The reason for all this problems is the bad idea of a unified numbering plan (= all numbers in a country have the same length including area code).
This fixed number length did not allow easy "escaping" for longer numbers and has led to the actual problems.
An variable length numbering plan would have many advantages:
- Different length area codes
Short ones for big cities, longer one
for small towns.
See in germany, the area code for Berlin
is 030 (two digits plus the '0'), but
it can be as long as 034533 (five digits
plus the '0').
- Different length phone numbers
If your area code length is variable,
so the amount of usable numbers in this
area code is variable. This means, while
maintaining a maximum number length in
total (as required by international phone
exchanges), you can still have more numbers
in the big cities. I personally think its
insane to have different area codes for the
same city like in the USA. Here in germany
all lines in the same city maintain the same
area code.
- Easy transition
Our town (rather small) once had numbers
with three digits. When it occured that
this might not be enough they said:
Ok, let all numbers beginning with 'x' be
four digits. They did this of course before
using the first digit 'x' for any three
digit number. This allowed to keep the old
numbers while beeing able to greater the
ammount of possible numbers.
After a while this was still not enough,
but in the meanwhile most of the old three
digit numbers disappeared (they were withheld
when the subscribers changed. For the new
subscriber you can give out a new longer
number), so finally they could reuse the
numbers used for the old three-digit numbers
for newly four-digit numbers.
And because this was still not enough, they
had other unused areas which they declared
to be six-digit numbers. They put new numbers
into this range, removed old numbers when they
got them.
As you can see, this is a very smooth and
nice transition scheme. Nobody needs to be
forced to get a new number, but you still
can cope with the need for new numbers.
- Direct dial-in to branch exchange
Big companies usually have a number like
123-0, -0 beeing the main line. You can
direct dial people in this company if you
know their extension, e.g. 123-101. And
if three digits extension are not enough,
you can make them longer as with normal
phone numbers.
So you know that your companies phone
numbers all beginn with the same prefix,
and you can directly map from extension to
the phone number.
So, you may understand why unified numbering plans are a bad idea, and variable length phone numbers are much more powerful. The question here is: Can -and will- the USA telcos lern from this?
I wonder how this clueless post deserves the Score of 4 some moderators upped it to.
Never, never ever had the id of a page been programmed with crystals. A crystal is the part of the pager which sets the reception frequency, nothing else. Very often you need to change the crystal when changing pager service, because different services use different radio frequencies. In fact there is a huge market for services like changing the crystals.
The id of the pager is stored inside an eeprom in modern pagers (in very old pagers it was just inside an prom and thus not changeable). Probably the ir port can be used for reprogramming this id in the eeprom, but pager used to have some programming contacts, motorola usually hides them behind the battery slide. The service owns a device in which you can put the pager and which interfaces these contacts. This way you can reprogram the id, given that you have a.) the right software and know b.) the password (the firmware of the pager blocks reprogramming otherwise). If you are a virtue with your soldering iron you may unsolder the eeprom and change the id using a programmer but nowadays the eeprom might be integrated into the main controller and thus not be able to programmed seperately.
There is no reason why an ir port should be used for this programming. At least this cannot be the sole reason for the ir port. I guess that its just the same pager as another for a higher price which makes usage out of the ir port. its always the same, different models are of the same hardware (because its cheaper) but features are disabled in software/firmware.
One simple reason, why NN 6 is not compatible to what worked in NN 4.7: DHTML in NN 4.7 was not standards compatible. DHTML in IE * is not standards compatible either.
Mozilla is W3C-standards compatible, while nearly all webpages out there aren't. Most webpages are only NN and IE compatible. But who is to blame here? The programmers of a fully standards compatible browser, or all these silly web "designers" out there who don't follow standards? Yes, to support NN + IE in it currents version they had to tweak the standard, but it is still possible to write DHTML code which will work in all three browsers.
It seems that Netscape is pushing W3C standards the hard way by simply refusing to accept old shit pages.
So you are simply wrong. IE4 has _not_ better support for CSS standards than NN6. It has worse. NN 4.7 and IE * are the same shit when it comes to standards compliance.
So if you want to stay compatible you have to code in three standards: NN 4.7, IE plus the ultimate W3C-compliant. Hopefully Microsoft will turn to the W3C-track too.
