While I didn't read the entire DVD Forum specs, etc. I went through most of what is publically available.
In order to get the books with the specs, you must sign and NDA that you aren't going to share the info in the books.
They explicitly state that there are no per-unit royalties and once the NDA & book fees are paid, there is no more money to pay in.
The main focus is on hardware manufacturers -- they don't give a damn about copying software as they only make money from the NDA/License agreement.
So YES you could redistribute the BINARY code, just not the source. Source would violate the NDA. NVidia has already proved there is a Linux market for binary-only drivers. That is all this would be -- a binary plugin.
However, no one but the original licensee could use the official DVD logos -- that is part of the agreement. If you don't use the logos (and there is a FAQ question on that, but it deals with hardware), then all is cool.
Damn it! I need to hit a small lottery payout. I'd buy the darn license and pay whoever could write such a plugin a fee and release it as a freely redistributable binary. $10K isn't a lot to a company, but I don't have that laying around.
I looked it up: (http://www.dvdfourm.org) and there are NO per-unit fees. Buy book, sign the NDA ($10,000) and someone could legally release a binary-only DECSS plugin. Yes, it could be given away freely -- just no source.
Personally, I think RedHat, Lindows & the others should do this for the people who just want to play their movies without getting into religious debates over licenses.
Hell, $10,000 isn't lunch money if spread between SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, UnitedLinux, IBM, etc.
There are DVD players for Linux. The problem arises when you realize the DVD consortium wants a license fee ($10,000, I think) for each type of "product" such as a software player.
In theory, someone could pay the $10K and release a closed-source plug-in for Ogle/MPlayer/Xine. However, I'm not sure if there are per-unit fees associated. There probably are and I don't think the consortium makes allowances for free software.
Actually, it is a public school (Spokane, WA area) and there is only two "teams" per grade (6+) allowed to participate.
Yes, it would qualify as upper-middle class. They like the mindless Flash & Director games, I know. It makes me sick.
You think advertising on regular websites is bad, check out those targeted towards kids! I've never seen so much intense marketing crap than on those websites.
I've got my kids running Linux (Red Hat 8) on laptops (ages 12, 12, 14) for both school and home.
OpenOffice works fine for all their school work, and they connect fine to the school's wireless LAN. They can connect to the shared drive in school to save work, thanks to Samba.
However, web sites are a different matter. Linux doesn't do Director so they all were pissed about not being able to do much with Nick.com, Disney.com, CartoonNetwork.com, etc. until I got them all CrossOver Plugin and installed the Shockwave Director plugins.
Fortunately RealPlayer, Xine and MPlayer are good enough for playing all media content. This will be 100% true when Mplayer makes the latest install easier and handle Quicktime Sorensen better.
1. Personally, I use Linux whenever I'm not troubleshooting a problem with someone's Windows install. To be fair, it is usually the USER'S fault as opposed to Windows, but not always -- downloading trojaned warez; opening unscanned.EXEs, etc.
2. My daughter just moved to the "laptop team" at her middle school, where they get almost all their work/homework on a laptop. They *require* Windows/Office/IE and have a couple other programs they install. At first, I had her on RedHat with Mozilla (Java/Flash/Real plugins), XPDF, and OpenOffice 1.0.1 on their wireless network. While 95% of everything DID work, she wasn't proficient enough with OpenOffice and the instructor didn't have time to figure the differences between MS Office/OO to help her all the time. If she was more proficient, she might have pulled it off. OO generated perfectly compatible Excel/PowerPoint documents.
3. At the office, they have more complex Excel and Word documents that don't translate 100% and get screwy on the formatting. Also, since we can't move all 5,000+ users at once we must have almost seamless interoperability with the data. There is a mix of Office 97/2000/XP and OpenOffice. MS Office 97/2000 formats [doc/xls/ppt] are the corporate standard. They are NOT going to translate the thousands of existing documents to OO XML formats, nice as it is. Also Visio and Project are requirements.
