What kind of network stuff is in DirectX? I would've thought most of the network protocols would need to be application-specific, so a generic protocol library would be pointless.
Pretty much all LCDs since 2005, and some before, support it.
Not true. Up until last year Dell's 24" screens didn't do HDCP (and more to the point, why the hell should you be required to upgrade your expensive 1 year old monitor? Some of the monitors I use date back 10 years and still work as well as they did when they were bought)
In any case, my monitor does do HDCP, but only because it happened to be the monitor I wanted - the existance (or not) of HDCP support didn't factor into it at all. My graphics card doesn't support HDCP and nor does my software.
On the flip side, if you are using DX instead of OpenGL, DX10 is very nice compared to DX9
See, I don't get this at all. I don't know the ins and outs of games programming, but I can't understand why everyone uses DirectX (supported on exactly one (1) platform) instead of OpenGL (supported on pretty much *every* platform capable of doing 3D)?
Sure, they might not want to port their software to other OSes *now* but it would seem to make business sense to at least leave the option open. Take GoogleEarth for example - AFAIK that was written for DirectX (before Google bought it) and presumably Google has had to quite a lot of work to build the ports for OS X and Linux, even though the Linux port is a fairly half-arsed WINE-wrapped affair.
How are the Western economies ever going to compete, once the East gets properly established?
If you're dealing with a big business then it doesn't really matter where they are based, so the East could easilly win. However, there are big advantages with dealing with small local businesses, and that is something the East can't replace.
Basically it comes down to:
* Dealing with big businesses is low risk - very little chance of them going out of business, taking your money and leaving you high and dry with big stack of propriatory systems that you can't get support for. * Dealing with small businesses generally gives you much better service - unlike the big businesses an individual customer _does_ matter so your problems are not going to get completely ignored.
So whilest big business may head Eastwards, maybe the smaller businesses will become more important in the West.
Yes, and if it can't make a direct peer-to-peer connection it hijacks someone else's client to proxy your traffic. This means: 1. If you aren't behind a NAT your connection will be used (probably without your knowledge) to proxy other people's VoIP traffic. 2. If the majority of connections can't be made directly peer-to-peer the limited number of clients that can act as a proxy may well be overloaded (there was a story about this a couple of years ago ISTR since more and more people are putting firewalls infront of their machines). 3. The traffic is encrypted, but if the encryption were to be broken the people you are proxying via could evesdrop (yes, core internet routers could do this anyway, but now you're talking about random end users too) 4. The quality of your call is affected by the quality of 3rd party internet connections. 5. Not entirely NAT related, but just in the general "why the way Skype does things is bad": Skype can silently fall back to TCP to work around firewalling issues - this leads to potentially very poor call quality since TCP does head of line blocking (the last thing you want for VoIP!). Yes, I understand you're trying to appeal to the masses who don't know how to set up a firewall, but giving them crappy call quality instead of instructions on how to fix their firewall is not the answer.
The industry standard VoIP protocols (such as SIP) do _not_ hijack the connections of random other users without their knowledge, which means that these protocols require the ability to set up a peer to peer connection.
STUN can be used in many cases to help make peer-to-peer protocols work through NAT, but it is not reliable (and even the RFC admits it can *never* be reliable). Far better to just ditch NAT - it's a nasty hack and it's time is long since past.
My ISP would have to relax it's "no servers allowed" policy.
Or you could just change to an ISP that doesn't impose stupid restrictions on it's customers.
I should point out that I personally generally don't use word processors for anything other than writing letters. For serious documents I find it much better to use a markup language (leads to a greater proportion of my time spent actually _writing_ the document rather than battling the word processor).
For Corprate work OO is political suciede.
I don't believe that statement is at all well founded. My previous employer was a Linux-only shop and used OOo exclusively as the office suite. Never seemed to have any real problems. And if you're exchanging documents with an external party you'd be completely crazy to use Office format anyway, due to the amount of metadata embedded in the document.
The main problem I have had with Open Office is usually minor font and layout problems
I have had exactly the same sorts of problems using MS Office though. Especially dealing with boxes in Word (things like tables, embedded images, etc seem to have a mind of their own).
In general, my feelings on *all* GUI word processors is that because so many options (layout, style, etc) are hidden, and there are often several ways to do the same job, I end up spending too long trying to work out how to turn off a particular layout option, etc. Whereas when I use a markup language, it's plainly obvious what is causing the layout to behave how it's behaving.
