I think it's really important to keep other options alive.
IE is a great browser, but it lacks some important features. It's hard to control javascript, for example, and you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental. If you let people turn off the ads, the advertisers won't be happy, and as a good multi-national corporate citizen, MS probably won't want to do anything to jeopardize the platform's value to advertisers.
There's no way (at least no easy way) to convert a real video file into something you can edit or recompress. Why? It's a feature that content providers want. To me it's a bug. I can understand Real doing that, and having a proprietary data format comes in handy.
More and more I think we're going to see these large companies deliberately crippling our tools for the benefit of content providers. But that only works with proprietary data formats and protocols. The web is still open.
The big story in advertising is pop-up windows. If Mozilla bills itself as the browser that helps you defeat that annoying ads, a lot of people will respond to it. And a lot of people will put up with annoying little errors as they get worked out, because the pop-up windows are incredibly annoying. MS isn't going to do that. They'll never side with their users over the content providers. That leaves a niche.
As for me, the ability to turn off animated gifs will be enough to make me switch. Those things really bug me.
All of these ads are going to get worse and worse. Mozilla should bill itself as the answer. It is the answer. And we need it.
I think you have to differentiate between what happens when small ISP customers are absorbed into a large ISP and the service that a large ISP gives its typical customer.
I owned and ran a small ISP for about six years. When we started out, big companies didn't do a very good job of getting people online. Getting the tcp/ip stack to work was often difficult, and strange modem problems were common. So there was a real niche for a company like ours, which could try to put more effort into getting people online.
And when people had problems, they could call or email us, and I'd pick up the phone. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I was the person who built the entire system, and I think I was probably able to give better support than the average support guy at a large ISP.
But times changed. If you buy a computer now -- almost any computer -- the odds are overwhelming that it's going to work. It's really easy to set up net service on a modern windows machine. After we sold our company, I went to the Earthlink site and signed up. I was online immediately, with no hassles. And they have access numbers all over the country. I've even used it in Paris. That's a big advantage. I think Earthlink does a good job.
When small ISPs were cannibalized by the large ones, it was very bloody. Customers were jerked around, email addresses were often forcibly changed, and the deals were always very bad for the guys who had the small ISPs. We were lucky -- we sold to another small ISP, and they've just added to our features, nothing was taken away. Not even the shell accounts.
Typically the large ISP wrote the contract -- they agreed to pay so much per customer, but only for the customers who stuck through the transitition. So when 1/3 of the customers dropped off, it was no skin off the big ISP's nose. They didn't have to pay for those people. And there are lots of horror stories about the big guys not paying the money that they owed legitimately, even under the lopsided contracts that they wrote.
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. They would invariably change the terms at the end of the negotiation, and back out of comittments they had made to us. For the most part the guys who built those large ISPs through aquisition were bottom feeders, sharks who were trying to pick the bones of distressed small businesses. Most of them didn't seem like honest guys. So it was never surprising to me that guys like that didn't treat the customers well.
The real problem with the big players is that they're few in number and are vulnerable to pressure. A world with 100,000 mom and pop ISPs isn't as easy to wiretap as a world with 3 blue chip corporate ISPs. And every now and then Time/Warner/AOL or AT&T will say someting really scary -- like how they think that e-commerce people should pay them a commission, how they would be completely within their rights to block access to whatever sites they felt like blocking.
Big ISPs can provide good service, especially in a simpler world where things tend to interoperate more easily. But I don't feel confident that the market or the government will always protect consumers the way that they deserve.
In the old days they forced the guys who owned the movie theatres to sell the studios they owned. The wisdom of such a move isn't apparent to most people now. The "synergy" of having the pipe and the content is seen as a good thing.
I'm certain that we're going to see attempts to build copy protection into the net itself. I think they'll fail, but the companies will try. Those are the kinds of problems, I think, are going to be the real costs of the consolidation of the mom and pop ISPs into a small number of large companies.
