The parts of Linux community that really are Nvidia customers in a serious way are also dependent on the availablity of a complete, standards compliant openGL implementation, which means they not only depend on the Nvidia driver, but also the libraries, that Nvidia is not likely to support on top of anything except their driver.
Interesting. Perhaps that explains the sharp split I see in this forum between those who insist that only Nvidia makes a card usable on Linux and those who (like me) see the Nvidia drivers as buggy garbage that is not worth installing. The first group must be willing to tolerate the bugs in order to get some features that the average desktop user does not need.
They are probably worried that releasing low-level specifications for external driver writers would create the following burdens:
1. Answering inevitable questions related to those specs
2. Pressure to not change driver-visible behavior across generations
3. Dealing with the fallout from people using buggy drivers written by third parties--most of the anger will be directed at NVidia eventhough the real problem is that not everybody is qualified to write a tricky low-level driver.
These sound like likely rationalizations. The answers are:
1) Answering some questions (i.e., publishing a spec.) is better than answering none.
2) Changing driver-visible behavior must make life difficult for their own developers. Avoiding it where possible is a good idea.
3) They are themselves publishing buggy drivers right now.
Good luck running your state if you make it impossible to sell cars there.
This would not make it impossible to sell cars there. The auto manufacturers are already providing these service manuals to their dealers. This law would require them to sell them to anyone who wants to buy them. This doesn't make it even difficult for them to sell cars there.
While I'm sure they would be in direct violation of Massachusetts law, the whole argument would be rendered moot should the industry take it to the federal court. Massachusetts most likely would lose.
I would expect the case against Massachusetts to be dismissed quickly. There would be no conflict whatsoever between the laws. By publishing the information encrypted form the auto manufacturer would be engaging in a straightforward violation of the state law. The DMCA does not grant anyone special authority to encrypt anything and certainly not as a way to evade legally required disclosure.
Not necessarily. The constitution defines certain areas in which the federal goverment can make laws. If a matter is clearly in that area, the federal law trumps. If it is clearly not in that area, the federal law can be struck down outright as unconstitutional. There are numberous grey areas which create controversy.
The auto manufactures could encrypt the computers and any attempt to crack it would be grounds for violating the DMCA (anti-circumvention portion).
If this is information that they are legally required to disclose, this trick would not work. If things worked that way, I could encrypt my tax return and tell the IRS, "I have filed as required. Sorry you can't read it, but we have the DMCA, you know."
They're saying "providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals".
So, my interpretation of that is:
"If we released the drivers as open source, then people might figure out how to optimize and tune the Linux drivers. This could result in a better GPU experience on Linux than under Windows. That would embarrass us. To ensure a consistent experience across platforms, we therefore must prevent others from tinkering with the drivers, which mandates closed source."
Does anyone else read it that way?
No, they are saying that as long as Nvidia releases a driver for Linux, customers don't need to know how to program the card themselves and should stop complaining. Very patronizing. Those who are complaining don't want Nvidia to open-source its driver. They want the information they need to write a completely new driver.
Most common excuse for don't open the source for drivers is IP. But most part of times, the real reason is users will see there is no difference in hardware between standard and platinum cards.
Yes, that is a common excuse. It is a sort of a boogy-man. It probably isn't true, but it is scary. Remember, two of the three video card makers have already released the requested information.
So ATi opens up, and the community COMPLETELY failed to deliver a usable solution.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "usable solution". I can now pop in a recent AMD card, install Ubuntu, and working opensource drivers are automatically installed. Hardware accelaration (including OpenGL support) just works. That's good enough for me. Perhaps you have stricter requirements.
Nvidia has surely wronged here, the angry hippie want's them to give THEIR source code for FREE. Nothing wrong with that eh?
I don't get it. It's their code, let them do whatever they wish with it, they paid money for making it.
Nobody wants their code. We want specs. Some of us think that if we buy a video card, we should be told how to operate it with a program we write. This was the industry norm in the MS-DOS days.
Vote with your wallet and go by Amd chips, stop griefing over stupid things.
Linus should be sending Nvidia chocolates and flowers on the anniversary of Nvidia first Linux driver release. 3D / hardware acceleration on Linux was in a terrible state for a very long time. Open source drivers were going almost nowhere, and there was a very small number of cards on the market with "proper" support. Even if Nvidia opened up their full design so people could design open soruce drivers, those drivers would still be way behind where Nvidia is. Nvidia closed source drivers are certainly much easier to use and far more effective than the alternative for people that *gasp* want to use their PC and not make a statement about open source issues. I know a few people who only switched over to Linux (for good) after they got an Nvidia card and would be properly supported.
