Neither the GPL nor the BSD licenses are perfect. The BSD license doesn't have a way to prevent GPL 'lockout', and the GPL doesn't play nice with others.
That's a very strange way of putting it.
There are those in the coding community that are happy to see their code distributed far and wide as long as it stays "open", and those that don't care if it stays open or not. The latter use the BSD license, the former the GPL.
The BSD people got upset for a variety of reasons, but one of them is what you're apparently claiming above. Theo said it was "unethical" for someone to take BSD code and license a modified version under the GPL. And the thing is, it clearly isn't. It clearly isn't because that's essentially what the BSD people said they were perfectly ok with - they licensed it under the BSD license because they didn't care whether or not it stayed open, so whether it's being incorporated into the next version of Windows, or a GPL licensed Linux code-base, really isn't an issue, at least according to what the authors claimed was their intent and desire.
This is one reason why most of us looking on this from the outside were completely bewildered. Despite the enthusiasm the BSD community has for calling GNU people "zealots" it was very obvious that the BSD community is the one with the extremely weird and extreme views, notably a hatred of a particular license that's far closer to their ideals than alternatives they've never expressed a problem with, from Apple's APSL to Microsoft's various EULAs.
Honestly, I have to congratulate the SFLC for a variety of reasons. One is that if I were in the Linux developers shoes, I wouldn't want to cooperate with the OpenBSD people any more, given the mindless hatred and illogical confrontation the Linux community has been under, and I certainly wouldn't relicense any of my code under a non-copyleft license. There's nothing, of course, preventing the OpenBSD people from accepting GPL'd changes beyond ideology. So for the SFLC to actually persuade the Linux people to do this shows both very positive diplomatic skills on their behalf, and beyond reasonable attitude from the developers.
It's also impressive they did this rather than giving up in disgust while Theo apparently misrepresented what they were doing and tried to undermine their talks.
The GPL is not, in any sense, incompatible with the BSD license except in the minds of a few extremists or except in the sense that the additional conditions of the GPL may be unacceptable to some of those who developer under the BSD license. Add GPL code to OpenBSD's kernel and you can legally redistribute OpenBSD, still. You may not be able to allow others to release closed changes to the kernel, unless you take care to identify the GPL'd portions and ensure that they're optional. Given this furore was about a device driver, a strictly optional component, it's hard to see how the argument that the Linux community were taking without giving back has a leg to stand on, especially when the argument is that they're not giving back because they're refusing to allow others to take without giving back. Uh-huh. Right.
I've said everything I needed to about Theo and the bizarre difference between the way the Linux community dealt with a real copyright violation on the part of the OpenBSD developers, and the OpenBSD developers were/are dealing with a proposed change that may be a copyright violation if done now, but I did want to make a comment on the inanity of the ideology and arguments about "morality" that Theo and some of the other hot-heads in the BSD community have been making, and also to congratulate, with a certain amount of surprise, the SFLC on their achievement. Honestly, I don't think the right way of dealing with a whining screaming child that's clearly misbehaving is to give them what they claim to want. I don't think this will ultimately pacify the OpenBSD zealots in the long term. But perhaps, ultimately, those with cooler heads in that same community might be more willing to speak out against the zealots the next time they blow up, and if that happens, the SFLC will have done the free software community a favor.
No, I'm talking about Janet Reno. The incident is actually one of the great celebrated examples of Jack's kookiness. Quoth Wikipedia (which, alas, cites paper sources):
Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you."[10][11] He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.[12] The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy." Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook."[10]
I seem to remember him attacking Janet Reno for being a lesbian (which she isn't, I might add, making the attack doubly bizarre) so I doubt he's going to attack gamers for being homophobic.
The court has only certain remedies available; unless the defendant consents then the remedies are pretty much limited to fines and restraints preventing them from violating copyrights in the future. The court cannot order the source code opened.
Seems to me you've missed why the labels would want this: If your credit card is embedded in an MP3 file, are you really going to even pass it on to your friends, let alone upload it onto a P2P file distribution network?
It actually makes perfect sense, and your exact reasons for being horrified at the idea are almost certainly why it was proposed, not something they didn't think of.