In the end, the computer is a tool. In a complex office environment Linux *MUST* be able to seamlessly deal with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project documents. Until that time, it isn't a clear choice for the best tool.
It *IS* getting there, though. OpenOffice is good enough in most cases -- the few complex/odd documents in Excel can be manually translated over and the rest left as is. Mr Project and Kivio/Dia are coming along but will NEED import/export abilities before Linux "turns the office corner".
Well, Poe did write poetry -- thus a poet. He wrote a lot about the macabre, death and dying -- thus morbid. He was known to frequently drink to excess, and died drunk in a gutter -- thus an alcoholic.
So what is your point? Timothy was correct in his assertion. Poe WAS a morbid, alcoholic poet!
It was called a BattDisk, from DKB (Dean K. Brown) and was on a Zorro II card for an Amiga. It held a total of 2 Mb and could be booted from -- making a blazing fast boot for the machine.
Damn! Google is fast. I clicked the link in the Slashdot story, then without looking, clicked the top link on the news.google.com site -- which was back to the Slashdot story!
Code something GPL that performs equal to or better than BitKeeper.
I'm not familiar with the arguments of CVS vs BitKeeper. If it is a philosophical argument about a way to do things, then fine. Someone take the CVS code, fork it, and modify it to do what BitKeeper does.
It is a question of the "Software as Religion" vs "Software as Tool".
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that Linus and the other kernel hackers were pretty proficient with CVS and knew what they were doing. If they are more productive with BK, then there is something wrong with CVS.
Productivity is what counts. This isn't an addiction -- if people want to they can switch back to CVS at any time.
Most computers come with USB ports. Most home computers do NOT come with ethernet jacks as standard.
Most satellite Internet providers use a form of header-rewrite on the packets, routing everything back to your PC through their NOC. It makes for difficulties in setting up direct-to-router connections.
Way back when Apple sued Microsoft for ripping off the look of their interface, Apple lost. The ONLY thing they got the judge to concede was the Trash Can was theirs. Thus, MS changed to a recycle bin -- a sideswipe at the Apple-California neo-environmental stereotype.
The editorial cartoons of the time were great. One showed a picture of Jobs carrying a trashcan full of legal documents with someone commenting "At least the judge let you keep something to carry all that home in."
"In the past, about 2% of the residents would use over 90% of the available bandwidth causing slowdowns and poor performance for everyone."...
"We found that over 50% of the network traffic leaving the housing network headed out the Internet was from one single file sharing application. """...
" 1. All network traffic to/from any UCI computer, web site or server is untouched. There are no controls and no need to shape this, as it is "educational" traffic. Further, as it does not go to or from the Internet, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it stays within the UCI network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus."
My congratulations to UC Irvine. This sounds like an excellent solution.
One solution is to limit the lenght of message that can be recorded. If they can't say it in 15-30 seconds, it shouldn't be voice mail. They can leave a phone number or send e-mail.
People are also missing the corporate angle to the voicemail/e-mail thing. It will most likely be streamed to you from a central messaging server so bandwidth utilization will be spread more evenly.
About the same amount of money/time it took me to get them retrained on Office 2000 as opposed to Office 95. About the same it took to retrain all the Wordperfect people onto Office 2000.
Ditto for Office XP.
Training is an ongoing expense, and this type of stuff goes on all the time. Yes, they will adapt. OpenOffice is configurable -- set the shortcut keys to match the ones in MS Word/Excel, and configure the menus/toolbars to look the same.
The big question is WOULD it be in their best interest to sell machines to hackers?
The problem is that MS is positioning the machine for SECURE network connectivity, and the basis of a connected home entertainment system. Do your banking thru the Xbox, shop online, etc.
If it is HACKABLE then their facade of SECURE doesn't hold up. The whole problem revolves around what MS considers the end-use for the Xbox.