I don't know if Hewitt had much or anything to do with the HP-12C financial calculator, but if he did, he accomplished something extraordinary.
The 12C, alone out of all of the electronic devices that I can think of, is "finished". It hasn't been changed for more than a decade. Even the documentation is the same. But even so, it's still the overwhelming first choice for financial professionals.
My point is that it's complete, changing it would make it worse. The interface, the functionality that's built in, the functionality that's left out. The size, shape and weight of the device. According to the market, no one has been able to top it. The design is perfect.
What other electronic product can make any of those claims? The idea that a tool -- like a word processor -- could be "finished" is totally alien to the way we think about our tools. Most geeks would say that "finishing" is impossible. But the 12C shows that's not true.
Hewitt's company has done a lot of great things, and people will write about most of them over the next few days. I hope the 12C doesn't get lost in the shuffle.
Isn't this a local issue? Different counties in Florida had different kinds of voting machines. I'm sure that different jurisdictions would be willing to look at different technologies.
The answer here isn't to write letters. People need to start companies that support the existing open source solutions, and wade through the bidding process to win the contracts.
I don't understand why drive manufacturers would want to impose copy protection on their customers. How does a company like IBM benefit from cooperating with this scheme?
I don't think that there are many customers who would prefer a copy protected drive. Why would a rational company ignore the desires of its customers in order to satisfy the desires of the companies who will benefit from these crippled drives?
Are they afraid of lawsuits? Legistlation? Are they being paid? Are they simply standing in solidarity with other multi-national corporations?
I don't understand why drive manufacturers are on board, and it seems to me that knowing why they're doing what they're doing would help us to think of effective strategies to comabat this noxiouis proposal.
This is a huge issue, and we need to take it seriously. I would go so far as to say it's a "do or die" issue, perhaps more important than cryptography. We need to draw a line in the sand.
When drive manufacturers build hard disks, who are they working for? The owners of intellectual property, or us, the people who buy them? It seems to me that they're working for us. Why don't they act like it? What's going on here?
I don't want to encourage strident or peurile pseudo-political action. And I'm not sure what to do about it. But this just can't be allowed to go through. This is the sort of thing that ought to make us all consider writing checks to the EFF, at the very least.
All of the conventional wisdom about concentrating press power into a few hands, as has been the trend lately, suggests that this story won't get much play. The same dynamic exists in the debate over the giveaway of new HDTV frequencies to the broadcasters. You don't hear much about that, because the people getting the giveaway are the ones who are supposed to be protecting us from such scams.
The bad news is that all of the people who are suppsoed to be protecting us from scams like this current one are also the same people who own all of the intellectual property. Will Time/Warner allow its journalists to talk about this issue?
We have to stay focused on this. We have to tell people we know about it. We have to make noise. And we have to make sure that our lobbyists are well funded.
Why shouldn't it be hard now? Was this a "security through obscurity" thing that is no longer obscure?
I don't understand why they wouldn't have used well known algorithms that are believed to be strong. I'm pretty sure that I was using PGP with RSA and IDEA in 1993.
There have been some comparisons of the various BSDs here, which have been helpful. But to me the real issue is what software will run on the various BSDs. I know that the BSDs generally have emulation available, but I never know if it's stable or trustworthy.
If you wanted to run a database enabled JSP web application, would any of the BSDs work well? Does Postgres run well on any of the BSDs? MySQL? Do they have to run in emulation mode? And what's the status of Java on the various BSDs?
OpenBSD has a lot of appeal to me, but I have the impression that it won't run the software I need to run.
This is exactly right, or at least part of it is. I don't think the.com part is central.
But I agree completely about the hierarchical nature of the DNS system. The WHO should use subdomains under their own name -- who.org, or whatever.
This is really the same issue as using.kids or.porn -- the idea that people who want to distribute some sort of rating or trust info ought to be able to use TLDs to do it. The problem with that idea is that there are countless possible ratings systems that we might need to distribute, and it really doesn't make sense to have too many TLDs.