Have you tried it? Because I have, and burning iTS AAC to a CD and then re-ripping it at 128kbps AAC does not result in any noticeable loss in quality, not to my ears anyway. The thing is that audio compression algorithms generally always throw the same things away, meaning that once compressed, a decompression and recompression at the same bitrate will generally not be that different.
It's not ideal, but honestly it's not a "serious loss in quality" by a long shot. The major issue with the whole burning CDs and re-ripping them is that it's a slow, tedious, operation, not that you lose quality.
Eclipse isn't just written in Java, it also requires installation of a non-standard widget library called SWT. SWT is not part of the Java framework. It's SWT that would have held up any porting of Eclipse in the past, though as others have noted, Eclipse and SWT have been available for the Mac for years despite the implied suggestion that it's something new.
SWT is one of those things that is technically better than the alternatives in some respects, but ultimately the worth of adopting it is seriously open to question. Eclipse is oriented towards using it in place of AWT and SWING, the standard Java widget libraries, which in my view somewhat undermines Eclipse's usefulness as a Java development environment for certain types of application. Still with 90% of Java, in my experience, being used on the back-end, where no GUIs are ever developed, it's still very relevant and for many people will be a strong alternative to Netbeans.
Nope. The only thing UMTS and CDMA have in common are that at an air interface level, both use a Code Division Multiple Access multiplexing scheme, and that only applies to UMTS for versions R99 through Rev. 7: Rev 8 is OFDMA based.
UMTS and CDMA don't even use similar, let alone compatible, implementations of the air interface.
Also check into ISDN, which generally can run over the same two wires as POTS so is usually available even if DSL isn't. Latency is better than POTS/V.90 as is bandwidth. The major issue with ISDN is the way, in the US, it is charged, but with dial on demand, you may be able to mitigate some of that. Also some ISPs will run an ISDN based technology called IDSL which is essentially ISDN over a dedicated line, replacing the per minute charges ISDN providers charge with a fixed monthly fee.
Everyone tends to forget ISDN because, well, it was mismarketed in the mid-nineties by US telcos, but even as an Internet access method, which despite the marketing is not its primary use, it sucks less than dial-up.
Because they realize that Gnome can't survive as a desktop that's being hacked in C/C++.
Given:
1. Sun has freed Java. Java being a mature, complete, platform that isn't catching up with someone else's spec all the time
2. Mono is still at an early enough stage (in terms of amount of use within GNOME) that we can safely drown it in the bathtub without anyone ever finding out.
...why not switch to Java, and be rid of the Mono trap without losing the advantages of a modern managed code environment?
Normally I'd say the parent AC is engaging in flamebait:
OSI is looking for any excuse to reject this license.
especially with the usual digs at the GPL (funny how the second oldest free software in common use is the one everyone blames for incompatibility with the new licenses that came out in the last five to ten years.)
However, in this case, the "any excuse to reject this license" claim may well be right. Eric S. Raymond, on the OSI Board's blog, has somewhat unhelpfully suggested that he's leaning towards wanting the licenses rejected for reasons other than their compliance with the open source definition, namely Microsoft's entirely unrelated OOXML activities.
I'm not sure the OSI is being smart in associating itself with that view.
Not exactly. In both countries, the "incoming calls" (calls to mobiles) are paid for by telephone users, it's just in the UK the caller pays the entire cost, whereas in the US the mobile phone subscriber covers the "additional" costs incurred by having the call terminate on a mobile phone. Someone, somewhere, is paying for those incoming calls. Chances are it's you when you're calling someone else on a landline.
In the end, unless you receive considerably more calls than you make, it all works out roughly equal on the "bundled minutes" front. The only way you can safely say otherwise is if you really don't factor in the costs everyone else will be incurring.
The O2 tariffs are pretty lousy by US standards. Even if we buy the "I don't care about the costs people will face calling me" thing, the tariffs do not include unlimited in-network mobile to mobile, or unlimited off-peak calls, both of which are standard on US contract tariffs, and increasingly common on rival UK operator tariffs too. I don't see any way in which the O2 offerings aren't awful.
Yup, I can well imagine. It's always awkward moving from the Wii to the DVR, because all of a sudden you go from this fantastic, 100% intuitive, point-and-click interface to a kludgy buttons-on-a-remote thing. The maintainers of MythTV might do well to note this, and fix the mouse issues with mythfrontend, right now it barely works (as in many buttons don't respond, or do the opposite of what they're supposed to if you use the mouse) presumably because they expect everyone to be using button-remotes, but if MythTV users started using a Wiimote instead, it might actually result in a more usable DVR that's better than TiVo's or Dish Network's.
