Like arms dealers, lawyers supply both sides of the field, always win regardless of which side loses, and never get tarnished with the mud and blood that flies.
Isn't that reference back to front? The ratio of natives to British in India was collosal, so it is the British empire that needs to be seen as a small force attempting to make an incursion into an immovably immense continent. Not surprisingly, even such a great "success" turned out to be ephemeral.
I think Tim Sweeney is not being entirely genuine and even-handed in his treatment of what has gone before and what needs to be newly invented. Early on he mentions functional languages, naming LISP, Haskell and Miranda explicitly, but without any useful examination he dismisses them as irrelevant ("theory", instead of "practice"). Yet then, in the remainder of his essay, he effectively makes a very sound case for bringing in precisely those high-powered features that make functional languages as powerful as they indeed are.
LISP users have been doing all the clever things he mentions not just for years but for *decades*. To a significant extent, more modern functional languages (LISP is partly functional, partly imperative, and partly various other flavours) effectively just put syntactic sugar around LISP concepts to make functional programming more palatable to the parenthesis-challanged.
Continual development in programming languages is not only useful but essential for progress, but to dismiss the work carried out by a whole genre of computing isn't particularly helpful.
Conclusion: There is absolutely no cause for celebration, no precedent for success, and numerous reasons for pessimism.
Why then do so many posters here seem to think that appealing to the law and/or government is going to deliver to us the world we want? This looks like extraordinary wishful thinking to me.
Fighting a planetful of power politics, business greed, visionary blindness and establishment inertia is about as likely to succeed as ploughing your way through an iceberg a thousand times your size.
Don't bother. Route around the problem. There are more ways than one, and some good ones are bound to emerge if we put our thinking caps on.
The other responses have highlighted very well the main reasons why you're wishing for the impossible and the inadvisable, so I'll add just a couple of small riders.
There simply isn't the time during a 3 or 4-year degree course to teach the general educative material and also to provide the vocational training that you want. Educational lessons can be painted in broad strokes so a lot can be crammed in to a short period of time. In contrast, vocational training necessarily has to deal with a large amount of specific detail and only a tiny part of that has any real educational value. Even worse than the low educational density though is that the details can often obscure any educational benefits that might be had from the exercise, ie. you churn out IOS experts that don't know what *really* happens when you enable a particular feature. It's almost the antithesis of education.
There is also another point to consider: should education bias students before releasing them into a nominally free market? Of course it's impossible to avoid bias altogether, but one sure way of promoting bias is to do as you seem to want and actually *focus* on a leading market player. [Shudder...]
In contrast, everything you're looking for can be found in tech school, where there is no or little pretence at providing a general education. Go for it, but it will not serve you well in an ever-changing future, mark my words.
Disseminating the source code is fine for hackers, but DeCSS isn't going to make it out of the hacker community while it remains in its present form. It needs to be downloadable as a binary, ready-to-run plugin in order for Joe Bloggs to download it to enable his Linux player. As a no-brainer plugin it would be unstoppable because *everyone* would be spreading it around, not just the comparatively small community of source hackers.
There are around 5000 titles out on DVD, and I want to watch them all. The value of each title to the studios is around 15 dollars apiece, on average, and that must be at least the value that I place on my viewing of each title, since that is typically the amount that I pay willingly. My player of choice is Linux, and I cannot view these DVDs on Linux now because of the action of the plaintiff.
However, the actual value I place on DVDs must be higher than their direct cost, to justify the expense and the desire to buy them. In actuality, I consider that the consequent harm caused to me by not being permitted to view these DVDs on my player of choice far exceeds the mere cost value, to the tune of 100 dollars apiece on average (based on the damage to my intended career as Linux movie critic), and therefore the plaintiff's action results in a consequent loss to myself of 500,000 dollars minus the saved direct cost of 75,000 dollars. [This valuation is a result of a personal assessment based on private data and is not open to modification by any other party. The assessment algorithm (but not the private data, which is a trade secret) is available for inspection, at a cost of 5 million dollars per request.]
