"What bullshit. The music itself is in essence a monopoly. I can only Buy EMI music via EMI outlets or whomever EMI decide to license to."
Which, as is usual with people who call the arguments of others "bullshit" entirely misses the point, because _you can play that EMI music on equipment that EMI didn't make without having to do anything special_. Norway don't give two hoots about whether the iTunes store has exclusives that aren't available elsewhere, how much they charge for them, what profits the store makes, or whether it's integrated with the iTunes software. The entirety and totality of their complaint is based on the fact that the store _only_ sells content using a DRM format that Apple refuse to let other on-line stores, device makers, or software writers license, period.
"A cetain percentage of music is available in market A but not market B because of the way labels license their music"
This is a straw man, because they aren't asking Apple to sell _content_ in Norway that they offer elsewhere.
"Music must be licensed in each and every country."
_Some_ music must be licensed in each and every country, because each country has its own copyright laws which last for different periods of time, with differing fair use provisions, national collection agencies that distribute royalties to artists, etc.
"Europe never got angry about this"
Because the EC doesn't expect all member states to have exactly the same laws on everything. And even if they did, the fact that Norway isn't in the EC would mean that its laws would still be Norway-specific, as unlike the US, the EC doesn't expect countries that aren't part of it to obey its laws unless they're applying for membership.
"Europe is getting confused"
It seems to be Americans who are confused, because this is only a European issue insofar as Norway happens to be located on a land-mass called Europe, which also has something called the "European Community" which some countries on that land-mass belong to, but Norway doesn't. This is therefore a European issue in the same way that something happening in Peru or Quebec is an American issue by dint of them happening to be located on a continent called "America".
"and hysterical about a non issue"
The ones who seem to be getting hysterical are people in the US who object to any US-based company being expected to conform with somebody else's laws in order to sell stuff to the people who live there. By contrast, the Norwegians seem to be acting in a cool and rather dignified manner, having given Apple a number of ways they can make the Norwegian iTunes store comply with Norwegian law: (1) offer music in a choice of DRM formats; (2) license FairPlay to others; or (3) sell music without DRM. These measures only apply to music sold to those living in Norway, and as with any company operating in a sovereign nation, they are perfectly free to either comply with that nation's laws, or cease doing business there, but this last option isn't something that the Norwegians are forcing on Apple in any way, and it only affects the iTunes store, not other Apple products.
"they're telling Apple, *solely because their success*, how to conduct business with the competition in Norway"
No, they're telling Apple *solely due to being a business* how to conduct business with the competition in Norway, just like the US, South Korea, Australia, etc. tell businesses how to conduct business with the competition in their countries.
"The message is clear: Even if you follow all the rules and obey all the laws, if you get too big, we'll squash you."
The message is actually "Norwegian law applies in Norway, not US law". Apple did not get squashed because they are big -- they got squashed because their iTunes store terms of service contravene Norwegian consumer protection laws. In contrast with the US, Nordic countries have a rather long tradition of giving humans more rights than companies, which is one of the reasons why they're rather good (although expensive) places to live.
"Region-specific DVDs are the more familiar example; did we as a society just decide to surrender completely to that one?"
No, we all went out and bought DVD players with publicly-available "no region" hacks and an in-built capability to skip the bits that the DVD makers try and force us to watch ("Millions of people who wouldn't think of driving a combine-harvester through a puppy-farm, setting fire to a children's hospital after welding all the doors shut, or launching an ICBM at Finland commit the immeasurably worse crime of copying DVDs or lending them to their friends and family").
"You will have the same hoops to jump through if you were to buy music from any of the Playsforsure stores and tried to play it on your Zune or if I wanted to play them on my iPod."
Or tried to play music from the Zune store on a PlaysForSure device or iPod.
"It seems like MS may be a bit more of a leader on being open with their copy protection."
This is only true when MS aren't selling their own hardware. The XBox, XBox-360, and Zune have proprietary DRM schemes that they won't license to other hardware manufacturers, and on-line stores that only sell content for those devices, so they're neither more nor less open than Apple when they're selling the same sorts of things.
"This is not an endorsement, but Apple is being very predatory/monopolistic with their music protection, compared with the next big DRM provider."
They both behave in exactly the same way when selling equivalent products. The Zune has a closed DRM scheme, cannot use content encoded with any other DRM format including their own PlaysForSure, has on-line store that only sells content in that closed format, and requires special software to access and use it from a PC, just like the iPod with its iTunes Store and iTunes software.
You're thinking of trade and manufacturing monopolies, not corporations, which didn't exist prior to the 19th century. Mediaeval / renaissance Europeans had an Aristotelian mind-set that would have regarded giving a company the status of a person as totally ludicrous, and even if somebody had come up with the idea, the massively influential and powerful Catholic Church would have regarded it and the concept of absolving such a man-created being from the moral and ethical obligations that God-created ones were expected to follow as a double heresy. As the Knights Templar discovered, having vast wealth and lots of influence with the crowned heads of many nations doesn't help much when being accused of heresy means (a) that one is automatically guilty, (b) all possessions go to the Church and its "allies" (a powerful motivation for finding rich heretics!), and (c) there is a high probability of getting burned at the stake or imprisoned for life, both of which probably seemed rather pleasant after a few weeks spent with the Inquisition.