It is rather easy to live with region codes, if you are for example an resident of the United States, given the fact, that the list of dvds available in the US is very much of a superset of what is available in other countries.
to say it clearly: you might simply not be able to get a dvd in your own region code, if you are not in region 1.
i would love to support my local distributors, dealers etc., but if they simple do not release a movie in my country / region (here=europe), i can not do much other than importing a rc 1 one dvd. This is clearly still morally much better than just going the easy way, avoid the extra costs for international shipping and taxes, and get a divx type copy of the movie. This way i can support great movies. If the companies want to prevent me from doing that, they will simply cut of their own revenue. I wonder how dumb you can be and still successfull operate a multinational business like big movie studio.
The technology behind this is old, and to my knowledge such dvds have been arround for some time now. Get th is straight: this won't break livid and even not all multi-region dvd players.
The point here is, that this new detection is just a code snippet inside the navigational code on the dvd. The navigational code is just some kind of program code which is interpreted by a dvd player. Apparently you can ask the dvd player about his country-code this way too, this was probably intended for multi-region dvds which could then present different menus etc. for different regions. As livid is not yet able to use the navigational code on the dvd, it is not affected by this. The raw mpeg data will not change and will still be playable. And of course, once livid is able to interpret navigation, it can tell the software the region code the software likes.
Same goes true for multi-region dvd players. Some of the smarter region-free-hacks will tell the player the appropiate region code. The new code could only detect players which has been set region-free by setting region code to zero, or by simply disabling the check done by the player itself. So if your player was hacked to play RC2, but still report itselfs as RC1, you will run into problems with the dvds described above.
but i repeat: this is not new. I heard about such code on dvds almost a year ago already. Typical fud from hollywood companies. This dumb move will change little to nothing.
Oh fine, but you shouldn't forget to tell these people that the german government will throw them out too, after they have done the work. Our lovely german "green card" isn't even intended to be changed to permanent stay.
Remember, its pronounced Green Card, but its spelled Slave Trade.
I may be wrong, but for the intended recipient of a message it should be possible to detect, that his key was compromised and used with a vulnerable copy of PGP. The receiving PGP/GnuPG just should check if there are any additional encodings which shouldn't be there regarding to the own local genuine version of the key.
Of course this may give false alarms with emails which where intentionally encrypted to more than one recipient, but the software should probably be configurable to warn about this.
So you may get aware of the problem and can contact the sender of the email to see if he is using a tampered key / pgp version.
The name is Jonas Luster (i know him personally for some time now) and he works for Exodus in Security Department as a Security Engineer. But let me ask you a question. What has proper Abuse-Handling to do with the person? Of course there are some well-known people who are very good in abuse-handling, but that doesn't mean that other providers with mere unknown persons in abuse sucks in Abuse. So i won't even make any statements about Exodus' Abuse Handling just because of the fact that Jonas doesn't handle Abuse there.
The recent editorial about the iopener on freshmeat has an interesting comment by the developer of the iopener which was just fired after he just finished the design.
Seems that netpliance may have very bad karma.
Read it here - lookout for the last comment or search for Rohner.
This comment seems to be authentic, at least at another webpage the name 'John Rohner' can be found with a @netpliance.com address.
Yes, they give you one month of time. But as they blacklist smarthosts of open relays too, this can be much to less time.
ORBS had half of germany scanned last year, and some major ISPs turned out with 200+ open relays. Now all of this relays are under control of the customers, so you need time to find out what MTA they run, how to fix it, even explain the problem to them.
If you try to tell ORBS that you are working on it and need more time, they simply tell you, "Duh, you have plenty of time, we don't care how long your work days are". This and the fact that ORBS is lying (they tell that they won't scan blocks and won't use data which were likely get out of such scans) makes them unreliably and not a source to trust in.
>I am just happy that we have an _endorsed_ set >of drivers for the dxr2.
So i am. I just emailed the first bug reports to the author.
>with this release, and the CSS crack stuff
No, you will very likely do not need this, as the CSS decryption is done in hardware here.
>should now be relatively easy to write a >program that plays encrypted DVDs.
You haven't understood. It will not play DVDs. It will play MPEG-Streams, like them found on DVDs. But you will have problems with all the extra features and even with some "normal" DVDs. The player can only play files, but although the data is organized in files on the DVD it is not guaranteed that the movie (and only the movie) is in file a and the extras in file b...
>And it's half-assed. so what? Would you prefer >_nothing_? Everyone would love a full driver >set, but the linux market is too small to >justify development of a kick-ass GTK navigator >or something.
He, i didn't said i want such things. I just wanted to *INFORM* the readers of slashdot about the limitations of the driver. The work is fine (i congratulated the author already this morning, before this item even appeared on slashdot), but it has limitation and you should know about it. Too often crap was written about DVD under Linux on Slashdot.
>They released some drivers (ON THEIR OWN CVS!) >and are acknowledging them.