OK, that's me taken care of. Has anyone else suffered a loss as a result of the injunction? If so, and if there are more than just a few of us, then the primary justification for the judge's ruling is rendered void.
It's not exactly the same concept since the Transmeta chips aren't gate-level reconfigurable computers, but the dynamic compilation stage seems to have close parallels in both products.
I never did learn though whether Starbridge use layout caching in order not to have to recompile parts of the code already traversed previously. It sounds to me like this nice feature of Crusoe would be equally useful in dynamic RC designs like Starbridge's.
Regarding CPU cores versus FPGA arrays, an FPGA like Xilinx's RC series (6200 onwards) can be regarded as just a core for a microcoded processor because layout control is performed by writing the layout info into a memory-mapped store, which in concept is no different to writing microcode to a conventional microcoded controller. It might be a bit difficult to identify an "instruction set" among all this funky layout data, but hey, when discussing concepts one has to be flexible.:-)
Several months ago Slashdot featured a supercomputer-on-a-desktop that used on-the-fly reprogrammable FPGAs (Xilinx chips almost certainly) to gain massive speedup over conventional microprocessors. It featured a dynamic pre-compilation stage that fulfils a function very similar to that of the Code Morphing Software in the Transmeta products. (This general area is called Reconfigurable Computing, RC.)
Has anyone heard any more about the company that was manufacturing the supercomputers? I seem to have lost the URL.
If that's what the Act says then it's easy to bypass the whole problem: just embed deCSS in gcc.
The CSS functionality will then clearly not be the primary purpose of the product, and the massive worldwide commercial significance of gcc equally clearly invalidates the other clauses.
How long did it take lawyers to draft the Act so tightly?:-)
Yeah, sure, it's a well-proven strategy with many accepted advantages, and Transmeta will have much success with it.
But the universe could have been theirs instead of just the valley. The opportunity for an explosive ascendency was there and they failed to recognize it, despite having possibly the best icon for such a course in their midst. What a waste.
I think you've missed the main thing that's wrong with Transmeta: it's the lack of a key vision as to the possibilities of an exponential market explosion based around their product. They're occupying the valley instead of conquering the universe. Let me explain.
What's the single most important lesson that the computing scene has learned in the last few years? Hey, that's an easy one: that the massively parallel development in the Free/Open Software community outpaces that in even the best funded closed commercial teams by a huge factor, easily two orders of magnitude. The productivity is without peer, verging on the ridiculous by traditional measures.
Yet Transmeta is not opening up the development of Code Morphing Software to the community, apparently as a result of an incredibly regressive devotion to the antiquated concept of Intellectual Property and its laughable protection through obscurity or non-disclosure. So, instead of the next few quarters seeing a myriad of ports of CMS to dozens of architectures being attempted (and inevitably quite a few of them succeeding rapidly), we're going to be forever waiting on the closed Transmeta team to deliver. It's going to be the pits. It's going to be annoying. It's going to be slow.
Even worse, open development would be highly likely to optimize the hell out of the x86 version of CMS in very short order, far more rapidly than TM could despite their current great lead. You just can't hold back a thousand highly enthusiastic parallel streams of development, even if there is a substantial attrition rate. In contrast, now it's going to be a straight race between TM and Intel, and in this head-to-head between closed teams, only a fool would discount Intel despite the far greater ease with which Crusoe can be optimized compared to Intel hardware.
This is a terrible waste of a supreme opportunity. Transmeta could lay to waste all competition everywhere with Crusoe if they freed CMS from its appalling harness of proprietary development. Imagine all computing everywhere running on TM hardware, simply because Crusoe executes *all* instruction sets in current use. That's not an impossible vision, but it can't be achieved within a small closed group of developers.
What a pity... and 10 times the pity because the presence of Linus must have kept the benefits of community development pretty obvious within the company. A missed opportunity, possibly the biggest missed opportunity ever to occur in computing.
[And no, their portability/flexibility argument for not opening CMS and the VLIW architecture does not affect what I've said above, because whereas the porting of CMS for a single ISA to a new VLIW architecture can be performed effectively by their single centralized team, there is no way that this scales to porting dozens of ISAs to it. That can be done effectively only in a distributed manner. (The portability benefits of non-disclosure could have been achieved quite easily through a simple system of TM design guidelines.)]
