You can see a difference between an all digital and mixed digital and analog setup.
My HD-DVR puts out both HDMI and YCbCr component, and my HD-TV takes both inputs. So I'm able to switch between the two and compare the exact same input signal. Honestly with my gear I can't see one whit of difference.
Since HDMI/HDCP has the occasional glitch-requiring-reboot, I don't even bother with HDMI anymore. The hassle outweighs the benefit.
This article pimps UDI, which uses an HDMI-backwards compatible plug and can do higher bandwidth (10.8Gbps) and HDCP (copy protection enforcement).
Unfortunately, HDCP implementation sucks. Standard procedure for the problems almost everyone has with HDCP-enabled cable boxes is to *reboot the box*. Apparently, in the exchange of encryption keys a handshake sometimes gets dropped, and nobody has a firmware solution.
Of course, even it worked right, HDCP would still suck.
Just like with the rest of the Open Source community, there are a mix of motives and situations. I'm not a kernel developer, but as an observer of FOSS generally:
Some are paid to work on Linux as employees of Linux distros like Red Hat or Novel, or work for hardware or system vendors who want their products to work with Linux (HP, Intel, Dell, etc.).
Some are in job positions in corporations where they use Linux, and need/want a particular piece of third-party hardware to work for their application (be it a financial database or what have you).
Some are in academia and have the time to "publish" open source.
Some are just enthusiasts or experts or learners in a particular domain, and enjoy the challenge and notoriety they get. Some leverage that unpaid notoriety in order to get paying jobs. (FOSS credentials are portable.)
And yeah, some just get cheetos brought down to the basement by mom.;)
Windows and Solaris provide a binary kernel API so that compiled code can be loaded. We can release drivers without giving away the keys to the hardware. Linux explicitly doesn't allow that. With Linux it is all or nothing, and many hardware manufacturers choose the predictable 'nothing' instead of the less predictable 'all'.
It probably is true that the Linux kernel's intentional lack of ABI compatibility has been a hurdle for some vendors who would otherwise produce a proprietary kernel driver for their hardware. It hasn't stopped nvidia from doing that, and it hasn't stopped that company that sells winmodem drivers, among others.
But really, closed-source drivers are bad for so many reasons that pretty much everyone here already knows about (unmaintainable, un-redistributable, can't be reviewed for security or other trust issues, can't be improved upon). Plus Linux has been able to grow very rapidly, and an ABI-compatibility constraint would have hampered that. So enabling closed-source drivers is a big lose on many fronts.
Sure there are going to be a few vendors who feel they absolutely cannot open their drivers and cannot open their hardware specs enough to let the community produce an open driver. There are several different reasons a company might take this position, some more valid than others (given that binary drivers can be disassembled by a competing vendor anyway).
My bet is that as these vendors see other companies having a good working relationship with the kernel community, more of them will see that the benefits of opening (shifting some development/support/maintenance/liability costs outside of their own budgets, having access to the increasing Linux market) outweigh the benefits of keeping their specs closed.
So anything Greg K-H & other kernel devs & the OSDL/Linux Foundation do to reach out to these vendors and provide a process that they can understand and trust deserves kudos, IMHO.
You'll notice that the credit-card fraud-rate is lower in europe, where we have relatively strong data-protection laws, than in the USA where personal data is protected less.
I'm interested in privacy issues, and wasn't aware of that. What do you think accounts for the difference in fraud-rate? Is it because Europe's laws require companies to handle credit card numbers themselves more carefully? Or because companies are required to more carefully handle the identifying information that could be used to open bogus card accounts?
I would say that most Americans aren't very aware of Europe's approach to privacy. (But then most of us don't even know that having only 2-weeks of vacation per year is insane.)
But I probably wouldn't encourage people to install Ubuntu first, like I did in the past, but instead point them to Fedora.
It's funny you didn't say RHEL instead of Fedora. I wonder why. Oh that's right, you have to *pay* for it. Does that mean Red Hat doesn't support FOSS either? I'm just so confused.
I don't run Ubuntu myself, but it seems to me this deal provides more freedom. From the FAQ:
In addition to the free service and products, users may also use CNR to access commercial products and services as well as proprietary drivers, but it's entirely up to them.
That means if you want to, you can buy proprietary codecs and stuff. But it's not part of Ubuntu's distro, and nobody will twist your arm.
This might help make it possible to finally switch grandmas and girlfriends from Windows.
How do I, as a consumer, boycott ChoicePoint or Axciom?
