Yes, I would mind. But in that case I just would not buy media that requires that. My opinion is that people (or companies) have the right to demand that from me. And I don't care as long as nobody forces me to buy their stuff.
BTW it is unlikely that you need to contact a central server for authentication, it least this could not be justified with copy protection. But what would be a good way of protecting data is to give each device a secret key so that you need to buy a personalized copy that will only work on your device. And if you then, for example, buy another device you would need to get a new copy, so they also need some information about you in this case to give you a second copy without requiring payment.
"One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary."
As long as they do not change this, they make sure that it operates well with Free Software and the implementation of the standard does not get too intrusive I'm almost convinced that this is not a bad idea. I think that people DO have a right to protect their things, and that the market will regulate itself: the more restrictions the big media companies introduce ("loud reading of this e-book is not allowed"), the more important will free media get. I firmly believe that this step will actually reduce the influence of the media corporations, because it reduces the usefulness of their stuff and it shows the advantages of free alternatives.
Note that this kind of screen could be the first step to DRM mechanisms build into the output device: They could use it to send pictures or videos encrypted to the screen. Unless you know the key that's inside your screen there will be no chance to get the raw data. Much safer than a software solution. And at least a solution thats a little bit more OpenSource-friendly (you can safely give away the source of the OS without harming the DRM protection, because everything happens in the screen). Also note that the same thing is possible for audio with USB speakers.
Here is my first experience with a copy-protected cd:
it was 'Better Days' by JOE (Jive Records/Zomba). I got it from Amazon.de. The only sign that it was copy-protected was a very small printing on the back side "This CD is not playable on computers (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM)". So I tried it on my computer running Linux, with a Creative Dxr2 5x DVD-ROM and I could hear it on audio mode. To my surprise I was also able to rip it using cdparanoia (otherwise I would have returned it immediately, I have far too many CDs to manage them in any for but Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format). So I tried it on my DVD-Player (Yamakawa AVphile 715), and it worked, too. However I noticed that the player needed an unusual long time to detect it as a CD. Next try was my stereo, an old Sony CD player: worked fine as well. Then I tried a Windows PC with a 40x Pioneer CD-ROM: did not detect the CD. Ok, so at least in one cd drive the copy protection worked.
I thought about the possibility of returning it to Amazon, but I felt bad about the idea of returning a CD that I had already ripped and that worked in most computers, so I didnt do this. I wrote a letter to Amazon.de though, asking them to include information about copy protected CDs in the description and I told them that I would never buy a copy-protected CD, and if I would ever get another one I would return it immediately. They replied, telling that they cannot put this information in the description, but because of the special circumstances I was allowed to return even opened CDs if they are copy-protected.
Negative financial data is tracked (Schufa) but you have a right to gain access to the information they store on you and if it is wrong and you can proove it, correct it.
Also important to note is that nobody can request data from or give data to Schufa without your written permission. (No bank will give you a credit without this permission though)
At the risk of sounding like a troll (which this is not), I think the US has a stronger tradition of personal freedom.
You're certainly right, but the article was about laws in germany.
Germany has had some historical autocratic/statist leanings and nationalism or the belief in the state has entertained some moments of popularity.
50 years ago. Today nationalism and especially patriotism is not a very common phenomenon, and, compared to the US (or france, or..), the majority of germans are not patriotic at all. People watch movies like 'Pearl Habour' or people hanging US flags after 9/11 with disbelief. If a german would make a movie like this or put a german flag in a car people would call him right wing extremist...
But there is a certain amount of trust in the state and government that americans seem to lack though.
I suspect the truth of it is that having a national ID card is useful to the government, but often in a good way.
Why? It's not like there is somebody at every corner asking for your identity. Actually, in my whole life, I have been asked for my identity card by local authorities inside germany exactly once. And that was because a friend and me were driving next to a congress hall where a summit of european heads of state was taking place. There is no 'tracking' of people, if the police wants to know your identity they will find it out whether you have a identity card or not. Usually you need the id if you, for example, open a bank account, rent a car or things like this. In all these cases the companies already know your identity anyway and the id card is used as a proof.