I'm not often in personal contact with Microsoft machinery, but when I cannot avoid it, it often drives me up the wall that unless one is using all-Microsoft components, things often just fail to work.
This is particularly so in respect of their web browser, eg. if you have Netscape installed instead of MS Internet Explorer then don't bother attempting to install Netmeeting --- it notes the absence of MSIE and refuses point blank to install at all.
It's this kind of tie-in that makes a mockery of Microsoft's claim that Windows is really an open platform, ie. in the browser case they make damn sure that MSIE *cannot* be replaced by an alternative. It may look an open platform from the outside, but they do everything in their power to prevent non-Microsoft choices from being made. It's the pits for user choice, and this kind of tie-in dependency is one of the principal drivers of the MS monopoly.
Do the Findings of Fact address this tie-in issue in any way?
I don't think that what you say is the case, because small-scale cracked copying (as opposed to commercial-scale replication or cloning) of DVDs is an *exact* counterpart to personal copying of music on cassette tapes as practiced extremely widely over the last two decades. The studios took great exception to that as well, yet in practice it didn't decimate the music industry at all. In fact, it probably stimulated it. [Eg. it's very common for folks to later buy CDs of the artists that they had recorded on cassette in earlier days when they were much poorer, especially at school or university. Nostalgia is a very powerful force.]
But then, it's pointless to point out the flaws in anti-copying arguments and the counter-lessons of history to a bunch of deaf, short-termist money grabbers with closed minds.
Yes, I already use Festival, as a plugin for the irssi IRC client. It works a treat.
However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.
MPEG 1 video with MP3 audio is unfortunately a long way off (possibly infinitely) because it's not an officially approved combination, and MPEG 2 with DD5.1, DTS, DDS or MPEG5.1 audio are unfortunately out of reach online for the next several years because of bandwidth constraints. Darn, I beamed down too soon.
Being right doesn't always make one popular
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 2
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's wrong. Roblimo has discovered the sharp and hysterical edge of the Slashdot mob, which coexists alongside the community's even-handed and insightful edge. Unfortunately the first edge is hurtful, every bit as much as the second encourages one to excellence. Jon Katz discovered the same thing and survived the experience of being dragged through the mud. Now Roblimo's being savaged, and has reacted with a mild rebuke to the community.
You may not like it, but if you don't think it's deserved then you're not being even-handed. The community has a *large* mindless element nowadays (whatever the subject matter), and yes, their "contribution" can often be hurtful and unfair. Stay in there Robin!
I couldn't find any reference to the audio streaming technology that they intend to use for this, nor to the range of supported platforms.
Maybe we'd better let them know right now that a world exists outside of Windows and Mac, and that it's thumbs down for closed clients and proprietary protocols and thumbs up for open standards.
It would be disappointing to have to take PA to task for being technologically blinkered when their cool system is finally launched.
Given the pedigree of Debian, I'm a bit bemused at my own experience with it around the time of the hamm/slink transition. After many years of running various RedHats and a couple of years of Slackware prior to that, I didn't expect many surprises. In fact, I expected even greater stability, if that were possible, because of that super pedigree thing (not really possible, since I never had any instability nor any other trouble with RH, but I expected good things anyway).
Alas, I persevered for 4 weeks during which I had to update numerous libraries (some repeatedly) in order to get Netscape and other quite normal stuff to work, always following the appropriate installation procedures for the item in question. Towards the end of this period, things got so bad that not only would Netscape no longer work properly, but the GIMP wouldn't come up at all. In utter frustration, I dumped the whole lot and went back to RedHat.
I have no idea what went wrong but it did, badly. This doesn't concern me too much personally (I'll try again when potato is released), but I can't help wondering how Linux newbies are coping with Debian, as opposed to Debian newbies that are fully-fledged Unix old-timers. If I managed to screw it so thoroughly then there must be quite a bit of rope available for hanging oneself in the distro.