Very similar situation to why a home user should ditch XP on their computer for Ubuntu. Fact is, they shouldn't.
OOo is basically the same as Office - there's not a lot of reason to use one over the other if you already have both available unless you need a specific feature (e.g. the ability to read/write ODF documents). However, there are extremely good reasons for switching from Windows to Linux. Not least things like security, ease of use, availability of free tools, etc. - I don't believe you can compare Windows to Linux in the same way as you can compare office suites.
Why would Microsoft do *anything* with works? This can't be a big money-maker for them, unless they are charging OEMs behind the scenes to have it installed (in which case the OEMs are stupid for installing it).
I suspect it's because the OEMs need a cheap/free word processor to pre-install and Microsoft knows that if they don't supply one the OEMs will just install the alternatives (which are much more functional so would cut into the MS Office sales). I imagine a lot of people use Works on their shiny new PCs, realise it's a piece of crap and immediately go out and buy MS Office.
I am usually an opponent for the use of OpenOffice stating it is a sub-par replacement for office...
Out of interest, what do you believe that Office offers over OOo for the average home user (who is probably only interested in wordprocessing the odd letter)?
My ISP only allows me one dynamic address... I use a NAT router (with their blessing) and have several machines at honme. With IPV6, is there still NAT routing?
You can do NAT but it is strongly discouraged (it's basically reserved for situations where you need to move machines between networks, rather than sharing of a single address between multiple devices). Your ISP _should_ give you at least a/64 IPv6 network (if you make each network a/64 then IPv6 autoconfiguration works, which makes everyone's life easier). In general, NAT is a Bad Thing since it breaks peer to peer applications such as VoIP and often required that the device doing NAT have specific knowledge of the layer 5 protocols you're using.
Of course, if they try and give you a single IPv6 address instead of a sanely sized prefix then you should go find an ISP who has clue and doesn't jsut try to rip you off.
Oh, and NAT firewalling? what about NAT firewalling?
There's no such thing as NAT firewalling. There is firewalling (which may or may not be stateful) and there is NAT (which requires stateful connection tracking). The existance of one does not imply the existance or requirement of the other. And yes, you can still do stateful packet inspection for IPv6.
Yea, for the few who just want to run an operating system, that an interesting choice. You can install and run Linux, and learn first hand why so many people get frustrated by it.
I just want to run an operating system. On occasion I've installed and run Windows and learnt first hand why so many people get frustrated by it.
But if the OS is only a means to and end, and what you care about is running useful applications rather than just an OS, then you may want to run an OS that suports the applications that you run. I've seen wine, I've tried it, it is not a viable solution for most windows applications.
If you're using Win98 you're probably just using the machine for word processing and web browsing - there are perfectly good wordprocessors and web browsers for Linux.
I've been using Linux on one of my systems for years. I still get frustrated by the learning curve. But I still run Windows on several other systems (including a Win98 system that I'm posting through now), because they run the software that I need to run to do the things that I want to do and to be compatable with the rest of the people that I interact with.
I've been using Windows on one of my systems for a couple of years. I still get frustrated by the learning curve. But I still run Linux on several other systems (including a Fedora Core 6 system that I'm posting through now), because they run the software that I need to run to do the things that I want to do and to be compatable with the rest of the people that I interact with.
Who are you to dictate people stop using a product that might be better than what Microsoft is releasing today?
There are alternatives to Microsoft products you know...
I should probably also point out that back when Microsoft was releasing Win98 (with no potential for IPv6 support), IPv6 was already pretty well proven on other operating systems so you can't really complain about having to upgrade because of some new technology - you chose to use software that didn't support an existing piece of technology which was inevitably going to replace IPv4 eventually (many of us hoped/assumed it would happen sooner too).
MS has a history of being very short sighted with regards to network protocols - they originally refused to support IPv4 because "the internet is a fad, it'll be gone and forgotten soon", they left it a long time before bothering to implement IPv6 at all and they still have no support for SCTP (and seem to have no intention of addressing this). And I guess it makes some sense - MS has absolutely no interest in perpetuating the use of old technologies. You chose to deal with a company who want you to make an expensive upgrade regularly - you can't complain when you have to upgrade.