For some reason it is legal for companies I do business with to sell my personal information to them (and for other companies and the US Gov't to buy it from them).
As a consumer I usually have no knowledge of this, and therefore no leverage in the marketplace. That's why government action (legislation + enforcement) is a necessary part of the solution for this particular problem.
My concern is that this legislation legitimizes these private information databases (choosing to regulate them a tad) instead of abolishing them outright.
That means that in order to execute any such programs on their OLPC, those programs are going to need to be "signed" by an "authority" before they can be executed.
Umm, NO.
If you RTFA, they specifically designed the security model so that children could write their own apps which can do *anything*. But they set up some defaults (which can be overridden) to protect the system.
What they are aiming at is a way to set sensible limits per-program, at install time:
The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user's behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.
So at install time, a package (they call it a bundle IIRC) has a list of specific rights that the program will need in order to do its job. If the bundle doesn't ask for a certain right at install time and tries to use it later (because, say, it was maliciously modified), it will be denied.
If an app *is* signed by OLPC, it can have any right that it specifically asks for at install time. Otherwise, there are some rules about what subsets of rights are allowable together (i.e. asking for certain rights will exclude certain others by default). But again, the whole thing can be overridden.
This is nothing like Trusted Computing or DRM. It's more like a wrapper around SELinux (I don't know if that's actually how they implemented it).
So flame me, but Schenier has little authority when he speaks of psychology.
If you read the essay you'll see that he isn't inventing his own psychological theories. He's doing a survey of several fields that have produced results relevant to security, and showing how those results affect decision-making and perception around security.
He may make mistakes in applying theories from other fields, but it's only by publishing his applications that the academic conversation can occur. Cross-disciplinary stuff is like that.
For your enjoyment, here's the list of references from his essay, many from outside the field of security. #10 sounds especially authoritative;)
1 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
2 Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, HarperCollins, 1998.
3 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Willful Thinking, Little, Brown & Co, 2005.
4 Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
5 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, HarperCollins, 2004.
6 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
7 David Ropeik and George Gray, Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You, Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
8 Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books, 1999.
9 Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2000.
10 Daniel Gilbert, "If only gay sex caused global warming," Los Angeles Times, 2 Jul 2006.
11 Jeffrey Kluger, "Why we Worry About the Things we Shouldn't...And Ignore the Things we Should," Time, 26 Nov 2006.
12 Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Scribner, 2004.
13 Daniel Gilbert, "If only gay sex caused global warming," Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.
15 Gerg Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, et al, Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart, Oxford University Press, 1999.
16 Daniel Kahnerman and Amos Tversky, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," Econometrica, 1979, 47:263-291.
17 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnerman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice," Science, 1981, 211: 453-458.
18 John Adams, "Cars, Cholera, and Cows: The Management of Risk and Uncertainty," CATO Policy Analysis #335, March 4, 1999.
19 Daniel J. Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and R.H. Thaler, "Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem," Journal of Political Economy, 1990, 98: 1325-1348.
20 Jack L. Knetsch, "Preferences and Nonrevsrsibility of Indifference Curves," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1992, 17: 131-139.
21 David L. Rosenhan and Samuel Messick, "Affect and Expectation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966, 3: 38-44.
22 Neil D. Weinstein, "Unrealistic Optimism about Future Life Events," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1980, 39: 806-820.
23 P. Winkielman, R.B. Zajonc, and N. Schwarz, "Subliminal affective priming attributional interventions," Cognition and Emotion, 1977, 11:4, 433-465.
24 Daniel Gilbert, "If only gay sex caused global warming," Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006.
25 Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2000.
26 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnerman, "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases," Science, 1974, 185:1124-1130.
27 Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
In his essay he tells a little joke about aiming for 100% security:
I remember in the weeks after 9/11, a reporter asked me: "How can we prevent this from ever happening again?" "That's easy," I said, "simply ground all the aircraft."
100% security has never been his aim. His aim, AFAICT, is to distinguish real security from BS, so we can evaluate the costs and tradeoffs and then make smart choices.
More on this philosophy:
The truth is that we're not hopelessly bad at making security trade-offs.[...]There are several specific aspects of the security trade-off that can go wrong. For example:
1. The severity of the risk.
2. The probability of the risk.
3. The magnitude of the costs.
4. How effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk.
5. How well disparate risks and costs can be compared.
The more your perception diverges with reality in any of these five aspects, the more your perceived trade-off won't match the actual trade-off.