[Yes, of course it was all my fault. I'm merely wondering how it was possible for it to happen at all, against a backdrop of more than just a little experience and a total lack of such problems with other systems, spanning Linux, many Unixes, and BSD. Very bemused.]
A cracked DVD written onto media without encryption is not a duplicate of that DVD, and being different to the original it isn't going to lead to the huge market losses that they are alleging will happen. It's not mainstream. It won't be sold in the high-street as a forgery of the original product.
If you don't distinguish between this kind of enterprising but limited-market stuff and mass-volume copying then it's no surprise that you can be led by the nose by those who base their attempts at consumer control on the fiction of rampant piracy.
Sorry, but no, their action isn't valid even from their own point of view, simply because they've got their facts wrong. The DeCSS crack cannot be used for producing "pirate" copies of DVDs, so their case is based on a totally incorrect premise.
Are there grounds for a countersuit anywhere here?
I guess you can't sue someone for being technically clueless, irritating and regressive, but how about at least seeking punitive damages for them willfully wasting the time of the court and of hundreds of defendents while in full possession of the knowledge that the DeCSS crack *cannot* lead to the production of "pirate" copies of DVDs?
But if commercially available writers don't allow you to write to the special sectors then it's impossible to create "pirate" copies of DVDs even if one *does* possess the decryption key, so the DVD piracy claims are 200% bogus either way.
Talk about a weak case. The judges are going to have to be deaf, (very) dumb and blind to let this action succeed.
To flesh out this scenario a little more, here are some possible answers to the more obvious objections:
- If BG's as clever as portrayed, how come that he thinks that Windows is good? Easy: it's the worm's eye view effect, ie. he's too close to the ground to see the greater picture. Or alternatively, he's got his nose stuck so deep into it that he can't smell it anymore.
- If BG thinks Windows is the best O/S, why the hell would he want to develop a rival one? Because it's a win-win situation: if Windows continues to dominate then he's vindicated for his earlier brilliance which was quashed by the DoJ, and if WinLinux decimates Windows then he's seen as The System Architect With The Midas Touch.
- And almost as important as the preceding reason is that WinLinux would surely wipe the ground with all other Linux distributions in terms of numbers of copies sold. (We geeks probably wouldn't buy it, but we're a small minority compared to the great unwashed masses.)
- And finally: Linux is GPL'd, so anything that WinLinux can do could also be offered in every other Linux distribution, so where's BG's advantage? The key here is a matter of timing: WinLinux could release a new version with ever-better Windows compatibility every 6 months, which to all intents and purposes would mean that all other distros would always lag behind it in that area. This would be the final nail in the coffin, given that the BG-sanctioned distro would have such a collosal advantage in the market anyway for its intended audience.
You guys are underestimating Gates. He truly believes that Windows can easily out-compete everything else, and that Microsoft applications have no viable opposition. But he doesn't like being associated with a foundering ship.
For this reason, ol' Gatesy is positioning himself to become an independent system architect and technology advisor not only to his old baby in Redmond, but also to his new venture, Windows Linux Inc, whose primary goal will be to market a Linux-based O/S that runs all Microsoft applications.
This will achieve 3 goals simultaneously: (i) Billy Boy will be making massively more money because he'll be selling WinLinux for $300 *AND EVERYONE WILL BE BUYING IT ANYWAY BECAUSE IT'S "MICROSOFT-APPROVED"*; (ii) Windows will continue to be a success despite massive competition in the O/S market from WinLinux among others, simply because most of the world knows no better (this will vindicate him in his belief that Windows is tops); and (iii) he'll continue to make massive amounts of money by selling his apps on WinLinux as well, through a concession from Microsoft.
All the above things are easily achievable, and even its risks are of the win-win variety, without any pun being intended. Bill may be down in the dumps a bit at the moment, but fairly soon he's going to be on top of the world again. As soon as Windows Linux Inc launches, I pity Microsoft investors.
Slashdot Mirror
Like arms dealers, lawyers supply both sides of the field, always win regardless of which side loses, and never get tarnished with the mud and blood that flies.
Somehow that doesn't seem right.