Or we could look to the present when the open source ATI drivers are more than good enough for most users.
I did not, however, it makes sense. They also don't want to show you all of the software voodoo they have in the driver that runs on your CPU, but should be running on your video card
No one ask has asked them to. They have been asked to explain the boring bit twiddling which a competing driver (likely without the voodoo and hence of slightly lower performance) would need to do.
Seriously, I don't see any point in anyone supporting that piece of crap. Every NVidia card I've ever tried it on has resulted in either a blank screen, or a flickering blue screen - this goes from older NVidia cards (which should be supported by now) right up to the latest new $2000+ cards - it works on nothing. Why do distributions even bundle it? All it does is make it difficult for people with NVidia cards to get their distro up and running, because first they have to deliberately disable the nouveau driver, force the system to use bare bones vesa, add the real driver manually, and then re-configure the system to use it. Not exactly "new user friendly" there.
Seriously distro maintainers - nouveau is a chunk of crap, dump it and you'll be making your distro easier to use for a lot of people. Even if you have NVidia cards all get sent to the low-res vesa driver by default, at least they'll be able to see things on their screens.
My experience is different. I just ran some tests on Ubuntu 12.04. Both Nouveau and Nvidia's own driver worked, the difference was thet Nouveau worked without screen glitches during video mode switches. There was no noticable difference when running Bzflag at max quality.
I'm pretty sure Linus doesn't really care about whether the driver is FOSS or not (he just wants to make sure it's freely available to those who want it), but he is concerned that it doesn't play well with kernel updates, with the result that often updating your kernel will break nvidia's driver, as opposed to 90% of all the other proprietary drivers out there (number pulled from my ass).
Most drivers don't break between kernel versions because they can be distributed with the kernel and the kernel developers can fix problems with them. The kernel developers dislike the closed-source drivers because they are huge, complicated, and opaque. They would like the hardware manufacturers to answer questions about how the hardware works so that they can write their own lean drivers. They just need to know what all of the 'buttons' do./p.
Why should the Linux community take the burden to design, maintain and upgrade a "stable API for drivers" only to bend to the desire of a company that by their own admission doesn't care about Linux?
Because this is a problem for ALL drivers and every other OS does the correct way. Why should hardware manufactures take the burden to design, maintain and upgrade drivers only to bend to the whims of the linux community?
By and large the "whim" of the Linux community is "tell us how your card works on the register level and we will write the drivers ourselves." Most manufactures fell in line years ago when they figured out that they were being asked to do less, not more. Nvidia is one of the last holdouts.
The most likely reason for their unwillingness to release specs is incompence. They have most likely never produced decent documention even for internal use. In other words, their developement process is disorganized. Producing good documentation might mean employing two or three extra persons. But, it would be worth it since not only Linux driver developers would benefit, their own developers would benefit. After all, the binary drivers of which they seem to be so proud do not exactly have a reputation for high quality.
As for rule of law... Well there certainly aren't 30k terrorists in the USA. The people put on surveillance must then include criminals and innocent people. I'd love to see statistics on what crimes these 30k are accused of and how many of them do not get convicted (or their case never goes to trial to being with).
The article doesn't even mention terrorism. This includes all cases where someone's phone was tapped or his e-mail read under a court order. For the police to tell someone that they have tapped his phone or are reading his e-mail would defeat the whole purpose of doing so.
The judge in the article does not want to stop tapping the phones of suspected mobsters and shady politicians. He wants to have the warrants unsealed automatically after a certain number of years have gone by. That way, anyone who was not a legitimate suspect would have a chance to complain in court.
You're fine with 1 in 100 people being under surveillance? Think about that.
Um,.01% is 1 in 10,000.
If it were 1 in 100, that would mean about 85,000 secret surveillance orders a year in a city the size of New York City. That would be clearly absurd. 1 in 10,000 would mean 850. The idea that there are 850 mobsters, corrupt politicians, and foreign spies in New York City doesn't exactly strain creduality.
That would surely require a constitutional amendment.
Hardly. It would just require our silent acquiescence.
Like how Obama has normalized Bush's radical policies of due process free detention...
Even the War on Terror trump card goes only so far. Extending copyright so that access to bills could be restricted is so pointless and would antagonize so may powerful organizations that silent acquiescence is most unlikely. The line to sue would be out the door. People would see this as affecting their rights. In contrast, almost nobody thinks that rules about enemy combatants could ever have any relevance to him.
