Not only is JWZ right on target, there's the other factor to consider.
Suppose everyone boycotts DVDs and it DOES work. Sales plummet. What will MPAA announce? "Sales are down x% since the eeeevil pirating program DeCSS was released. Obviously everyone's pirating now, and for the good of the world we must put Johansen on death row!". It's just like the RIAA's announcement last year when 1998 record sales were down the MP3s were responsible. That rhetoric's nowhere to be found now that 1999 CD sales hit an all-time high.
Someone really needs to make sure EFF and the other defense lawyers know about that - there's a giant REAL piracy operation going on and MPAA is paying no attention to it.
If AOL owns 2 of the big record companies (keep in mind who's "on top" in the AOL-TW merger), that could mean good things in terms of putting the smack down on RIAA. Consider this: 2 of the RIAA's big member companies will be owned by the makers of an MP3 player (AOL owns Nullsoft Winamp/Macamp). That's gotta make Hilary Rosen nervous.
Will Steve Case have the savvy to pioneer online music distribution? He's in the right position now - he has the content, he's got the websites, and he even has player software. Stay tuned...
Corel has already committed HUGE chunks of code and bugfixes to Wine, and that includes in the last couple of months. Corel paid Cygnus to add several MS Visual C++ compatibility features to gcc. These are now available free of charge for everyone in gcc 2.95.2. Even if they never submit another patch they'll have done a ton of good things for Wine, including many "unsexy" things that wouldn't normally get done in an open source project.
That said, they have indeed slowed down commits recently as they approach beta. It's because they want to have a stable tree to build a shipping product. This is perfectly normal, as anyone who's developed commercial software knows. (heck, or even non-commercial - the Linux kernel has code freezes too). They've been reasonably open about the process with the Wine team (ie, we don't know their ship dates, but we don't care either).
As far as future participation, they're going to merge back any Wine bugfixes they make post-codefreeze once their apps go gold. They are currently paying Alexandre Julliard (Wine's leader) to make a necessary major architectural change that should greatly improve compatibility for Win32 apps. (Keep in mind this change won't help their applications - it's only for running existing Windows binaries that it comes fully into play). Once all this is done and shaken down I think you'll see a real "beta" version of Wine rather than the current pre-alphas. So if you have a favorite Windows app that's misbehaving read wine/documentation/bug-reports in the Wine source distribution and get posting on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.
Finally, Corel's work is even helping their competitors - we are aware on wine-devel of a fairly major Mac/Windows app who's developers have it up and running on WineLib to prove to their bosses that a Linux port is easy and feasible. It's doubtful that would've happened this soon if Corel hadn't gotten involved and blazed the trail.
BTW, Wine is under an X11-style license (and is switching to the real X11 license as we speak). If it were GPL'd it would be useless for closed-source commercial applications such as Corel's.
That message means the drive's region didn't match the disc. There are a few reasons for this:
1) wrong-region disc in a region-locked drive 2) attempting to use a dvd-rom drive that hasn't had it's firmware "cold-booted" by usage on a Windows machine (don't laugh, it's true for certain very brain-dead drives) 3) incorrect or no DVD-ROM kernel patch from www.kernel.dk (the January 8, 2000 version against 2.2.14 is known to work well on a lot of drives, but if you have an oddball one email Jens Axboe and he can likely sort you out).
I don't have the actual patent number, but my understanding is that Gemstar has a patent on the concept of a user-controlled on-screen channel grid. For instance, all DSS recievers have to pay these morons money under their patent, as do some of the newer TVs that have a guide built-in.
What's really funny about this is that the on-screen channel guide is pretty much secondary to the TiVo's functionality - they AREN'T being sued over the actual hard-disc-recorder aspects.
This is the most frequently asked question of all. Wine does not and cannot support.VXD/.SYS kernel-mode device drivers (this includes all winmodems). Whine at your laptop/modem maker for Linux support - at least Lucent has put out a binary-only module for their winmodems. And work is ongoing on a "generic" Linux winmodem driver - see www.linmodems.org.