Is it just a game machine? Or is it their "beachhead" in the household for "non-computer" network access?
Whether the idea fails or not doesn't matter. Right now, what matters, is what MS THINKS is going to happen.
I'm not missing the step. most of those 200,000,000 people don't have anything I'm interested in.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone spends their time surfing the net for MP3s and porn.
Central data storage, like government records, school records, etc. are better served by a nice fat landline.
Wireless is nice, but for bandwidth it doesn't hold a candle to fiber optics.
Optics has it's place -- and that place is the backbone. Yes, it would be nice to see universal availability of wireless for CLIENTS, but for heavy servers... they would still be better served by fiber even if it was just between distributed servers to rsync.
You can only serve so many people off of a cable modem line. Once more than half-a-dozen people get online, your wireless connection will be no better than dial-up for speed.
Cable/DSL isn't exactly at massive penetration levels. People by the droves will still need to pay for lines at $50 or so a month. It is just that those lines may be shared among a few friends now.
You're not going to have 200 people sharing one cable line. The quality would be terrible and no one would be interested.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't. Someone (a company) needs to pay the one-time licensing fee to make it legal. Then freely distribute the binary-only plugin.
You, as a user, wouldn't pay an additional fee. There are no royalties with DVD formats, only what is on them.
Hmmm... I need to send a letter to SuSE, Sun and RedHat. They seem to want to push into the desktop market and this is a big sticking point.
While I didn't read the entire DVD Forum specs, etc. I went through most of what is publically available.
In order to get the books with the specs, you must sign and NDA that you aren't going to share the info in the books.
They explicitly state that there are no per-unit royalties and once the NDA & book fees are paid, there is no more money to pay in.
The main focus is on hardware manufacturers -- they don't give a damn about copying software as they only make money from the NDA/License agreement.
So YES you could redistribute the BINARY code, just not the source. Source would violate the NDA. NVidia has already proved there is a Linux market for binary-only drivers. That is all this would be -- a binary plugin.
However, no one but the original licensee could use the official DVD logos -- that is part of the agreement. If you don't use the logos (and there is a FAQ question on that, but it deals with hardware), then all is cool.
Damn it! I need to hit a small lottery payout. I'd buy the darn license and pay whoever could write such a plugin a fee and release it as a freely redistributable binary. $10K isn't a lot to a company, but I don't have that laying around.
I looked it up: (http://www.dvdfourm.org) and there are NO per-unit fees. Buy book, sign the NDA ($10,000) and someone could legally release a binary-only DECSS plugin. Yes, it could be given away freely -- just no source.
Personally, I think RedHat, Lindows & the others should do this for the people who just want to play their movies without getting into religious debates over licenses.
Hell, $10,000 isn't lunch money if spread between SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, UnitedLinux, IBM, etc.
-Charles
There are DVD players for Linux. The problem arises when you realize the DVD consortium wants a license fee ($10,000, I think) for each type of "product" such as a software player.
In theory, someone could pay the $10K and release a closed-source plug-in for Ogle/MPlayer/Xine. However, I'm not sure if there are per-unit fees associated. There probably are and I don't think the consortium makes allowances for free software.
Actually, it is a public school (Spokane, WA area) and there is only two "teams" per grade (6+) allowed to participate.
Yes, it would qualify as upper-middle class. They like the mindless Flash & Director games, I know. It makes me sick.
You think advertising on regular websites is bad, check out those targeted towards kids! I've never seen so much intense marketing crap than on those websites.
I've got my kids running Linux (Red Hat 8) on laptops (ages 12, 12, 14) for both school and home.
OpenOffice works fine for all their school work, and they connect fine to the school's wireless LAN. They can connect to the shared drive in school to save work, thanks to Samba.
However, web sites are a different matter. Linux doesn't do Director so they all were pissed about not being able to do much with Nick.com, Disney.com, CartoonNetwork.com, etc. until I got them all CrossOver Plugin and installed the Shockwave Director plugins.