Besides, if you're using Win98 the chances are that you only use your machine for word processing (no internet access required) and web surfing (you can gateway your old IPv4 browser to IPv6 HTTP servers using an HTTP proxy).
Now a more significant problem that I can see is that (to my knowledge) there are _still_ no consumer grade DSL routers that support IPv6 at all. So what that means is that I can't buy a future-proof DSL router, and there's really no good reason why this should be the case other than lazyness on the part of the router manufacturers.
You would think scheduling a big upgrade for the middle of the holiday season would be asking for trouble.
Sensible people don't leave stuff till the last minute. Sensible people would already be running IPv6 *now* since it's been fairly well proven for many years.
Of course most business people seem to not be sensible, so this will be another Y2K style problem of leaving everything until the sky falls in and IANA says "sorry, there are no more IPv4 addresses" and then running around like headless chickens trying to refit their entire network infrastructure within a few days.
This problem comes up time and time again - businesses get told by the techies "this is going to be a problem - we should do something about it before it's actually causing us trouble". The highups refuse to fund the work so it doesn't get done. Then when the fact that it wasn't done causes the sky to fall in the work has to be done anyway, but now it has to be done quickly, meaning that care can't be taken to make it a smooth transition. The end result is that it costs the business far more than it would've done if they had just taken notice of the techies in the first place.
On a related note, did you know that telephone networks are replacing their antiquated TDM/SS7 infrastructure with shiny new IP networks.... and guess what, they are spending vast amounts of cash rolling out IPv4 networks rather than IPv6... Crazy huh?
Report to CEO: According to this user, there is no Free Software that plays HD-DVD under these conditions. Therefore our DRM is effective enough to stall this user from his form of copying.
So what you're saying is they would be happy if there was no way for anyone to use the HD-DVDs (and thus noone would ever buy them) since that would prevent copying?
According to this user, DRM *IS* slowing down the expected demographic from copying. However, our models do not agree that an addtional 200% of the audience still remains to be captured, and therefore we consider his logic flawed.
No, that's not what I said. What I said was that you have prevented 100 people from using copies and at the same time you have also reduced your total paying audiance by 200 people. I made no mention of a percentage of the total audiance.
The technical knowledge displayed by this user falls within the outlier range past the two-standard-deviation range. We consider losses like him to be acceptible business loss since we have regained the rest of our projected market.
Ok, look at it this way - I have the knowledge to circumvent most of the current copy protection on CDs. Which means that, if I so wish, I could choose to buy a copyprotected CD and still use it. On the other hand, an unknowledgable user isn't going to be able to do this, so as far as they are concerned the CD is just "broken". The unknowledgable user does, however, probably know how to drive LimeWire and download the CD illegally. So the unknowledgable user has a choice: 1. Buy a CD which is no use to them since they can't rip it for use on their computer/mp3 player/whatever 2. Do without the content 3. Illegally download the content. Which option do _you_ think they will take? I'm betting (3).
Re:DRM in current use that hasnt been cracked yet
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Re:DRM in current use that hasnt been cracked yet
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NDS VideoGuard sattelite and cable TV encryption
Incorrect - there are several (closed source) softcams for Windows and some of the programmable hardware CAMs (such as the DragonCAM) can do VideoGuard (although require a valid viewing card). Sadly, from what I can tell there are no open source softcams to do it (I'd dearly love to be able to ditch my Sky decoder and just let my MythTV box decrypt the channels I subscribe to directly from the DVB-S transport stream).
Re:The BBC and Licensing?
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The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do? They can either implement some form of UK-based DRM or not attempt to show programmes online at all.
DRM is unnecessary - they can simply restrict access by IP address to UK residents. This would put the "protection" on par with their DVB streams (which they are actively pushing to be unencrypted), which are geographically restricted to (more or less) the UK. Just because you are delivering content over IP doesn't mean you need extra protection - it's just as easy to proxy a DVB stream to a non-UK IP address as it is to proxy an IP stream to a non-UK IP address.
The BBC's charter requires that they make the content available for all licence payers without tieing them to equipment sold by specific manufacturers. The current iPlayer does not meet the charter since it requires you to use Windows. They have not said when a Linux version will be available, only that they will review the situation every 6 months (which implies it will take several years). Also, they keep saying they are aiming for a platform agnostic solution by releasing players for Windows, OS X and Linux - that is _not_ platform agnostic - what happens if I want to play content on my phone or other device not running these OSes? The *only* way to be platform agnostic is to use an open standard and thus allow anyone to implement a player for a platform of their choice.
