Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
·
· Score: 1
Has anybody else been checking this guy's links? They don't even say what he says they do...like the link to the FSF "warn[ing] against using the LGPL for any project"....it contains this line:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation."
Not quite the damning of the LGPL that his link suggests. Not surprising, given that the FSF wrote the LGPL, but whatever. The real point here is that for users to have functionality that they want and need to interact with the rest of the world, we need to allow non-free plugins. The vast majority of users would rather have a system that is useful than one that's idealogically pure but functionally crippled. This religious zealotry that produces the opinion that we should stonewall everything that doesn't think our way and the user be damned is very dangerous to the future of OSS.
You know, I hadn't considered that. It's brilliant. Just so long as you don't ever actually branch to 3.0...
Now...could you guys at least give us a gtk copy of klipper? I'm tired of burning my resources loading QT and such just so I can have a decent clipboard (I run Gnome, but use klipper on it anyway). I recognize that there's a lot of talk about a big rich clipboard, which would probably be even cooler, but can't we just get the first draft that at least stores your text cut/pastes?
Is the fact that all 3 replies to my post suggest alternative projects an indication that the project I'm asking about isn't quite there yet? Or is it just that nobody has come by who's actually knowledgable about Metacity's compositing and texture-from-pixmap, etc.?
Re:DRM to be used in GNOME's multimedia backend
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Your assertion that gstreamer is evil because it allows others to make linking proprietary software is zealous anti-user crap. You say the GPL nature of KPDF allows the user to remove the DRM and "be left with a fully-functional PDF viewer." But you miss something obvious to anyone who actually has to use the software: the PDF viewer is no longer "fully functional" when it can't read the DRMed file somebody sent you.
It's great to want everything to be free. But here in the real world, real users want to be able to work with everyone else, and some of those folks aren't willing to open up. Your response is to stoically ignore them and purposefully keep users from being able to properly interact with them. The Gnome team's response has been to do what they can to enable their users to work with the outside world.
You're never going to have a legal and free-as-in-speech mp3 plugin. You and the OSS-religious-crazies would thus force us to break the law or not use mp3s. That strikes me as downright ridiculous.
Oh, and about the FSF warning against the LGPL. Isn't Gnome part of the GNU project, and thus FSF-sponsored?
The PS3 is going to be a giant bomb, if you look at history. Nintendo got the NES and SNES, and then lost on the N64. Each console manufactorer gets two. Now it's Microsoft's turn.
Dude, this isn't a seesaw on a playground somewhere. They aren't taking turns. There's only one example in the history of the world (Nintendo) and now you're certain that every console maker from now till eternity will get two winners? What a dumbass.
(Note that I'm not saying anything about how any of the new consoles will do....just that you are a dumbass.)
I'm not. I'm asking about Metacity's new compositing manager, which depends on the texture-from-pixmap extension in new xorg drivers. It accomplishes roughly the same thing, but is to my understanding somewhat less of a hack.
It's worse than that...when I looked at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero , my first impression was that it was full of terrible ideas. It also looked like people were just reaching for ideas that needed to break 2.x, but maybe that was just because the criteria for being added to that page included breakage (the stuff that sounded more reasonable was mostly moved to other pages for possible inclusion in 2.x). But seriously...here are some of the suggestions:
Make GNOME a standards organization instead of a software development shop
Does that not seem like a sure-fire way to kill the project to anybody else? "Uh...we just decided not to develop software anymore...we're just going to approve or disapprove of other people's stuff."
Make GNOME truly-cross platform- i.e., make apps and environment work on Windows.
Er...doesn't Windows sort of already have a desktop environment? I can see making apps portable....but what purpose are they really going to serve by porting the whole desktop?
There are also long, tedious discussions of moving from "applications" to "objects"...i.e. making the desktop centered on the document. People talk about this a lot it seems, but it always seems to me that it makes a lot of sense for some types of applications, and no sense at all for others. I don't have a document in solitaire, just for the dumbest example. And then there's talk about changing from a "desktop" metaphor to an "assistant" metaphor, with contextual text input and later voice input. Ok, it worked on Star Trek, but this concept just gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about it actually applied to real computers. I can just feel the suck from here.