The current drivers come with compilable source, but it's been so badly obfuscated as to be useless. You see things like *(29384+57+a) = (((12+2) 3) + (159)); Some effort has gone into "reverse engineering" this source code, but at least one of those guys gave up and bought a G400.
There also is no register-level documentation for any of the cards. 3Dfx, ATI, and Matrox have all supplied this and have gained good drivers as a result.
This means for instance that the utah-glx guys (including Carmack) a) can't fix bugs b) can't enable DMA (which would at least make things competitive with the Windows drivers) and c) can't optimize in general.
You're missing the point by about 10 miles. Assuming you aren't simply astroturfing (and the bit about "productive and functional" makes me wonder), sit back and learn.
It's been proven time and again that in the case of video drivers, open source wins every time. 3Dfx, ATI, and Matrox have all opened up specs for their cards (if not actual code), and all have benefited from the ongoing work on the utah-glx code and their drivers. Not only that, the common codebase for things like Mesa means cards can be as equal as possible given their hardware. A fix for the ATI Rage Pro can magically propagate to the G400 driver.
Contrast with nVidia, who currently ship abysmal drivers (partial texture uploading is horribly broken, for instance, which breaks a very interesting application I'm beta testing). Source is indeed available for these drivers, but it's been obfuscated into uselessness so nobody can read it, let alone fix it. Presumably this is related to the ongoing patent lawsuits against them - they would appear to have something to hide at the register level.
As a simple result of being effectively closed source, nVidia not only has the worst and slowest Linux 3D support of any graphics board maker (the open-source ATI Rage Pro driver, for a hideously bad old chipset, kills the TNT on Quake3), but they're going to have to rectify the situation themselves. Note the contrast: if you're open, smart guys like John Carmack will fix your drivers and everyone will think you're cool because of his and others' work. If your closed your drivers are only as good as your last release, and you get blasted for bugs, particularly if you leave 6 months between releases as nVidia has.
Finally, as far as Star Wars, we aren't the ones being hurt by the disadvantages of closed source there - LucasFilm is. Movies can be and have been rendered on Linux (Titanic being the usual example), and it makes no difference to us the viewing public, it's just more uptime for the animators.
It doesn't even mean the same thing across different cores in the same family. On P6-core processors (PPro/P2/pre-Coppermine P3s) BogoMIPS happens to work out to about the same as the processor's clock speed. But that's not true on 386/486/Pentium, and likely not on the K6s and Athlons either. Throw in a totally different architecture (MIPS, Alpha, S/390;-) and it's a totally meaningless comparison.
and they have been for months. That was literally the first bugfix posted when Creative opened up the source. Get the curent CVS version or a recent snapshot.
Specifically, Corel is involved in WINE so they could easily port their apps to Linux. They are by all accounts almost done with this for their first round of apps (they recently split their tree from the WineHQ one so they could do beta testing without us all possibly breaking their stuff - we'll remerge once they ship:). They are even paying Wine's leader (Alexandre Julliard) money to fix Wine's last major architectural problem (only 1 address space for all processes) despite the fact that the problem doesn't directly affect their applications.
(as an aside, the Wine team has seen interest from some other "name-brand" commercial software vendors about using WineLib to port their stuff now that Corel's done the hard part - we may have enough apps to conquer the desktop sooner than you think:)
As has been stated before, GraphOn's system has completely different goals and is more like WinFrame or VNC than Wine.
Great stuff! I almost ruined my keyboard when I got to the bit about voiding their warranty because of Kyle "HardOCP.com" Bennet. Probably funnier than anything in the actual Quickies too:)
It means, if you've been following along, that the real version of history is where the Techno Talking Babes (who I'd take over Lara Croft any day) have obviously saved history as we know it. Kudos to ESR for stocking up on lemons;-)
Supermount lets you set your removable drives up so you can eject and insert new media at pretty much any time, just like in a well-known operating system named after a feature of your house. When new disks are inserted and you access them they are automatically mounted for you behind the scenes, with settings you've specified beforehand. Whenever you aren't accessing them the drive is automatically unmounted again so you can eject it.