Isn't that reference back to front? The ratio of natives to British in India was collosal, so it is the British empire that needs to be seen as a small force attempting to make an incursion into an immovably immense continent. Not surprisingly, even such a great "success" turned out to be ephemeral.
I think Tim Sweeney is not being entirely genuine and even-handed in his treatment of what has gone before and what needs to be newly invented. Early on he mentions functional languages, naming LISP, Haskell and Miranda explicitly, but without any useful examination he dismisses them as irrelevant ("theory", instead of "practice"). Yet then, in the remainder of his essay, he effectively makes a very sound case for bringing in precisely those high-powered features that make functional languages as powerful as they indeed are.
LISP users have been doing all the clever things he mentions not just for years but for *decades*. To a significant extent, more modern functional languages (LISP is partly functional, partly imperative, and partly various other flavours) effectively just put syntactic sugar around LISP concepts to make functional programming more palatable to the parenthesis-challanged.
Continual development in programming languages is not only useful but essential for progress, but to dismiss the work carried out by a whole genre of computing isn't particularly helpful.
Observation on "Our Side vs The World":
- No. of provisional wins: ~ 2 (M$/DoJ, CDA)
- No. of effective wins: 0
- No. of heavyweight cases against: 10000000000
- Big money supports which side: against
- Politics supports which side: against
Conclusion: There is absolutely no cause for celebration, no precedent for success, and numerous reasons for pessimism.
Why then do so many posters here seem to think that appealing to the law and/or government is going to deliver to us the world we want? This looks like extraordinary wishful thinking to me.
Fighting a planetful of power politics, business greed, visionary blindness and establishment inertia is about as likely to succeed as ploughing your way through an iceberg a thousand times your size.
Don't bother. Route around the problem. There are more ways than one, and some good ones are bound to emerge if we put our thinking caps on.
Is this threat and finger really by CmdrTaco?
The other responses have highlighted very well the main reasons why you're wishing for the impossible and the inadvisable, so I'll add just a couple of small riders.
...]
There simply isn't the time during a 3 or 4-year degree course to teach the general educative material and also to provide the vocational training that you want. Educational lessons can be painted in broad strokes so a lot can be crammed in to a short period of time. In contrast, vocational training necessarily has to deal with a large amount of specific detail and only a tiny part of that has any real educational value. Even worse than the low educational density though is that the details can often obscure any educational benefits that might be had from the exercise, ie. you churn out IOS experts that don't know what *really* happens when you enable a particular feature. It's almost the antithesis of education.
There is also another point to consider: should education bias students before releasing them into a nominally free market? Of course it's impossible to avoid bias altogether, but one sure way of promoting bias is to do as you seem to want and actually *focus* on a leading market player. [Shudder
In contrast, everything you're looking for can be found in tech school, where there is no or little pretence at providing a general education. Go for it, but it will not serve you well in an ever-changing future, mark my words.
Disseminating the source code is fine for hackers, but DeCSS isn't going to make it out of the hacker community while it remains in its present form. It needs to be downloadable as a binary, ready-to-run plugin in order for Joe Bloggs to download it to enable his Linux player. As a no-brainer plugin it would be unstoppable because *everyone* would be spreading it around, not just the comparatively small community of source hackers.
Is anyone up the task?
There are around 5000 titles out on DVD, and I want to watch them all. The value of each title to the studios is around 15 dollars apiece, on average, and that must be at least the value that I place on my viewing of each title, since that is typically the amount that I pay willingly. My player of choice is Linux, and I cannot view these DVDs on Linux now because of the action of the plaintiff.
However, the actual value I place on DVDs must be higher than their direct cost, to justify the expense and the desire to buy them. In actuality, I consider that the consequent harm caused to me by not being permitted to view these DVDs on my player of choice far exceeds the mere cost value, to the tune of 100 dollars apiece on average (based on the damage to my intended career as Linux movie critic), and therefore the plaintiff's action results in a consequent loss to myself of 500,000 dollars minus the saved direct cost of 75,000 dollars. [This valuation is a result of a personal assessment based on private data and is not open to modification by any other party. The assessment algorithm (but not the private data, which is a trade secret) is available for inspection, at a cost of 5 million dollars per request.]