Perhaps Nintendo should encourage TV makers to build in the sensor bars.
It's not like the wiimote is being tracked in 3 space with 6 degrees of freedom. You can't map the game lightsaber position to the position of the wiimote as you are holding it.
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but yes, the Wiimote is tracked in 3D space. The Wiimote uses the sensor-bar (a bar containing multiple infrared beacons that you place on top of, or underneath, the TV) to determine its approximate location, and sends this information back using Bluetooth to the Wii. The only issue with this is you have to point the Wiimote towards the bar (and clear line of sight must be maintained between the Wiimote and the bar.)
I remember being fairly impressed by an early video of the Wii which, uncharacteristically given its more recent family friendly publicity, included a shot of a gamer holding a sword to a victim's throat. As the Wiimote was moved, so was the sword.
It's an extremely impressive device. Oh, and if you can get a sensor bar (third party models exist), there are drivers to get Wiimotes working on PCs, albeit experimentally at the moment. In the medium term I can see PC games being released that support them.
You know Dave, I'm really disappointed in this reaction and the reaction of most others in the Mac community on this news.
To address your point first: The hack was an Apple WiFi hack. It was presented that way because that was the news. The fact one could use the same exploit as a basis of a means to hack other operating systems was really not news - Windows is hackable, everyone knows that, and even GNU/Linux doesn't have a reputation for being invulnerable. Meanwhile Mac OS X, the operating system with the second highest mindshare, was promoted by most of its supporters, including at times Apple, has being free of the viruses and malware that plague Windows, and suddenly Maynor found there was a massive hole in that. So what was news was that this hack affected that operating system. To claim otherwise would be like to claim news that a thirty floor building suddenly being underwater in the middle of New Orleans is not a story, because the same flood affected all the single floor buildings surrounding it.
More importantly though, the Mac community spent an enormous amount of time trying to destroy Maynor's credibility, including misrepresenting his video and claiming there was no such bug, and that he was lying when he claimed to be unable to reveal the hack due to an NDA. It would be nice to see people who fed into that smear campaign at least acknowledge that the chief allegations against Maynor et al were wrong: he really did have an exploit, it was serious, he was unable to give details out due to an NDA, you may not understand the reasons why he presented it the way he did but there really is no evidence whatsoever of dishonesty on his part. He really does deserve an apology.
So, all you GPL cult members out there. Keep your hands off of the True-Freedom Software, BSD! If you really are so hot to have GPL'd code write your own from scratch.
DMCA complaints can also involve access protection (DVD's CSS is such a thing, it does nothing to prevent anything from being copied, but attempts to ensure that the content can only be accessed by authorized software.)
That said, you're right, this CRC is neither an effective access control mechanism or copy control mechanism on any planet I've ever lived on. The system appears to be to prevent any kind of writing to add content, not any kind of reading. A judge would throw out a DMCA based attack in a heartbeat.
Actually, that's just a variant of option #2, that it's a conspiracy to lock out GNOME users. As I said, neither explanation appears rational, you wouldn't use this method to do either #1 or #2, #1 is useless, #2 is inevitably going to be bypassed.
It only seems prudent to checksum the data to make sure you don't have a corrupt file.
Well, yeah, but why would you want to actively disable access to the parts of the music library that aren't corrupt simply because some of it might be? It's not as if the iPod will explode (or become more corrupt) because of a bad read.
I'm having a hard time understanding the justification for this change, both the "It's just to prevent corruption" explanation, and the "It's a conspiracy by Apple against GNOME users" one. In the absence of anything concrete from Apple, it seems all we can do is speculate.
I see the BSD trolls are out continuing to modg down anything that points out how ridiculous they're making themselves look. What the hell is going? How did OpenBSD sink this low? And why are you trolls doing this anyway?
To paraphrase you "I don't really care what you say, I'm going to randomly quote a paragraph from what you said and then write about something else."
I mean, in all seriousness, what the hell does anything you wrote have to do with either the paragraph you quoted or anything else I wrote in the comment you're replying to?