1. The music industry forced us to use DRM (FairPlay) with iTunes 2. We can't license FairPlay to others, because if it gets cracked we are required to update it everywhere very quickly or we get in trouble. 3. Since the record companies sell 90% of their music free of DRM anyway (on CDs), they should let us drop DRM for iTunes. 4. If the record industry would let us drop DRM, we would do it "in a heartbeat". 5. My Reality Distortion Field pwnz U all! Mwahahahahaha!
MS has just released a new OS that is more locked down with DRM than any other OS so far.
Which MS did in order to deliver HD-DVD, using the same excuse that Jobs uses to justify iTunes/FairPlay ("they won't let us sell content without it").
Let's see what Apple does or doesn't do to their OS to support HD movies before we judge them less evil than MS in this regard.
OK thanks, I didn't know that only iTunes sells iPod-compatible DRM.
In trying to evaluate whether Jobs is just making "not-my-fault" excuses, or is serious about saying that Apple would embrace DRM-free music, this statistic is also interesting (FTA):
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?
It's true, the people I know who use iPods with only legal music stick entirely with ripped CDs or legal mp3s.
80 PLUS rocks. Why can't I do a search for 80 PLUS-certified power supplies on newegg.com? And for some PSUs they sell that are 80 PLUS, Newegg's product page doesn't even tell you.
Let's look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store - they are the industry's most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that's 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today's most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
I think he's assuming that all of the 97% of non-iTunes music is non-DRM, but it may be possible that some fraction was bought from other stores. Anyway, it's interesting data, IMHO.
The second phase of the translator project, including translators for Spreadsheet (Microsoft Office Excel®) and Presentation (Microsoft Office PowerPoint®), will begin in February. Regular customer technology previews will be posted to SourceForge.net beginning in May 2007, and the final versions are scheduled to be available for customers in November 2007.
One thing I'm wondering is how to automatically keep the OpenXML translator up to date on windows. If you install it from the MS Office Downloads site, will WindowsUpdate just keep it updated for you?
Slashdot Mirror
My HD-DVR puts out both HDMI and YCbCr component, and my HD-TV takes both inputs. So I'm able to switch between the two and compare the exact same input signal. Honestly with my gear I can't see one whit of difference.
Since HDMI/HDCP has the occasional glitch-requiring-reboot, I don't even bother with HDMI anymore. The hassle outweighs the benefit.
This article pimps UDI, which uses an HDMI-backwards compatible plug and can do higher bandwidth (10.8Gbps) and HDCP (copy protection enforcement).
Unfortunately, HDCP implementation sucks. Standard procedure for the problems almost everyone has with HDCP-enabled cable boxes is to *reboot the box*. Apparently, in the exchange of encryption keys a handshake sometimes gets dropped, and nobody has a firmware solution.
Of course, even it worked right, HDCP would still suck.
Just like with the rest of the Open Source community, there are a mix of motives and situations. I'm not a kernel developer, but as an observer of FOSS generally:
;)
Some are paid to work on Linux as employees of Linux distros like Red Hat or Novel, or work for hardware or system vendors who want their products to work with Linux (HP, Intel, Dell, etc.).
Some are in job positions in corporations where they use Linux, and need/want a particular piece of third-party hardware to work for their application (be it a financial database or what have you).
Some are in academia and have the time to "publish" open source.
Some are just enthusiasts or experts or learners in a particular domain, and enjoy the challenge and notoriety they get. Some leverage that unpaid notoriety in order to get paying jobs. (FOSS credentials are portable.)
And yeah, some just get cheetos brought down to the basement by mom.
It probably is true that the Linux kernel's intentional lack of ABI compatibility has been a hurdle for some vendors who would otherwise produce a proprietary kernel driver for their hardware. It hasn't stopped nvidia from doing that, and it hasn't stopped that company that sells winmodem drivers, among others.
But really, closed-source drivers are bad for so many reasons that pretty much everyone here already knows about (unmaintainable, un-redistributable, can't be reviewed for security or other trust issues, can't be improved upon). Plus Linux has been able to grow very rapidly, and an ABI-compatibility constraint would have hampered that. So enabling closed-source drivers is a big lose on many fronts.
Sure there are going to be a few vendors who feel they absolutely cannot open their drivers and cannot open their hardware specs enough to let the community produce an open driver. There are several different reasons a company might take this position, some more valid than others (given that binary drivers can be disassembled by a competing vendor anyway).
My bet is that as these vendors see other companies having a good working relationship with the kernel community, more of them will see that the benefits of opening (shifting some development/support/maintenance/liability costs outside of their own budgets, having access to the increasing Linux market) outweigh the benefits of keeping their specs closed.