OK, that's me taken care of. Has anyone else suffered a loss as a result of the injunction? If so, and if there are more than just a few of us, then the primary justification for the judge's ruling is rendered void.
Thanks for the URL.
:-)
It's not exactly the same concept since the Transmeta chips aren't gate-level reconfigurable computers, but the dynamic compilation stage seems to have close parallels in both products.
I never did learn though whether Starbridge use layout caching in order not to have to recompile parts of the code already traversed previously. It sounds to me like this nice feature of Crusoe would be equally useful in dynamic RC designs like Starbridge's.
Regarding CPU cores versus FPGA arrays, an FPGA like Xilinx's RC series (6200 onwards) can be regarded as just a core for a microcoded processor because layout control is performed by writing the layout info into a memory-mapped store, which in concept is no different to writing microcode to a conventional microcoded controller. It might be a bit difficult to identify an "instruction set" among all this funky layout data, but hey, when discussing concepts one has to be flexible.
Several months ago Slashdot featured a supercomputer-on-a-desktop that used on-the-fly reprogrammable FPGAs (Xilinx chips almost certainly) to gain massive speedup over conventional microprocessors. It featured a dynamic pre-compilation stage that fulfils a function very similar to that of the Code Morphing Software in the Transmeta products. (This general area is called Reconfigurable Computing, RC.)
Has anyone heard any more about the company that was manufacturing the supercomputers? I seem to have lost the URL.
If that's what the Act says then it's easy to bypass the whole problem: just embed deCSS in gcc.
:-)
The CSS functionality will then clearly not be the primary purpose of the product, and the massive worldwide commercial significance of gcc equally clearly invalidates the other clauses.
How long did it take lawyers to draft the Act so tightly?
Yeah, sure, it's a well-proven strategy with many accepted advantages, and Transmeta will have much success with it.
But the universe could have been theirs instead of just the valley. The opportunity for an explosive ascendency was there and they failed to recognize it, despite having possibly the best icon for such a course in their midst. What a waste.
I think you've missed the main thing that's wrong with Transmeta: it's the lack of a key vision as to the possibilities of an exponential market explosion based around their product. They're occupying the valley instead of conquering the universe. Let me explain.
... and 10 times the pity because the presence of Linus must have kept the benefits of community development pretty obvious within the company. A missed opportunity, possibly the biggest missed opportunity ever to occur in computing.
What's the single most important lesson that the computing scene has learned in the last few years? Hey, that's an easy one: that the massively parallel development in the Free/Open Software community outpaces that in even the best funded closed commercial teams by a huge factor, easily two orders of magnitude. The productivity is without peer, verging on the ridiculous by traditional measures.
Yet Transmeta is not opening up the development of Code Morphing Software to the community, apparently as a result of an incredibly regressive devotion to the antiquated concept of Intellectual Property and its laughable protection through obscurity or non-disclosure. So, instead of the next few quarters seeing a myriad of ports of CMS to dozens of architectures being attempted (and inevitably quite a few of them succeeding rapidly), we're going to be forever waiting on the closed Transmeta team to deliver. It's going to be the pits. It's going to be annoying. It's going to be slow.
Even worse, open development would be highly likely to optimize the hell out of the x86 version of CMS in very short order, far more rapidly than TM could despite their current great lead. You just can't hold back a thousand highly enthusiastic parallel streams of development, even if there is a substantial attrition rate. In contrast, now it's going to be a straight race between TM and Intel, and in this head-to-head between closed teams, only a fool would discount Intel despite the far greater ease with which Crusoe can be optimized compared to Intel hardware.
This is a terrible waste of a supreme opportunity. Transmeta could lay to waste all competition everywhere with Crusoe if they freed CMS from its appalling harness of proprietary development. Imagine all computing everywhere running on TM hardware, simply because Crusoe executes *all* instruction sets in current use. That's not an impossible vision, but it can't be achieved within a small closed group of developers.