Fortunately RealPlayer, Xine and MPlayer are good enough for playing all media content. This will be 100% true when Mplayer makes the latest install easier and handle Quicktime Sorensen better.
1. Personally, I use Linux whenever I'm not troubleshooting a problem with someone's Windows install. To be fair, it is usually the USER'S fault as opposed to Windows, but not always -- downloading trojaned warez; opening unscanned .EXEs, etc.
2. My daughter just moved to the "laptop team" at her middle school, where they get almost all their work/homework on a laptop. They *require* Windows/Office/IE and have a couple other programs they install. At first, I had her on RedHat with Mozilla (Java/Flash/Real plugins), XPDF, and OpenOffice 1.0.1 on their wireless network. While 95% of everything DID work, she wasn't proficient enough with OpenOffice and the instructor didn't have time to figure the differences between MS Office/OO to help her all the time. If she was more proficient, she might have pulled it off. OO generated perfectly compatible Excel/PowerPoint documents.
3. At the office, they have more complex Excel and Word documents that don't translate 100% and get screwy on the formatting. Also, since we can't move all 5,000+ users at once we must have almost seamless interoperability with the data. There is a mix of Office 97/2000/XP and OpenOffice. MS Office 97/2000 formats [doc/xls/ppt] are the corporate standard. They are NOT going to translate the thousands of existing documents to OO XML formats, nice as it is. Also Visio and Project are requirements.
In the end, the computer is a tool. In a complex office environment Linux *MUST* be able to seamlessly deal with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project documents. Until that time, it isn't a clear choice for the best tool.
It *IS* getting there, though. OpenOffice is good enough in most cases -- the few complex/odd documents in Excel can be manually translated over and the rest left as is. Mr Project and Kivio/Dia are coming along but will NEED import/export abilities before Linux "turns the office corner".
-Charles
Well, Poe did write poetry -- thus a poet.
He wrote a lot about the macabre, death and dying -- thus morbid.
He was known to frequently drink to excess, and died drunk in a gutter -- thus an alcoholic.
So what is your point? Timothy was correct in his assertion. Poe WAS a morbid, alcoholic poet!
It was called a BattDisk, from DKB (Dean K. Brown) and was on a Zorro II card for an Amiga. It held a total of 2 Mb and could be booted from -- making a blazing fast boot for the machine.
Damn! Google is fast. I clicked the link in the Slashdot story, then without looking, clicked the top link on the news.google.com site -- which was back to the Slashdot story!
Code something GPL that performs equal to or better than BitKeeper.
I'm not familiar with the arguments of CVS vs BitKeeper. If it is a philosophical argument about a way to do things, then fine. Someone take the CVS code, fork it, and modify it to do what BitKeeper does.
It is a question of the "Software as Religion" vs "Software as Tool".
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that Linus and the other kernel hackers were pretty proficient with CVS and knew what they were doing. If they are more productive with BK, then there is something wrong with CVS.
Productivity is what counts. This isn't an addiction -- if people want to they can switch back to CVS at any time.
Most computers come with USB ports. Most home computers do NOT come with ethernet jacks as standard.
Most satellite Internet providers use a form of header-rewrite on the packets, routing everything back to your PC through their NOC. It makes for difficulties in setting up direct-to-router connections.
Amiga wasn't worth suing, as their market share was dismal. Superior though they were.
Way back when Apple sued Microsoft for ripping off the look of their interface, Apple lost. The ONLY thing they got the judge to concede was the Trash Can was theirs. Thus, MS changed to a recycle bin -- a sideswipe at the Apple-California neo-environmental stereotype.
The editorial cartoons of the time were great. One showed a picture of Jobs carrying a trashcan full of legal documents with someone commenting "At least the judge let you keep something to carry all that home in."