Creative has a bad history on this. The current driver is based on a driver fragment programmed by another person who wasn't supported by Creative too. Creative didn't helped him, but they linked to his page for "Linux Support". So let me repeat this: They *refused* to help, but they referenced to his work. Sorry, but this is no good doing.
And now we have in raw the same situation again. Creative hasn't supported the programmer of the current driver. They added their copyright remarks to the drivers where in fact they have no copyright on it. They put it on their webpage and even do not state, that they didn't wrote it. And of course they tell nobody that were even to lazy to support the development of this driver.
Sorry, but this is really bad beheavior by Creative. This shouldn't be honored.
I can see no profit for us by the fact that the driver is hosted on their CVS. It makes no difference if it is on their CVS, on another CVS or just on a webpage, if they don't support the development.
Sorry, maybe i'm paranoid, but this appears to me clearly as an atempt to get the honor for everyones else work.
>you can't have everything when your desktop >marketshare is so low.
It seems to be high enough for one company to develop a DVD decoder only for linux. And even Sigma Design will add linux drivers for their next generation of DVD decoder cards. But they will write their drivers self instead of waiting for other people to go through the hassle of reverse engineering windows drivers.
So their are many companies who recognized the importance of linux support. Currently i won't list Creative here. The GPL'd Live-Driver is a beginning (and a work which is entirely by them), but they need to change their behaviour *fast*. Their current doing is no real open-source-spirit.
But this seems to be common to companies in the last time. Instead of real linux support they are just giving some blablabla and are hoping that the linux support will just appear. It won't work this way.
I dislike this. Creative is taking the Fame for this Driver and is using it for their own public relations.
To clarify: This driver was not written by Creative. In fact its creation wasn't even supported by Creative with information about the hardware. I mailed with the author and he had to find out all informations by himself either by reference manuals or reverse engineering.
Now all Creative did was adding their Copyright messages (what a laugh!) and making the driver public available via their server. And they cheated the programmers again, as they made it available on their CVS without telling them how to access it, or even that the published it. When i mailed the author about this, he just didn't knew, that the driver where available in public.
Sorry, but if this is the way Creative wants to go in future for Linux "Support" i won't recommend buying their products.
And now for some clarification about the driver: As creative didn't helped the driver is still unstable and without many features. And the main parts of DVD (the navigation) are not contained. You may now play a VOB-File from the Disc (if the file is not encrypted). But you are missing all the DVD features, and if there are some extras mixed in one file, you will have to play them sequentially.
It is not very likely, that DVD navigation will be supported very soon, as the DVD forum has maked this a closed standard, which you have to pay for access and even sign a NDA.
So this driver is a first step, but will not really be helpful for dvd playing.
The only one who may help is Creative, as they have signed the NDA and have the standards. They would need to release a (binary-only) module for navigation and other issues. But if they continue to use other peoples work without doing anything thereselfs, this is not to be awaited.
In short: There is no fame which Creative can take for this driver. The haven't done anything and they even didn't show the willingness to do something in the future. This may change, but in the moment it doesn't look like.
If you want to watch DVD on Linux you better stick with a company which is truly supporting linux on their products. For example the guys from linuxtv.org/convergence.de will have a dvd decoder card for linux very likely till the end of this year in production. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, i just know them from the livid mailinglist. But they are truly supporting linux and not just taking other peoples work. So support them!
>I wonder how long till these drivers will be >able to run DVD's fullscreen on a K6-2 300 >with good framerates?
As this driver is for a hardware decoder, the framerate and fullscreen doesn't have to do anything with your processor speed.
>Once it can do this then I will buy me a Creative >Labs DVD drive....
Don't do it. This driver is for the DXR2 Kit, but this is no longer for sale for some time now. They are selling now the DXR3 Kit which has totally different hardware and can therefore not be used with this driver.
I personally won't recommend buying anything from Creative again. This driver was not written neither was the development supported by Creative. The author found all internals out by reverse-engineering. All what Creative did was putting their Copyright remarks into the files and making the driver available through their servers.
You missed my point. All of the encoders / psychoacustic models have strengths and flaws. They mentioned that they used Fraunhofer, but then they talked again about simply 'MP3'. As i say, there is no general MP3, and therefore it is wrong to write a test about MP3 when they in fact tested MP3/Fraunhofer.
This is the usual confusion when dealing with MP3 and one of the main reasons why some people always say MP3 is crap (the probably heard bad encoded files) and other disagree. A little more clarification and correctness would not be wrong.
That was what i intended to say. As english is not my mother tongue i have sometime problems expressing my meanings. Sorry for that.