In this particular case point (b) was of course the main reason for the Templars being accused of heresy in the first place, but that merely underlines the fact that this was a period when the extremely wealthy had to be even more careful about what they said and did than everyone else (Ballmer's "monkey dance" and chair throwing could for example have been presented by jealous rivals as evidence of obvious demonic possession, thereby opening Bill G. to accusations of sorcery, and anyone else associated with him to the same).
"But I think what GP said may apply to Southern and Eastern Europe."
I live in a part of Europe that's as far south as you can get while still being in Europe (Spain), and computers are everywhere, as are personal music players (mostly iPods) -- just about everyone seems to have some sort of broadband Internet link too. However, it is likely that the Zune will have a fairly difficult time here despite this due to the iconic status that the iPod has attained, especially among females, few of whom would even consider being seen with anything else.
"A masterpiece of arrogance and misdirection. Let's review Grocklaw's take"
Because, as we all know, Groklaw is a completely unbiased source that has no pro-FOSS, anti-MS agenda, and PJ hasn't ever deleted a single posted opinion that doesn't agree with hers...
They seem to have the rather wise attitude that free software (i.e. free as in beer, but not ad-ware, which they class as commercial software) helps to promote MP3, and thus ensure that hardware and software vendors continue to support it and thus pay royalties to Thompson, hence the fact that they offer a free command-line tool to encode and decode them on the very web-site that details their patent royalty strategies.
"All I'm saying is that between the two options, MP3's probably made better business sense because most files being distributed were in that format(on the Napster and Napster like networks)"
They made good business sense as a lowest common denominator, but the advantages offered by AAC in terms of compression and superior sound quality (at low bit-rates -- MP3 and AAC are more or less equivalent in sound terms at high bit-rates, but AAC files are smaller) would I think have meant that many would have preferred it if offered the option, especially in the days when most people had dial-up connections, and would therefore have appreciated smaller files with the same sound quality as their larger MP3 equivalents. So why then did AAC have to wait for Apple to popularise it on personal computers? I think this is largely due to Microsoft's love of proprietary formats which ensured that they wouldn't volountarily offer an existing superior (to MP3) standard when they could design their own ones, and thus get royalty payments from device manufacturers who were desperate to tap into Windows' commanding market share. And now, as is par for the course, MS have shafted "their partners" by launching their own music player that not only uses a DRM format nobody else can license (together with an iTunes Store wannabe that only sells media in that format), but also plays AAC files, thus ensuring that those who used iTunes to rip their CDs can put all those files on a Zune without having to convert anything, which only a small minority of players from vendors other that Apple are capable of doing.
"AAC wasn't the dominant format when people were first making business decisions. MP3's are the dominant one and are open, so why burn money supporting something when a free alternative exists?"
MP3 is _not_ an open standard in the FOSS sense, or free in the beer sense, because it is encumbered with patents owned by Thompson, who enforce them vigorously in the US, EU, and Asia (see http://www.mp3licensing.com/ for details): furthermore, unlike with AAC, MP3 royalties must be paid for streamed content, so it can actually end up being (significantly!) more expensive than AAC for certain types of media distribution. In both cases, device developers must pay roughly comparable royalties for including codecs, and the fact that AAC files are smaller due to a better compression system means that they consume less bandwidth when downloading, and require less storage space, so they're better suited to bandwidth and storage-sensitive applications than MP3, hence the fact that virtually every mobile phone capable of downloading and storing music supports AAC.
As to lock-in, this is a device manufacturing decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple. AAC is an ISO/IEC standard that was first published in 1997, so Apple simply adopted it, and had no part in specifying anything about it (originally specified by Dolby, Fraunhofer (part of the Thompson group who also own the patents on MP3), AT&T, Sony and Nokia). Note also that FairPlay is only related to AAC insofar as once Apple had made the decision to distribute all iTunes store content in that format, it was therefore the one they wrote their DRM scheme for, but the nature of DRM is such that they could just as easily have written it for MP3 had they chosen to distribute content in that format instead.
So those who buy from the iTunes Store are indeed locked into Apple, but that lock-in is due to FairPlay, and not AAC, which, like MP3, is a technology that Apple have to license just like everyone else.
Wikipedia has an excellent entry on AAC here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin g) that should help dispel many of the myths surrounding it.
"Sony does the same thing for the PlayStation platform. An SDK ~is~ available, if you pay the huge fee for it, and Sony still gets to decide if your title is good enough to get their PlayStation branding."
Getting the Playstation logo has nothing to do with quality -- if it did, then every game for the PS1 and PS2 would be both excellent and stable instead of there being truckloads of terrible games that also have many obvious bugs in them. This crap-ware is out there because all the PlayStation logo really says is that (1) a games producer paid Sony for it, and (2) also agrees to give Sony a percentage of any revenues the game generates, just like 3rd. party games with XBox or various Nintendo console logos (i.e. this is a standard industry practice, not a case of Sony being more "evil" than the others). Hardware manufacturers are also expected to pony up for logos, and this is far from being restricted to the games industry -- DVD, THX, Dolby, iPod, Q-link and various other logos commonly seen on consumer electronics also usually involve paying a lump sum plus a percentage of revenues from sales or a fixed price per item shipped to whoever owns or administers the logo.