In Germany everybody has a national id card, and I have never heard anybody complain about it. On the contrary, after WTC many people wondered that the US doesnt have one. The concept of not having an ID sounds very strange to most people here.
A missing piece in the acticle is the importance of Apache 2.0 for WebDAV. WebDAV is a HTTP-extension making the HTTP-server a real fileserver - Apache 2.0 comes with full WebDAV support. As WebDAV is quite flexible and allows stuff like meta-data, versioning and different authentication mechanisms (that are unfortunately not finalized yet) it is a possible successor for both NFS and SMB/Cifs.
WindowsXP supports the mounting of WebDAV shares, as does Linux with the help of the DAV filesystem driver. And Apache could be the standard fileserver... scary.
If your last point is true, then you have nothing to worry about. I'm just proposing an alternative to X windows. Why is it so damned great that we have Gtk, Xt, and so much toolkit diversity but when I propose an alternative to X Windows everyone shits their pants?
The reason for the remaining toolkit war between Gtk and Qt - almost everything else is almost dead in the free software world - are the different philosophies, especially C++ vs. C. You won't solve this by having a new window system. If you present group one an interface that is as weird as GTK/Glib they wont use it. If you give pure C programmers a C++ interface they won't use it.
However, you are free to use only software created with one toolkit and don't use any other - and you will still have more software than with a new windowing system. If you want to enforce it, patch X11 so it supports only QT apps. Tadaa, only one style in your system, finally the same style across all apps.
Frankly, the result would be a lot more than
nothing. Go use Mac OS X. Tell me that you
prefer using X Windows on Linux.
Actually I do prefer KDE over MacOS X, but even if I didnt: still nobody convinced me that there is a technical barrier that prevents anybody who invests a few hundred manyears to implement a MacOS X look-alike GUI on X11. X11 allows it. Even if it there would be something missing, add the feature to XFree. You will waste A LOT of time writing a windowing system that would be much better invested in improving KDE (or Gnome). If somebody really want to do this I cant stop him, but I can predict that unless the new system has all the old features, including 3D and driver suppport, plus improvements that are so significant that people bother to change no one will use it. You need much more than architectural improvements, you need either features that are impossible with X11 or a performance that is so much higher that people can actually see the difference.
I believe that network transparency should be achieved at a higher level, which means assuming more than a dumb video terminal. Larger functional blocks of information, less chattiness, that leaves more of the rendering to the "client"
DisplayPostScript can do this for you, you just have to add DPS support to the toolkit of your choice.
I don't really think that "network transparency" should be part of the architecture of a desktop windowing environment at all,
There is not a real difference between inter-process-communication and a real network. Whatever you do with IPC can be done with a network as well.
so I don't see what this has to do with security.
To access the graphics hardware you need special privileges that a user-level app should not have. So you either need a server that has these priviliges (requiring IPC, the X11 way), give the app the power to access the hardware (bad idea if the user can install applications, but ok and used in some embedded solutions) or put a significant part of the windowing system in the kernel (not really recommended, but the windows way).
With regards to "advantage of internal support for vector fonts", the advantage is that all apps would just say "draw these letters to the screen with these fonts" and the anti-aliasing, etc. would happen internally. Now, only apps written to the XRender extension do that. This means some apps support anti-aliasing, some don't.
So what? Is your argument "the app has to be rewritten to use anti-aliased fonts, so I better rewrite it completely to use a new windowing system"? (and BTW it's usually only a matter of updating the toolkit)
Why not just make something new and better (DPS based or otherwise) and support X11 as an add-on, or for backwards compatibility with legacy X11 apps?
Because no user will notice the difference. Neither will most app developers who use toolkits anyway. It is just a HUGE amount of work, consider all the drivers, video support, 3D and so on, and what will be the result: nothing.