It makes more sense to look at the existing systems to deliver rating information, ranging from SSL's hierarchical key certification, to the W3's PICS standard to just putting a gif on a site that says it's certified, seeing where the shortcomings are, and coming up with a consistent, elegant, reasonable, and non-authoritarian way to deliver rating information consistently.
We need a community database, with a web app to make it work, that maps company and product names to critical web sites.
A place where you could type in "guiness" and get the guiness sucks site, even if it has an ugly or non-obvious url.
Ideally, the app would be distributed, so several sites could share the same db, and there wouldn't be a single point of failure.
preserve the process, VOTE NADER
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
Everyone I know is voting for candidates based on their stances on a variety of issues. I know a lot of people, for example, who are voting Gore because of their concerns about abortion or gay rights. Most of the people I know who support Bush do so because they believe he's got more integrity than Gore, or because they like his tax plan.
Nader's core issue, though, is that the process that we use to hash out all the other issues is corrupt. I believe him. If you believe him, it's very hard not to put this up at the top of the issue list. And if you do that, I don't think there's anyone but Nader you can support.
Our government is, among other things, a machine that people can use to resolve conflicts peacefully and reasonably. If that functionality goes down, lots of other stuff that depends on it is going to break as well.
Think about some of the stories we've read here. Sun's McNealy saying, "You have no privacy, deal with it." The guy from Sony records talking about how they'll fight to the death to preserve their chokehold on music distribution, even if they have to control the network itself. AT&T talking about how they feel that since they deliver people to e-commerce sites, they ought to get a cut.
Time and time again, the interests of citizens and consumers are going up against the interests of corporations, and the citizens are coming out on the short end of the deal. The Democrats are only marginally better than the Republicans. Horrible concentrations of power have been allowed to accumulate under the current administration. And incredibly unethical stock market scams have been tolerated because the bubble was valuable politcally. And I don't have to remind anyone here what's been allowed to go on with intellectual property rights. Who benefits from intellectual property rights? People or corporations?
Let me ask slashdotters what I believe is our core issue: is it a sweatshop if the work is intellectually interesting? Why do you think that companie are relucatant to hire people in their 30's? How do you think your boss would react if you had kids, and were serious about leaving at 5p to spend time with them?
I don't think that these problems pop up because the individuals in the parties are bad. I think it happens because the process is corrupt, and money drives it. And I don't think that electing people who are sympathetic to certain categories of people (techies, working class people, feminists, or whatever) is going to give any kind of long term results.
We need to fix the machine. We need to restore integrity to the process of debate. We need to prevent monopolists from grabbing more power than they already have.
Nader will not win. He would not be a good president if he did. He is too strident and inflexible -- a president has to be able to compromise. But Nader can put these issues on the map. He's the only one who's trying. If you vote for Nader, it will go on the tally, and the bigger the tally is the more likely it is that a real party will take them seriously.
How much chance does the little guy on ICANN have to make change? Did you sit out of that process anyway? If you believe that grass roots participation in the ICANN process is important, don't you believe that grass roots participation ought to be a general principle for government in general? Who's behind that?
Slashdot is far and away the least reliable web site I read regularly. It's much worse than ebay.
I realize that it's because the readership is so high, but it seems a little out of place to take pot shots at ebay, when the page containing the jab stalls out on you.
Adboe's non-linear editor is called Premiere. If you've never done anything with DV, you probably don't realize how intensely cool it is. An OSS NLE would be a tremendous tool to have.
Capture card drivers would be particularly important for an NLE, though, because programs like Premiere use a DV or MPEG camera's hardware codec to speed things up considerably during editing. In other words, you need to have your camera plugged in via the firewire while you're editing, even if you're not capturing anything. My PII-350 can't display DV in full resolution in real time using a software codec, I need the camera's hardware codec to make it work.