It was originally written by Steven C. Tweedie for 2.0.x, but he abandonded it a while ago. This new version was ported up to 2.2.x and cleaned up a bit by a Russian programmer in response to a request on CoSource. As one of the "sponsors" of that development I'm thrilled with SuperMount, and I think it's great that Mandrake's picked it up (hopefully they'll maintain it and/or port to 2.3/2.4). It's much nicer than Redhat's autofs hack, and it enables games with redbook audio tracks to work in Wine amongst other things. (you can't play audio on a mounted drive under Linux, which is a severe limitation for games).
Well, 2.2.14pre16 or so is actually more stable than 2.2.13 final (there've been a LOT of stability and security fixes by Alan Cox and others in the 2.2.14pre series). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I trust AC's "pre" kernels more than most people's finals:)
Actually, there are a few Dreamcast games using it: Sega Rally 2, Quarterback Club, Expendable, and Incoming. Oddly, those are the only 4 titles on the system that cannot maintain a flat 60 FPS framerate. Please explain, if WinCE is so great;-)
The current (GPL'd) drivers will continue to develop independantly of the binary-only branch. The binary-only drivers will supply certain IP-bound features of the card (EAX's reverb and HRTF algorithms notably), while the open-source drivers will continue to be developed. (The open source drivers will also get effects, but they won't be Emu/Ensoniq's algorithms).
Wavetable features will be developed for the GPL driver - Creative released register specs for the emu10k1 engine Tuesday on the list, and the new commented.h file is in CVS now. The ALSA guys are working on their own version of such a driver - since they already have soundfont code for the AWE32 they may have an edge on getting wavetable running faster.
Plus, Alan Cox will be placing the current driver into the 2.3.x kernel soon (cleanup for that is almost done). Creative thinks this is cool (and under GPL they can't really object:)
All interesting apps (XMMS, mpg123, the Flash plugin, RealPlayer G2 beta) and games (Q2/Q3A/UT/XMAME) work and sound great now. Problems remaining:
- the mixer is quite messed up (master volume in kmix controls both front/back panning and bass/treble!) A consequence of this is that the digital inputs aren't all working. - No MIDI wavetable/soundfont support yet (Creative has just released some more info on the hardware that makes it possible however) - No 4 speaker/3d audio yet
On the plus side, joysticks work great, and a bunch of apps can open and use the card at once now (I tried 2 XMMSs, an mpg123, and a TiMidity++ running, which created quite a cacophany!:)
This is also why the DVD "crack" is such a big deal. CSS on DVDs is emphatically *not* copy protection - you can do a bit-for-bit copy of an "encrypted" DVD and it'll play fine in any player. In fact, you can even fiddle with the region codes in the copy so the copy will play anywhere.
Ok, so what's it good for? It won't stop people from pressing pirate DVDs - all players out there will play unencrypted discs just fine. And indeed, Hong Kong companies are churning out questionable-quality DVDs of the Star Wars trilogy and Episode I (in part because Lucas has repeatedly insisted that no real SW DVDs will come out until 2006! - another instance of someone needing to be beaten bloody to take our money).
So, that leaves us with one thing: it stops people from creating "unauthorized" (read: didn't pay big money to the DVD Forum's members) players. No wonder they're upset that the crack will allow a Linux(/BSD/BeOS) DVD player.
I believe this only applies to the version 3 ROMs (with the updated motherboard).
Hit control-apple-option-N any time there's a "sliding apple" system error screen up and it'll print out a complete list of names on the team and a sample of the team yelling "Apple II!" will play.
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Not only is JWZ right on target, there's the other factor to consider.
Suppose everyone boycotts DVDs and it DOES work. Sales plummet. What will MPAA announce? "Sales are down x% since the eeeevil pirating program DeCSS was released. Obviously everyone's pirating now, and for the good of the world we must put Johansen on death row!". It's just like the RIAA's announcement last year when 1998 record sales were down the MP3s were responsible. That rhetoric's nowhere to be found now that 1999 CD sales hit an all-time high.