In any case, there's more, but my point is just that I also don't see a reason to break from 2.x, and I think that most of the reasons that have been suggested are cart-before-horse ideas that suck. The only thing I saw on that page that I thought was a good plan was a rich-data-storing clipboard application, and I don't see how that requires breaking 2.x; furthermore, I'd just be happy if they would copy klipper...I don't care much about clipping anything but text, but the cut/paste management is the one thing I still miss from KDE.
When I saw the first post calling Gnome an OSX ripoff, I started thinking, "Gee, I wonder what parts of OSX this guy could possibly think were ripped off by Gnome? Particularly with the restriction that they weren't ripped off by OSX in the first place?"
But now it all makes sense. The poster obviously was under the impression that Apple invented multiuser environments and indexed searches.
I've been interested in this gl compositing business for some time, and was real excited when I read Davyd's preview of 2.14. But since then I've spent a bit of time trying to find out what I have to do to actually enable that functionality, without luck.
In the preview he somewhat cryptically says that you need "some features in unstable xorg" and "texture-from-pixmap" support. I'm not positive, but my reading suggests that the latter is a feature of the drivers, in my case meaning I have to wait for Nvidia to release new ones (Also, I think it means that Geforce2 and earlier cards are left out in the cold, as new Nvidia drivers no longer support them). As for the former, I couldn't tell whether "unstable xorg" at the time of his writing meant what would eventually become xorg 7.0, or something later than that which still hasn't been released.
If someone could enlighten me about this, I'd really appreciate it. What version of xorg does one need, what drivers, and about how much graphics horsepower?
I will admit that Nintendo's equipment since the SNES has been well above par in this respect. On the other hand, they also didn't have the same stringent performance requirements, and thus are easier to stabilise cheaply.
Generally I agree with you...generally. But I think there are certain instances where companies have been willing to indefinitely lose money somewhere, using their lossy division to drive business into profitable divisions. In this case MS could end up making the calculated decision that they need to spend money on Xbox product (even indefinitely) in order to forge ahead with their pervasive windows-device world. It's not a viable piece in that puzzle now, but if they were able to pump up penetration this generation, then next generation (assuming they hold on) they could have a box in a large percentage of living rooms which really only integrates well with MS (or MS-partner) gear like PCs, DVRs, music players, etc. And such a stronghold could conceivably be worth spending billions annually on the money hole of Xbox.
(Note how many times I say "could"...I'm certainly not saying that's how it'll play out. My best guess is that Xbox will start making money at some point. But I also don't see them dramatically changing the sales figures or market share this generation.)
Oh, right, Saturn. Doesn't fit the category of "competing products" if only 4 people had one. I'm not counting Neo-Geo either. I've seen one of each of those, and since you asked, I was in my mid-teens when the PSX came out. I didn't get one, but I bought the PS2 at launch when I was in college.
But ok, I'll admit that I shouldn't have said "any" of the competition. The important issue is that they were significantly higher priced than their *primary* competitors. And the Dreamcast parallel is really the one that matters most anyway. Saying that Sony would be "stupid" to drop the PS3 at a higher price point than a less powerful competitor that has been selling poorly is, well, stupid.
Well....Ok.....but we aren't talking about going to war with China. We're just saying we disapprove of their government's policy. I would have have had no complaints if the administration (or anyone else) had chosen to engage in verbal "Iraq-bashing" concerning their pursuit of WMD's. In fact, I guess that was kind of Clinton's policy (well, plus economic sanctions, a no-fly-zone, threats, etc.) toward Saddam. But I digress; point is, you should have to make a hell of a lot stronger case to go to war than you would to complain about a government; your analogy is bunk.