What a pity
[And no, their portability/flexibility argument for not opening CMS and the VLIW architecture does not affect what I've said above, because whereas the porting of CMS for a single ISA to a new VLIW architecture can be performed effectively by their single centralized team, there is no way that this scales to porting dozens of ISAs to it. That can be done effectively only in a distributed manner. (The portability benefits of non-disclosure could have been achieved quite easily through a simple system of TM design guidelines.)]
I'm sad for what might have been.
I'm not often in personal contact with Microsoft machinery, but when I cannot avoid it, it often drives me up the wall that unless one is using all-Microsoft components, things often just fail to work.
This is particularly so in respect of their web browser, eg. if you have Netscape installed instead of MS Internet Explorer then don't bother attempting to install Netmeeting --- it notes the absence of MSIE and refuses point blank to install at all.
It's this kind of tie-in that makes a mockery of Microsoft's claim that Windows is really an open platform, ie. in the browser case they make damn sure that MSIE *cannot* be replaced by an alternative. It may look an open platform from the outside, but they do everything in their power to prevent non-Microsoft choices from being made. It's the pits for user choice, and this kind of tie-in dependency is one of the principal drivers of the MS monopoly.
Do the Findings of Fact address this tie-in issue in any way?
I don't think that what you say is the case, because small-scale cracked copying (as opposed to commercial-scale replication or cloning) of DVDs is an *exact* counterpart to personal copying of music on cassette tapes as practiced extremely widely over the last two decades. The studios took great exception to that as well, yet in practice it didn't decimate the music industry at all. In fact, it probably stimulated it. [Eg. it's very common for folks to later buy CDs of the artists that they had recorded on cassette in earlier days when they were much poorer, especially at school or university. Nostalgia is a very powerful force.]
But then, it's pointless to point out the flaws in anti-copying arguments and the counter-lessons of history to a bunch of deaf, short-termist money grabbers with closed minds.
Yes, I already use Festival, as a plugin for the irssi IRC client. It works a treat.
However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.
MPEG 1 video with MP3 audio is unfortunately a long way off (possibly infinitely) because it's not an officially approved combination, and MPEG 2 with DD5.1, DTS, DDS or MPEG5.1 audio are unfortunately out of reach online for the next several years because of bandwidth constraints. Darn, I beamed down too soon.
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's wrong. Roblimo has discovered the sharp and hysterical edge of the Slashdot mob, which coexists alongside the community's even-handed and insightful edge. Unfortunately the first edge is hurtful, every bit as much as the second encourages one to excellence. Jon Katz discovered the same thing and survived the experience of being dragged through the mud. Now Roblimo's being savaged, and has reacted with a mild rebuke to the community.
You may not like it, but if you don't think it's deserved then you're not being even-handed. The community has a *large* mindless element nowadays (whatever the subject matter), and yes, their "contribution" can often be hurtful and unfair. Stay in there Robin!
I couldn't find any reference to the audio streaming technology that they intend to use for this, nor to the range of supported platforms.
Maybe we'd better let them know right now that a world exists outside of Windows and Mac, and that it's thumbs down for closed clients and proprietary protocols and thumbs up for open standards.
It would be disappointing to have to take PA to task for being technologically blinkered when their cool system is finally launched.
Given the pedigree of Debian, I'm a bit bemused at my own experience with it around the time of the hamm/slink transition. After many years of running various RedHats and a couple of years of Slackware prior to that, I didn't expect many surprises. In fact, I expected even greater stability, if that were possible, because of that super pedigree thing (not really possible, since I never had any instability nor any other trouble with RH, but I expected good things anyway).
Alas, I persevered for 4 weeks during which I had to update numerous libraries (some repeatedly) in order to get Netscape and other quite normal stuff to work, always following the appropriate installation procedures for the item in question. Towards the end of this period, things got so bad that not only would Netscape no longer work properly, but the GIMP wouldn't come up at all. In utter frustration, I dumped the whole lot and went back to RedHat.
I have no idea what went wrong but it did, badly. This doesn't concern me too much personally (I'll try again when potato is released), but I can't help wondering how Linux newbies are coping with Debian, as opposed to Debian newbies that are fully-fledged Unix old-timers. If I managed to screw it so thoroughly then there must be quite a bit of rope available for hanging oneself in the distro.