>suck. Writing more won't help. We need a better
>windowing system, rewritten from scratch for
>desktop use, that supports network operation >without sacrificing speed,
How do you want to improve speed? That's one of the problems. People claim that its slow, but nobody has an idea of how to make it faster without making it less secure (by letting the programs/clients access the hardware directly) or putting everything in the kernel (trading speed for stability). The only other solution I see is to reduce traffic by putting more logic on the server, and this is something already exists, it's called DisplayPostScript... of course people would have to start using it, but this is more realistic than porting appliations to a completely new system.
And even if there was a solution to improve speed, why start something new from scratch instead of using the existing XFree and adding a new communication mechanism?
> supports transparency and vector fonts
> internally
What's the advantage of saying 'this command is internally' over using an extension? There is no big difference in the X11 protocol...
> that includes a widget set/toolkit as part of
> the windowing system.
The only advantage for the user (less IPC traffic) can be achieved with DPS as well. You don't need a new windowing system for this...
> Just look at OS X for proof that your argument
> is entirely irrational.
OS X does not have any X11 legacy applications, and they use a DisplayPostScript variant as well. And OF COURSE they made sure that all existing applications still work on their new system.
No, please, not another windowing system. X11 is fine for most purposes and, if you need something is does not provide, write an extension. There are more than enough 'alternatives' that are either designed for niches, have never been finished or will never get a significant marekt share. They don't have any significant advantage, at least as a general window system, and they lack applications. And despite those people who claim that X11 is sooo bloated (usually because they see the memory usage and do not realize that most of the memory is taken by pixmaps that won't take less space in other solutions) there are proofs like TinyX and WeirdX.
Technocracy? Didn't the Simpsons have an episode similar to that?
In Civilization (the game) this is a government that is chosen by competence instead of popular vote. It usually replaces democracy in the 3rd millenium.
And be careful about calling everyone else an idiot. Everyone on the road thinks they know how to drive and that all the others are incompetent, if that is the case then why are there so many accidents?
As I said (earlier in the thread), idiots are a product of perceiption, they certainly don't consider themselves idiots, too. But this doesn't change my opinion.
IMHO, in an ideal world, there should be a license for every kind of intellectual property. For source code, text, music, movies, ideas (=patents), everything. It's not very logical to make up different licenses because it gets you into trouble as soon as you want to combine media (write a game using open music, make a movie of an open book, distribute documentation with your software...).
But why is it moral? Because the majority thinks so. In India people may consider eating cows as barbaric as people in the US would eating dogs. But it doesn't matter because it's only a minority, their opinion doesnt count
No, the reason for democracy is that your state has a problem if the majority of people isn't happy. If there is only a small group against it it's no problem, then they are called radicals. So the concept of the modern democracy is that the people can elect whoever they want. The only problam is that the media corporations tell them what and who they want.
Next trick: filtering out the idiots who actually think they're smarter than everybody else. *ahem*
"Idiots" are a product of perception, of course. I do not doubt that any group of people with sufficient size would consider me to be an idiot. That's no problem, actually I am proud of it.
In any group with a sufficiently large number of people the majority are idiots. You can find this out by reading slashdot comments, and the quality here is certainly better than in the average AOL chat room. Interactivity doesn't make sense unless you find a good way to filter out all these idiots. Who cares about the ability to read the thoughts of 4 billion idiots?
And even if you were able to filter them out, it would not really help to improve the world. Ok, you could read stuff written by non-idiots, but as long as the majority of voters can still be influenced by those few media corporations. Most of your examples are either "mass-media delivers to idiots" or "idiot to idiot" communication.
Abolish the democracy, form a technocracy!
If the article was a comment I would moderate it "-1, Troll". It's a stupid discussion that nobody needs, the question has been asked a thousand times..
The author doesnt even have a point, saying "if I would not use a package manager it would be a mess". Well, he uses one, so it's not a problem. And if he didn't he could easily put each package in a single directory and create the world's longest environment variable.
No, you don't. It's the package manager's job do avoid any conflicts. Windows has these problems because each piec of software comes with its own installation program and does not know anything about the others.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I would mind. But in that case I just would not buy media that requires that. My opinion is that people (or companies) have the right to demand that from me. And I don't care as long as nobody forces me to buy their stuff.