You're right - the PS3 isn't about games. It's Sony's attempt to use their current market lead in the console market to force Blu-Ray players out into the public.
Right.....Sony's going to cannibalise their most profitable business (selling video games) just to get a tiny lead in a commodity market (selling video players) where they could, maybe, if they play their cards right, make a tenth as much money. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Regardless of how much it costs to build, there's no way the PS3 ships at a higher price than the 360. Sony just isn't that stupid.
Really? That's odd....because the launch prices of their first two consoles were dramatically higher than any of the competing products available at the time. The Dreamcast cost less than half what a PS2 cost on the PS2 launch date. Are you suggesting that Sony was "stupid" in their launch plans for the two most successful consoles in history? And that they've gotten smarter since? Gee...I hope not.
True enough...MS is a lot stronger competitor than Sega was with the DC. And the other reply to you is correct; my primary objective was to point out the foolishness of the GP saying "this looks like the end of the playstation." I mean, the PS2 is still the top-selling console by a huge margin....it seems at the very least a bit counterintuitive to be reading Sony's eulogy.
But also, I think it is worth noting some of the parallels. The biggest one is failure in Japan....consoles (historically) just flat don't do well when the Japanese don't buy them in large numbers.
And then of course there's the counterpoint to the ridiculous conclusion drawn by the author of this article. He says:
But if Sony's really hoping to make Dreamcast 2.0 a reality, now would be a very good time to change tactics. Relying on obfuscation and hype is only likely to work once, especially for gamers who believed tall promises about the PS2 Emotion Engine's ability to present the most impressive game worlds imaginable but actually received a system only moderately more powerful than the Dreamcast.
This strikes me as completely ass-backwards. After all, it did completely annihilate the DC. Which is to say that a "moderately more powerful" system was plenty. Is this author suggesting that everyone should have just bought the Dreamcast? Or is he suggesting that this time, knowing that the PS2 was only a bit more powerful than the DC, that gamers won't be "fooled again" and will just buy the 360? None of that sounds reasonable to me. It seems to me that a gamer who was looking at history would say to himself, "Well, the last time Sony brought its console out later and said it'd be faster....it was only a bit faster, but the competing product was stone-dead within a couple months. I probably ought to hold out for the Sony console, lest my 360 lose dev support overnight."
Now, obviously, that's not going to happen; MS was willing to buy game developers left and right to get game support for the first Xbox, so even in the worst case they can do that again. And they aren't likely to have to anyway. But my point is that it seems silly to me to suggest that bringing out a faster, better console later "won't work again" because last time it wasn't faster enough. Right?
We have had countless reports on how shittily designed the PS2 was. The only console we had to turn upside-down to have it read disks!
We have had countless reports on how shittily designed the Xbox 360 was. The only console for which we had to suspend the power supply from a string to keep it from overheating!
And by the way....that was the classic problem of the PSX, not PS2. The PS2 was more notorious for just giving random read failures. But consoles in general have always been horrendously unreliable...ever blow into your NES? I'm on my second PS2 right now, and my roommate is on his second Xbox (not 360).
Between the awesome lead XBox 360 has been able to gain given its earlier release date, this may be the end of Playstation. The next-gen Playstation sounds like it is a potentially superior product. But on one side, there's XBox 360 and the potential release of Halo 3. On the other side, theres Nintendo Revolution and its very unique controller. If Playstation doesn't find something to set it apart from these other two consoles, I believe Playstation's days are numbered.
Class excercise:
1)Replace every instance of "xbox 360" with "dreamcast."
2)Replace every instance of "revolution" with "gamecube."
3)Replace game references with similar titles available for dreamcast just prior to PS2 launch.
4)Go searching for the resultant string in the archives of gamer forums and see how many matches you can come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anybody else been checking this guy's links? They don't even say what he says they do...like the link to the FSF "warn[ing] against using the LGPL for any project"....it contains this line:
Which license is best for a given library is a matter of strategy, and it depends on the details of the situation."