I swear there's a quotation of Twain where he has choice words for anyone who dares to change his text, but I can't find it...
I remember that reading that when his books were first published the editor removed anything then considered offensive. I don't remember what all that was though I do remember that it included references to perspiration. Twaine told the woman who did the editing at the children's book publisher that she could use scissors to remove anything she thought improper, but she was not to alter one word of what was left.
Twaine knew that he tended to be crude. He relied on friends and editors to tell him when it should be toned down.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that would be a problem. These bills are part of the public domain. Now Congress could pass a law changing that status...but I don't want to give them any ideas!
That would surely require a constitutional amendment. Otherwise it could hardly be expected to withstand challenge on the basis that it 1) exceeds the powers granted in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution (since such a law clearly does not promote the progress of Science and the useful arts), and 2) that it violates the first amendment right to discuss public affairs. I would expect the government to be enjoined from enforcing such a law within days if not hours.
By sending them to law school, having them pass the bar exam, getting them appointed as a federal judge and then having them specialize in copyright issues.
You see, the second you say "it's okay for a private person to decide whether or not you're breaking the law" you expose copyright for the sham it truly is.
I think the point is that you don't need enough federal judges to watch every minute of video. You would set up a heirarcy of workers with increasing qualifications. Most of the workers would have gone through a few days of training. They might sort the videos into two piles: those with no third-party material, and those with some. The workers on the next level might sort those with some third party material into those which probably constitute fair use, those which almost certainly do not, and the borderline cases. The borderline cases would go to someone with formal legal training.
And signal to every camera that they're up to no good:p
Obscuring the license plate is illegal;)
I suppose that depends on how the scanners work. I suspect they scan the frame for things which look like license plate numbers. If the IR lamps create enough glare, the scanner might record nothing.
I am looking forward to the comical legal exchanges which are likely to ensue the first time someone is accused of "obscuring" his license plate in this way.
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The parts of Linux community that really are Nvidia customers in a serious way are also dependent on the availablity of a complete, standards compliant openGL implementation, which means they not only depend on the Nvidia driver, but also the libraries, that Nvidia is not likely to support on top of anything except their driver.
Interesting. Perhaps that explains the sharp split I see in this forum between those who insist that only Nvidia makes a card usable on Linux and those who (like me) see the Nvidia drivers as buggy garbage that is not worth installing. The first group must be willing to tolerate the bugs in order to get some features that the average desktop user does not need.
They are probably worried that releasing low-level specifications for external driver writers would create the following burdens:
1. Answering inevitable questions related to those specs
2. Pressure to not change driver-visible behavior across generations
3. Dealing with the fallout from people using buggy drivers written by third parties--most of the anger will be directed at NVidia eventhough the real problem is that not everybody is qualified to write a tricky low-level driver.
These sound like likely rationalizations. The answers are:
1) Answering some questions (i.e., publishing a spec.) is better than answering none.
2) Changing driver-visible behavior must make life difficult for their own developers. Avoiding it where possible is a good idea.
3) They are themselves publishing buggy drivers right now.
Good luck running your state if you make it impossible to sell cars there.
This would not make it impossible to sell cars there. The auto manufacturers are already providing these service manuals to their dealers. This law would require them to sell them to anyone who wants to buy them. This doesn't make it even difficult for them to sell cars there.
While I'm sure they would be in direct violation of Massachusetts law, the whole argument would be rendered moot should the industry take it to the federal court. Massachusetts most likely would lose.
I would expect the case against Massachusetts to be dismissed quickly. There would be no conflict whatsoever between the laws. By publishing the information encrypted form the auto manufacturer would be engaging in a straightforward violation of the state law. The DMCA does not grant anyone special authority to encrypt anything and certainly not as a way to evade legally required disclosure.
Federal law trumps state law.
Not necessarily. The constitution defines certain areas in which the federal goverment can make laws. If a matter is clearly in that area, the federal law trumps. If it is clearly not in that area, the federal law can be struck down outright as unconstitutional. There are numberous grey areas which create controversy.
The auto manufactures could encrypt the computers and any attempt to crack it would be grounds for violating the DMCA (anti-circumvention portion).
If this is information that they are legally required to disclose, this trick would not work. If things worked that way, I could encrypt my tax return and tell the IRS, "I have filed as required. Sorry you can't read it, but we have the DMCA, you know."
They're saying "providing a consistent GPU experience across multiple platforms for all of our customers continues to be one of our key goals".