Agreed. Dan's frequently got the best comments - I even nominated him, but to no avail :(
...and these were on sale BEFORE DECSS EXISTED!
Someone really needs to make sure EFF and the other defense lawyers know about that - there's a giant REAL piracy operation going on and MPAA is paying no attention to it.
If AOL owns 2 of the big record companies (keep in mind who's "on top" in the AOL-TW merger), that could mean good things in terms of putting the smack down on RIAA. Consider this: 2 of the RIAA's big member companies will be owned by the makers of an MP3 player (AOL owns Nullsoft Winamp/Macamp). That's gotta make Hilary Rosen nervous.
Will Steve Case have the savvy to pioneer online music distribution? He's in the right position now - he has the content, he's got the websites, and he even has player software. Stay tuned...
Corel has already committed HUGE chunks of code and bugfixes to Wine, and that includes in the last couple of months. Corel paid Cygnus to add several MS Visual C++ compatibility features to gcc. These are now available free of charge for everyone in gcc 2.95.2. Even if they never submit another patch they'll have done a ton of good things for Wine, including many "unsexy" things that wouldn't normally get done in an open source project.
That said, they have indeed slowed down commits recently as they approach beta. It's because they want to have a stable tree to build a shipping product. This is perfectly normal, as anyone who's developed commercial software knows. (heck, or even non-commercial - the Linux kernel has code freezes too). They've been reasonably open about the process with the Wine team (ie, we don't know their ship dates, but we don't care either).
As far as future participation, they're going to merge back any Wine bugfixes they make post-codefreeze once their apps go gold. They are currently paying Alexandre Julliard (Wine's leader) to make a necessary major architectural change that should greatly improve compatibility for Win32 apps. (Keep in mind this change won't help their applications - it's only for running existing Windows binaries that it comes fully into play). Once all this is done and shaken down I think you'll see a real "beta" version of Wine rather than the current pre-alphas. So if you have a favorite Windows app that's misbehaving read wine/documentation/bug-reports in the Wine source distribution and get posting on comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.
Finally, Corel's work is even helping their competitors - we are aware on wine-devel of a fairly major Mac/Windows app who's developers have it up and running on WineLib to prove to their bosses that a Linux port is easy and feasible. It's doubtful that would've happened this soon if Corel hadn't gotten involved and blazed the trail.
BTW, Wine is under an X11-style license (and is switching to the real X11 license as we speak). If it were GPL'd it would be useless for closed-source commercial applications such as Corel's.
-Ian, wine-devel and proud (grep "Ian Schmidt" ChangeLog).
See Wine run! Screenshots at http://home.twcf.rr.com/ischmidt/wine.ht ml
That message means the drive's region didn't match the disc. There are a few reasons for this:
1) wrong-region disc in a region-locked drive
2) attempting to use a dvd-rom drive that hasn't had it's firmware "cold-booted" by usage on a Windows machine (don't laugh, it's true for certain very brain-dead drives)
3) incorrect or no DVD-ROM kernel patch from www.kernel.dk (the January 8, 2000 version against 2.2.14 is known to work well on a lot of drives, but if you have an oddball one email Jens Axboe and he can likely sort you out).
-Ian (not a LiViD coder, I just enjoy their work)
I don't have the actual patent number, but my understanding is that Gemstar has a patent on the concept of a user-controlled on-screen channel grid. For instance, all DSS recievers have to pay these morons money under their patent, as do some of the newer TVs that have a guide built-in.
What's really funny about this is that the on-screen channel guide is pretty much secondary to the TiVo's functionality - they AREN'T being sued over the actual hard-disc-recorder aspects.
This is the most frequently asked question of all. Wine does not and cannot support .VXD/.SYS kernel-mode device drivers (this includes all winmodems). Whine at your laptop/modem maker for Linux support - at least Lucent has put out a binary-only module for their winmodems. And work is ongoing on a "generic" Linux winmodem driver - see www.linmodems.org.
The current drivers come with compilable source, but it's been so badly obfuscated as to be useless. You see things like *(29384+57+a) = (((12+2) 3) + (159)); Some effort has gone into "reverse engineering" this source code, but at least one of those guys gave up and bought a G400.