[Yes, of course it was all my fault. I'm merely wondering how it was possible for it to happen at all, against a backdrop of more than just a little experience and a total lack of such problems with other systems, spanning Linux, many Unixes, and BSD. Very bemused.]
A cracked DVD written onto media without encryption is not a duplicate of that DVD, and being different to the original it isn't going to lead to the huge market losses that they are alleging will happen. It's not mainstream. It won't be sold in the high-street as a forgery of the original product.
If you don't distinguish between this kind of enterprising but limited-market stuff and mass-volume copying then it's no surprise that you can be led by the nose by those who base their attempts at consumer control on the fiction of rampant piracy.
Sorry, but no, their action isn't valid even from their own point of view, simply because they've got their facts wrong. The DeCSS crack cannot be used for producing "pirate" copies of DVDs, so their case is based on a totally incorrect premise.
A question for the lawyer types ...
Are there grounds for a countersuit anywhere here?
I guess you can't sue someone for being technically clueless, irritating and regressive, but how about at least seeking punitive damages for them willfully wasting the time of the court and of hundreds of defendents while in full possession of the knowledge that the DeCSS crack *cannot* lead to the production of "pirate" copies of DVDs?
But if commercially available writers don't allow you to write to the special sectors then it's impossible to create "pirate" copies of DVDs even if one *does* possess the decryption key, so the DVD piracy claims are 200% bogus either way.
Talk about a weak case. The judges are going to have to be deaf, (very) dumb and blind to let this action succeed.
To flesh out this scenario a little more, here are some possible answers to the more obvious objections:
- If BG's as clever as portrayed, how come that he thinks that Windows is good? Easy: it's the worm's eye view effect, ie. he's too close to the ground to see the greater picture. Or alternatively, he's got his nose stuck so deep into it that he can't smell it anymore.
- If BG thinks Windows is the best O/S, why the hell would he want to develop a rival one? Because it's a win-win situation: if Windows continues to dominate then he's vindicated for his earlier brilliance which was quashed by the DoJ, and if WinLinux decimates Windows then he's seen as The System Architect With The Midas Touch.
- And almost as important as the preceding reason is that WinLinux would surely wipe the ground with all other Linux distributions in terms of numbers of copies sold. (We geeks probably wouldn't buy it, but we're a small minority compared to the great unwashed masses.)
- And finally: Linux is GPL'd, so anything that WinLinux can do could also be offered in every other Linux distribution, so where's BG's advantage? The key here is a matter of timing: WinLinux could release a new version with ever-better Windows compatibility every 6 months, which to all intents and purposes would mean that all other distros would always lag behind it in that area. This would be the final nail in the coffin, given that the BG-sanctioned distro would have such a collosal advantage in the market anyway for its intended audience.
You guys are underestimating Gates. He truly believes that Windows can easily out-compete everything else, and that Microsoft applications have no viable opposition. But he doesn't like being associated with a foundering ship.
For this reason, ol' Gatesy is positioning himself to become an independent system architect and technology advisor not only to his old baby in Redmond, but also to his new venture, Windows Linux Inc, whose primary goal will be to market a Linux-based O/S that runs all Microsoft applications.
This will achieve 3 goals simultaneously: (i) Billy Boy will be making massively more money because he'll be selling WinLinux for $300 *AND EVERYONE WILL BE BUYING IT ANYWAY BECAUSE IT'S "MICROSOFT-APPROVED"*; (ii) Windows will continue to be a success despite massive competition in the O/S market from WinLinux among others, simply because most of the world knows no better (this will vindicate him in his belief that Windows is tops); and (iii) he'll continue to make massive amounts of money by selling his apps on WinLinux as well, through a concession from Microsoft.
All the above things are easily achievable, and even its risks are of the win-win variety, without any pun being intended. Bill may be down in the dumps a bit at the moment, but fairly soon he's going to be on top of the world again. As soon as Windows Linux Inc launches, I pity Microsoft investors.