I am curious to know why there don't seem to be many video capture cards that can handle higher quality video signals. Composite and s-video capture is easy to do with cards like the PVR-250 and so on, but I've connected my home cinema up with connections like RGB scart and component video. Is the circuitry prohibitively expensive?
I can see why the media cartels would want to limit the capture of high quality streams (if you can record the hi-def version for free, why buy the DVD?), but surely somebody's got a PC solution for capturing higher quality video?
But if copy prevention has been forced on us, in the form of HDCP etc., then surely we can now make compliant devices that can capture unencrypted DVI/HDMI video signals? That's what copy prevention is for, right? Don't allow copying of restricted media, but allow it for unrestricted media?
I'd really like to put a homebrew PC in my setup to act as a PVR, but have it record at component video quality. Are there any solutions? If so, are they any that have open source drivers?
You could ALWAYS put any other media player you want on it, but now you have to.
I made another post on this issue. Let me just quote something that I think is important:
.. If Joe Average ends up with a PC loaded with Windows Reduced Monopoly Edition, then they would have probably bought it from a retailer who would have plugged the media gap with an alternative player before the machine was sold.
If Dell started selling PCs with this version of windows, you could bet your arse that it would probably come with iTunes or Winamp installed and preconfigured instead.
They'd probably only download WMP if it's forced upon them by a 'critical' update.
I reckon that if Joe Average ends up with a PC loaded with Windows Reduced Monopoly Edition, then they would have probably bought it from a retailer who would have plugged the media gap with an alternative player before the machine was sold.
If Dell started selling PCs with this version of windows, you could bet your arse that it would probably come with iTunes or Winamp installed and preconfigured instead.
Microsoft's own choice of "Reduced Media Edition" is deceptive, and it seems that the EU picked up on that.
MS would obviously try to make out that the RME would not be as good as the normal version, hence persuading customers to cement their WMP monopoly if possible. Implying somehow that media playback isn't quite up to scratch in this new version might sway customers/retailers to going for the non-N editions.
I say that the original name was deceptive because it implies that media playback is not as good on the 'full' versions of Windows. Your choice of media is somehow 'reduced'. Of course, this is false: you can put ANY media player you want on it.
MS also have a habit of naming their products very generically. For example, "Internet Explorer", or "Windows Media Player". If you say to the average Windows-using Joe, "Play this file in a media player", the words "media player" probably get translated into "Windows Media Player" in their head: that's the effect of the generic naming. It makes them think that there is only one media player. Therefore, calling this "Reduced Media Edition" might make people think that it's not capable of playing media at all. It's a *good thing* that the EU picked up on this small point.
As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel.
Novel means "strikingly new, unusual, or different". Non-obvious means "not obvious". Neither of these follow directly from the fact that nobody's done it before.
I think Microsoft has clearly seen that nobody else has bothered to patent this, and so they have jumped on it in order to have a legal weapon to stop interopability, should such a situation ever occur in the future.
I think OGG needs a sugardaddy -- a sponsor like Linux has with IBM -- someone with bucks that can really take ownership of pushing it into the marketplace by demonstrating its power and versatility.
I'd like to see some interesting bundling deals on retail store shelves:
"Buy Ubuntu Linux on CD and an iRiver player loaded with $ARTIST's last 5 albums for $CHEAP_PRICE!"
Having software that rips your CDs to Vorbis by default (or MP3 if you prefer) would be marvellous. I just don't think there's enough marketing clout available for it.
The bitstream format of Ogg Theora has been frozen, meaning that any Theora video now will still be a valid Theora video in the future.
Theora encoders are very likely nowhere near the level maturity held by some of the other codecs here (somebody who knows better back that up for me - I know nothing about Theora encoders) that have actually been around for ages. Still, it would have been nice to see Theora in action. Even if it was just as a comparison of how far they have to go really, it would have been useful to see.
You're absolutely right; the goal is not to force everybody onto GNU/Linux. Instead, a better goal would be to allow the user to use whatever platform they want.
There's a key area underlying that goal: adoption of open standards.
If there's an incredibly popular platform X whose applications use mostly open standards, then the interopability challenge is generally minimal to make a similar app on (or port to) another platform.