In the MS world, broken premiere drivers are a big problem -- the app tend to crash a lot if you buy a cheap board (with crummy drivers).
Maybe open source drivers would solve the problem... it would be cool to find out.
It would also be very cool if real hollywood money started pouring into linux development.
I love my KDE gui -- I'm a lot more productive with it than I am with NT or MacOS.
But X itself is a little slow. If you compare running a remote app remotely over X to running a remote app using something like Citrix's terminal server or pcanywhere, X is kind of a dog.
To me this project is an overwhelmingly positive development. Not because of the open source angle, and not because of the linux suppoort (although that's very nice).
Real Networks makes you pay for quality authoring tools, and they make you pay for server software on a per stream basis.
Apple makes you pay for quality authoring tools, but the streams are free.
That's HUGE. If Real Networks doesn't follow suit, they will lose, because ISPs will offer one price for QT streaming and another price for Real Networks streaming. Publishers will go the cheap route.
Apple has the right to test the open source waters however they see fit. Their license sucks, they're open sourcing some relatively minor products (compared to OS X, this server is minor), and they'd prefer it if every linux user bought a mac to author QT on.
But they're learning how to make open source work. They say that the open source community has doubled performance and added linux support. Those are wins for Apple. They will be noticed, and it will affect their future decisions.
The more democratic pricing model than what's offered by Real Networks is the fundamental good news in this product. You can serve as many streams as you want for free, as long as you've got the bandwidth, and bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time.
This kind of license (or something better) is a necessary precondition of a true grass roots net radio movement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's really important to keep other options alive.
IE is a great browser, but it lacks some important features. It's hard to control javascript, for example, and you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental. If you let people turn off the ads, the advertisers won't be happy, and as a good multi-national corporate citizen, MS probably won't want to do anything to jeopardize the platform's value to advertisers.
There's no way (at least no easy way) to convert a real video file into something you can edit or recompress. Why? It's a feature that content providers want. To me it's a bug. I can understand Real doing that, and having a proprietary data format comes in handy.
More and more I think we're going to see these large companies deliberately crippling our tools for the benefit of content providers. But that only works with proprietary data formats and protocols. The web is still open.
The big story in advertising is pop-up windows. If Mozilla bills itself as the browser that helps you defeat that annoying ads, a lot of people will respond to it. And a lot of people will put up with annoying little errors as they get worked out, because the pop-up windows are incredibly annoying. MS isn't going to do that. They'll never side with their users over the content providers. That leaves a niche.
As for me, the ability to turn off animated gifs will be enough to make me switch. Those things really bug me.
All of these ads are going to get worse and worse. Mozilla should bill itself as the answer. It is the answer. And we need it.
I think you have to differentiate between what happens when small ISP customers are absorbed into a large ISP and the service that a large ISP gives its typical customer.
I owned and ran a small ISP for about six years. When we started out, big companies didn't do a very good job of getting people online. Getting the tcp/ip stack to work was often difficult, and strange modem problems were common. So there was a real niche for a company like ours, which could try to put more effort into getting people online.
And when people had problems, they could call or email us, and I'd pick up the phone. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I was the person who built the entire system, and I think I was probably able to give better support than the average support guy at a large ISP.
But times changed. If you buy a computer now -- almost any computer -- the odds are overwhelming that it's going to work. It's really easy to set up net service on a modern windows machine. After we sold our company, I went to the Earthlink site and signed up. I was online immediately, with no hassles. And they have access numbers all over the country. I've even used it in Paris. That's a big advantage. I think Earthlink does a good job.
When small ISPs were cannibalized by the large ones, it was very bloody. Customers were jerked around, email addresses were often forcibly changed, and the deals were always very bad for the guys who had the small ISPs. We were lucky -- we sold to another small ISP, and they've just added to our features, nothing was taken away. Not even the shell accounts.