So anything Greg K-H & other kernel devs & the OSDL/Linux Foundation do to reach out to these vendors and provide a process that they can understand and trust deserves kudos, IMHO.
I'm interested in privacy issues, and wasn't aware of that. What do you think accounts for the difference in fraud-rate? Is it because Europe's laws require companies to handle credit card numbers themselves more carefully? Or because companies are required to more carefully handle the identifying information that could be used to open bogus card accounts?
I would say that most Americans aren't very aware of Europe's approach to privacy. (But then most of us don't even know that having only 2-weeks of vacation per year is insane.)
Because of all the pipe dreams, no doubt.
Now they'll have something to eat besides all the cockroaches.
Vpnc works great but it doesn't do certificates yet like the Cisco client.
It's funny you didn't say RHEL instead of Fedora. I wonder why. Oh that's right, you have to *pay* for it. Does that mean Red Hat doesn't support FOSS either? I'm just so confused.
P.S., I'm making a point, not baiting flames.
That means if you want to, you can buy proprietary codecs and stuff. But it's not part of Ubuntu's distro, and nobody will twist your arm.
This might help make it possible to finally switch grandmas and girlfriends from Windows.
How do I, as a consumer, boycott ChoicePoint or Axciom?
For some reason it is legal for companies I do business with to sell my personal information to them (and for other companies and the US Gov't to buy it from them).
As a consumer I usually have no knowledge of this, and therefore no leverage in the marketplace. That's why government action (legislation + enforcement) is a necessary part of the solution for this particular problem.
My concern is that this legislation legitimizes these private information databases (choosing to regulate them a tad) instead of abolishing them outright.
If you RTFA, they specifically designed the security model so that children could write their own apps which can do *anything*. But they set up some defaults (which can be overridden) to protect the system.
What they are aiming at is a way to set sensible limits per-program, at install time: So at install time, a package (they call it a bundle IIRC) has a list of specific rights that the program will need in order to do its job. If the bundle doesn't ask for a certain right at install time and tries to use it later (because, say, it was maliciously modified), it will be denied.
If an app *is* signed by OLPC, it can have any right that it specifically asks for at install time. Otherwise, there are some rules about what subsets of rights are allowable together (i.e. asking for certain rights will exclude certain others by default). But again, the whole thing can be overridden.
This is nothing like Trusted Computing or DRM. It's more like a wrapper around SELinux (I don't know if that's actually how they implemented it).
If you read the essay you'll see that he isn't inventing his own psychological theories. He's doing a survey of several fields that have produced results relevant to security, and showing how those results affect decision-making and perception around security.
;)
He may make mistakes in applying theories from other fields, but it's only by publishing his applications that the academic conversation can occur. Cross-disciplinary stuff is like that.
For your enjoyment, here's the list of references from his essay, many from outside the field of security. #10 sounds especially authoritative
Let's just hope that Osama isn't an organ donor.
More on this philosophy:
Yes, but this article actually has content.
Can you kindly read the rest of the thread before you bother posting? MMMOk, thanks.
1. The music industry forced us to use DRM (FairPlay) with iTunes
2. We can't license FairPlay to others, because if it gets cracked we are required to update it everywhere very quickly or we get in trouble.
3. Since the record companies sell 90% of their music free of DRM anyway (on CDs), they should let us drop DRM for iTunes.
4. If the record industry would let us drop DRM, we would do it "in a heartbeat".
5. My Reality Distortion Field pwnz U all! Mwahahahahaha!
Let's see what Apple does or doesn't do to their OS to support HD movies before we judge them less evil than MS in this regard.
In trying to evaluate whether Jobs is just making "not-my-fault" excuses, or is serious about saying that Apple would embrace DRM-free music, this statistic is also interesting (FTA): It's true, the people I know who use iPods with only legal music stick entirely with ripped CDs or legal mp3s.
80 PLUS rocks. Why can't I do a search for 80 PLUS-certified power supplies on newegg.com? And for some PSUs they sell that are 80 PLUS, Newegg's product page doesn't even tell you.
For example, this Antec EA380 Newegg product page doesn't even mention 80 PLUS, but clicking through to the manufacturer's product page clearly shows the 80 PLUS logo.
C'mon newegg! Get with it!
TFA is verrry light on technical details, but even bluetooth 2.0 is something like 3Mb/s. So transfering 10GB would take what, like 2 hours?
What I'm saying is it's fine for streaming LUG Radio, but not great for backing up your pr0n to something you can leave hidden under the mattress.