It's cool that Fedora is sharing this stuff openly. It would be great if you could also be upfront about the plans for FC7. Which variant of these FC7 Metrics proposals have you decided on going with?
If you're doing something wrong, and they happen to catch you because they were looking for someone else -- then you shouldn't have been doing whatever it was you were doing.
Whether you are doing something wrong is not the point. The point is that having police search your house because they're looking for someone else in the general area tramples your rights. That search is oppressive in and of itself.
A full-pipe search is like a house-to-house search in that respect. It is justified in only the most extreme circumstances.
The bigger story for me is that Mark Russinovich, who wrote all those great sysinternals programs, and who investigated the Sony rootkit, is now a Microsoft employee. I guess that's because I missed this story back in July.
If a few of the most populated states like CA, [...] decide to blow it off...
CA Senator Diane Feinstein is one of the "liberals" who strongly supports Real ID. (She's also sponsoring a pro-DRM bill, and she voted to affirm the NSA chief who brought us illegal wiretapping to be head of the CIA claming that he would "speak truth to power".)
I suspect that many of her loyal constituents would be upset about that if they knew, but how many people have the first clue about what the federal government has been doing?
The point is, yeah the states *could* block Real ID, but Senators see increased federal power as the hammer for all nails, and their constituents are mostly in the dark.
Interesting read. I didn't realize that Cerf is now a VP and "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google. This quote (emph. mine) nails it, IMHO:
The best long-term answer to this problem is significantly more broadband competition. Ideally, physical layer problems merit physical layer solutions. While the prospects for such "intermodal" competition remain dim for the foreseeable future, Congress should ensure that the FCC has all the tools it needs to maximize the chances for long-term success in this area.
1. It sounds like they won't be pulling NSA cables out of the AT&T (and other) facilities. They're just claiming to use them under FISA now. This wired blog raises some interesting questions about this. 2. During Attorney General Gonzales' previous congressional testimony on this topic, he was very careful and lawerly in asserting that his statements only applied to the program under discussion, that is the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". The clear implication is that there are other programs besides TSP which have not seen the light of day.
In short, don't let this stop the oversight hearings.
The way we see it people will either buy these plugins as a way to support our general work on GStreamer or they buy it cause they need something legally licensed in their jurisdiction.
Thanks for making this very clear. This has been a missing piece for linux-on-the-desktop, so I hope the marketplace rewards you!
I'm going to buy the "everything" bundle myself for my windows-to-linux converts.
5) Is the software distro-aware? If I install it on Fedora, will I know if some livna RPM tries to blow away a library?
I found the answer to this part on Christian's blog.
The codecs are distributed inside tarballs together with instructions. We realize this is not as painless an install as one could wish for. But doing packages for a million and one distro's was not a plausible solution either. That said we are working on a codec installer/updater which will automatically download and install any codec bought in the shop.
I hope Fluendo will consider providing packages for the top three distros. But I guess distro communities could provide a source package a la jpackage.org for Sun Java.
I tried to understand the Conditions of Use but I have questions that should be in a FAQ on your site:
1) The license seems to say "per computer". Does that mean it's OK to install the same software in two versions of Linux on the same (dual-boot) computer?
2) Is there a process for me to legally move the software to a different computer (deleting it on the old one, of course).
3) Does the software "phone home" in any way?
4) The Indemnity clause demands that the buyer (licensee) indemnify you against anything. Where's the part where you promise that you have legally licensed the patents that you are implementing, thus indemnifying *us*?
5) Is the software distro-aware? If I install it on Fedora, will I know if some livna RPM tries to blow away a library?
The 'technology community' in general has shown no interest in building systems and standards that contain provisions for reasonably safeguarding IP contentholders legal rights
The technology community has shown that it is a practical impossibility to prevent copy-ability, and attempts to do so are burdensome to the consumer, stifle innovation, and are doomed to be cracked anyway.
Ultimately the answer to this problem is not a technological one. You (the *AA) need to spend your efforts educating people as to what is and is not fair use.
When people are taught why copying a friend's CD is theft, but ripping to their iPod is not, a *surprising* number of people will do the right thing most of the time.
This may sound hopelessly naive to you (or to anyone with a heart pumping greedy green goo), but there are tons of examples of the efficacy of public awareness campaigns if you just look.