"I guess I jsut have to go by Steve's word since the IBM folks were at the keynote and they didn't call him a liar"
1) IBM have never called _anyone_ a liar, even when (as is the case with SCO) they obviously are liars. It simply isn't the way they work. 2) Steve has been known to stretch the truth when doing so suits him, e.g. all those claims about whatever Apple are pushing being N times faster than what they aren't pushing, such-and-such a system being the fastest personal computer in the world, etc. 3) IBM did not produce any material stating that they were going to make 3GHz Apple-style PPC chips either before, during, or indeed after Jobs' claim. It is thus something he, rather than they, said.
My theory is that Jobs said this with IBM there to try and put them in an awkward position in the hope that they would then do what he wanted to avoid looking stupid. When it didn't work, he was the one who ended up looking stupid, so he threw one of his famous hissy-fits, gave IBM a piece of his mind, and got told in no uncertain terms that Apple's wants and needs would be given the priority that their 4% consumption figures warranted, which meant they'd get their higher clock speeds some time after the rest of the POWER line did, and to please refrain from making promises on IBM's behalf in the future, thanks for your call Steve, have a nice day.
NB: I have nothing against Steve Jobs' habit of stretching the truth now and again -- he is after all primarily a marketer (and a very able one at that), and good marketers tell customers what they want to hear, and that sometimes involves bending facts to fit in with whatever version of reality they're trying to sell today.
The fact that they mention RedHat's ownership of JBoss as having been the deciding factor in their OS selection points to this being a cluster running distributed Enterprise Java Beans, which means it will probably compare poorly in terms of efficiency with their old mainframe applications that were likely written in heavily optimised FORTRAN, which would account for their having to feed data to it in batches. This together with an observed inability on the part of EJB programmers (as distinct from other types of Java programmer) to write even marginally optimal code explains why they get such crappy performance out of the cluster (farming EJBs out among several servers is _not_ grid computing, any more than using a clustered web server is grid computing).
If one actually reads the article, it appears that this company has been well and truly hornswoggled by somebody or other, because nothing they say in the article makes any sense otherwise. Everything they cite as a benefit of "grid computing" versus a 20 year-old mainframe can also be claimed for modern mainframes (which have plenty of other features not found in their cluster), and I fail to see where they get their "65% hardware savings" from, because those PowerEdge 6850 servers (which are from Dell, and not Intel as the article claims) start at well over $17,000 a piece (including a $1,500 discount) with dual 3GHz Xeons, so 50 of the things would cost nearly $900,000, compared with an entry-level price for the z9 of about $100,000, meaning that you'd get a pretty capable one for $900,000 that would comfortably exceed their system's quoted 100 TPS whilst taking up less space and consuming less power (both space and power cost money, and must therefore be factored into the cost of a system over its projected life span).
Note also that they don't say how much it cost to rewrite all that software in Java, but the fact that it took 14 months during which time they were paying their own people, CapGemini, and "several smaller local boutiques" to do it means that it was probably a very costly exercise indeed, and you have to add the price of RedHat Enterprise (not cheap), JBoss Enterprise, and whatever database they're using (they don't say which one, but I reckon there's at least a 90% chance its name begins with "O", and it's produced by a company whose CEO is called Larry, and has a taste for antique Samurai swords and expensive sailing boats).
So the real story is this: for a total system cost that exceeds that of a modern mainframe, they've now got something with less performance and less features that takes up more space, uses more power, will become obsolete a lot sooner, but padded out CapGemini's pockets nicely, contributed to the local economy by putting money into the bank accounts of several local software boutiques, and allows them to use modern buzz-words such as "grid computing", albeit inappropriately.
"When Apple switched TO IBM FROM Motorola, Steve announced at the Macworld(or was it WWDC) keynote that IBM had promised 3.0GHz G5s within a year."
Just because Steve said it doesn't mean that IBM made such promises, only that Steve claimed they did, which given his penchant for spin, doesn't actually prove that IBM promised Apple anything at all.
"Perhaps IBM is trying to win back Apple with this announcement?"
I'm far from convinced that it was Apple who dropped PPC rather than IBM deciding that Apple's demanding and difficult nature together with their ownership of significant portions of PPC IP simply wasn't worth the hassle for the relatively small number of chips they consumed. Lest we forget, IBM pulled off a major coup by getting all three games console manufacturers to use their chips, including Microsoft, whose prior XBox offering was as solidly planted in the Intel world as their PC software offerings. This was announced shortly after Apple's change to Intel, but the fact that consoles are integrated consumer electronics items means that negotiations must have been going on for quite some time before-hand, because the choice of CPU has a radical effect on the design of the rest of the hardware, the system software and firmware, compatibility with existing stuff for prior consoles, and a host of other factors that mean it isn't something manufacturers do on the spur of the moment (well, except for Nintendo, whose use of a PPC in their GameCube made using one for the Wii pretty much a no-brainer). MS and Sony in particular must have been given some pretty convincing presentations fairly early in the design cycle for them to select that CPUs they eventually used, so it's pretty much a certainty that negotiations were going on quite a long time before Apple announced that they would now be selling what amount to PC-compatibles in pretty boxes after two decades of mocking them.