So, my interpretation of that is:
"If we released the drivers as open source, then people might figure out how to optimize and tune the Linux drivers. This could result in a better GPU experience on Linux than under Windows. That would embarrass us. To ensure a consistent experience across platforms, we therefore must prevent others from tinkering with the drivers, which mandates closed source."
Does anyone else read it that way?
No, they are saying that as long as Nvidia releases a driver for Linux, customers don't need to know how to program the card themselves and should stop complaining. Very patronizing. Those who are complaining don't want Nvidia to open-source its driver. They want the information they need to write a completely new driver.
Most common excuse for don't open the source for drivers is IP. But most part of times, the real reason is users will see there is no difference in hardware between standard and platinum cards.
Yes, that is a common excuse. It is a sort of a boogy-man. It probably isn't true, but it is scary. Remember, two of the three video card makers have already released the requested information.
So ATi opens up, and the community COMPLETELY failed to deliver a usable solution.
I guess that depends on what you mean by "usable solution". I can now pop in a recent AMD card, install Ubuntu, and working opensource drivers are automatically installed. Hardware accelaration (including OpenGL support) just works. That's good enough for me. Perhaps you have stricter requirements.
Nvidia has surely wronged here, the angry hippie want's them to give THEIR source code for FREE. Nothing wrong with that eh?
I don't get it. It's their code, let them do whatever they wish with it, they paid money for making it.
Nobody wants their code. We want specs. Some of us think that if we buy a video card, we should be told how to operate it with a program we write. This was the industry norm in the MS-DOS days.
Vote with your wallet and go by Amd chips, stop griefing over stupid things.
I agree.
Linus should be sending Nvidia chocolates and flowers on the anniversary of Nvidia first Linux driver release. 3D / hardware acceleration on Linux was in a terrible state for a very long time. Open source drivers were going almost nowhere, and there was a very small number of cards on the market with "proper" support. Even if Nvidia opened up their full design so people could design open soruce drivers, those drivers would still be way behind where Nvidia is. Nvidia closed source drivers are certainly much easier to use and far more effective than the alternative for people that *gasp* want to use their PC and not make a statement about open source issues. I know a few people who only switched over to Linux (for good) after they got an Nvidia card and would be properly supported.
Or we could look to the present when the open source ATI drivers are more than good enough for most users.
I did not, however, it makes sense. They also don't want to show you all of the software voodoo they have in the driver that runs on your CPU, but should be running on your video card
No one ask has asked them to. They have been asked to explain the boring bit twiddling which a competing driver (likely without the voodoo and hence of slightly lower performance) would need to do.
Seriously, I don't see any point in anyone supporting that piece of crap. Every NVidia card I've ever tried it on has resulted in either a blank screen, or a flickering blue screen - this goes from older NVidia cards (which should be supported by now) right up to the latest new $2000+ cards - it works on nothing. Why do distributions even bundle it? All it does is make it difficult for people with NVidia cards to get their distro up and running, because first they have to deliberately disable the nouveau driver, force the system to use bare bones vesa, add the real driver manually, and then re-configure the system to use it. Not exactly "new user friendly" there.
Seriously distro maintainers - nouveau is a chunk of crap, dump it and you'll be making your distro easier to use for a lot of people. Even if you have NVidia cards all get sent to the low-res vesa driver by default, at least they'll be able to see things on their screens.
My experience is different. I just ran some tests on Ubuntu 12.04. Both Nouveau and Nvidia's own driver worked, the difference was thet Nouveau worked without screen glitches during video mode switches. There was no noticable difference when running Bzflag at max quality.
I'm pretty sure Linus doesn't really care about whether the driver is FOSS or not (he just wants to make sure it's freely available to those who want it), but he is concerned that it doesn't play well with kernel updates, with the result that often updating your kernel will break nvidia's driver, as opposed to 90% of all the other proprietary drivers out there (number pulled from my ass).
Most drivers don't break between kernel versions because they can be distributed with the kernel and the kernel developers can fix problems with them. The kernel developers dislike the closed-source drivers because they are huge, complicated, and opaque. They would like the hardware manufacturers to answer questions about how the hardware works so that they can write their own lean drivers. They just need to know what all of the 'buttons' do./p.
He should start looking at making a stable API for drivers, and draw a line in the sand to firewall GPL compliance.
That would be counter-productive since it would just make it easier for companies to supply junk drivers instead of documentation.
Why should the Linux community take the burden to design, maintain and upgrade a "stable API for drivers" only to bend to the desire of a company that by their own admission doesn't care about Linux?
Because this is a problem for ALL drivers and every other OS does the correct way. Why should hardware manufactures take the burden to design, maintain and upgrade drivers only to bend to the whims of the linux community?