Anything that your computer plays / outputs through speakers, can be recorded. And easily too. And in quality indistinguishable from the source, if you have the right equipment. Those facts will never change, no matter what DRM is used.
That is, until everyone is running Vista or later.
Vista is supposed to degrade the sound quality of (some) DRM-protected content that is output through a non-copy-protected channel. From the whitepaper (emphasis mine):
Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content.
But you're right, what they are trying to do is essentially impossible. Doesn't stop them from trying, and making us pay for it.
Not all delays can be considered procrastination; the key is that a person must believe it would be better to start working on given tasks immediately, but still not start.
Slashdot karma be damned, but IMHO LOTR almost completely failed to capture that Tolkienesque feel that I get from reading the books.
As a Tolkien fan, it could have been far far worse, and it was still an epic movie-making acheivement. I enjoyed the films for what they were. Seeing a cave troll was neat and all, but that over-the-top style, blaring music, and constant cgi-on-steroids action missed the finer points of Tolkien's sense of history and especially language. For god's sake man, let's hear a riddle or two!
So I say let someone with a lighter touch try to capture the spirit of Tolkien on film for The Hobbit.
The final initiative is the Patent Quality Index which seeks to define a quantitative metric for the quality of patents.
The article failed to mention that the metric will be a web-based distributed evaluation system, in which nerds in basements will view each patent and score them either "hot or not".
1. If they wanted to make the effort, they could release the portions that are not covered by third-party licenses. That would probably help the OSS driver writers a lot even if it's not enough to be a whole driver on its own.
2. If they wanted to make the effort, they could probably get or buy agreement from at least some of their licensors. Again, any bits would help.
But aside from the costs of 1 and 2, nVidia may have other reasons to not open their driver. For example, their lawyers might have made them afraid that they could be held liable for software patent claims against their existing code.
From nVidia's point of view, they probably don't envision the costs outweighing the benefits. So why make that effort?
This is true, the law went into effect recently (a year maybe?). I don't know why the parent is modded down, it's relevant to the topic at hand.
I've had a couple of scares as a result. Once I lost my wallet and didn't realize it until after I was driving. Another time I just forgot my wallet (which happens occasionally when I break my routine of storing keys and wallet together).
Ah, there's nothing like that extra nervous feeling you get when you see a cop and know that he could arrest you if he doesn't like your bumper stickers. My ID is now a liferaft. I can't wait until they insert the chip/barcode tatoo/biometric database and then I'll finally be safe to leave the house without fear.
I think Red Hat is still working out how to allow real community involvement while still keeping control. And they seem to be making progress. If they get the balance right, maybe they'll end up with more people on their boards who will take users' needs into consideration more naturally.
Transparency needed to come first, and that's way better now. Fedora's governance was non-obvious, with a different Leader of the Week handing down Red Hat fiats. Now they seem to be consciously trying to expose more of the decision making process, and the leadership team seems more stable and active. This is all to the good.
I'd still like to see more voices on the advisory board that take the user point of view. You'll get some swinging dick who says "Hey let's just track all Fedora users so we know how many there are, and who cares if some people whine about privacy." And nobody is there to say: "Whoa there cowboy, we're not Microsoft yet."
But if they're moving towards more open governance as it appears, I think they'll end up hearing out their users' concerns more as a consequence.
I haven't noticed any impact on the DVR. It takes a long time for it to recover the guide information, but it's complete by the time I use it. (They could cache it on the disk for quicker recovery, but nooo.)
Actually, this model (moto dct 6412 w/comcast software) has had enough problems that a lot of users recommend power cycling it often anyway. So I get that benefit as a side-effect.
But IMHO it's laziness to burn a full 50W when off. As it is, when "off" the disk constantly chatters, no doubt spooling stuff for decoding. I'm pretty sure that both video decoders are going full blast. They could turn those off in standby (I'm pretty sure an earlier firmware version did turn them off), and still have some brains alive to download channel info (and upload my usage patterns and video of my living room on demand).
But then, what's their incentive to save *my* electricity?
TFA points out something many people don't know which materially affects their privacy. The fact that there are other ways of gathering the same data does not negate the fact that cookies are actively used for that purpose, nor is it "hysteria" to point out such use of cookies. Hence my reply to your post.
DoubleClick cannot read its cookie any other time, when there's no HTTP connection from your computer to DoubleClick. Like all the rest of the pages on which DoubleClick has no banner or other "self-clicking" link.