There also is no register-level documentation for any of the cards. 3Dfx, ATI, and Matrox have all supplied this and have gained good drivers as a result.
This means for instance that the utah-glx guys (including Carmack) a) can't fix bugs b) can't enable DMA (which would at least make things competitive with the Windows drivers) and c) can't optimize in general.
You're missing the point by about 10 miles. Assuming you aren't simply astroturfing (and the bit about "productive and functional" makes me wonder), sit back and learn.
It's been proven time and again that in the case of video drivers, open source wins every time. 3Dfx, ATI, and Matrox have all opened up specs for their cards (if not actual code), and all have benefited from the ongoing work on the utah-glx code and their drivers. Not only that, the common codebase for things like Mesa means cards can be as equal as possible given their hardware. A fix for the ATI Rage Pro can magically propagate to the G400 driver.
Contrast with nVidia, who currently ship abysmal drivers (partial texture uploading is horribly broken, for instance, which breaks a very interesting application I'm beta testing). Source is indeed available for these drivers, but it's been obfuscated into uselessness so nobody can read it, let alone fix it. Presumably this is related to the ongoing patent lawsuits against them - they would appear to have something to hide at the register level.
As a simple result of being effectively closed source, nVidia not only has the worst and slowest Linux 3D support of any graphics board maker (the open-source ATI Rage Pro driver, for a hideously bad old chipset, kills the TNT on Quake3), but they're going to have to rectify the situation themselves. Note the contrast: if you're open, smart guys like John Carmack will fix your drivers and everyone will think you're cool because of his and others' work. If your closed your drivers are only as good as your last release, and you get blasted for bugs, particularly if you leave 6 months between releases as nVidia has.
Finally, as far as Star Wars, we aren't the ones being hurt by the disadvantages of closed source there - LucasFilm is. Movies can be and have been rendered on Linux (Titanic being the usual example), and it makes no difference to us the viewing public, it's just more uptime for the animators.
Alan Cox - Linus' #2 man and maintainer of the stable kernels (2.2.x and 2.0.x).
David Dawes - XFree86 leader
Donald Becker - Wrote nearly ever ethernet driver in the kernel, invented Beowulf
Jordan Hubbard - FreeBSD's leader
Brian Paul - Wrote the Mesa OpenGL-alike library used by eg. Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc.
It doesn't even mean the same thing across different cores in the same family. On P6-core processors (PPro/P2/pre-Coppermine P3s) BogoMIPS happens to work out to about the same as the processor's clock speed. But that's not true on 386/486/Pentium, and likely not on the K6s and Athlons either. Throw in a totally different architecture (MIPS, Alpha, S/390 ;-) and it's a totally meaningless comparison.
and they have been for months. That was literally the first bugfix posted when Creative opened up the source. Get the curent CVS version or a recent snapshot.
Specifically, Corel is involved in WINE so they could easily port their apps to Linux. They are by all accounts almost done with this for their first round of apps (they recently split their tree from the WineHQ one so they could do beta testing without us all possibly breaking their stuff - we'll remerge once they ship :). They are even paying Wine's leader (Alexandre Julliard) money to fix Wine's last major architectural problem (only 1 address space for all processes) despite the fact that the problem doesn't directly affect their applications.
:)
(as an aside, the Wine team has seen interest from some other "name-brand" commercial software vendors about using WineLib to port their stuff now that Corel's done the hard part - we may have enough apps to conquer the desktop sooner than you think
As has been stated before, GraphOn's system has completely different goals and is more like WinFrame or VNC than Wine.
-Ian "wine-devel" Schmidt
Great stuff! I almost ruined my keyboard when I got to the bit about voiding their warranty because of Kyle "HardOCP.com" Bennet. Probably funnier than anything in the actual Quickies too :)
LiViD moved to http://www.linuxvideo.org/ which is still up, so I don't think openprojects' outage is lawsuit-related.