BTW it is unlikely that you need to contact a central server for authentication, it least this could not be justified with copy protection. But what would be a good way of protecting data is to give each device a secret key so that you need to buy a personalized copy that will only work on your device. And if you then, for example, buy another device you would need to get a new copy, so they also need some information about you in this case to give you a second copy without requiring payment.
"One bright spot for free software advocates: Any software that implements the standards must be "based on open source code." Hardware copy-protection schemes can remain proprietary."
As long as they do not change this, they make sure that it operates well with Free Software and the implementation of the standard does not get too intrusive I'm almost convinced that this is not a bad idea. I think that people DO have a right to protect their things, and that the market will regulate itself: the more restrictions the big media companies introduce ("loud reading of this e-book is not allowed"), the more important will free media get. I firmly believe that this step will actually reduce the influence of the media corporations, because it reduces the usefulness of their stuff and it shows the advantages of free alternatives.
Note that this kind of screen could be the first step to DRM mechanisms build into the output device: They could use it to send pictures or videos encrypted to the screen. Unless you know the key that's inside your screen there will be no chance to get the raw data. Much safer than a software solution. And at least a solution thats a little bit more OpenSource-friendly (you can safely give away the source of the OS without harming the DRM protection, because everything happens in the screen). Also note that the same thing is possible for audio with USB speakers.
it was 'Better Days' by JOE (Jive Records/Zomba). I got it from Amazon.de. The only sign that it was copy-protected was a very small printing on the back side "This CD is not playable on computers (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM)". So I tried it on my computer running Linux, with a Creative Dxr2 5x DVD-ROM and I could hear it on audio mode. To my surprise I was also able to rip it using cdparanoia (otherwise I would have returned it immediately, I have far too many CDs to manage them in any for but Ogg Vorbis or MP3 format). So I tried it on my DVD-Player (Yamakawa AVphile 715), and it worked, too. However I noticed that the player needed an unusual long time to detect it as a CD. Next try was my stereo, an old Sony CD player: worked fine as well. Then I tried a Windows PC with a 40x Pioneer CD-ROM: did not detect the CD. Ok, so at least in one cd drive the copy protection worked.
I thought about the possibility of returning it to Amazon, but I felt bad about the idea of returning a CD that I had already ripped and that worked in most computers, so I didnt do this. I wrote a letter to Amazon.de though, asking them to include information about copy protected CDs in the description and I told them that I would never buy a copy-protected CD, and if I would ever get another one I would return it immediately. They replied, telling that they cannot put this information in the description, but because of the special circumstances I was allowed to return even opened CDs if they are copy-protected.
Negative financial data is tracked (Schufa) but you have a right to gain access to the information they store on you and if it is wrong and you can proove it, correct it.
Also important to note is that nobody can request data from or give data to Schufa without your written permission. (No bank will give you a credit without this permission though)
You're certainly right, but the article was about laws in germany.
Germany has had some historical autocratic/statist leanings and nationalism or the belief in the state has entertained some moments of popularity.
50 years ago. Today nationalism and especially patriotism is not a very common phenomenon, and, compared to the US (or france, or..), the majority of germans are not patriotic at all. People watch movies like 'Pearl Habour' or people hanging US flags after 9/11 with disbelief. If a german would make a movie like this or put a german flag in a car people would call him right wing extremist...
But there is a certain amount of trust in the state and government that americans seem to lack though.
I suspect the truth of it is that having a national ID card is useful to the government, but often in a good way.
Why? It's not like there is somebody at every corner asking for your identity. Actually, in my whole life, I have been asked for my identity card by local authorities inside germany exactly once. And that was because a friend and me were driving next to a congress hall where a summit of european heads of state was taking place. There is no 'tracking' of people, if the police wants to know your identity they will find it out whether you have a identity card or not. Usually you need the id if you, for example, open a bank account, rent a car or things like this. In all these cases the companies already know your identity anyway and the id card is used as a proof.
In Germany everybody has a national id card, and I have never heard anybody complain about it. On the contrary, after WTC many people wondered that the US doesnt have one. The concept of not having an ID sounds very strange to most people here.