Not quite the damning of the LGPL that his link suggests. Not surprising, given that the FSF wrote the LGPL, but whatever. The real point here is that for users to have functionality that they want and need to interact with the rest of the world, we need to allow non-free plugins. The vast majority of users would rather have a system that is useful than one that's idealogically pure but functionally crippled. This religious zealotry that produces the opinion that we should stonewall everything that doesn't think our way and the user be damned is very dangerous to the future of OSS.
I'm aware of that. I wasn't asking about AIGLX in the first place. I also wasn't asking about compiz or xgl.
Well, that's the end of this discussion....your cognitive dissonance is far too serious for me to attempt to reason with you.
Well, shit...I could have told you that.
You know, I hadn't considered that. It's brilliant. Just so long as you don't ever actually branch to 3.0...
Now...could you guys at least give us a gtk copy of klipper? I'm tired of burning my resources loading QT and such just so I can have a decent clipboard (I run Gnome, but use klipper on it anyway). I recognize that there's a lot of talk about a big rich clipboard, which would probably be even cooler, but can't we just get the first draft that at least stores your text cut/pastes?
Dude, that freeciv sig is fan-fucking-tastic.
Is the fact that all 3 replies to my post suggest alternative projects an indication that the project I'm asking about isn't quite there yet? Or is it just that nobody has come by who's actually knowledgable about Metacity's compositing and texture-from-pixmap, etc.?
Your assertion that gstreamer is evil because it allows others to make linking proprietary software is zealous anti-user crap. You say the GPL nature of KPDF allows the user to remove the DRM and "be left with a fully-functional PDF viewer." But you miss something obvious to anyone who actually has to use the software: the PDF viewer is no longer "fully functional" when it can't read the DRMed file somebody sent you.
It's great to want everything to be free. But here in the real world, real users want to be able to work with everyone else, and some of those folks aren't willing to open up. Your response is to stoically ignore them and purposefully keep users from being able to properly interact with them. The Gnome team's response has been to do what they can to enable their users to work with the outside world.
You're never going to have a legal and free-as-in-speech mp3 plugin. You and the OSS-religious-crazies would thus force us to break the law or not use mp3s. That strikes me as downright ridiculous.
Oh, and about the FSF warning against the LGPL. Isn't Gnome part of the GNU project, and thus FSF-sponsored?
The PS3 is going to be a giant bomb, if you look at history. Nintendo got the NES and SNES, and then lost on the N64. Each console manufactorer gets two. Now it's Microsoft's turn.
Dude, this isn't a seesaw on a playground somewhere. They aren't taking turns. There's only one example in the history of the world (Nintendo) and now you're certain that every console maker from now till eternity will get two winners? What a dumbass.
(Note that I'm not saying anything about how any of the new consoles will do....just that you are a dumbass.)
Now if they would just get around to copying klipper, I would finally no longer miss anything from KDE...
Thanks, but we are not talking about compiz.
If you're asking about Xgl and compiz...
I'm not. I'm asking about Metacity's new compositing manager, which depends on the texture-from-pixmap extension in new xorg drivers. It accomplishes roughly the same thing, but is to my understanding somewhat less of a hack.
It's worse than that...when I looked at http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero , my first impression was that it was full of terrible ideas. It also looked like people were just reaching for ideas that needed to break 2.x, but maybe that was just because the criteria for being added to that page included breakage (the stuff that sounded more reasonable was mostly moved to other pages for possible inclusion in 2.x). But seriously...here are some of the suggestions:
Make GNOME a standards organization instead of a software development shop
Does that not seem like a sure-fire way to kill the project to anybody else? "Uh...we just decided not to develop software anymore...we're just going to approve or disapprove of other people's stuff."
Make GNOME truly-cross platform- i.e., make apps and environment work on Windows.
Er...doesn't Windows sort of already have a desktop environment? I can see making apps portable....but what purpose are they really going to serve by porting the whole desktop?