No, if you want to see it this way, they are all three propietary, and at least MP3 is even patented.
There is still no free alternatively. LAME uses at least a GPL-psychoacustic model, but Fraunhofer seems to claim for the file format, and therefore even LAME is not legal.
After all MP3 is pseudo-open-standard because their are many open-source players and encoders out there, but in the legal sight Fraunhofer has the hand over us all.
I think another format is needed. The GPL'd psychoacustic model from LAME seems to be a good start. The big problem is that MP3 is the one which has the most players and is most widespread. I'm unsure if the MP3 monopol can be broken.
All these comparements of "MP3" against other audio compression technologies are rather meaningless.
There is simple no "MP3" at all. MP3 is using a psychoacustic model for data reduction, and this model is not specified in the MP3 patents and therefore there are different models out there with varying results. I know of at least 6 models at this time:
- DIST10 The acustic model used by the ISO reference source. Said to be rather bad.
- BLADEENC Is basically the DIST10 model, but with few improvements and fixes.
- FRAUNHOFER Used by Producer, l3enc etc. Said to be one of the best.
- GPSYCHO GPL-model used by LAME. Apperently also quite good quality.
- XING/OLD The old Xing Encoder used this. Cuts the frequencies at 16 kHz. Increndibly fast compared to others, but bad quality.
- XING/NEW Apparently the new Xing Encoder (at least the linux version) use a new model, as there is a new switch for changing between cut at 16 kHz and not cut. To my tests the quality is ok.
So you see, testing just one MP3 encoder is not meaningfull. All these encoders have different qualities, different speeds. Some encoders have better sound at 128 kbps than other at 160 kbps or more. Use a bad encoder, and the result will be bad. Use a good encoder, and the difference to a CD will be heard only by trained people (these people who helped developing the psychoacustic models).
Additional every psychoacustic model will not match on all people. The human ear is just too complicated and different for a catch-all model. So even different persons may rate the encoders different in quality.
If i may offer a advise for MP3-Encoding: Use the new Xing-Encoder for Linux or LAME. Make use of variable Bitrate-Encoding. Fixed Bitrate-Encoding is bad, as the bitrate will always be to low at some very special pieces of the audio and very often just to high. Variable bitrate encoding tries to use the Bitrate just needed. I've made very good experiences using VBR and got smaller files which sounds better.
The way they cheated byte was rather incredible. The sales people of byte visited Kahn in his office, where he put out posters naming all big magazines with numbers behind it, and only byte stroken througth. And then he told them, he could advertise in all magazines but didnt have enough money left for advertising in byte. That way he got the ad on credit...:-)
Yes, it is true, we have now all needed parts for software decoding of DVDs, but any software doing so will be illegal and/or non-free.
1. CSS The information about CSS was obtained by reverse engineering some DVD software decoder. Reverse engineering is nearly everytime prohibited by license agreements, and for example european law allows reverse engineering only for software compatibility issues. So the CSS source was not obtained in a legal way, and it is at least a very problematic issue if we may use this source however. Im unsure if CSS is also protected by patents.
However CSS licensing is for free, but this will likely permit a opensource decoder.
2. MPEG-II
MPEG2 decoding software is available (Reference Decodec of the MPEG Simulation Group), but MPEG2 is subject to licensing with MPEG LA (www.mpegla.com). The license fee is $4 per copy.
3. AC3
AC3 decoding software is available, written using public available specs. However AC3 is subject to licensing issues (and probably patented too). The price for the (one-time) licensing is said to be about US$ 20000.
To summarize: We have all needed information for writing a decoder but we may not do so. Im sure that some people ignoring law however will publish such software, like happened with MP3 encoders, but the software will be very likely illegal to use.
Some countries apparently do not allow software patents, which will increase the possibility of a legal decoder, but be aware, that you as a user of such software are also bound to your countries law.
Be careful in what you are doing. If you want to do something reasonable try to convince some company to release a software decoder for linux or write a device driver for their decoding hardware.
Uh! Oh! You missed the fact...
on
DVD-RAM Support
·
· Score: 1
You missed the fact, that DVD-RAM can only be read by DVD-Players explicitely supporting DVD-RAM. Most, if not all, standalone players and DVD-ROM drives for PCs out there are unable to read DVD-RAM!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, oh. So you really think your mental problems to group the digits in a number are a valid reason for using a technically bad numbering plan?
Very funny.
The reason for all this problems is the bad idea of a unified numbering plan (= all numbers in a country have the same length including area code).
This fixed number length did not allow easy "escaping" for longer numbers and has led to the actual problems.