Consider this: if the most popular applications on Windows used open standards, then people who wanted to use Windows could do so; those who thought it sucked could move to another platform, be it Mac, Linux, or BSD, with minimal transfer costs. Why minimal transfer costs? Because their documents, music, and videos are in formats easily readable by a number of different applications. The openly-documented network protocols they would have used on one platform could be implemented just as well on the next. All you need is someone to write the application.
So this brings us back to the question that the article asked: is OSS on Windows good for Linux? Well: * Open source software tends to favour open standards. * If the OSS apps use them correctly, then an increase in the popularity of OSS apps on Windows increases the adoption of open standards on Windows. * These open standards may well be in use already on other platforms. And if they're not, just go ahead and code them: no patents or NDAs are stopping you. * The Windows user who uses OSS apps now has an easier time moving to another platform, should they wish. * Everybody's happy, apart from proponents of Vendor lock-in.
If the browser could offer to use the IE rendering engine as a secondary option, should the user wish to visit a mal-designed web site, then it would be a very useful quick switch.
Obviously, to do this sensibly, you would have to: * Switch back to gecko the moment the user left the mal-designed site. * Disable ActiveX by default. And then only use it when the IE rendering engine is enabled.
For those who know what they're doing, this is certainly a plus point.
If it's suitably unintrusive enough to be used by the masses, then I think it could just work out in Netscape's favour.
But if I, as the tech-savvy computer user, wish to rip some of my CDs (or vinyls, whatever) to a digital format for playback on my portable device, I'd appreciate being able to use an open format.
I can't do that with WMA.
Of course, the masses won't care, since WMP will rip to WMA by default, which will work (we hope) on all the MS-supporting media devices.
"Over time, proprietary standards always lose because industry standards always win because you get more for less," said Michael A. George, the general manager of Dell's consumer business. Dell has just introduced a 5-gigabyte music player, using the Windows standard...
I wonder if any of the general public will realise what contradictory behaviour this is?
"Proprietary standards always lose, so that's why our media player uses a proprietary standard (WMA) and the iPod uses an open format (AAC)".
(Mp3 has delibarately been left out of the above sarcastic statement, due to its obvious ubiquity).
I bought a nice cobalt blue Microsoft wireless mouse recently, and have noticed that it's incredibly difficult to middle-click the wheel.
I inevitably end up scrolling up or down a line, clicking on some random text somewhere, and having firefox give me a page slightly based on what's in my clipboard.
* Preventing unofficial driver releases, the shortcomings of which may be blamed on the hardware maker by lesser-informed people.
* Some drivers really are quite complicated. Take graphics card drivers, for instance. NVidia are constantly coming up with newer versions that increase performance, as they discover new optimisations and so on.
* The old corporate mentality that one should never divulge any secrets, especially when they're full of complicated information (see previous point) that could be sold for a price to other companies.
* The drivers may imploy legally-encumbered procedures, such as patented algorithms (shudder), or trade secrets, or reveal details of hardware that would normally only be available under NDA.
But of course, the last few of these reasons are a load of shite, and ideally we'd all have openly-documented hardware, and hence nice open-source drivers for everything.
Keep badgering the hardware vendors: something will eventually happen (as shown by this story!).
What about all of those zombie machines out there that send spam via Outlook
Now this isn't exactly an email problem, but a user problem. If a zombified machine can effectively click send just like the (l)user normally would, then it can't be stopped.
However, since any recipients know exactly who the spam came from, they can inform the ISP that John H Luser is spamming them, and the ISP can take it from there.
Because unless it is beneficial to the businesses at large, and makes technical _and_ business sense, standards are not going to be implemented.
Businesses do not have a god-given right to profit at every moment.
Imagine that in the home cinema scene, that we came up with a standard for transmitting digital video and digital sound, with potential to upgrade the format in which the video/audio was sent in the future, should better codecs/formats arise. A bit like DV over Firewire, for instance.
Now, wouldn't it be great if that was the predominent standard, and every manufacturer implemented that? Think of the competition: you need an inexpensive interface, and that's it. Plug and go. You also need an inexpensive cable, no heavily-shielded cables for each primary colour or each discrete sound channel.
Any manufacturer could compete in the huge market it brought. If someone comes up with some better video format, then bingo: so long as it doesn't exceed the bandwidth of the cable, send it over that too!