So despite the fact that Apple spun things to make it look like this was a choice they made, Apple's prior record on spin would suggest that we not blindly believe them, but instead consider what the situation looked like from IBMs' perspective:
1) Apple were constantly pushing for options that weren't necessarily in line with IBM's goals as a manufacturer of CPUs, the vast bulk if which were sold for embedded systems and large servers rather than desktops and laptops.
2) The presence of Apple IP in the PPC line meant that IBM couldn't sell them to others without Apple's permission, and would probably need to pay (perhaps significant) royalties if that permission could be obtained, which is far from being certain given Jobs' antagonism to anybody making what might turn out to be a potential Mac clone.
3) Despite Apple implying that IBM couldn't make chips with clocks above 2.X GHz, they seemed to have absolutely no problem producing ones with multiple cores that run at 3.2GHz for Microsoft and Sony in volumes and at prices that were attractive consumer electronics manufacturers who are hoping to sell hundreds of millions of units during a product's life-cycle. What then is more likely: that (as Apple claim) IBM couldn't manufacture chips at high clock rates despite amply demonstrating their ability to do so, or that IBM were not willing to dedicate large amounts of time and effort on a version of the Power architecture that they could only sell to a customer who accounted for at best 4% of their output (and that 4% was prior to the deals that made with MS and Sony, so it would have ended up being a lot less than 4% a couple of years down the line)?
4) Apple also wanted extremely low-power G5 chips for laptops, which wasn't something the other 96% of IBM's market were demanding. They would thus have to devote considerable amounts of R&D to a project that was only of interest to one minor (in overall production terms) customer instead of using those resources to improve products and the processes that manufacture them which were selling in far larger numbers.
With the above in mind, it is IMO far more likely that IBM told Apple to sod off rather than the other way around, just as any company would when faced with a choice between dedicating research, design, and manufacturing capacity to satisfy the whims of one small, difficult, and tempestuous customer, or using them to satisfy the requirements of others who are much larger, more profitable, and easier to work with.
"if you dig into the bug, they link to an in-depth analysis of the malloc system works and I could have really used that when I was porting some software from Linux to OS X"
I take it you're referring to nemo's article on using malloc() for stack smashing. It is indeed excellent, and as is the case with many hacking techniques, contains much that is useful for those writing legitimate code, and is both well explained and has illustrative examples. Note though that this is typical for Phrack, which tends to attract contributions from extremely knowledgeable (albeit amoral!) people, and is thus a valuable resource for anyone who needs to know the inner workings of current operating systems.
"The rtsp hole *does* exist on all Macs, MOAB just screwed up their demo of it."
I've already said as much in at least one of my posts, because the article by nemo that they cite is entirely PPC-based, but the exploit he wrote about uses a bug (well, not really a bug as such, but a design issue) in the malloc() routine that's part of OS X, and not therefore specific to any CPU architecture. Note though that as nemo's article says, you need to "trick" the system into allocating memory blocks that are contiguous with the one that the original application uses (which it doesn't normally do) otherwise the exploit will generate a SEG_FAULT, so that particular stack smashing technique is somewhat failure-prone in the real world, hence the fact that the MOAB example usually just crashes QuickTime even when run on the Intel-based Macs it targets. This is why, despite the fact that the Mac programming community (and therefore probably Apple) have known about the issue for quite a while (at least a year), the practical difficulties involved in using it to wreak any real mischief have meant that it's been regarded as an interesting curiosity rather than something to be overly concerned about, or at least that was the situation until Finisterre et al tried to publicise it with a bad single-architecture example that amply demonstrates why those who were already aware of it hadn't been either worrying or nefariously crafting cunning bits of malware for OS X.
Thanks for the link. However, I wonder why they didn't put this information in their source code instead of sticking it in an update to a blog, as like a growing number of people, I tend to steer clear of blogs due to the fact that they're usually full of self-serving crap. This one seems to be pretty typical of blogs, with a significant portion of the page space taken up by an exchange with someone on AOL, complete with them using emotive terms such as "Gestapo", and claims that the other person was seeking publicity despite the fact that AOL conversations don't magically publish themselves on someone else's blog, gleeful claims about publishing hate EMAILs (which will not of course include any valid criticisms, as these seem to disappear into the Great Bit Bucket In The Sky: apparently, they want us to believe they only receive hearty congratulations and hate mail), and other typcially bloggy rubbish.