I'd prefer the DRM version then to wait for some form of non-DRM equivalent to be implemented!
As a licence payer, I would prefer them not to waste my licence fee on this crap if they aren't going to implement it in a platform agnostic way in accordance with their charter. Using the licence fee to pay for a system that can only be used on a platform produced by a single vendor (a totally unethical vendor at that) is unacceptable.
Actually yes, I do "use locks" - however I am not in any way caught up in the fantasy world (eg as inhabited by the RIAA, MPAA, etc) of believing that locking my car/house/etc actually prevents any reasonably organised or determined criminal from stealing anything.
I think you are perpetuating the myth that the DRM "locks" only deter people from committing a criminal act. In fact, the DRM prevents a significant number of people for doing what they are legally entitled to do, and thinks to the EUCD and DMCA the DRM now turns them into criminals for exercising their legal rights - great huh?
The purpose of DRM was to curb copying, which it has done.
But at what cost?
Sure, I can't copy an HD-DVD(*), but that's ok coz I'm not going to bother buying an HD-DVD until I can play an HD-DVD using Free software (which ultimately means the DRM would have to be cracked).
It doesn't make good economic sense to stop 100 people using copies if the means to prevent copying also stops 200 people from buying it in the first place. And unless you can stop *all* copying, those who don't want to buy DRM'd content can always find the content in an un-DRM'd format through other (not legal) means.
As far as I'm concerned, if I buy a CD (for example), I have the right to play that CD on my computer, rip it to Vorbis format, etc. If the publisher designs the CD so that I can't exercise those rights then it is useless to me and I will get the content via some other means in a DRM-free format. If the publisher makes sure *all* official formats are DRM'd then the only choices I have are to either do without the content, or download the content illegally - either way the content producer doesn't get their money.
It would be quite possible (though not exactly trivial) to record a given segment of the data stream and hack the particular key used to encrypt it, thus "breaking the DRM" on that particular block of content.
I've not seen DirecTV, but here in the UK, a lot of satellite content is encrypted with NDS VideoGuard and then streamed over DVB. It's very easy to record a chunk of DVB stream to work on (plug the LNB into a DVB-S receiver card and cat the whole transport stream to a file).
The question is, how far do you want to go to crack the DRM - if you only want to receive the channels you're subscribed to then you just need to work out the encryption algorithm and let the viewing card provide the keys. The algorithm isn't something that's going to change regularly, so cracking that for a single block of content will allow you to decode pretty much any content that your viewing card will provide the keys for.
On the other hand, if you want to be able to watch content without a viewing card then you're going to have to crack the card too, and that is harder.
NDS VideoGuard _has_ been cracked (to the point that you still need your viewing card), but unfortunately noone seems to have released a softCAM as Free software (there are a few closed source softCAMs floating around for Windows, the DreamBox has a working SoftCAM in it, and there are programmable hardware CAMs which can be made to do NDS VideoGuard). I'm not interested in receiving channels I'm not entitled to, but I _am_ interested in being able to decode the ones I am subscribed to.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
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"Because," he pointed out, "if the copy protection prevents just one person from copying it, it's done its job."
Has it still done it's job when it pisses off a lot of the customers to the point that they won't bother buying the next thing you release?
Why not have the graphics card itself decompressing the MPEG contents?
This is already done to some extent - e.g. a number of graphics drivers have the XvMC extension, which allows offloading of MPEG2 motion compensation to the card. The problem here is that when a new codec appears you need to update the drivers (and maybe the hardware). For example, whilest the nVidia drivers provide XvMC support, they can't help with H.264 decoding.
Also, offloading all the decoding to the graphics card will limit the amount of post-processing you can do to the video since the CPU will not have access to the raw video (think: deinterlacing, special effects, etc).
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DirectX isn't just graphics. It's sound
OpenAL?
network play
What kind of network stuff is in DirectX? I would've thought most of the network protocols would need to be application-specific, so a generic protocol library would be pointless.
Pretty much all LCDs since 2005, and some before, support it.