Typically the large ISP wrote the contract -- they agreed to pay so much per customer, but only for the customers who stuck through the transitition. So when 1/3 of the customers dropped off, it was no skin off the big ISP's nose. They didn't have to pay for those people. And there are lots of horror stories about the big guys not paying the money that they owed legitimately, even under the lopsided contracts that they wrote.
We were approached over and over again by large ISPs who wanted to buy us. They would invariably change the terms at the end of the negotiation, and back out of comittments they had made to us. For the most part the guys who built those large ISPs through aquisition were bottom feeders, sharks who were trying to pick the bones of distressed small businesses. Most of them didn't seem like honest guys. So it was never surprising to me that guys like that didn't treat the customers well.
The real problem with the big players is that they're few in number and are vulnerable to pressure. A world with 100,000 mom and pop ISPs isn't as easy to wiretap as a world with 3 blue chip corporate ISPs. And every now and then Time/Warner/AOL or AT&T will say someting really scary -- like how they think that e-commerce people should pay them a commission, how they would be completely within their rights to block access to whatever sites they felt like blocking.
Big ISPs can provide good service, especially in a simpler world where things tend to interoperate more easily. But I don't feel confident that the market or the government will always protect consumers the way that they deserve.
In the old days they forced the guys who owned the movie theatres to sell the studios they owned. The wisdom of such a move isn't apparent to most people now. The "synergy" of having the pipe and the content is seen as a good thing.
I'm certain that we're going to see attempts to build copy protection into the net itself. I think they'll fail, but the companies will try. Those are the kinds of problems, I think, are going to be the real costs of the consolidation of the mom and pop ISPs into a small number of large companies.
Why don't you buy the commercial version of SSH? You can pay your way, and your customers can pay theirs, and eveyrone will be happy.
If you're unwilling to pay yourself, then maybe you should reconsider your model.
I don't know if Hewitt had much or anything to do with the HP-12C financial calculator, but if he did, he accomplished something extraordinary.
The 12C, alone out of all of the electronic devices that I can think of, is "finished". It hasn't been changed for more than a decade. Even the documentation is the same. But even so, it's still the overwhelming first choice for financial professionals.
My point is that it's complete, changing it would make it worse. The interface, the functionality that's built in, the functionality that's left out. The size, shape and weight of the device. According to the market, no one has been able to top it. The design is perfect.
What other electronic product can make any of those claims? The idea that a tool -- like a word processor -- could be "finished" is totally alien to the way we think about our tools. Most geeks would say that "finishing" is impossible. But the 12C shows that's not true.
Hewitt's company has done a lot of great things, and people will write about most of them over the next few days. I hope the 12C doesn't get lost in the shuffle.
Isn't this a local issue? Different counties in Florida had different kinds of voting machines. I'm sure that different jurisdictions would be willing to look at different technologies.
The answer here isn't to write letters. People need to start companies that support the existing open source solutions, and wade through the bidding process to win the contracts.
I don't understand why drive manufacturers would want to impose copy protection on their customers. How does a company like IBM benefit from cooperating with this scheme?
I don't think that there are many customers who would prefer a copy protected drive. Why would a rational company ignore the desires of its customers in order to satisfy the desires of the companies who will benefit from these crippled drives?
Are they afraid of lawsuits? Legistlation? Are they being paid? Are they simply standing in solidarity with other multi-national corporations?
I don't understand why drive manufacturers are on board, and it seems to me that knowing why they're doing what they're doing would help us to think of effective strategies to comabat this noxiouis proposal.
This is a huge issue, and we need to take it seriously. I would go so far as to say it's a "do or die" issue, perhaps more important than cryptography. We need to draw a line in the sand.
When drive manufacturers build hard disks, who are they working for? The owners of intellectual property, or us, the people who buy them? It seems to me that they're working for us. Why don't they act like it? What's going on here?