NB: the quality of the bugs that they've published so far is extremely low: one only affects Intel Macs, and according to the Intarweb, has a minimal probability of executing correctly even on those, with the most common occurrence being that QuickTime crashes (severity is thus minimal); another is a bug in a cross-platform open source application that few Mac users know about let alone run, and also exists if said application is used on Windows or Linux (not an Apple bug, and again of minimal risk to the vast majority of Mac users); while today's little gem, if one follows the links rather than simply believing the rubbish in the blog, is actually an Internet Explorer 5 vulnerability that required an un-patched version of Windows-2000 to demonstrate it, and has in any case already been fixed by a QuickTime patch, so even those few who still insist on using IE5 on an un-patched vanilla Win2K system (which can't be installed under Boot Camp, and therefore has precisely zero probability of affecting _any_ Mac user) don't have to worry about it.
This initiative was announced a month ago, so I for one was expecting them to have some pretty impressive stuff lined up for at least the first days given the amount of publicity they were drumming up, so seeing the usual barrel bottom scraping that is so typical of Finisterre's attempts to gain fame and fortune for himself by trying to show that Macs are just as vulnerable to exploits as Windows (while usually ending up very effectively demonstrating that they aren't) is disappointing to say the least. Lest we forget, this is the man who wrote the first proof-of-concept worm for OS X that AV companies made a of of noise about until everyone discovered that the technique it used would only work if you had a network of systems connected to each-other by BlueTooth, and made a lot of noise about an OS X kernel vulnerability that turned out to be in deprecated AppleTalk code which requires a serial port that no Mac has shipped with for a decade. Now he's going to give a wake-up call to smug Apple fan boys everywhere with a bug that might work on an Intel Mac if the stars happen to be in the correct alignment, a bug in an open source application that _includes_ Macs in the list of things it runs on, and a bug in the version of IE5 that comes on the original installation media for Windows-2000, but was fixed long ago by Microsoft in patches to both IE and Windows, and Apple with a patch to QuickTime for those who apparently trust MS to write an OS and browser, but don't trust them to patch either. Way to go Kevin!!!
Where does it say that? The article linked to the original Slashdot topic (http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-01-01-200 7.html) has nothing like what you're quoting anywhere in it -- the only thing that even points at an x86 Mac being used is a bit of disassembly that obviously uses x86 named registers rather than the numbered ones for PPC.
"I still have a couple of shelves of VHS tapes, and no (serious) reason to rebuy them."
Same here, but I have to keep a VHS machine around to play them, and what happens when it finally breaks down (as it will do eventually)? How long will VHS machines be generally available now that DVD recorders cost the same or less, and what will we have to pay for them when they cease to become mass-market items? None of these are issues for people with DVD libraries if they decide to opt for a high-definition system at some point because they can not only play DVDs, but also have very capable up-scalers that will make those DVDs look better on large-screen HD-capable TVs than the DVD player they're replacing (unless said DVD player is both modern and expensive).
"Why would I need to rebuy my DVDs if I got an HD-DVD player without the ability to play DVDs? TVs have more than one input - not to mention that I'm European so I can daisy-chain SCART devices and have any number of different format players hooked up"
You may like having an ever-growing number of legacy devices daisy-chained together, but most people don't (I know this may come as a shock to Slashdotters, but the term "Home Entertainment System" actually refers to something you put in your home to entertain you, not the process of converting a home into a data format museum).
"VHS players are still easily available and cheap"
Are they? Try walking into any major UK electronics retailer and looking for one -- they're getting pretty thin on the ground nowadays, and you're likely to pay more for them than a DVD recorder if you can find one (most retailers don't have them in stock, but have to order them, as is the case with machines for that other dying format, audio cassettes).
"Finally, my PC has a DVD writer and VIVO (video in - video out) graphics cards are much cheaper than rebuying a shelf of videos: I could format-shift them myself if I really needed too."
And you are of course a typical man-in-the-street, nearly all of whom (a) know what a VIVO graphics card is, (b) can find one and install it in their computer, and (c) will of course have a desktop system that can accept such cards rather than a laptop because nobody buys laptops (and this desktop system will of course store all multimedia files in one of the overwhelmingly popular Ogg formats that all personal music / video players must support or be doomed to commercial oblivion).
Meanwhile, back in the real world of _consumer_ electronics, ordinary mortals with existing VHS libraries are faced with two realistic possibilities: (1) buy the old content they actually watch on DVD for a couple of quid each second-hand or in bargain bins, or a fiver otherwise, or (2) spend 120 spondoolicks on a combo DVD/VHS recorder that requires 1 cable, 1 electrical outlet, needs no graphics cards, computers, or other devices, will transfer their old content at the touch of a button, and record new stuff with far better image and sound quality than their VHS system. Option (2) is worthwhile if a person has a large library of personal content or some commercial stuff that isn't available on DVD, otherwise the fact that the DVD copies can't be better than the tapes they come from means that buying the content on DVDs is probably preferable, and for most people, cheaper, than spending money on equipment / media and a considerable amount of time copying tapes to DVD.
Which brings me back to the point I was originally making, i.e. that none of the above will be necessary for people with DVD libraries if one of the HD formats becomes popular because they can both play DVDs rather better than most dedicated CD players.