An variable length numbering plan would have many advantages:
- Different length area codes
Short ones for big cities, longer one
for small towns.
See in germany, the area code for Berlin
is 030 (two digits plus the '0'), but
it can be as long as 034533 (five digits
plus the '0').
- Different length phone numbers
If your area code length is variable,
so the amount of usable numbers in this
area code is variable. This means, while
maintaining a maximum number length in
total (as required by international phone
exchanges), you can still have more numbers
in the big cities. I personally think its
insane to have different area codes for the
same city like in the USA. Here in germany
all lines in the same city maintain the same
area code.
- Easy transition
Our town (rather small) once had numbers
with three digits. When it occured that
this might not be enough they said:
Ok, let all numbers beginning with 'x' be
four digits. They did this of course before
using the first digit 'x' for any three
digit number. This allowed to keep the old
numbers while beeing able to greater the
ammount of possible numbers.
After a while this was still not enough,
but in the meanwhile most of the old three
digit numbers disappeared (they were withheld
when the subscribers changed. For the new
subscriber you can give out a new longer
number), so finally they could reuse the
numbers used for the old three-digit numbers
for newly four-digit numbers.
And because this was still not enough, they
had other unused areas which they declared
to be six-digit numbers. They put new numbers
into this range, removed old numbers when they
got them.
As you can see, this is a very smooth and
nice transition scheme. Nobody needs to be
forced to get a new number, but you still
can cope with the need for new numbers.
- Direct dial-in to branch exchange
Big companies usually have a number like
123-0, -0 beeing the main line. You can
direct dial people in this company if you
know their extension, e.g. 123-101. And
if three digits extension are not enough,
you can make them longer as with normal
phone numbers.
So you know that your companies phone
numbers all beginn with the same prefix,
and you can directly map from extension to
the phone number.
So, you may understand why unified numbering plans are a bad idea, and variable length phone numbers are much more powerful. The question here is: Can -and will- the USA telcos lern from this?
I wonder how this clueless post deserves the Score of 4 some moderators upped it to.
Never, never ever had the id of a page been programmed with crystals. A crystal is the part of the pager which sets the reception frequency, nothing else. Very often you need to change the crystal when changing pager service, because different services use different radio frequencies. In fact there is a huge market for services like changing the crystals.
The id of the pager is stored inside an eeprom in modern pagers (in very old pagers it was just inside an prom and thus not changeable). Probably the ir port can be used for reprogramming this id in the eeprom, but pager used to have some programming contacts, motorola usually hides them behind the battery slide. The service owns a device in which you can put the pager and which interfaces these contacts. This way you can reprogram the id, given that you have a.) the right software and know b.) the password (the firmware of the pager blocks reprogramming otherwise). If you are a virtue with your soldering iron you may unsolder the eeprom and change the id using a programmer but nowadays the eeprom might be integrated into the main controller and thus not be able to programmed seperately.
There is no reason why an ir port should be used for this programming. At least this cannot be the sole reason for the ir port. I guess that its just the same pager as another for a higher price which makes usage out of the ir port. its always the same, different models are of the same hardware (because its cheaper) but features are disabled in software/firmware.
One simple reason, why NN 6 is not compatible to what worked in NN 4.7: DHTML in NN 4.7 was not standards compatible. DHTML in IE * is not standards compatible either.
Mozilla is W3C-standards compatible, while nearly all webpages out there aren't. Most webpages are only NN and IE compatible. But who is to blame here? The programmers of a fully standards compatible browser, or all these silly web "designers" out there who don't follow standards? Yes, to support NN + IE in it currents version they had to tweak the standard, but it is still possible to write DHTML code which will work in all three browsers.
It seems that Netscape is pushing W3C standards the hard way by simply refusing to accept old shit pages.
So you are simply wrong. IE4 has _not_ better support for CSS standards than NN6. It has worse. NN 4.7 and IE * are the same shit when it comes to standards compliance.
So if you want to stay compatible you have to code in three standards: NN 4.7, IE plus the ultimate W3C-compliant. Hopefully Microsoft will turn to the W3C-track too.
Actually they are not really on up-to-date. For example in the internet business they are way behind US and Europe.
It is rather easy to live with region codes, if you are for example an resident of the United States, given the fact, that the list of dvds available in the US is very much of a superset of what is available in other countries.
to say it clearly: you might simply not be able to get a dvd in your own region code, if you are not in region 1.
i would love to support my local distributors, dealers etc., but if they simple do not release a movie in my country / region (here=europe), i can not do much other than importing a rc 1 one dvd. This is clearly still morally much better than just going the easy way, avoid the extra costs for international shipping and taxes, and get a divx type copy of the movie. This way i can support great movies. If the companies want to prevent me from doing that, they will simply cut of their own revenue. I wonder how dumb you can be and still successfull operate a multinational business like big movie studio.