Now, would businesses adopt it in any way other than perhaps a single auxiliary port? Nope, probably not.
Implementing a standard that is disruptive to current business practices might not get your standard widely adopted, but that doesn't make it a bad standard. In fact, I think that in such a situation, where businesses ignore the long-term benefits to keep down the short-term costs, is an example of market failure.
The anonymous coward parent should be modded up as a good question.
Red Hat make their money from services, don't they? Support contracts and so on?
That doesn't have to do much with developing the code other than the loose tie-in that they might know more about the code if they wrote it.
Of course, when the code is freely available for all to view, anybody who understands code can take a good look at it and offer their own independent support contracts.
Red Hat modify linux and the overlaying system tools, but they don't directly sell *them* (it's free software, after all). If they add anything on top that isn't free software, then by all means apply patents to that.
If you use the code, if you use their patented stuff, you had best negotiate a license or be sued out of existence. However, if you want to code around the patent, this could be very useful.
As much as this might disappoint the Perl hackers, there isn't always one way to do it. Sometimes there's only one good way of doing things (MP3 decoding comes to mind), and if the single-path bottleneck is patented then things might get difficult.
Why does free software have to be subjected to patents? It's not a commercial enterprise. If commercial entities stand to lose money from the competition of free software, surely that's their problem and not the free software coders'?
I think this could only work if the duration for which software patents were valid was shortened considerably (to, say, 3 years).
Slashdot Mirror
I am curious to know why there don't seem to be many video capture cards that can handle higher quality video signals. Composite and s-video capture is easy to do with cards like the PVR-250 and so on, but I've connected my home cinema up with connections like RGB scart and component video. Is the circuitry prohibitively expensive?
I can see why the media cartels would want to limit the capture of high quality streams (if you can record the hi-def version for free, why buy the DVD?), but surely somebody's got a PC solution for capturing higher quality video?
But if copy prevention has been forced on us, in the form of HDCP etc., then surely we can now make compliant devices that can capture unencrypted DVI/HDMI video signals? That's what copy prevention is for, right? Don't allow copying of restricted media, but allow it for unrestricted media?
I'd really like to put a homebrew PC in my setup to act as a PVR, but have it record at component video quality. Are there any solutions? If so, are they any that have open source drivers?
All comments appreciated.
You could ALWAYS put any other media player you want on it, but now you have to.
.. If Joe Average ends up with a PC loaded with Windows Reduced Monopoly Edition, then they would have probably bought it from a retailer who would have plugged the media gap with an alternative player before the machine was sold.
I made another post on this issue. Let me just quote something that I think is important:
If Dell started selling PCs with this version of windows, you could bet your arse that it would probably come with iTunes or Winamp installed and preconfigured instead.
They'd probably only download WMP if it's forced upon them by a 'critical' update.
I reckon that if Joe Average ends up with a PC loaded with Windows Reduced Monopoly Edition, then they would have probably bought it from a retailer who would have plugged the media gap with an alternative player before the machine was sold.
If Dell started selling PCs with this version of windows, you could bet your arse that it would probably come with iTunes or Winamp installed and preconfigured instead.
Microsoft's own choice of "Reduced Media Edition" is deceptive, and it seems that the EU picked up on that.
MS would obviously try to make out that the RME would not be as good as the normal version, hence persuading customers to cement their WMP monopoly if possible. Implying somehow that media playback isn't quite up to scratch in this new version might sway customers/retailers to going for the non-N editions.
I say that the original name was deceptive because it implies that media playback is not as good on the 'full' versions of Windows. Your choice of media is somehow 'reduced'. Of course, this is false: you can put ANY media player you want on it.
MS also have a habit of naming their products very generically. For example, "Internet Explorer", or "Windows Media Player". If you say to the average Windows-using Joe, "Play this file in a media player", the words "media player" probably get translated into "Windows Media Player" in their head: that's the effect of the generic naming. It makes them think that there is only one media player. Therefore, calling this "Reduced Media Edition" might make people think that it's not capable of playing media at all. It's a *good thing* that the EU picked up on this small point.
As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel.
Novel means "strikingly new, unusual, or different". Non-obvious means "not obvious". Neither of these follow directly from the fact that nobody's done it before.