I don't want to encourage strident or peurile pseudo-political action. And I'm not sure what to do about it. But this just can't be allowed to go through. This is the sort of thing that ought to make us all consider writing checks to the EFF, at the very least.
All of the conventional wisdom about concentrating press power into a few hands, as has been the trend lately, suggests that this story won't get much play. The same dynamic exists in the debate over the giveaway of new HDTV frequencies to the broadcasters. You don't hear much about that, because the people getting the giveaway are the ones who are supposed to be protecting us from such scams.
The bad news is that all of the people who are suppsoed to be protecting us from scams like this current one are also the same people who own all of the intellectual property. Will Time/Warner allow its journalists to talk about this issue?
We have to stay focused on this. We have to tell people we know about it. We have to make noise. And we have to make sure that our lobbyists are well funded.
This is simply totally and utterly unacceptable.
Why shouldn't it be hard now? Was this a "security through obscurity" thing that is no longer obscure?
I don't understand why they wouldn't have used well known algorithms that are believed to be strong. I'm pretty sure that I was using PGP with RSA and IDEA in 1993.
Does anyone want to speculate why the NSA chose linux instead of OpenBSD, or some other BSD?
There have been some comparisons of the various BSDs here, which have been helpful. But to me the real issue is what software will run on the various BSDs. I know that the BSDs generally have emulation available, but I never know if it's stable or trustworthy.
If you wanted to run a database enabled JSP web application, would any of the BSDs work well? Does Postgres run well on any of the BSDs? MySQL? Do they have to run in emulation mode? And what's the status of Java on the various BSDs?
OpenBSD has a lot of appeal to me, but I have the impression that it won't run the software I need to run.
This is exactly right, or at least part of it is. I don't think the .com part is central.
.kids or .porn -- the idea that people who want to distribute some sort of rating or trust info ought to be able to use TLDs to do it. The problem with that idea is that there are countless possible ratings systems that we might need to distribute, and it really doesn't make sense to have too many TLDs.
But I agree completely about the hierarchical nature of the DNS system. The WHO should use subdomains under their own name -- who.org, or whatever.
This is really the same issue as using
It makes more sense to look at the existing systems to deliver rating information, ranging from SSL's hierarchical key certification, to the W3's PICS standard to just putting a gif on a site that says it's certified, seeing where the shortcomings are, and coming up with a consistent, elegant, reasonable, and non-authoritarian way to deliver rating information consistently.
We need a community database, with a web app to make it work, that maps company and product names to critical web sites.
A place where you could type in "guiness" and get the guiness sucks site, even if it has an ugly or non-obvious url.
Ideally, the app would be distributed, so several sites could share the same db, and there wouldn't be a single point of failure.
Everyone I know is voting for candidates based on their stances on a variety of issues. I know a lot of people, for example, who are voting Gore because of their concerns about abortion or gay rights. Most of the people I know who support Bush do so because they believe he's got more integrity than Gore, or because they like his tax plan.
Nader's core issue, though, is that the process that we use to hash out all the other issues is corrupt. I believe him. If you believe him, it's very hard not to put this up at the top of the issue list. And if you do that, I don't think there's anyone but Nader you can support.
Our government is, among other things, a machine that people can use to resolve conflicts peacefully and reasonably. If that functionality goes down, lots of other stuff that depends on it is going to break as well.
Think about some of the stories we've read here. Sun's McNealy saying, "You have no privacy, deal with it." The guy from Sony records talking about how they'll fight to the death to preserve their chokehold on music distribution, even if they have to control the network itself. AT&T talking about how they feel that since they deliver people to e-commerce sites, they ought to get a cut.
Time and time again, the interests of citizens and consumers are going up against the interests of corporations, and the citizens are coming out on the short end of the deal. The Democrats are only marginally better than the Republicans. Horrible concentrations of power have been allowed to accumulate under the current administration. And incredibly unethical stock market scams have been tolerated because the bubble was valuable politcally. And I don't have to remind anyone here what's been allowed to go on with intellectual property rights. Who benefits from intellectual property rights? People or corporations?