The technology behind this is old, and to my knowledge such dvds have been arround for some time now. Get th is straight: this won't break livid and even not all multi-region dvd players.
The point here is, that this new detection is just a code snippet inside the navigational code on the dvd. The navigational code is just some kind of program code which is interpreted by a dvd player. Apparently you can ask the dvd player about his country-code this way too, this was probably intended for multi-region dvds which could then present different menus etc. for different regions. As livid is not yet able to use the navigational code on the dvd, it is not affected by this. The raw mpeg data will not change and will still be playable. And of course, once livid is able to interpret navigation, it can tell the software the region code the software likes.
Same goes true for multi-region dvd players. Some of the smarter region-free-hacks will tell the player the appropiate region code. The new code could only detect players which has been set region-free by setting region code to zero, or by simply disabling the check done by the player itself. So if your player was hacked to play RC2, but still report itselfs as RC1, you will run into problems with the dvds described above.
but i repeat: this is not new. I heard about such code on dvds almost a year ago already. Typical fud from hollywood companies. This dumb move will change little to nothing.
Oh fine, but you shouldn't forget to tell these people that the german government will throw them out too, after they have done the work. Our lovely german "green card" isn't even intended to be changed to permanent stay.
Remember, its pronounced Green Card, but its spelled Slave Trade.
I may be wrong, but for the intended recipient of a message it should be possible to detect, that his key was compromised and used with a vulnerable copy of PGP. The receiving PGP/GnuPG just should check if there are any additional encodings which shouldn't be there regarding to the own local genuine version of the key.
Of course this may give false alarms with emails which where intentionally encrypted to more than one recipient, but the software should probably be configurable to warn about this.
So you may get aware of the problem and can contact the sender of the email to see if he is using a tampered key / pgp version.
The name is Jonas Luster (i know him personally for some time now) and he works for Exodus in Security Department as a Security Engineer. But let me ask you a question. What has proper Abuse-Handling to do with the person? Of course there are some well-known people who are very good in abuse-handling, but that doesn't mean that other providers with mere unknown persons in abuse sucks in Abuse. So i won't even make any statements about Exodus' Abuse Handling just because of the fact that Jonas doesn't handle Abuse there.
The recent editorial about the iopener on freshmeat has an interesting comment by the developer of the iopener which was just fired after he just finished the design.
Seems that netpliance may have very bad karma.
Read it here - lookout for the last comment or search for Rohner.
This comment seems to be authentic, at least at another webpage the name 'John Rohner' can be found with a @netpliance.com address.
Yes, they give you one month of time. But as they
blacklist smarthosts of open relays too, this can be much to less time.
ORBS had half of germany scanned last year, and some major ISPs turned out with 200+ open relays. Now all of this relays are under control of the customers, so you need time to find out what MTA they run, how to fix it, even explain the problem to them.
If you try to tell ORBS that you are working on it and need more time, they simply tell you, "Duh, you have plenty of time, we don't care how long your work days are". This and the fact that ORBS is lying (they tell that they won't scan blocks and won't use data which were likely get out of such scans) makes them unreliably and not a source to trust in.
Block ORBS.
>I am just happy that we have an _endorsed_ set
...
>of drivers for the dxr2.
So i am. I just emailed the first bug reports to the author.
>with this release, and the CSS crack stuff
No, you will very likely do not need this, as the CSS decryption is done in hardware here.
>should now be relatively easy to write a
>program that plays encrypted DVDs.
You haven't understood. It will not play DVDs. It will play MPEG-Streams, like them found on DVDs. But you will have problems with all the extra features and even with some "normal" DVDs. The player can only play files, but although the data is organized in files on the DVD it is not guaranteed that the movie (and only the movie) is in file a and the extras in file b
>And it's half-assed. so what? Would you prefer >_nothing_? Everyone would love a full driver
>set, but the linux market is too small to
>justify development of a kick-ass GTK navigator
>or something.
He, i didn't said i want such things. I just wanted to *INFORM* the readers of slashdot about the limitations of the driver. The work is fine (i congratulated the author already this morning, before this item even appeared on slashdot), but it has limitation and you should know about it. Too often crap was written about DVD under Linux on Slashdot.
>They released some drivers (ON THEIR OWN CVS!)
>and are acknowledging them.
Creative has a bad history on this. The current driver is based on a driver fragment programmed by another person who wasn't supported by Creative too. Creative didn't helped him, but they linked to his page for "Linux Support". So let me repeat this: They *refused* to help, but they referenced to his work. Sorry, but this is no good doing.