"DVD has some other benefits too, of course, but rebuying a film to avoid rewinding would be crazy"
The primary benefit for those of us with wives / live-in girlfriends is storage space. Commercial media tend to use one bulky tape / movie, and while one can squeeze eight hours recording time out of an E-240 using the long-play feature most video rec
The description of the bug says nothing of the sort. A quote from MOAB website says:
"Affected versions This issue has been successfully exploited in QuickTime(TM) Version 7.1.3, Player Version 7.1.3. Previous versions should be vulnerable as well. Both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X versions are affected."
Now where, O wise and insightful Coward, does it say anything about Intel chips there? Or for that matter, here:
"Proof of concept, exploit or instructions to reproduce Requires a working Ruby interpreter. The exploit provided will create a QTL file, which can be locally opened or served remotely via web server. The exploit source code includes notes and other comments about the different options available."
Does "a working Ruby interpreter", and the creation of a QTL file now require an an Intel-compatible CPU? No, I thought not.
Furthermore, they say the following:
"Exploitation conditions For further information about OS X heap implementation, we encourage to read nemo's excellent write-up for Phrack magazine: OS X heap exploitation techniques."
Nemo's article is filled with PPC code, and has no Intel code whatsoever, but anything based on his techniques would work on both PPC and Intel Macs because it uses a bug in a malloc() routine that's part of the _OS X runtime library_. Or rather, it would work on both systems if the exploit had been written by somebody with a fraction of nemo's abilities, and not the publicity-seeking pair of arseholes behind MOAB.
So where in the bug description does it say that it is Intel-specific, as you claim, astonishingly brilliant AC that you are, claim?
Slashdot Mirror
"What bullshit. The music itself is in essence a monopoly. I can only Buy EMI music via EMI outlets or whomever EMI decide to license to."
Which, as is usual with people who call the arguments of others "bullshit" entirely misses the point, because _you can play that EMI music on equipment that EMI didn't make without having to do anything special_. Norway don't give two hoots about whether the iTunes store has exclusives that aren't available elsewhere, how much they charge for them, what profits the store makes, or whether it's integrated with the iTunes software. The entirety and totality of their complaint is based on the fact that the store _only_ sells content using a DRM format that Apple refuse to let other on-line stores, device makers, or software writers license, period.
"A cetain percentage of music is available in market A but not market B because of the way labels license their music"
This is a straw man, because they aren't asking Apple to sell _content_ in Norway that they offer elsewhere.
"Music must be licensed in each and every country."
_Some_ music must be licensed in each and every country, because each country has its own copyright laws which last for different periods of time, with differing fair use provisions, national collection agencies that distribute royalties to artists, etc.
"Europe never got angry about this"
Because the EC doesn't expect all member states to have exactly the same laws on everything. And even if they did, the fact that Norway isn't in the EC would mean that its laws would still be Norway-specific, as unlike the US, the EC doesn't expect countries that aren't part of it to obey its laws unless they're applying for membership.
"Europe is getting confused"
It seems to be Americans who are confused, because this is only a European issue insofar as Norway happens to be located on a land-mass called Europe, which also has something called the "European Community" which some countries on that land-mass belong to, but Norway doesn't. This is therefore a European issue in the same way that something happening in Peru or Quebec is an American issue by dint of them happening to be located on a continent called "America".
"and hysterical about a non issue"
The ones who seem to be getting hysterical are people in the US who object to any US-based company being expected to conform with somebody else's laws in order to sell stuff to the people who live there. By contrast, the Norwegians seem to be acting in a cool and rather dignified manner, having given Apple a number of ways they can make the Norwegian iTunes store comply with Norwegian law: (1) offer music in a choice of DRM formats; (2) license FairPlay to others; or (3) sell music without DRM. These measures only apply to music sold to those living in Norway, and as with any company operating in a sovereign nation, they are perfectly free to either comply with that nation's laws, or cease doing business there, but this last option isn't something that the Norwegians are forcing on Apple in any way, and it only affects the iTunes store, not other Apple products.
"they're telling Apple, *solely because their success*, how to conduct business with the competition in Norway"
No, they're telling Apple *solely due to being a business* how to conduct business with the competition in Norway, just like the US, South Korea, Australia, etc. tell businesses how to conduct business with the competition in their countries.
"The message is clear: Even if you follow all the rules and obey all the laws, if you get too big, we'll squash you."
The message is actually "Norwegian law applies in Norway, not US law". Apple did not get squashed because they are big -- they got squashed because their iTunes store terms of service contravene Norwegian consumer protection laws. In contrast with the US, Nordic countries have a rather long tradition of giving humans more rights than companies, which is one of the reasons why they're rather good (although expensive) places to live.
"If the European union countries want to play tough"
Norway isn't in the European Union.
"In reality their doing more to serve the RIAA's agenda"
The RIAA is a purely American organisation that has no representation in, or influence over Norway.
"Region-specific DVDs are the more familiar example; did we as a society just decide to surrender completely to that one?"
No, we all went out and bought DVD players with publicly-available "no region" hacks and an in-built capability to skip the bits that the DVD makers try and force us to watch ("Millions of people who wouldn't think of driving a combine-harvester through a puppy-farm, setting fire to a children's hospital after welding all the doors shut, or launching an ICBM at Finland commit the immeasurably worse crime of copying DVDs or lending them to their friends and family").