This is something I'm finding from the pro-Theo camp, they're not interested in how utterly insane the BSD community looking at the moment thanks to rants like Theo's, they're just blindly lashing out at anyone with a dissenting view. They're absolutely not interested in addressing the fact that the OpenBSD team is looking increasingly ridiculous, increasingly unstable, and definitely not a group anyone in their right mind would trust.
That said, I believe the iPod's HD is a straight (if small, at 1.8") IDE drive, so you should be able to hook it up to a standard IDE interface using the right cable (it may even be the same as the 2.5" IDE interface, I can't remember.)
Ok, I'll have to take a look for that. Honestly, the lack of capacity has been the only thing stopping me from buying an N800 and using it to replace (amongst other things) my iPod.
Meh, maybe, maybe not. This only affects new iPods, so at this stage I suspect most people will just buy some other MP3 player that works with GNOME et al.
I know I will. I like Apple's new iPod line-up, but nothing they're selling is so compelling that the alternatives aren't worthy of consideration. I have been thinking of replacing my old 2nd gen 10G iPod, for a variety of reasons (I don't want to upgrade the battery again, and the thing is Firewire only, which I don't have on the laptop I want to move everything to), but I guess an iPod is out of the running at this stage. I'm just glad I didn't buy much from the iTMS.
Does anyone know if 8Gb+ SD cards are coming any time soon? The Nokia N800 might make a perfect replacement in terms of what I need a portable device for.
The GSM operators in the US lock the devices they themselves sell, but you can always buy compatible unlocked equipment and expect it to work. (I, personally, never buy a carrier phone as my primary phone, and this goes back as long as when GSM finally came to this part of Florida, about five years ago.)
You don't get the situation with the US GSM operators that you do in the IS-95 world where Sprint PCS (for a long time, possibly still) did not take unlocked devices, Verizon and Sprint have an agreement not to permit each other's devices to be activated on the rival network even when unlocked, MVNOs are forbidden by Sprint from activating rival's devices, etc.
The SIM/R-UIM cards themselves create an expectation that activation is at the user's whim, not the operator's. The US GSM operators honor that expectation, whereas users of IS-95 networks generally have no expectation that a particular device will ever work on their network unless their operator "approves" it according to arbitrary rules that make no sense from an customer point of view.
BTW I was wrong in describing R-UIMs as a Qualcomm thing, I've looked into them a little and they're essentially for all the TIA digital standards (IS-95, IS-136, and the 3G versions thereof.) I don't think anyone ever bothered making IS-136 phones (D-AMPS) that supported it because the standard was effectively dead by the time R-UIMs came along. You're correct in saying take-up has been low amongst operators, but that's really the problem isn't it?
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That's a very strange way of putting it.
There are those in the coding community that are happy to see their code distributed far and wide as long as it stays "open", and those that don't care if it stays open or not. The latter use the BSD license, the former the GPL.
The BSD people got upset for a variety of reasons, but one of them is what you're apparently claiming above. Theo said it was "unethical" for someone to take BSD code and license a modified version under the GPL. And the thing is, it clearly isn't. It clearly isn't because that's essentially what the BSD people said they were perfectly ok with - they licensed it under the BSD license because they didn't care whether or not it stayed open, so whether it's being incorporated into the next version of Windows, or a GPL licensed Linux code-base, really isn't an issue, at least according to what the authors claimed was their intent and desire.
This is one reason why most of us looking on this from the outside were completely bewildered. Despite the enthusiasm the BSD community has for calling GNU people "zealots" it was very obvious that the BSD community is the one with the extremely weird and extreme views, notably a hatred of a particular license that's far closer to their ideals than alternatives they've never expressed a problem with, from Apple's APSL to Microsoft's various EULAs.
Honestly, I have to congratulate the SFLC for a variety of reasons. One is that if I were in the Linux developers shoes, I wouldn't want to cooperate with the OpenBSD people any more, given the mindless hatred and illogical confrontation the Linux community has been under, and I certainly wouldn't relicense any of my code under a non-copyleft license. There's nothing, of course, preventing the OpenBSD people from accepting GPL'd changes beyond ideology. So for the SFLC to actually persuade the Linux people to do this shows both very positive diplomatic skills on their behalf, and beyond reasonable attitude from the developers.
It's also impressive they did this rather than giving up in disgust while Theo apparently misrepresented what they were doing and tried to undermine their talks.