And now we have in raw the same situation again. Creative hasn't supported the programmer of the current driver. They added their copyright remarks to the drivers where in fact they have no copyright on it. They put it on their webpage and even do not state, that they didn't wrote it. And of course they tell nobody that were even to lazy to support the development of this driver.
Sorry, but this is really bad beheavior by Creative. This shouldn't be honored.
I can see no profit for us by the fact that the driver is hosted on their CVS. It makes no difference if it is on their CVS, on another CVS or just on a webpage, if they don't support the development.
Sorry, maybe i'm paranoid, but this appears to me clearly as an atempt to get the honor for everyones else work.
>you can't have everything when your desktop >marketshare is so low.
It seems to be high enough for one company to develop a DVD decoder only for linux. And even
Sigma Design will add linux drivers for their next generation of DVD decoder cards. But they will write their drivers self instead of waiting for other people to go through the hassle of reverse engineering windows drivers.
So their are many companies who recognized the importance of linux support. Currently i won't list Creative here. The GPL'd Live-Driver is a beginning (and a work which is entirely by them), but they need to change their behaviour *fast*. Their current doing is no real open-source-spirit.
But this seems to be common to companies in the last time. Instead of real linux support they are just giving some blablabla and are hoping that the linux support will just appear. It won't work this way.
I don't know why this defective duplicate of my posting appears. Please moderate it down to -1 (Redundant). Thanks.
I dislike this. Creative is taking the Fame for this Driver and is using it for their own public relations.
To clarify: This driver was not written by Creative. In fact its creation wasn't even supported by Creative with information about the hardware. I mailed with the author and he had to find out all informations by himself either by reference manuals or reverse engineering.
Now all Creative did was adding their Copyright messages (what a laugh!) and making the driver public available via their server. And they cheated the programmers again, as they made it available on their CVS without telling them how to access it, or even that the published it. When i mailed the author about this, he just didn't knew, that the driver where available in public.
Sorry, but if this is the way Creative wants to go in future for Linux "Support" i won't recommend buying their products.
And now for some clarification about the driver: As creative didn't helped the driver is still unstable and without many features. And the main parts of DVD (the navigation) are not contained. You may now play a VOB-File from the Disc (if the file is not encrypted). But you are missing all the DVD features, and if there are some extras mixed in one file, you will have to play them sequentially.
It is not very likely, that DVD navigation will be supported very soon, as the DVD forum has maked this a closed standard, which you have to pay for access and even sign a NDA.
So this driver is a first step, but will not really be helpful for dvd playing.
The only one who may help is Creative, as they have signed the NDA and have the standards. They would need to release a (binary-only) module for navigation and other issues. But if they continue to use other peoples work without doing anything thereselfs, this is not to be awaited.
In short: There is no fame which Creative can take for this driver. The haven't done anything and they even didn't show the willingness to do something in the future. This may change, but in the moment it doesn't look like.
If you want to watch DVD on Linux you better stick with a company which is truly supporting linux on their products. For example the guys from linuxtv.org/convergence.de will have a dvd decoder card for linux very likely till the end of this year in production. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, i just know them from the livid mailinglist. But they are truly supporting linux and not just taking other peoples work. So support them!
>I wonder how long till these drivers will be
>able to run DVD's fullscreen on a K6-2 300
>with good framerates?
As this driver is for a hardware decoder, the framerate and fullscreen doesn't have to do anything with your processor speed.
>Once it can do this then I will buy me a Creative >Labs DVD drive....
Don't do it. This driver is for the DXR2 Kit, but this is no longer for sale for some time now. They are selling now the DXR3 Kit which has totally different hardware and can therefore not be used with this driver.
I personally won't recommend buying anything from Creative again. This driver was not written neither was the development supported by Creative. The author found all internals out by reverse-engineering. All what Creative did was putting their Copyright remarks into the files and making the driver available through their servers.
To my knowledge there is no such problem. Can you
please give details? Probably the fix is
very simple.
One hint directly: Avoid spaces and newlines
before the closing .
You missed my point. All of the encoders / psychoacustic models have strengths and flaws. They mentioned that they used Fraunhofer, but then they talked again about simply 'MP3'. As i say, there is no general MP3, and therefore it is wrong to write a test about MP3 when they in fact tested MP3/Fraunhofer.
This is the usual confusion when dealing with MP3 and one of the main reasons why some people always say MP3 is crap (the probably heard bad encoded files) and other disagree. A little more clarification and correctness would not be wrong.