I think Microsoft has clearly seen that nobody else has bothered to patent this, and so they have jumped on it in order to have a legal weapon to stop interopability, should such a situation ever occur in the future.
I think OGG needs a sugardaddy -- a sponsor like Linux has with IBM -- someone with bucks that can really take ownership of pushing it into the marketplace by demonstrating its power and versatility.
I'd like to see some interesting bundling deals on retail store shelves:
"Buy Ubuntu Linux on CD and an iRiver player loaded with $ARTIST's last 5 albums for $CHEAP_PRICE!"
Having software that rips your CDs to Vorbis by default (or MP3 if you prefer) would be marvellous. I just don't think there's enough marketing clout available for it.
The bitstream format of Ogg Theora has been frozen, meaning that any Theora video now will still be a valid Theora video in the future.
Theora encoders are very likely nowhere near the level maturity held by some of the other codecs here (somebody who knows better back that up for me - I know nothing about Theora encoders) that have actually been around for ages. Still, it would have been nice to see Theora in action. Even if it was just as a comparison of how far they have to go really, it would have been useful to see.
You're absolutely right; the goal is not to force everybody onto GNU/Linux. Instead, a better goal would be to allow the user to use whatever platform they want.
There's a key area underlying that goal: adoption of open standards.
If there's an incredibly popular platform X whose applications use mostly open standards, then the interopability challenge is generally minimal to make a similar app on (or port to) another platform.
Consider this: if the most popular applications on Windows used open standards, then people who wanted to use Windows could do so; those who thought it sucked could move to another platform, be it Mac, Linux, or BSD, with minimal transfer costs. Why minimal transfer costs? Because their documents, music, and videos are in formats easily readable by a number of different applications. The openly-documented network protocols they would have used on one platform could be implemented just as well on the next. All you need is someone to write the application.
So this brings us back to the question that the article asked: is OSS on Windows good for Linux? Well:
* Open source software tends to favour open standards.
* If the OSS apps use them correctly, then an increase in the popularity of OSS apps on Windows increases the adoption of open standards on Windows.
* These open standards may well be in use already on other platforms. And if they're not, just go ahead and code them: no patents or NDAs are stopping you.
* The Windows user who uses OSS apps now has an easier time moving to another platform, should they wish.
* Everybody's happy, apart from proponents of Vendor lock-in.
So the answer is... yes.
But on the other hand...
If the browser could offer to use the IE rendering engine as a secondary option, should the user wish to visit a mal-designed web site, then it would be a very useful quick switch.
Obviously, to do this sensibly, you would have to:
* Switch back to gecko the moment the user left the mal-designed site.
* Disable ActiveX by default. And then only use it when the IE rendering engine is enabled.
For those who know what they're doing, this is certainly a plus point.
If it's suitably unintrusive enough to be used by the masses, then I think it could just work out in Netscape's favour.
But if I, as the tech-savvy computer user, wish to rip some of my CDs (or vinyls, whatever) to a digital format for playback on my portable device, I'd appreciate being able to use an open format.
I can't do that with WMA.
Of course, the masses won't care, since WMP will rip to WMA by default, which will work (we hope) on all the MS-supporting media devices.
"Over time, proprietary standards always lose because industry standards always win because you get more for less," said Michael A. George, the general manager of Dell's consumer business. Dell has just introduced a 5-gigabyte music player, using the Windows standard...
I wonder if any of the general public will realise what contradictory behaviour this is?
"Proprietary standards always lose, so that's why our media player uses a proprietary standard (WMA) and the iPod uses an open format (AAC)".
(Mp3 has delibarately been left out of the above sarcastic statement, due to its obvious ubiquity).
What country do you live in?
I've never encountered anybody in my lifetime who has said 'Kleenex' when they meant tissue, here in the UK.
> Mozilla has ... middle-button-opens-new-tab.
Here's something weird:
I bought a nice cobalt blue Microsoft wireless mouse recently, and have noticed that it's incredibly difficult to middle-click the wheel.
I inevitably end up scrolling up or down a line, clicking on some random text somewhere, and having firefox give me a page slightly based on what's in my clipboard.
Conspiracy by MS to discourage middle clicking?
