance at Nikitin's publication list will show that he works in Control Theory, and never published in Topology or Geometry journals before... It's a bit as if a statistician announced a proof of Fermat, with a (by math standards) surprisingly short and elementary proof. Hats off if it's right, anyway I guess any mistake would be found pretty soon.
Can't tweak the interface? What a joke. For Pete's sake, we have the hooks to put rootless XFree86 on top of Aqua and run every Window manager under the sun.