Not true. Up until last year Dell's 24" screens didn't do HDCP (and more to the point, why the hell should you be required to upgrade your expensive 1 year old monitor? Some of the monitors I use date back 10 years and still work as well as they did when they were bought)
In any case, my monitor does do HDCP, but only because it happened to be the monitor I wanted - the existance (or not) of HDCP support didn't factor into it at all. My graphics card doesn't support HDCP and nor does my software.
On the flip side, if you are using DX instead of OpenGL, DX10 is very nice compared to DX9
See, I don't get this at all. I don't know the ins and outs of games programming, but I can't understand why everyone uses DirectX (supported on exactly one (1) platform) instead of OpenGL (supported on pretty much *every* platform capable of doing 3D)?
Sure, they might not want to port their software to other OSes *now* but it would seem to make business sense to at least leave the option open. Take GoogleEarth for example - AFAIK that was written for DirectX (before Google bought it) and presumably Google has had to quite a lot of work to build the ports for OS X and Linux, even though the Linux port is a fairly half-arsed WINE-wrapped affair.
How are the Western economies ever going to compete, once the East gets properly established?
If you're dealing with a big business then it doesn't really matter where they are based, so the East could easilly win. However, there are big advantages with dealing with small local businesses, and that is something the East can't replace.
Basically it comes down to:
* Dealing with big businesses is low risk - very little chance of them going out of business, taking your money and leaving you high and dry with big stack of propriatory systems that you can't get support for.
* Dealing with small businesses generally gives you much better service - unlike the big businesses an individual customer _does_ matter so your problems are not going to get completely ignored.
So whilest big business may head Eastwards, maybe the smaller businesses will become more important in the West.
Well I am only paying for the "cheap seats" DSL $14.99/mo, If I want to realy be a server too at&t says I have to get
a more expensive type of DSL.
Sounds like a classic case of "you get what you pay for"... you can't really complain that your bargain-basement DSL is crappy.
umm is skype VoIP? works for me.
Yes, and if it can't make a direct peer-to-peer connection it hijacks someone else's client to proxy your traffic. This means:
1. If you aren't behind a NAT your connection will be used (probably without your knowledge) to proxy other people's VoIP traffic.
2. If the majority of connections can't be made directly peer-to-peer the limited number of clients that can act as a proxy may well be overloaded (there was a story about this a couple of years ago ISTR since more and more people are putting firewalls infront of their machines).
3. The traffic is encrypted, but if the encryption were to be broken the people you are proxying via could evesdrop (yes, core internet routers could do this anyway, but now you're talking about random end users too)
4. The quality of your call is affected by the quality of 3rd party internet connections.
5. Not entirely NAT related, but just in the general "why the way Skype does things is bad": Skype can silently fall back to TCP to work around firewalling issues - this leads to potentially very poor call quality since TCP does head of line blocking (the last thing you want for VoIP!). Yes, I understand you're trying to appeal to the masses who don't know how to set up a firewall, but giving them crappy call quality instead of instructions on how to fix their firewall is not the answer.
The industry standard VoIP protocols (such as SIP) do _not_ hijack the connections of random other users without their knowledge, which means that these protocols require the ability to set up a peer to peer connection.
STUN can be used in many cases to help make peer-to-peer protocols work through NAT, but it is not reliable (and even the RFC admits it can *never* be reliable). Far better to just ditch NAT - it's a nasty hack and it's time is long since past.
My ISP would have to relax it's "no servers allowed" policy.
Or you could just change to an ISP that doesn't impose stupid restrictions on it's customers.
Grammar checking?
:)
If you trust Word's grammar checking you're doomed already
I should point out that I personally generally don't use word processors for anything other than writing letters. For serious documents I find it much better to use a markup language (leads to a greater proportion of my time spent actually _writing_ the document rather than battling the word processor).
For Corprate work OO is political suciede.
I don't believe that statement is at all well founded. My previous employer was a Linux-only shop and used OOo exclusively as the office suite. Never seemed to have any real problems. And if you're exchanging documents with an external party you'd be completely crazy to use Office format anyway, due to the amount of metadata embedded in the document.
The main problem I have had with Open Office is usually minor font and layout problems
I have had exactly the same sorts of problems using MS Office though. Especially dealing with boxes in Word (things like tables, embedded images, etc seem to have a mind of their own).