Use the in-built updater in QuickTime, which will find it for you.
"You will have the same hoops to jump through if you were to buy music from any of the Playsforsure stores and tried to play it on your Zune or if I wanted to play them on my iPod."
Or tried to play music from the Zune store on a PlaysForSure device or iPod.
"It seems like MS may be a bit more of a leader on being open with their copy protection."
This is only true when MS aren't selling their own hardware. The XBox, XBox-360, and Zune have proprietary DRM schemes that they won't license to other hardware manufacturers, and on-line stores that only sell content for those devices, so they're neither more nor less open than Apple when they're selling the same sorts of things.
"This is not an endorsement, but Apple is being very predatory/monopolistic with their music protection, compared with the next big DRM provider."
They both behave in exactly the same way when selling equivalent products. The Zune has a closed DRM scheme, cannot use content encoded with any other DRM format including their own PlaysForSure, has on-line store that only sells content in that closed format, and requires special software to access and use it from a PC, just like the iPod with its iTunes Store and iTunes software.
You're thinking of trade and manufacturing monopolies, not corporations, which didn't exist prior to the 19th century. Mediaeval / renaissance Europeans had an Aristotelian mind-set that would have regarded giving a company the status of a person as totally ludicrous, and even if somebody had come up with the idea, the massively influential and powerful Catholic Church would have regarded it and the concept of absolving such a man-created being from the moral and ethical obligations that God-created ones were expected to follow as a double heresy. As the Knights Templar discovered, having vast wealth and lots of influence with the crowned heads of many nations doesn't help much when being accused of heresy means (a) that one is automatically guilty, (b) all possessions go to the Church and its "allies" (a powerful motivation for finding rich heretics!), and (c) there is a high probability of getting burned at the stake or imprisoned for life, both of which probably seemed rather pleasant after a few weeks spent with the Inquisition.
In this particular case point (b) was of course the main reason for the Templars being accused of heresy in the first place, but that merely underlines the fact that this was a period when the extremely wealthy had to be even more careful about what they said and did than everyone else (Ballmer's "monkey dance" and chair throwing could for example have been presented by jealous rivals as evidence of obvious demonic possession, thereby opening Bill G. to accusations of sorcery, and anyone else associated with him to the same).
"i consider the scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, ... ) to be part of Europe's elite as well"
Sweden has been in the EU since 1995.
"But I think what GP said may apply to Southern and Eastern Europe."
I live in a part of Europe that's as far south as you can get while still being in Europe (Spain), and computers are everywhere, as are personal music players (mostly iPods) -- just about everyone seems to have some sort of broadband Internet link too. However, it is likely that the Zune will have a fairly difficult time here despite this due to the iconic status that the iPod has attained, especially among females, few of whom would even consider being seen with anything else.
"A masterpiece of arrogance and misdirection. Let's review Grocklaw's take"
Because, as we all know, Groklaw is a completely unbiased source that has no pro-FOSS, anti-MS agenda, and PJ hasn't ever deleted a single posted opinion that doesn't agree with hers...
"I, for one, like living in a society ruled by laws rather than the whims of men"
Laws are by definition whims of men, hence the fact that there are so many stupid ones.
"Why are so many free programs available then?"
They seem to have the rather wise attitude that free software (i.e. free as in beer, but not ad-ware, which they class as commercial software) helps to promote MP3, and thus ensure that hardware and software vendors continue to support it and thus pay royalties to Thompson, hence the fact that they offer a free command-line tool to encode and decode them on the very web-site that details their patent royalty strategies.
"All I'm saying is that between the two options, MP3's probably made better business sense because most files being distributed were in that format(on the Napster and Napster like networks)"
They made good business sense as a lowest common denominator, but the advantages offered by AAC in terms of compression and superior sound quality (at low bit-rates -- MP3 and AAC are more or less equivalent in sound terms at high bit-rates, but AAC files are smaller) would I think have meant that many would have preferred it if offered the option, especially in the days when most people had dial-up connections, and would therefore have appreciated smaller files with the same sound quality as their larger MP3 equivalents. So why then did AAC have to wait for Apple to popularise it on personal computers? I think this is largely due to Microsoft's love of proprietary formats which ensured that they wouldn't volountarily offer an existing superior (to MP3) standard when they could design their own ones, and thus get royalty payments from device manufacturers who were desperate to tap into Windows' commanding market share. And now, as is par for the course, MS have shafted "their partners" by launching their own music player that not only uses a DRM format nobody else can license (together with an iTunes Store wannabe that only sells media in that format), but also plays AAC files, thus ensuring that those who used iTunes to rip their CDs can put all those files on a Zune without having to convert anything, which only a small minority of players from vendors other that Apple are capable of doing.
"AAC wasn't the dominant format when people were first making business decisions. MP3's are the dominant one and are open, so why burn money supporting something when a free alternative exists?"
n g) that should help dispel many of the myths surrounding it.