The GPL is not, in any sense, incompatible with the BSD license except in the minds of a few extremists or except in the sense that the additional conditions of the GPL may be unacceptable to some of those who developer under the BSD license. Add GPL code to OpenBSD's kernel and you can legally redistribute OpenBSD, still. You may not be able to allow others to release closed changes to the kernel, unless you take care to identify the GPL'd portions and ensure that they're optional. Given this furore was about a device driver, a strictly optional component, it's hard to see how the argument that the Linux community were taking without giving back has a leg to stand on, especially when the argument is that they're not giving back because they're refusing to allow others to take without giving back. Uh-huh. Right.
I've said everything I needed to about Theo and the bizarre difference between the way the Linux community dealt with a real copyright violation on the part of the OpenBSD developers, and the OpenBSD developers were/are dealing with a proposed change that may be a copyright violation if done now, but I did want to make a comment on the inanity of the ideology and arguments about "morality" that Theo and some of the other hot-heads in the BSD community have been making, and also to congratulate, with a certain amount of surprise, the SFLC on their achievement. Honestly, I don't think the right way of dealing with a whining screaming child that's clearly misbehaving is to give them what they claim to want. I don't think this will ultimately pacify the OpenBSD zealots in the long term. But perhaps, ultimately, those with cooler heads in that same community might be more willing to speak out against the zealots the next time they blow up, and if that happens, the SFLC will have done the free software community a favor.
No, I'm talking about Janet Reno. The incident is actually one of the great celebrated examples of Jack's kookiness. Quoth Wikipedia (which, alas, cites paper sources):
Heh.
I seem to remember him attacking Janet Reno for being a lesbian (which she isn't, I might add, making the attack doubly bizarre) so I doubt he's going to attack gamers for being homophobic.
No, you couldn't. But that's not relevant.
The court has only certain remedies available; unless the defendant consents then the remedies are pretty much limited to fines and restraints preventing them from violating copyrights in the future. The court cannot order the source code opened.
Seems to me you've missed why the labels would want this: If your credit card is embedded in an MP3 file, are you really going to even pass it on to your friends, let alone upload it onto a P2P file distribution network?
It actually makes perfect sense, and your exact reasons for being horrified at the idea are almost certainly why it was proposed, not something they didn't think of.
Have you tried it? Because I have, and burning iTS AAC to a CD and then re-ripping it at 128kbps AAC does not result in any noticeable loss in quality, not to my ears anyway. The thing is that audio compression algorithms generally always throw the same things away, meaning that once compressed, a decompression and recompression at the same bitrate will generally not be that different.
It's not ideal, but honestly it's not a "serious loss in quality" by a long shot. The major issue with the whole burning CDs and re-ripping them is that it's a slow, tedious, operation, not that you lose quality.
In fairness, when Apple was started, it was just three people, one of whom was Woz. Perhaps he's talking about the six months or so it was that?
Eclipse isn't just written in Java, it also requires installation of a non-standard widget library called SWT. SWT is not part of the Java framework. It's SWT that would have held up any porting of Eclipse in the past, though as others have noted, Eclipse and SWT have been available for the Mac for years despite the implied suggestion that it's something new.
SWT is one of those things that is technically better than the alternatives in some respects, but ultimately the worth of adopting it is seriously open to question. Eclipse is oriented towards using it in place of AWT and SWING, the standard Java widget libraries, which in my view somewhat undermines Eclipse's usefulness as a Java development environment for certain types of application. Still with 90% of Java, in my experience, being used on the back-end, where no GUIs are ever developed, it's still very relevant and for many people will be a strong alternative to Netbeans.
Nope. The only thing UMTS and CDMA have in common are that at an air interface level, both use a Code Division Multiple Access multiplexing scheme, and that only applies to UMTS for versions R99 through Rev. 7: Rev 8 is OFDMA based.
UMTS and CDMA don't even use similar, let alone compatible, implementations of the air interface.
Also check into ISDN, which generally can run over the same two wires as POTS so is usually available even if DSL isn't. Latency is better than POTS/V.90 as is bandwidth. The major issue with ISDN is the way, in the US, it is charged, but with dial on demand, you may be able to mitigate some of that. Also some ISPs will run an ISDN based technology called IDSL which is essentially ISDN over a dedicated line, replacing the per minute charges ISDN providers charge with a fixed monthly fee.