A missing piece in the acticle is the importance of Apache 2.0 for WebDAV. WebDAV is a HTTP-extension making the HTTP-server a real fileserver - Apache 2.0 comes with full WebDAV support. As WebDAV is quite flexible and allows stuff like meta-data, versioning and different authentication mechanisms (that are unfortunately not finalized yet) it is a possible successor for both NFS and SMB/Cifs.
WindowsXP supports the mounting of WebDAV shares, as does Linux with the help of the DAV filesystem driver. And Apache could be the standard fileserver... scary.
If your last point is true, then you have nothing to worry about. I'm just proposing an alternative to X windows. Why is it so damned great that we have Gtk, Xt, and so much toolkit diversity but when I propose an alternative to X Windows everyone shits their pants?
The reason for the remaining toolkit war between Gtk and Qt - almost everything else is almost dead in the free software world - are the different philosophies, especially C++ vs. C. You won't solve this by having a new window system. If you present group one an interface that is as weird as GTK/Glib they wont use it. If you give pure C programmers a C++ interface they won't use it.
However, you are free to use only software created with one toolkit and don't use any other - and you will still have more software than with a new windowing system. If you want to enforce it, patch X11 so it supports only QT apps. Tadaa, only one style in your system, finally the same style across all apps.
Frankly, the result would be a lot more than
nothing. Go use Mac OS X. Tell me that you
prefer using X Windows on Linux.
Actually I do prefer KDE over MacOS X, but even if I didnt: still nobody convinced me that there is a technical barrier that prevents anybody who invests a few hundred manyears to implement a MacOS X look-alike GUI on X11. X11 allows it. Even if it there would be something missing, add the feature to XFree. You will waste A LOT of time writing a windowing system that would be much better invested in improving KDE (or Gnome). If somebody really want to do this I cant stop him, but I can predict that unless the new system has all the old features, including 3D and driver suppport, plus improvements that are so significant that people bother to change no one will use it. You need much more than architectural improvements, you need either features that are impossible with X11 or a performance that is so much higher that people can actually see the difference.
I believe that network transparency should be achieved at a higher level, which means assuming more than a dumb video terminal. Larger functional blocks of information, less chattiness, that leaves more of the rendering to the "client"
DisplayPostScript can do this for you, you just have to add DPS support to the toolkit of your choice.
bye...
There already is one. It only lacks many extensions, stuff like 3D and support for at least 100 different graphics chipsets... have fun with it.
I don't really think that "network transparency" should be part of the architecture of a desktop windowing environment at all,
There is not a real difference between inter-process-communication and a real network. Whatever you do with IPC can be done with a network as well.
so I don't see what this has to do with security.
To access the graphics hardware you need special privileges that a user-level app should not have. So you either need a server that has these priviliges (requiring IPC, the X11 way), give the app the power to access the hardware (bad idea if the user can install applications, but ok and used in some embedded solutions) or put a significant part of the windowing system in the kernel (not really recommended, but the windows way).
With regards to "advantage of internal support for vector fonts", the advantage is that all apps would just say "draw these letters to the screen with these fonts" and the anti-aliasing, etc. would happen internally. Now, only apps written to the XRender extension do that. This means some apps support anti-aliasing, some don't.
So what? Is your argument "the app has to be rewritten to use anti-aliased fonts, so I better rewrite it completely to use a new windowing system"? (and BTW it's usually only a matter of updating the toolkit)
Why not just make something new and better (DPS based or otherwise) and support X11 as an add-on, or for backwards compatibility with legacy X11 apps?
Because no user will notice the difference. Neither will most app developers who use toolkits anyway. It is just a HUGE amount of work, consider all the drivers, video support, 3D and so on, and what will be the result: nothing.
>suck. Writing more won't help. We need a better
>windowing system, rewritten from scratch for
>desktop use, that supports network operation >without sacrificing speed,
How do you want to improve speed? That's one of the problems. People claim that its slow, but nobody has an idea of how to make it faster without making it less secure (by letting the programs/clients access the hardware directly) or putting everything in the kernel (trading speed for stability). The only other solution I see is to reduce traffic by putting more logic on the server, and this is something already exists, it's called DisplayPostScript... of course people would have to start using it, but this is more realistic than porting appliations to a completely new system.