I think the article was just addressing the fact that web usage across totally different sites (including Slashdot) is tracked (w/ the help of cookies) by the likes of doubleclick. That in itself is of interest, and many users still don't realize that it goes on. If that's news to a reader of the article, now they know that blocking doubleclick's cookies might help their online privacy a little.
Missing the point. If it's the fault of whoever did the dumb stuff, then your boss gets canned, not you.
I don't know if you've worked in the real world, but that has never happened in my experience. I've seen people fired for being malicious, but not for doing something dumb that caused damage. Not even once. And that's because places that value their people know they aren't robots.
What we do agree on is that if your network can't handle the occasional dumb stuff then you're definitely hosed.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be interesting to see stats for CPU and video for FC7 installs, I hope you guys will publish some of that.
It's cool that Fedora is sharing this stuff openly. It would be great if you could also be upfront about the plans for FC7. Which variant of these FC7 Metrics proposals have you decided on going with?
A full-pipe search is like a house-to-house search in that respect. It is justified in only the most extreme circumstances.
Now if we could just hold pharmaceutical companies responsible for their half of the spam in my inbox.
The bigger story for me is that Mark Russinovich, who wrote all those great sysinternals programs, and who investigated the Sony rootkit, is now a Microsoft employee. I guess that's because I missed this story back in July.
I suspect that many of her loyal constituents would be upset about that if they knew, but how many people have the first clue about what the federal government has been doing?
The point is, yeah the states *could* block Real ID, but Senators see increased federal power as the hammer for all nails, and their constituents are mostly in the dark.
1. It sounds like they won't be pulling NSA cables out of the AT&T (and other) facilities. They're just claiming to use them under FISA now. This wired blog raises some interesting questions about this.
2. During Attorney General Gonzales' previous congressional testimony on this topic, he was very careful and lawerly in asserting that his statements only applied to the program under discussion, that is the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". The clear implication is that there are other programs besides TSP which have not seen the light of day.
In short, don't let this stop the oversight hearings.
Thanks for making this very clear. This has been a missing piece for linux-on-the-desktop, so I hope the marketplace rewards you!
I'm going to buy the "everything" bundle myself for my windows-to-linux converts.
I found the answer to this part on Christian's blog.
I hope Fluendo will consider providing packages for the top three distros. But I guess distro communities could provide a source package a la jpackage.org for Sun Java.
I tried to understand the Conditions of Use but I have questions that should be in a FAQ on your site:
1) The license seems to say "per computer". Does that mean it's OK to install the same software in two versions of Linux on the same (dual-boot) computer?
2) Is there a process for me to legally move the software to a different computer (deleting it on the old one, of course).
3) Does the software "phone home" in any way?
4) The Indemnity clause demands that the buyer (licensee) indemnify you against anything. Where's the part where you promise that you have legally licensed the patents that you are implementing, thus indemnifying *us*?
5) Is the software distro-aware? If I install it on Fedora, will I know if some livna RPM tries to blow away a library?
Thanks in advance for any information.
The technology community has shown that it is a practical impossibility to prevent copy-ability, and attempts to do so are burdensome to the consumer, stifle innovation, and are doomed to be cracked anyway.
Ultimately the answer to this problem is not a technological one. You (the *AA) need to spend your efforts educating people as to what is and is not fair use.
When people are taught why copying a friend's CD is theft, but ripping to their iPod is not, a *surprising* number of people will do the right thing most of the time.
This may sound hopelessly naive to you (or to anyone with a heart pumping greedy green goo), but there are tons of examples of the efficacy of public awareness campaigns if you just look.
See A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutmann.
Vista is supposed to degrade the sound quality of (some) DRM-protected content that is output through a non-copy-protected channel. From the whitepaper (emphasis mine):
But you're right, what they are trying to do is essentially impossible. Doesn't stop them from trying, and making us pay for it.
Slashdot karma be damned, but IMHO LOTR almost completely failed to capture that Tolkienesque feel that I get from reading the books.
As a Tolkien fan, it could have been far far worse, and it was still an epic movie-making acheivement. I enjoyed the films for what they were. Seeing a cave troll was neat and all, but that over-the-top style, blaring music, and constant cgi-on-steroids action missed the finer points of Tolkien's sense of history and especially language. For god's sake man, let's hear a riddle or two!