I'm curious..
What kind of restrictions would DRM place on DVD burning? How can the burning hardware tell whether it's burning copyright material or not?
A few reasons:
* Preventing unofficial driver releases, the shortcomings of which may be blamed on the hardware maker by lesser-informed people.
* Some drivers really are quite complicated. Take graphics card drivers, for instance. NVidia are constantly coming up with newer versions that increase performance, as they discover new optimisations and so on.
* The old corporate mentality that one should never divulge any secrets, especially when they're full of complicated information (see previous point) that could be sold for a price to other companies.
* The drivers may imploy legally-encumbered procedures, such as patented algorithms (shudder), or trade secrets, or reveal details of hardware that would normally only be available under NDA.
But of course, the last few of these reasons are a load of shite, and ideally we'd all have openly-documented hardware, and hence nice open-source drivers for everything.
Keep badgering the hardware vendors: something will eventually happen (as shown by this story!).
Typing this on a 21 inch monitor
I tend to find that monitors are better off as displays, rather than input devices..
What about all of those zombie machines out there that send spam via Outlook
Now this isn't exactly an email problem, but a user problem. If a zombified machine can effectively click send just like the (l)user normally would, then it can't be stopped.
However, since any recipients know exactly who the spam came from, they can inform the ISP that John H Luser is spamming them, and the ISP can take it from there.
Because unless it is beneficial to the businesses at large, and makes technical _and_ business sense, standards are not going to be implemented.
Businesses do not have a god-given right to profit at every moment.
Imagine that in the home cinema scene, that we came up with a standard for transmitting digital video and digital sound, with potential to upgrade the format in which the video/audio was sent in the future, should better codecs/formats arise. A bit like DV over Firewire, for instance.
Now, wouldn't it be great if that was the predominent standard, and every manufacturer implemented that? Think of the competition: you need an inexpensive interface, and that's it. Plug and go. You also need an inexpensive cable, no heavily-shielded cables for each primary colour or each discrete sound channel.
Any manufacturer could compete in the huge market it brought. If someone comes up with some better video format, then bingo: so long as it doesn't exceed the bandwidth of the cable, send it over that too!
Now, would businesses adopt it in any way other than perhaps a single auxiliary port? Nope, probably not.
Implementing a standard that is disruptive to current business practices might not get your standard widely adopted, but that doesn't make it a bad standard. In fact, I think that in such a situation, where businesses ignore the long-term benefits to keep down the short-term costs, is an example of market failure.
The parent meant to say "there isn't always MORE THAN one way to do it."
Yes, that's what I meant. I should actually read my posts after pressing preview..
The anonymous coward parent should be modded up as a good question.
Red Hat make their money from services, don't they? Support contracts and so on?
That doesn't have to do much with developing the code other than the loose tie-in that they might know more about the code if they wrote it.
Of course, when the code is freely available for all to view, anybody who understands code can take a good look at it and offer their own independent support contracts.
Red Hat modify linux and the overlaying system tools, but they don't directly sell *them* (it's free software, after all). If they add anything on top that isn't free software, then by all means apply patents to that.
If you use the code, if you use their patented stuff, you had best negotiate a license or be sued out of existence. However, if you want to code around the patent, this could be very useful.
As much as this might disappoint the Perl hackers, there isn't always one way to do it. Sometimes there's only one good way of doing things (MP3 decoding comes to mind), and if the single-path bottleneck is patented then things might get difficult.
Why does free software have to be subjected to patents? It's not a commercial enterprise. If commercial entities stand to lose money from the competition of free software, surely that's their problem and not the free software coders'?
I think this could only work if the duration for which software patents were valid was shortened considerably (to, say, 3 years).
I do actually feel an unstoppable compulsion to buy one of them..
Like Winston Churchill once said, "that is something up with which I shall not put".
Sonic sucked after Sonic 2
Burn him!!!! How dare he insult Sonic 3 + Sonic & Knuckles.. that has to be one of the most complete and brilliantly-made games in existence!
theft of approximately 8.2 gigabytes of data
I thought it was done remotely? How did they manage to physically remove the data from Acxiom?
Oh, so they don't mean steal, or theft. They mean unlawful copying. Right. Should have said.
</pedant>