Everyone tends to forget ISDN because, well, it was mismarketed in the mid-nineties by US telcos, but even as an Internet access method, which despite the marketing is not its primary use, it sucks less than dial-up.
Given:
1. Sun has freed Java. Java being a mature, complete, platform that isn't catching up with someone else's spec all the time
2. Mono is still at an early enough stage (in terms of amount of use within GNOME) that we can safely drown it in the bathtub without anyone ever finding out.
Normally I'd say the parent AC is engaging in flamebait:
especially with the usual digs at the GPL (funny how the second oldest free software in common use is the one everyone blames for incompatibility with the new licenses that came out in the last five to ten years.)
However, in this case, the "any excuse to reject this license" claim may well be right. Eric S. Raymond, on the OSI Board's blog, has somewhat unhelpfully suggested that he's leaning towards wanting the licenses rejected for reasons other than their compliance with the open source definition, namely Microsoft's entirely unrelated OOXML activities.
I'm not sure the OSI is being smart in associating itself with that view.
Not exactly. In both countries, the "incoming calls" (calls to mobiles) are paid for by telephone users, it's just in the UK the caller pays the entire cost, whereas in the US the mobile phone subscriber covers the "additional" costs incurred by having the call terminate on a mobile phone. Someone, somewhere, is paying for those incoming calls. Chances are it's you when you're calling someone else on a landline.
In the end, unless you receive considerably more calls than you make, it all works out roughly equal on the "bundled minutes" front. The only way you can safely say otherwise is if you really don't factor in the costs everyone else will be incurring.
The O2 tariffs are pretty lousy by US standards. Even if we buy the "I don't care about the costs people will face calling me" thing, the tariffs do not include unlimited in-network mobile to mobile, or unlimited off-peak calls, both of which are standard on US contract tariffs, and increasingly common on rival UK operator tariffs too. I don't see any way in which the O2 offerings aren't awful.
Yup, I can well imagine. It's always awkward moving from the Wii to the DVR, because all of a sudden you go from this fantastic, 100% intuitive, point-and-click interface to a kludgy buttons-on-a-remote thing. The maintainers of MythTV might do well to note this, and fix the mouse issues with mythfrontend, right now it barely works (as in many buttons don't respond, or do the opposite of what they're supposed to if you use the mouse) presumably because they expect everyone to be using button-remotes, but if MythTV users started using a Wiimote instead, it might actually result in a more usable DVR that's better than TiVo's or Dish Network's.
Perhaps Nintendo should encourage TV makers to build in the sensor bars.
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but yes, the Wiimote is tracked in 3D space. The Wiimote uses the sensor-bar (a bar containing multiple infrared beacons that you place on top of, or underneath, the TV) to determine its approximate location, and sends this information back using Bluetooth to the Wii. The only issue with this is you have to point the Wiimote towards the bar (and clear line of sight must be maintained between the Wiimote and the bar.)
I remember being fairly impressed by an early video of the Wii which, uncharacteristically given its more recent family friendly publicity, included a shot of a gamer holding a sword to a victim's throat. As the Wiimote was moved, so was the sword.
It's an extremely impressive device. Oh, and if you can get a sensor bar (third party models exist), there are drivers to get Wiimotes working on PCs, albeit experimentally at the moment. In the medium term I can see PC games being released that support them.
You know Dave, I'm really disappointed in this reaction and the reaction of most others in the Mac community on this news.
To address your point first: The hack was an Apple WiFi hack. It was presented that way because that was the news. The fact one could use the same exploit as a basis of a means to hack other operating systems was really not news - Windows is hackable, everyone knows that, and even GNU/Linux doesn't have a reputation for being invulnerable. Meanwhile Mac OS X, the operating system with the second highest mindshare, was promoted by most of its supporters, including at times Apple, has being free of the viruses and malware that plague Windows, and suddenly Maynor found there was a massive hole in that. So what was news was that this hack affected that operating system. To claim otherwise would be like to claim news that a thirty floor building suddenly being underwater in the middle of New Orleans is not a story, because the same flood affected all the single floor buildings surrounding it.