And even if there was a solution to improve speed, why start something new from scratch instead of using the existing XFree and adding a new communication mechanism?
> supports transparency and vector fonts
> internally
What's the advantage of saying 'this command is internally' over using an extension? There is no big difference in the X11 protocol...
> that includes a widget set/toolkit as part of
> the windowing system.
The only advantage for the user (less IPC traffic) can be achieved with DPS as well. You don't need a new windowing system for this...
> Just look at OS X for proof that your argument
> is entirely irrational.
OS X does not have any X11 legacy applications, and they use a DisplayPostScript variant as well. And OF COURSE they made sure that all existing applications still work on their new system.
bye...
No, please, not another windowing system. X11 is fine for most purposes and, if you need something is does not provide, write an extension. There are more than enough 'alternatives' that are either designed for niches, have never been finished or will never get a significant marekt share. They don't have any significant advantage, at least as a general window system, and they lack applications. And despite those people who claim that X11 is sooo bloated (usually because they see the memory usage and do not realize that most of the memory is taken by pixmaps that won't take less space in other solutions) there are proofs like TinyX and WeirdX.
Yawn... see the comp.compression FAQ, compression of random data
Tribes2 is really bad for the Linux game market. I can't stop playing it and am simply not interrested in buying any other game since 6 months.
In Civilization (the game) this is a government that is chosen by competence instead of popular vote. It usually replaces democracy in the 3rd millenium.
And be careful about calling everyone else an idiot. Everyone on the road thinks they know how to drive and that all the others are incompetent, if that is the case then why are there so many accidents?
As I said (earlier in the thread), idiots are a product of perceiption, they certainly don't consider themselves idiots, too. But this doesn't change my opinion.
IMHO, in an ideal world, there should be a license for every kind of intellectual property. For source code, text, music, movies, ideas (=patents), everything. It's not very logical to make up different licenses because it gets you into trouble as soon as you want to combine media (write a game using open music, make a movie of an open book, distribute documentation with your software...).
But why is it moral? Because the majority thinks so. In India people may consider eating cows as barbaric as people in the US would eating dogs. But it doesn't matter because it's only a minority, their opinion doesnt count
No, the reason for democracy is that your state has a problem if the majority of people isn't happy. If there is only a small group against it it's no problem, then they are called radicals. So the concept of the modern democracy is that the people can elect whoever they want. The only problam is that the media corporations tell them what and who they want.
Next trick: filtering out the idiots who actually think they're smarter than everybody else. *ahem*
"Idiots" are a product of perception, of course. I do not doubt that any group of people with sufficient size would consider me to be an idiot. That's no problem, actually I am proud of it.
Did you notice that you can filter all JK articles using the preferences?
In any group with a sufficiently large number of people the majority are idiots. You can find this out by reading slashdot comments, and the quality here is certainly better than in the average AOL chat room. Interactivity doesn't make sense unless you find a good way to filter out all these idiots. Who cares about the ability to read the thoughts of 4 billion idiots?
And even if you were able to filter them out, it would not really help to improve the world. Ok, you could read stuff written by non-idiots, but as long as the majority of voters can still be influenced by those few media corporations. Most of your examples are either "mass-media delivers to idiots" or "idiot to idiot" communication.
Abolish the democracy, form a technocracy!
If the article was a comment I would moderate it "-1, Troll". It's a stupid discussion that nobody needs, the question has been asked a thousand times..
The author doesnt even have a point, saying "if I would not use a package manager it would be a mess". Well, he uses one, so it's not a problem. And if he didn't he could easily put each package in a single directory and create the world's longest environment variable.
Easy question: because you want to have a single namespace for all executable files, a single namespace for all man pages and so on.
No, you don't. It's the package manager's job do avoid any conflicts. Windows has these problems because each piec of software comes with its own installation program and does not know anything about the others.