It means, if you've been following along, that the real version of history is where the Techno Talking Babes (who I'd take over Lara Croft any day) have obviously saved history as we know it. Kudos to ESR for stocking up on lemons ;-)
Supermount lets you set your removable drives up so you can eject and insert new media at pretty much any time, just like in a well-known operating system named after a feature of your house. When new disks are inserted and you access them they are automatically mounted for you behind the scenes, with settings you've specified beforehand. Whenever you aren't accessing them the drive is automatically unmounted again so you can eject it.
It was originally written by Steven C. Tweedie for 2.0.x, but he abandonded it a while ago. This new version was ported up to 2.2.x and cleaned up a bit by a Russian programmer in response to a request on CoSource. As one of the "sponsors" of that development I'm thrilled with SuperMount, and I think it's great that Mandrake's picked it up (hopefully they'll maintain it and/or port to 2.3/2.4). It's much nicer than Redhat's autofs hack, and it enables games with redbook audio tracks to work in Wine amongst other things. (you can't play audio on a mounted drive under Linux, which is a severe limitation for games).
Well, 2.2.14pre16 or so is actually more stable than 2.2.13 final (there've been a LOT of stability and security fixes by Alan Cox and others in the 2.2.14pre series). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I trust AC's "pre" kernels more than most people's finals :)
Actually, there are a few Dreamcast games using it: Sega Rally 2, Quarterback Club, Expendable, and Incoming. Oddly, those are the only 4 titles on the system that cannot maintain a flat 60 FPS framerate. Please explain, if WinCE is so great ;-)
All of Creative's current drivers are full 100% Stallman-approved GNU General Public License Open Source(tm). No need to be cynical :)
The current (GPL'd) drivers will continue to develop independantly of the binary-only branch. The binary-only drivers will supply certain IP-bound features of the card (EAX's reverb and HRTF algorithms notably), while the open-source drivers will continue to be developed. (The open source drivers will also get effects, but they won't be Emu/Ensoniq's algorithms).
.h file is in CVS now. The ALSA guys are working on their own version of such a driver - since they already have soundfont code for the AWE32 they may have an edge on getting wavetable running faster.
:)
Wavetable features will be developed for the GPL driver - Creative released register specs for the emu10k1 engine Tuesday on the list, and the new commented
Plus, Alan Cox will be placing the current driver into the 2.3.x kernel soon (cleanup for that is almost done). Creative thinks this is cool (and under GPL they can't really object
All interesting apps (XMMS, mpg123, the Flash plugin, RealPlayer G2 beta) and games (Q2/Q3A/UT/XMAME) work and sound great now. Problems remaining:
:)
- the mixer is quite messed up (master volume in kmix controls both front/back panning and bass/treble!) A consequence of this is that the digital inputs aren't all working.
- No MIDI wavetable/soundfont support yet (Creative has just released some more info on the hardware that makes it possible however)
- No 4 speaker/3d audio yet
On the plus side, joysticks work great, and a bunch of apps can open and use the card at once now (I tried 2 XMMSs, an mpg123, and a TiMidity++ running, which created quite a cacophany!
This is also why the DVD "crack" is such a big deal. CSS on DVDs is emphatically *not* copy protection - you can do a bit-for-bit copy of an "encrypted" DVD and it'll play fine in any player. In fact, you can even fiddle with the region codes in the copy so the copy will play anywhere.
Ok, so what's it good for? It won't stop people from pressing pirate DVDs - all players out there will play unencrypted discs just fine. And indeed, Hong Kong companies are churning out questionable-quality DVDs of the Star Wars trilogy and Episode I (in part because Lucas has repeatedly insisted that no real SW DVDs will come out until 2006! - another instance of someone needing to be beaten bloody to take our money).
So, that leaves us with one thing: it stops people from creating "unauthorized" (read: didn't pay big money to the DVD Forum's members) players. No wonder they're upset that the crack will allow a Linux(/BSD/BeOS) DVD player.
I believe this only applies to the version 3 ROMs (with the updated motherboard).
Hit control-apple-option-N any time there's a "sliding apple" system error screen up and it'll print out a complete list of names on the team and a sample of the team yelling "Apple II!" will play.
Ahh, the good old days...