By and large the "whim" of the Linux community is "tell us how your card works on the register level and we will write the drivers ourselves." Most manufactures fell in line years ago when they figured out that they were being asked to do less, not more. Nvidia is one of the last holdouts.
The most likely reason for their unwillingness to release specs is incompence. They have most likely never produced decent documention even for internal use. In other words, their developement process is disorganized. Producing good documentation might mean employing two or three extra persons. But, it would be worth it since not only Linux driver developers would benefit, their own developers would benefit. After all, the binary drivers of which they seem to be so proud do not exactly have a reputation for high quality.
Openly bashing NVIDIA for doing things their way is wrong, because it's their product, and, therefore, their decision.
The right to make a decision does not include the right not to be criticised for the descision one make.
It isn't NVIDIA's job to make drivers for someone else's OS.
Does Nvidia have an OS of its own?
As for rule of law... Well there certainly aren't 30k terrorists in the USA. The people put on surveillance must then include criminals and innocent people. I'd love to see statistics on what crimes these 30k are accused of and how many of them do not get convicted (or their case never goes to trial to being with).
The article doesn't even mention terrorism. This includes all cases where someone's phone was tapped or his e-mail read under a court order. For the police to tell someone that they have tapped his phone or are reading his e-mail would defeat the whole purpose of doing so.
The judge in the article does not want to stop tapping the phones of suspected mobsters and shady politicians. He wants to have the warrants unsealed automatically after a certain number of years have gone by. That way, anyone who was not a legitimate suspect would have a chance to complain in court.
You're fine with 1 in 100 people being under surveillance? Think about that.
Um, .01% is 1 in 10,000.
If it were 1 in 100, that would mean about 85,000 secret surveillance orders a year in a city the size of New York City. That would be clearly absurd. 1 in 10,000 would mean 850. The idea that there are 850 mobsters, corrupt politicians, and foreign spies in New York City doesn't exactly strain creduality.
Hardly. It would just require our silent acquiescence.
Like how Obama has normalized Bush's radical policies of due process free detention...
Even the War on Terror trump card goes only so far. Extending copyright so that access to bills could be restricted is so pointless and would antagonize so may powerful organizations that silent acquiescence is most unlikely. The line to sue would be out the door. People would see this as affecting their rights. In contrast, almost nobody thinks that rules about enemy combatants could ever have any relevance to him.
I swear there's a quotation of Twain where he has choice words for anyone who dares to change his text, but I can't find it...
I remember that reading that when his books were first published the editor removed anything then considered offensive. I don't remember what all that was though I do remember that it included references to perspiration. Twaine told the woman who did the editing at the children's book publisher that she could use scissors to remove anything she thought improper, but she was not to alter one word of what was left.
Twaine knew that he tended to be crude. He relied on friends and editors to tell him when it should be toned down.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that would be a problem. These bills are part of the public domain. Now Congress could pass a law changing that status...but I don't want to give them any ideas!
That would surely require a constitutional amendment. Otherwise it could hardly be expected to withstand challenge on the basis that it 1) exceeds the powers granted in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution (since such a law clearly does not promote the progress of Science and the useful arts), and 2) that it violates the first amendment right to discuss public affairs. I would expect the government to be enjoined from enforcing such a law within days if not hours.
1) Judges are not required. You can TRAIN people.
By sending them to law school, having them pass the bar exam, getting them appointed as a federal judge and then having them specialize in copyright issues.
You see, the second you say "it's okay for a private person to decide whether or not you're breaking the law" you expose copyright for the sham it truly is.
I think the point is that you don't need enough federal judges to watch every minute of video. You would set up a heirarcy of workers with increasing qualifications. Most of the workers would have gone through a few days of training. They might sort the videos into two piles: those with no third-party material, and those with some. The workers on the next level might sort those with some third party material into those which probably constitute fair use, those which almost certainly do not, and the borderline cases. The borderline cases would go to someone with formal legal training.
Didn't anyone at the store find it suspicious that an expensive big Lego set would suddenly be heavily discounted?
I Lego fan might, but would the average person know that a plastic toy should cost more than $50?
And signal to every camera that they're up to no good :p
Obscuring the license plate is illegal ;)
I suppose that depends on how the scanners work. I suspect they scan the frame for things which look like license plate numbers. If the IR lamps create enough glare, the scanner might record nothing.
I am looking forward to the comical legal exchanges which are likely to ensue the first time someone is accused of "obscuring" his license plate in this way.