In general, my feelings on *all* GUI word processors is that because so many options (layout, style, etc) are hidden, and there are often several ways to do the same job, I end up spending too long trying to work out how to turn off a particular layout option, etc. Whereas when I use a markup language, it's plainly obvious what is causing the layout to behave how it's behaving.
Very similar situation to why a home user should ditch XP on their computer for Ubuntu. Fact is, they shouldn't.
OOo is basically the same as Office - there's not a lot of reason to use one over the other if you already have both available unless you need a specific feature (e.g. the ability to read/write ODF documents). However, there are extremely good reasons for switching from Windows to Linux. Not least things like security, ease of use, availability of free tools, etc. - I don't believe you can compare Windows to Linux in the same way as you can compare office suites.
Why would Microsoft do *anything* with works? This can't be a big money-maker for them, unless they are charging OEMs behind the scenes to have it installed (in which case the OEMs are stupid for installing it).
I suspect it's because the OEMs need a cheap/free word processor to pre-install and Microsoft knows that if they don't supply one the OEMs will just install the alternatives (which are much more functional so would cut into the MS Office sales). I imagine a lot of people use Works on their shiny new PCs, realise it's a piece of crap and immediately go out and buy MS Office.
I am usually an opponent for the use of OpenOffice stating it is a sub-par replacement for office...
Out of interest, what do you believe that Office offers over OOo for the average home user (who is probably only interested in wordprocessing the odd letter)?
My ISP only allows me one dynamic address... I use a NAT router (with their blessing) and have several machines at honme. With IPV6, is there still NAT routing?
/64 IPv6 network (if you make each network a /64 then IPv6 autoconfiguration works, which makes everyone's life easier). In general, NAT is a Bad Thing since it breaks peer to peer applications such as VoIP and often required that the device doing NAT have specific knowledge of the layer 5 protocols you're using.
You can do NAT but it is strongly discouraged (it's basically reserved for situations where you need to move machines between networks, rather than sharing of a single address between multiple devices). Your ISP _should_ give you at least a
Of course, if they try and give you a single IPv6 address instead of a sanely sized prefix then you should go find an ISP who has clue and doesn't jsut try to rip you off.
Oh, and NAT firewalling? what about NAT firewalling?
There's no such thing as NAT firewalling. There is firewalling (which may or may not be stateful) and there is NAT (which requires stateful connection tracking). The existance of one does not imply the existance or requirement of the other. And yes, you can still do stateful packet inspection for IPv6.
Yea, for the few who just want to run an operating system, that an interesting choice. You can install and run Linux, and learn first hand why so many people get frustrated by it.
I just want to run an operating system. On occasion I've installed and run Windows and learnt first hand why so many people get frustrated by it.
But if the OS is only a means to and end, and what you care about is running useful applications rather than just an OS, then you may want to run an OS that suports the applications that you run. I've seen wine, I've tried it, it is not a viable solution for most windows applications.
If you're using Win98 you're probably just using the machine for word processing and web browsing - there are perfectly good wordprocessors and web browsers for Linux.
I've been using Linux on one of my systems for years. I still get frustrated by the learning curve. But I still run Windows on several other systems (including a Win98 system that I'm posting through now), because they run the software that I need to run to do the things that I want to do and to be compatable with the rest of the people that I interact with.
I've been using Windows on one of my systems for a couple of years. I still get frustrated by the learning curve. But I still run Linux on several other systems (including a Fedora Core 6 system that I'm posting through now), because they run the software that I need to run to do the things that I want to do and to be compatable with the rest of the people that I interact with.
Who are you to dictate people stop using a product that might be better than what Microsoft is releasing today?
There are alternatives to Microsoft products you know...
I should probably also point out that back when Microsoft was releasing Win98 (with no potential for IPv6 support), IPv6 was already pretty well proven on other operating systems so you can't really complain about having to upgrade because of some new technology - you chose to use software that didn't support an existing piece of technology which was inevitably going to replace IPv4 eventually (many of us hoped/assumed it would happen sooner too).
MS has a history of being very short sighted with regards to network protocols - they originally refused to support IPv4 because "the internet is a fad, it'll be gone and forgotten soon", they left it a long time before bothering to implement IPv6 at all and they still have no support for SCTP (and seem to have no intention of addressing this). And I guess it makes some sense - MS has absolutely no interest in perpetuating the use of old technologies. You chose to deal with a company who want you to make an expensive upgrade regularly - you can't complain when you have to upgrade.