Let me ask slashdotters what I believe is our core issue: is it a sweatshop if the work is intellectually interesting? Why do you think that companie are relucatant to hire people in their 30's? How do you think your boss would react if you had kids, and were serious about leaving at 5p to spend time with them?
I don't think that these problems pop up because the individuals in the parties are bad. I think it happens because the process is corrupt, and money drives it. And I don't think that electing people who are sympathetic to certain categories of people (techies, working class people, feminists, or whatever) is going to give any kind of long term results.
We need to fix the machine. We need to restore integrity to the process of debate. We need to prevent monopolists from grabbing more power than they already have.
Nader will not win. He would not be a good president if he did. He is too strident and inflexible -- a president has to be able to compromise. But Nader can put these issues on the map. He's the only one who's trying. If you vote for Nader, it will go on the tally, and the bigger the tally is the more likely it is that a real party will take them seriously.
How much chance does the little guy on ICANN have to make change? Did you sit out of that process anyway? If you believe that grass roots participation in the ICANN process is important, don't you believe that grass roots participation ought to be a general principle for government in general? Who's behind that?
Vote Nader.
How does this new technique affect the amount of time it takes for a network to learn?
Slashdot has venture funding, and is at the center of a new IPO.
They have more money than most of us will make in a lifetime of work. That's great, it's a great site, they deserve it.
But they have a budget.
Slashdot is far and away the least reliable web site I read regularly. It's much worse than ebay.
I realize that it's because the readership is so high, but it seems a little out of place to take pot shots at ebay, when the page containing the jab stalls out on you.
Adboe's non-linear editor is called Premiere. If you've never done anything with DV, you probably don't realize how intensely cool it is. An OSS NLE would be a tremendous tool to have.
Capture card drivers would be particularly important for an NLE, though, because programs like Premiere use a DV or MPEG camera's hardware codec to speed things up considerably during editing. In other words, you need to have your camera plugged in via the firewire while you're editing, even if you're not capturing anything. My PII-350 can't display DV in full resolution in real time using a software codec, I need the camera's hardware codec to make it work.
In the MS world, broken premiere drivers are a big problem -- the app tend to crash a lot if you buy a cheap board (with crummy drivers).
Maybe open source drivers would solve the problem... it would be cool to find out.
It would also be very cool if real hollywood money started pouring into linux development.
What do they mean by film work?
I'd really love to see an open source premiere type tool. Is that what this means?
I'd love to see an NLE on linux, but I think getting capture card drivers to work well would probably be pretty hard.
I love my KDE gui -- I'm a lot more productive with it than I am with NT or MacOS.
But X itself is a little slow. If you compare running a remote app remotely over X to running a remote app using something like Citrix's terminal server or pcanywhere, X is kind of a dog.
To me this project is an overwhelmingly positive development. Not because of the open source angle, and not because of the linux suppoort (although that's very nice).
Real Networks makes you pay for quality authoring tools, and they make you pay for server software on a per stream basis.
Apple makes you pay for quality authoring tools, but the streams are free.
That's HUGE. If Real Networks doesn't follow suit, they will lose, because ISPs will offer one price for QT streaming and another price for Real Networks streaming. Publishers will go the cheap route.
Apple has the right to test the open source waters however they see fit. Their license sucks, they're open sourcing some relatively minor products (compared to OS X, this server is minor), and they'd prefer it if every linux user bought a mac to author QT on.
But they're learning how to make open source work. They say that the open source community has doubled performance and added linux support. Those are wins for Apple. They will be noticed, and it will affect their future decisions.
The more democratic pricing model than what's offered by Real Networks is the fundamental good news in this product. You can serve as many streams as you want for free, as long as you've got the bandwidth, and bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time.
This kind of license (or something better) is a necessary precondition of a true grass roots net radio movement.
It is an overwhelmingly positive development.