There are also long, tedious discussions of moving from "applications" to "objects"...i.e. making the desktop centered on the document. People talk about this a lot it seems, but it always seems to me that it makes a lot of sense for some types of applications, and no sense at all for others. I don't have a document in solitaire, just for the dumbest example. And then there's talk about changing from a "desktop" metaphor to an "assistant" metaphor, with contextual text input and later voice input. Ok, it worked on Star Trek, but this concept just gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about it actually applied to real computers. I can just feel the suck from here.
In any case, there's more, but my point is just that I also don't see a reason to break from 2.x, and I think that most of the reasons that have been suggested are cart-before-horse ideas that suck. The only thing I saw on that page that I thought was a good plan was a rich-data-storing clipboard application, and I don't see how that requires breaking 2.x; furthermore, I'd just be happy if they would copy klipper...I don't care much about clipping anything but text, but the cut/paste management is the one thing I still miss from KDE.
When I saw the first post calling Gnome an OSX ripoff, I started thinking, "Gee, I wonder what parts of OSX this guy could possibly think were ripped off by Gnome? Particularly with the restriction that they weren't ripped off by OSX in the first place?"
But now it all makes sense. The poster obviously was under the impression that Apple invented multiuser environments and indexed searches.
So, he's just an idiot; nothing to see here.
I've been interested in this gl compositing business for some time, and was real excited when I read Davyd's preview of 2.14. But since then I've spent a bit of time trying to find out what I have to do to actually enable that functionality, without luck.
In the preview he somewhat cryptically says that you need "some features in unstable xorg" and "texture-from-pixmap" support. I'm not positive, but my reading suggests that the latter is a feature of the drivers, in my case meaning I have to wait for Nvidia to release new ones (Also, I think it means that Geforce2 and earlier cards are left out in the cold, as new Nvidia drivers no longer support them). As for the former, I couldn't tell whether "unstable xorg" at the time of his writing meant what would eventually become xorg 7.0, or something later than that which still hasn't been released.
If someone could enlighten me about this, I'd really appreciate it. What version of xorg does one need, what drivers, and about how much graphics horsepower?
The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.
-B.F. Skinner
I will admit that Nintendo's equipment since the SNES has been well above par in this respect. On the other hand, they also didn't have the same stringent performance requirements, and thus are easier to stabilise cheaply.
Generally I agree with you...generally. But I think there are certain instances where companies have been willing to indefinitely lose money somewhere, using their lossy division to drive business into profitable divisions. In this case MS could end up making the calculated decision that they need to spend money on Xbox product (even indefinitely) in order to forge ahead with their pervasive windows-device world. It's not a viable piece in that puzzle now, but if they were able to pump up penetration this generation, then next generation (assuming they hold on) they could have a box in a large percentage of living rooms which really only integrates well with MS (or MS-partner) gear like PCs, DVRs, music players, etc. And such a stronghold could conceivably be worth spending billions annually on the money hole of Xbox.
...I'm certainly not saying that's how it'll play out. My best guess is that Xbox will start making money at some point. But I also don't see them dramatically changing the sales figures or market share this generation.)
(Note how many times I say "could"
Oh, right, Saturn. Doesn't fit the category of "competing products" if only 4 people had one. I'm not counting Neo-Geo either. I've seen one of each of those, and since you asked, I was in my mid-teens when the PSX came out. I didn't get one, but I bought the PS2 at launch when I was in college.
But ok, I'll admit that I shouldn't have said "any" of the competition. The important issue is that they were significantly higher priced than their *primary* competitors. And the Dreamcast parallel is really the one that matters most anyway. Saying that Sony would be "stupid" to drop the PS3 at a higher price point than a less powerful competitor that has been selling poorly is, well, stupid.
Well....Ok.....but we aren't talking about going to war with China. We're just saying we disapprove of their government's policy. I would have have had no complaints if the administration (or anyone else) had chosen to engage in verbal "Iraq-bashing" concerning their pursuit of WMD's. In fact, I guess that was kind of Clinton's policy (well, plus economic sanctions, a no-fly-zone, threats, etc.) toward Saddam. But I digress; point is, you should have to make a hell of a lot stronger case to go to war than you would to complain about a government; your analogy is bunk.