Besides, if you're using Win98 the chances are that you only use your machine for word processing (no internet access required) and web surfing (you can gateway your old IPv4 browser to IPv6 HTTP servers using an HTTP proxy).
Now a more significant problem that I can see is that (to my knowledge) there are _still_ no consumer grade DSL routers that support IPv6 at all. So what that means is that I can't buy a future-proof DSL router, and there's really no good reason why this should be the case other than lazyness on the part of the router manufacturers.
Well, you just convince the adult movies industry to switch over to IPv6 and disable IPv4..
:)
But how many people are actually going to phone up their ISP and demand porn
You would think scheduling a big upgrade for the middle of the holiday season would be asking for trouble.
Sensible people don't leave stuff till the last minute.
Sensible people would already be running IPv6 *now* since it's been fairly well proven for many years.
Of course most business people seem to not be sensible, so this will be another Y2K style problem of leaving everything until the sky falls in and IANA says "sorry, there are no more IPv4 addresses" and then running around like headless chickens trying to refit their entire network infrastructure within a few days.
This problem comes up time and time again - businesses get told by the techies "this is going to be a problem - we should do something about it before it's actually causing us trouble". The highups refuse to fund the work so it doesn't get done. Then when the fact that it wasn't done causes the sky to fall in the work has to be done anyway, but now it has to be done quickly, meaning that care can't be taken to make it a smooth transition. The end result is that it costs the business far more than it would've done if they had just taken notice of the techies in the first place.
On a related note, did you know that telephone networks are replacing their antiquated TDM/SS7 infrastructure with shiny new IP networks.... and guess what, they are spending vast amounts of cash rolling out IPv4 networks rather than IPv6... Crazy huh?
Report to CEO: According to this user, there is no Free Software that plays HD-DVD under these conditions. Therefore our DRM is effective enough to stall this user from his form of copying.
So what you're saying is they would be happy if there was no way for anyone to use the HD-DVDs (and thus noone would ever buy them) since that would prevent copying?
According to this user, DRM *IS* slowing down the expected demographic from copying. However, our models do not agree that an addtional 200% of the audience still remains to be captured, and therefore we consider his logic flawed.
No, that's not what I said. What I said was that you have prevented 100 people from using copies and at the same time you have also reduced your total paying audiance by 200 people. I made no mention of a percentage of the total audiance.
The technical knowledge displayed by this user falls within the outlier range past the two-standard-deviation range. We consider losses like him to be acceptible business loss since we have regained the rest of our projected market.
Ok, look at it this way - I have the knowledge to circumvent most of the current copy protection on CDs. Which means that, if I so wish, I could choose to buy a copyprotected CD and still use it. On the other hand, an unknowledgable user isn't going to be able to do this, so as far as they are concerned the CD is just "broken". The unknowledgable user does, however, probably know how to drive LimeWire and download the CD illegally. So the unknowledgable user has a choice:
1. Buy a CD which is no use to them since they can't rip it for use on their computer/mp3 player/whatever
2. Do without the content
3. Illegally download the content.
Which option do _you_ think they will take? I'm betting (3).
Aparantly the DragonCAM can do it - not tried myself though: http://www.pulsat.com/satellite/site/details.php?p roduct_id=145
NDS VideoGuard sattelite and cable TV encryption
Incorrect - there are several (closed source) softcams for Windows and some of the programmable hardware CAMs (such as the DragonCAM) can do VideoGuard (although require a valid viewing card). Sadly, from what I can tell there are no open source softcams to do it (I'd dearly love to be able to ditch my Sky decoder and just let my MythTV box decrypt the channels I subscribe to directly from the DVB-S transport stream).
The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do? They can either implement some form of UK-based DRM or not attempt to show programmes online at all.
DRM is unnecessary - they can simply restrict access by IP address to UK residents. This would put the "protection" on par with their DVB streams (which they are actively pushing to be unencrypted), which are geographically restricted to (more or less) the UK. Just because you are delivering content over IP doesn't mean you need extra protection - it's just as easy to proxy a DVB stream to a non-UK IP address as it is to proxy an IP stream to a non-UK IP address.