More importantly though, the Mac community spent an enormous amount of time trying to destroy Maynor's credibility, including misrepresenting his video and claiming there was no such bug, and that he was lying when he claimed to be unable to reveal the hack due to an NDA. It would be nice to see people who fed into that smear campaign at least acknowledge that the chief allegations against Maynor et al were wrong: he really did have an exploit, it was serious, he was unable to give details out due to an NDA, you may not understand the reasons why he presented it the way he did but there really is no evidence whatsoever of dishonesty on his part. He really does deserve an apology.
The ironing is delicious.
That said, you're right, this CRC is neither an effective access control mechanism or copy control mechanism on any planet I've ever lived on. The system appears to be to prevent any kind of writing to add content, not any kind of reading. A judge would throw out a DMCA based attack in a heartbeat.
Actually, that's just a variant of option #2, that it's a conspiracy to lock out GNOME users. As I said, neither explanation appears rational, you wouldn't use this method to do either #1 or #2, #1 is useless, #2 is inevitably going to be bypassed.
Well, yeah, but why would you want to actively disable access to the parts of the music library that aren't corrupt simply because some of it might be? It's not as if the iPod will explode (or become more corrupt) because of a bad read.
I'm having a hard time understanding the justification for this change, both the "It's just to prevent corruption" explanation, and the "It's a conspiracy by Apple against GNOME users" one. In the absence of anything concrete from Apple, it seems all we can do is speculate.
To paraphrase you "I don't really care what you say, I'm going to randomly quote a paragraph from what you said and then write about something else."
I mean, in all seriousness, what the hell does anything you wrote have to do with either the paragraph you quoted or anything else I wrote in the comment you're replying to?
This is something I'm finding from the pro-Theo camp, they're not interested in how utterly insane the BSD community looking at the moment thanks to rants like Theo's, they're just blindly lashing out at anyone with a dissenting view. They're absolutely not interested in addressing the fact that the OpenBSD team is looking increasingly ridiculous, increasingly unstable, and definitely not a group anyone in their right mind would trust.
Ha, I'm not ready to give it up quite yet!
That said, I believe the iPod's HD is a straight (if small, at 1.8") IDE drive, so you should be able to hook it up to a standard IDE interface using the right cable (it may even be the same as the 2.5" IDE interface, I can't remember.)
Ok, I'll have to take a look for that. Honestly, the lack of capacity has been the only thing stopping me from buying an N800 and using it to replace (amongst other things) my iPod.
Sounds like the time has come...
Meh, maybe, maybe not. This only affects new iPods, so at this stage I suspect most people will just buy some other MP3 player that works with GNOME et al.
I know I will. I like Apple's new iPod line-up, but nothing they're selling is so compelling that the alternatives aren't worthy of consideration. I have been thinking of replacing my old 2nd gen 10G iPod, for a variety of reasons (I don't want to upgrade the battery again, and the thing is Firewire only, which I don't have on the laptop I want to move everything to), but I guess an iPod is out of the running at this stage. I'm just glad I didn't buy much from the iTMS.
Does anyone know if 8Gb+ SD cards are coming any time soon? The Nokia N800 might make a perfect replacement in terms of what I need a portable device for.
The GSM operators in the US lock the devices they themselves sell, but you can always buy compatible unlocked equipment and expect it to work. (I, personally, never buy a carrier phone as my primary phone, and this goes back as long as when GSM finally came to this part of Florida, about five years ago.)
You don't get the situation with the US GSM operators that you do in the IS-95 world where Sprint PCS (for a long time, possibly still) did not take unlocked devices, Verizon and Sprint have an agreement not to permit each other's devices to be activated on the rival network even when unlocked, MVNOs are forbidden by Sprint from activating rival's devices, etc.
The SIM/R-UIM cards themselves create an expectation that activation is at the user's whim, not the operator's. The US GSM operators honor that expectation, whereas users of IS-95 networks generally have no expectation that a particular device will ever work on their network unless their operator "approves" it according to arbitrary rules that make no sense from an customer point of view.
BTW I was wrong in describing R-UIMs as a Qualcomm thing, I've looked into them a little and they're essentially for all the TIA digital standards (IS-95, IS-136, and the 3G versions thereof.) I don't think anyone ever bothered making IS-136 phones (D-AMPS) that supported it because the standard was effectively dead by the time R-UIMs came along. You're correct in saying take-up has been low amongst operators, but that's really the problem isn't it?