So I say let someone with a lighter touch try to capture the spirit of Tolkien on film for The Hobbit.
The article failed to mention that the metric will be a web-based distributed evaluation system, in which nerds in basements will view each patent and score them either "hot or not".
1. If they wanted to make the effort, they could release the portions that are not covered by third-party licenses. That would probably help the OSS driver writers a lot even if it's not enough to be a whole driver on its own.
2. If they wanted to make the effort, they could probably get or buy agreement from at least some of their licensors. Again, any bits would help.
But aside from the costs of 1 and 2, nVidia may have other reasons to not open their driver. For example, their lawyers might have made them afraid that they could be held liable for software patent claims against their existing code.
From nVidia's point of view, they probably don't envision the costs outweighing the benefits. So why make that effort?
This is true, the law went into effect recently (a year maybe?). I don't know why the parent is modded down, it's relevant to the topic at hand.
I've had a couple of scares as a result. Once I lost my wallet and didn't realize it until after I was driving. Another time I just forgot my wallet (which happens occasionally when I break my routine of storing keys and wallet together).
Ah, there's nothing like that extra nervous feeling you get when you see a cop and know that he could arrest you if he doesn't like your bumper stickers. My ID is now a liferaft. I can't wait until they insert the chip/barcode tatoo/biometric database and then I'll finally be safe to leave the house without fear.
I think Red Hat is still working out how to allow real community involvement while still keeping control. And they seem to be making progress. If they get the balance right, maybe they'll end up with more people on their boards who will take users' needs into consideration more naturally.
Transparency needed to come first, and that's way better now. Fedora's governance was non-obvious, with a different Leader of the Week handing down Red Hat fiats. Now they seem to be consciously trying to expose more of the decision making process, and the leadership team seems more stable and active. This is all to the good.
I'd still like to see more voices on the advisory board that take the user point of view. You'll get some swinging dick who says "Hey let's just track all Fedora users so we know how many there are, and who cares if some people whine about privacy." And nobody is there to say: "Whoa there cowboy, we're not Microsoft yet."
But if they're moving towards more open governance as it appears, I think they'll end up hearing out their users' concerns more as a consequence.
I haven't noticed any impact on the DVR. It takes a long time for it to recover the guide information, but it's complete by the time I use it. (They could cache it on the disk for quicker recovery, but nooo.)
Actually, this model (moto dct 6412 w/comcast software) has had enough problems that a lot of users recommend power cycling it often anyway. So I get that benefit as a side-effect.
But IMHO it's laziness to burn a full 50W when off. As it is, when "off" the disk constantly chatters, no doubt spooling stuff for decoding. I'm pretty sure that both video decoders are going full blast. They could turn those off in standby (I'm pretty sure an earlier firmware version did turn them off), and still have some brains alive to download channel info (and upload my usage patterns and video of my living room on demand).
But then, what's their incentive to save *my* electricity?
TFA points out something many people don't know which materially affects their privacy. The fact that there are other ways of gathering the same data does not negate the fact that cookies are actively used for that purpose, nor is it "hysteria" to point out such use of cookies. Hence my reply to your post.
I think the article was just addressing the fact that web usage across totally different sites (including Slashdot) is tracked (w/ the help of cookies) by the likes of doubleclick. That in itself is of interest, and many users still don't realize that it goes on. If that's news to a reader of the article, now they know that blocking doubleclick's cookies might help their online privacy a little.
Not only that, but site list is sorted without grouping by domain. So o.nytimes.com is far away in the list from video.nytimes.com. That's just lame.
When I measured power usage around my house not long ago, most remote-on devices used 1W each in standby. But there were some exceptions:
A cable co.-supplied DVR uses 52-53W ON, and 50W when "OFF". (I put a lamp timer on that thing, since I don't record overnight anyway.)
A regular (non-DVR) cable box uses 15-16W ON, and 15W OFF.
An HP4110 fax/scan/printer uses 10-11W ON(idle), and 10-11W OFF. (Ok, not a remote-on device. WTF?)
Stereo, LCD monitors, and CRT TV each uses =1W in standby.
I don't know if you've worked in the real world, but that has never happened in my experience. I've seen people fired for being malicious, but not for doing something dumb that caused damage. Not even once. And that's because places that value their people know they aren't robots.
What we do agree on is that if your network can't handle the occasional dumb stuff then you're definitely hosed.