The BBC's charter requires that they make the content available for all licence payers without tieing them to equipment sold by specific manufacturers. The current iPlayer does not meet the charter since it requires you to use Windows. They have not said when a Linux version will be available, only that they will review the situation every 6 months (which implies it will take several years). Also, they keep saying they are aiming for a platform agnostic solution by releasing players for Windows, OS X and Linux - that is _not_ platform agnostic - what happens if I want to play content on my phone or other device not running these OSes? The *only* way to be platform agnostic is to use an open standard and thus allow anyone to implement a player for a platform of their choice.
I'd prefer the DRM version then to wait for some form of non-DRM equivalent to be implemented!
As a licence payer, I would prefer them not to waste my licence fee on this crap if they aren't going to implement it in a platform agnostic way in accordance with their charter. Using the licence fee to pay for a system that can only be used on a platform produced by a single vendor (a totally unethical vendor at that) is unacceptable.
Actually yes, I do "use locks" - however I am not in any way caught up in the fantasy world (eg as inhabited by the RIAA, MPAA, etc) of believing that locking my car/house/etc actually prevents any reasonably organised or determined criminal from stealing anything.
I think you are perpetuating the myth that the DRM "locks" only deter people from committing a criminal act. In fact, the DRM prevents a significant number of people for doing what they are legally entitled to do, and thinks to the EUCD and DMCA the DRM now turns them into criminals for exercising their legal rights - great huh?
The purpose of DRM was to curb copying, which it has done.
But at what cost?
Sure, I can't copy an HD-DVD(*), but that's ok coz I'm not going to bother buying an HD-DVD until I can play an HD-DVD using Free software (which ultimately means the DRM would have to be cracked).
It doesn't make good economic sense to stop 100 people using copies if the means to prevent copying also stops 200 people from buying it in the first place. And unless you can stop *all* copying, those who don't want to buy DRM'd content can always find the content in an un-DRM'd format through other (not legal) means.
As far as I'm concerned, if I buy a CD (for example), I have the right to play that CD on my computer, rip it to Vorbis format, etc. If the publisher designs the CD so that I can't exercise those rights then it is useless to me and I will get the content via some other means in a DRM-free format. If the publisher makes sure *all* official formats are DRM'd then the only choices I have are to either do without the content, or download the content illegally - either way the content producer doesn't get their money.
It would be quite possible (though not exactly trivial) to record a given segment of the data stream and hack the particular key used to encrypt it, thus "breaking the DRM" on that particular block of content.
I've not seen DirecTV, but here in the UK, a lot of satellite content is encrypted with NDS VideoGuard and then streamed over DVB. It's very easy to record a chunk of DVB stream to work on (plug the LNB into a DVB-S receiver card and cat the whole transport stream to a file).
The question is, how far do you want to go to crack the DRM - if you only want to receive the channels you're subscribed to then you just need to work out the encryption algorithm and let the viewing card provide the keys. The algorithm isn't something that's going to change regularly, so cracking that for a single block of content will allow you to decode pretty much any content that your viewing card will provide the keys for.
On the other hand, if you want to be able to watch content without a viewing card then you're going to have to crack the card too, and that is harder.
NDS VideoGuard _has_ been cracked (to the point that you still need your viewing card), but unfortunately noone seems to have released a softCAM as Free software (there are a few closed source softCAMs floating around for Windows, the DreamBox has a working SoftCAM in it, and there are programmable hardware CAMs which can be made to do NDS VideoGuard). I'm not interested in receiving channels I'm not entitled to, but I _am_ interested in being able to decode the ones I am subscribed to.
"Because," he pointed out, "if the copy protection prevents just one person from copying it, it's done its job."
Has it still done it's job when it pisses off a lot of the customers to the point that they won't bother buying the next thing you release?
Why not have the graphics card itself decompressing the MPEG contents?
This is already done to some extent - e.g. a number of graphics drivers have the XvMC extension, which allows offloading of MPEG2 motion compensation to the card. The problem here is that when a new codec appears you need to update the drivers (and maybe the hardware). For example, whilest the nVidia drivers provide XvMC support, they can't help with H.264 decoding.
Also, offloading all the decoding to the graphics card will limit the amount of post-processing you can do to the video since the CPU will not have access to the raw video (think: deinterlacing, special effects, etc).