That was what i intended to say. As english is not my mother tongue i have sometime problems expressing my meanings. Sorry for that.
No, if you want to see it this way, they are all three propietary, and at least MP3 is even patented.
There is still no free alternatively. LAME uses at least a GPL-psychoacustic model, but Fraunhofer seems to claim for the file format, and therefore even LAME is not legal.
After all MP3 is pseudo-open-standard because their are many open-source players and encoders out there, but in the legal sight Fraunhofer has the hand over us all.
I think another format is needed. The GPL'd psychoacustic model from LAME seems to be a good start. The big problem is that MP3 is the one which has the most players and is most widespread. I'm unsure if the MP3 monopol can be broken.
All these comparements of "MP3" against other audio compression technologies are rather meaningless.
There is simple no "MP3" at all. MP3 is using a psychoacustic model for data reduction, and this model is not specified in the MP3 patents and therefore there are different models out there with varying results. I know of at least 6 models at this time:
- DIST10 The acustic model used by the ISO reference source. Said to be rather bad.
- BLADEENC Is basically the DIST10 model, but with few improvements and fixes.
- FRAUNHOFER Used by Producer, l3enc etc. Said to be one of the best.
- GPSYCHO GPL-model used by LAME. Apperently also quite good quality.
- XING/OLD The old Xing Encoder used this. Cuts the frequencies at 16 kHz. Increndibly fast compared to others, but bad quality.
- XING/NEW Apparently the new Xing Encoder (at least the linux version) use a new model, as there is a new switch for changing between cut at 16 kHz and not cut. To my tests the quality is ok.
So you see, testing just one MP3 encoder is not meaningfull. All these encoders have different qualities, different speeds. Some encoders have better sound at 128 kbps than other at 160 kbps or more. Use a bad encoder, and the result will be bad. Use a good encoder, and the difference to a CD will be heard only by trained people (these people who helped developing the psychoacustic models).
Additional every psychoacustic model will not match on all people. The human ear is just too complicated and different for a catch-all model. So even different persons may rate the encoders different in quality.
If i may offer a advise for MP3-Encoding: Use the new Xing-Encoder for Linux or LAME. Make use of variable Bitrate-Encoding. Fixed Bitrate-Encoding is bad, as the bitrate will always be to low at some very special pieces of the audio and very often just to high. Variable bitrate encoding tries to use the Bitrate just needed. I've made very good experiences using VBR and got smaller files which sounds better.
CD-Rate is 44.1 kHz x 2 x 16 Bits = 1411.2 kbps.
The way they cheated byte was rather incredible. The sales people of byte visited Kahn in his office, where he put out posters naming all big magazines with numbers behind it, and only byte stroken througth. And then he told them, he could advertise in all magazines but didnt have enough money left for advertising in byte. That way he got the ad on credit... :-)
Your fingerprints are at home? How do you do that? Did you cut your fingers from your hand?
Can it be that you are confusing the fingerprints of cryptosystems (like PGP) and your real fingerprints of your fingers?
Yes, it is true, we have now all needed parts for software decoding of DVDs, but any software doing so will be illegal and/or non-free.
1. CSS
The information about CSS was obtained by reverse engineering some DVD software decoder. Reverse engineering is nearly everytime prohibited by license agreements, and for example european law allows reverse engineering only for software compatibility issues. So the CSS source was not obtained in a legal way, and it is at least a very problematic issue if we may use this source however. Im unsure if CSS is also protected by patents.
However CSS licensing is for free, but this will likely permit a opensource decoder.
2. MPEG-II
MPEG2 decoding software is available (Reference Decodec of the MPEG Simulation Group), but MPEG2 is subject to licensing with MPEG LA (www.mpegla.com). The license fee is $4 per copy.
3. AC3
AC3 decoding software is available, written using public available specs. However AC3 is subject to licensing issues (and probably patented too). The price for the (one-time) licensing is said to be about US$ 20000.
To summarize: We have all needed information for writing a decoder but we may not do so. Im sure that some people ignoring law however will publish such software, like happened with MP3 encoders, but the software will be very likely illegal to use.
Some countries apparently do not allow software patents, which will increase the possibility of a legal decoder, but be aware, that you as a user of such software are also bound to your countries law.
Be careful in what you are doing. If you want to do something reasonable try to convince some company to release a software decoder for linux or write a device driver for their decoding hardware.
You missed the fact, that DVD-RAM can only be read by DVD-Players explicitely supporting DVD-RAM. Most, if not all, standalone players and DVD-ROM drives for PCs out there are unable to read DVD-RAM!
Same goes for DVD+RW.