"In the past, about 2% of the residents would use over 90% of the available bandwidth causing slowdowns and poor performance for everyone." ...
...
"We found that over 50% of the network traffic leaving the housing network headed out the Internet was from one single file sharing application. """
" 1. All network traffic to/from any UCI computer, web site or server is untouched. There are no controls and no need to shape this, as it is "educational" traffic. Further, as it does not go to or from the Internet, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it stays within the UCI network, we can take advantage of the high-speed connections and equipment we have on campus."
My congratulations to UC Irvine. This sounds like an excellent solution.
Tea?
Forget that! Wait until some the guys come over for NFL Playoffs and get drunk on beer.
"Hey! What's THIS button do?"
Puking all OVER the place! SOMEBODY'S wife is going to be PISSED!
One solution is to limit the lenght of message that can be recorded. If they can't say it in 15-30 seconds, it shouldn't be voice mail. They can leave a phone number or send e-mail.
People are also missing the corporate angle to the voicemail/e-mail thing. It will most likely be streamed to you from a central messaging server so bandwidth utilization will be spread more evenly.
POP3 it won't be.
About the same amount of money/time it took me to get them retrained on Office 2000 as opposed to Office 95. About the same it took to retrain all the Wordperfect people onto Office 2000.
Ditto for Office XP.
Training is an ongoing expense, and this type of stuff goes on all the time. Yes, they will adapt. OpenOffice is configurable -- set the shortcut keys to match the ones in MS Word/Excel, and configure the menus/toolbars to look the same.
The "rest of the company" is Lucent, not AT&T or AT&T Wireless which would be the division you're bitching about.
Lucent was spun off in 1996, thus Bell Labs wasn't part of your incidents in 1998.
BTW -- There are claims of Verizon, Qwest and others doing exactly the same thing today. Sad.
Actually, two days, two threads, and four posts to reach an intelligent response is damn fast for Slashdot. :-)
Hopefully, we can start a trend.
The big question is WOULD it be in their best interest to sell machines to hackers?
The problem is that MS is positioning the machine for SECURE network connectivity, and the basis of a connected home entertainment system. Do your banking thru the Xbox, shop online, etc.
If it is HACKABLE then their facade of SECURE doesn't hold up. The whole problem revolves around what MS considers the end-use for the Xbox.
Is it just a game machine? Or is it their "beachhead" in the household for "non-computer" network access?
Whether the idea fails or not doesn't matter. Right now, what matters, is what MS THINKS is going to happen.
Please! Everyone buy an X-Box for the holidays, just don't buy any games. Hack it into a nice little Linux box.
With MS losing between $100 - $200 per machine, they are counting on people buying lots of games to make their money back.
Take the opportunity to get a nice $199 DNS, e-mail or web server.
Microsoft has money to burn -- give them the opportunity.
I'm not missing the step. most of those 200,000,000 people don't have anything I'm interested in.
Contrary to popular belief, not everyone spends their time surfing the net for MP3s and porn.
Central data storage, like government records, school records, etc. are better served by a nice fat landline.
Wireless is nice, but for bandwidth it doesn't hold a candle to fiber optics.
Optics has it's place -- and that place is the backbone. Yes, it would be nice to see universal availability of wireless for CLIENTS, but for heavy servers... they would still be better served by fiber even if it was just between distributed servers to rsync.
Maybe, maybe not.
While I do have a cable modem with good speed, I also have three kids and a wife who have started to get active online.
While the 802.11b may outstrip *MY* usage of the cable, if all 5 people hit at once, it starts to get a little iffy.
You can only serve so many people off of a cable modem line. Once more than half-a-dozen people get online, your wireless connection will be no better than dial-up for speed.
Cable/DSL isn't exactly at massive penetration levels. People by the droves will still need to pay for lines at $50 or so a month. It is just that those lines may be shared among a few friends now.
You're not going to have 200 people sharing one cable line. The quality would be terrible and no one would be interested.