You're right - the PS3 isn't about games. It's Sony's attempt to use their current market lead in the console market to force Blu-Ray players out into the public.
Right.....Sony's going to cannibalise their most profitable business (selling video games) just to get a tiny lead in a commodity market (selling video players) where they could, maybe, if they play their cards right, make a tenth as much money. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Regardless of how much it costs to build, there's no way the PS3 ships at a higher price than the 360. Sony just isn't that stupid.
Really? That's odd....because the launch prices of their first two consoles were dramatically higher than any of the competing products available at the time. The Dreamcast cost less than half what a PS2 cost on the PS2 launch date. Are you suggesting that Sony was "stupid" in their launch plans for the two most successful consoles in history? And that they've gotten smarter since? Gee...I hope not.
True enough...MS is a lot stronger competitor than Sega was with the DC. And the other reply to you is correct; my primary objective was to point out the foolishness of the GP saying "this looks like the end of the playstation." I mean, the PS2 is still the top-selling console by a huge margin....it seems at the very least a bit counterintuitive to be reading Sony's eulogy.
But also, I think it is worth noting some of the parallels. The biggest one is failure in Japan....consoles (historically) just flat don't do well when the Japanese don't buy them in large numbers.
And then of course there's the counterpoint to the ridiculous conclusion drawn by the author of this article. He says:
But if Sony's really hoping to make Dreamcast 2.0 a reality, now would be a very good time to change tactics. Relying on obfuscation and hype is only likely to work once, especially for gamers who believed tall promises about the PS2 Emotion Engine's ability to present the most impressive game worlds imaginable but actually received a system only moderately more powerful than the Dreamcast.
This strikes me as completely ass-backwards. After all, it did completely annihilate the DC. Which is to say that a "moderately more powerful" system was plenty. Is this author suggesting that everyone should have just bought the Dreamcast? Or is he suggesting that this time, knowing that the PS2 was only a bit more powerful than the DC, that gamers won't be "fooled again" and will just buy the 360? None of that sounds reasonable to me. It seems to me that a gamer who was looking at history would say to himself, "Well, the last time Sony brought its console out later and said it'd be faster....it was only a bit faster, but the competing product was stone-dead within a couple months. I probably ought to hold out for the Sony console, lest my 360 lose dev support overnight."
Now, obviously, that's not going to happen; MS was willing to buy game developers left and right to get game support for the first Xbox, so even in the worst case they can do that again. And they aren't likely to have to anyway. But my point is that it seems silly to me to suggest that bringing out a faster, better console later "won't work again" because last time it wasn't faster enough. Right?
We have had countless reports on how shittily designed the PS2 was. The only console we had to turn upside-down to have it read disks!
We have had countless reports on how shittily designed the Xbox 360 was. The only console for which we had to suspend the power supply from a string to keep it from overheating!
And by the way....that was the classic problem of the PSX, not PS2. The PS2 was more notorious for just giving random read failures. But consoles in general have always been horrendously unreliable...ever blow into your NES? I'm on my second PS2 right now, and my roommate is on his second Xbox (not 360).
Between the awesome lead XBox 360 has been able to gain given its earlier release date, this may be the end of Playstation. The next-gen Playstation sounds like it is a potentially superior product. But on one side, there's XBox 360 and the potential release of Halo 3. On the other side, theres Nintendo Revolution and its very unique controller. If Playstation doesn't find something to set it apart from these other two consoles, I believe Playstation's days are numbered.
Class excercise:
1)Replace every instance of "xbox 360" with "dreamcast."
2)Replace every instance of "revolution" with "gamecube."
3)Replace game references with similar titles available for dreamcast just prior to PS2 launch.
4)Go searching for the resultant string in the archives of gamer forums and see how many matches you can come up with.