MP3 is _not_ an open standard in the FOSS sense, or free in the beer sense, because it is encumbered with patents owned by Thompson, who enforce them vigorously in the US, EU, and Asia (see http://www.mp3licensing.com/ for details): furthermore, unlike with AAC, MP3 royalties must be paid for streamed content, so it can actually end up being (significantly!) more expensive than AAC for certain types of media distribution. In both cases, device developers must pay roughly comparable royalties for including codecs, and the fact that AAC files are smaller due to a better compression system means that they consume less bandwidth when downloading, and require less storage space, so they're better suited to bandwidth and storage-sensitive applications than MP3, hence the fact that virtually every mobile phone capable of downloading and storing music supports AAC.
As to lock-in, this is a device manufacturing decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with Apple. AAC is an ISO/IEC standard that was first published in 1997, so Apple simply adopted it, and had no part in specifying anything about it (originally specified by Dolby, Fraunhofer (part of the Thompson group who also own the patents on MP3), AT&T, Sony and Nokia). Note also that FairPlay is only related to AAC insofar as once Apple had made the decision to distribute all iTunes store content in that format, it was therefore the one they wrote their DRM scheme for, but the nature of DRM is such that they could just as easily have written it for MP3 had they chosen to distribute content in that format instead.
So those who buy from the iTunes Store are indeed locked into Apple, but that lock-in is due to FairPlay, and not AAC, which, like MP3, is a technology that Apple have to license just like everyone else.
Wikipedia has an excellent entry on AAC here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codi
"Sony does the same thing for the PlayStation platform. An SDK ~is~ available, if you pay the huge fee for it, and Sony still gets to decide if your title is good enough to get their PlayStation branding."
Getting the Playstation logo has nothing to do with quality -- if it did, then every game for the PS1 and PS2 would be both excellent and stable instead of there being truckloads of terrible games that also have many obvious bugs in them. This crap-ware is out there because all the PlayStation logo really says is that (1) a games producer paid Sony for it, and (2) also agrees to give Sony a percentage of any revenues the game generates, just like 3rd. party games with XBox or various Nintendo console logos (i.e. this is a standard industry practice, not a case of Sony being more "evil" than the others). Hardware manufacturers are also expected to pony up for logos, and this is far from being restricted to the games industry -- DVD, THX, Dolby, iPod, Q-link and various other logos commonly seen on consumer electronics also usually involve paying a lump sum plus a percentage of revenues from sales or a fixed price per item shipped to whoever owns or administers the logo.
"I guess I jsut have to go by Steve's word since the IBM folks were at the keynote and they didn't call him a liar"
1) IBM have never called _anyone_ a liar, even when (as is the case with SCO) they obviously are liars. It simply isn't the way they work.
2) Steve has been known to stretch the truth when doing so suits him, e.g. all those claims about whatever Apple are pushing being N times faster than what they aren't pushing, such-and-such a system being the fastest personal computer in the world, etc.
3) IBM did not produce any material stating that they were going to make 3GHz Apple-style PPC chips either before, during, or indeed after Jobs' claim. It is thus something he, rather than they, said.
My theory is that Jobs said this with IBM there to try and put them in an awkward position in the hope that they would then do what he wanted to avoid looking stupid. When it didn't work, he was the one who ended up looking stupid, so he threw one of his famous hissy-fits, gave IBM a piece of his mind, and got told in no uncertain terms that Apple's wants and needs would be given the priority that their 4% consumption figures warranted, which meant they'd get their higher clock speeds some time after the rest of the POWER line did, and to please refrain from making promises on IBM's behalf in the future, thanks for your call Steve, have a nice day.
NB: I have nothing against Steve Jobs' habit of stretching the truth now and again -- he is after all primarily a marketer (and a very able one at that), and good marketers tell customers what they want to hear, and that sometimes involves bending facts to fit in with whatever version of reality they're trying to sell today.
The fact that they mention RedHat's ownership of JBoss as having been the deciding factor in their OS selection points to this being a cluster running distributed Enterprise Java Beans, which means it will probably compare poorly in terms of efficiency with their old mainframe applications that were likely written in heavily optimised FORTRAN, which would account for their having to feed data to it in batches. This together with an observed inability on the part of EJB programmers (as distinct from other types of Java programmer) to write even marginally optimal code explains why they get such crappy performance out of the cluster (farming EJBs out among several servers is _not_ grid computing, any more than using a clustered web server is grid computing).
If one actually reads the article, it appears that this company has been well and truly hornswoggled by somebody or other, because nothing they say in the article makes any sense otherwise. Everything they cite as a benefit of "grid computing" versus a 20 year-old mainframe can also be claimed for modern mainframes (which have plenty of other features not found in their cluster), and I fail to see where they get their "65% hardware savings" from, because those PowerEdge 6850 servers (which are from Dell, and not Intel as the article claims) start at well over $17,000 a piece (including a $1,500 discount) with dual 3GHz Xeons, so 50 of the things would cost nearly $900,000, compared with an entry-level price for the z9 of about $100,000, meaning that you'd get a pretty capable one for $900,000 that would comfortably exceed their system's quoted 100 TPS whilst taking up less space and consuming less power (both space and power cost money, and must therefore be factored into the cost of a system over its projected life span).
Note also that they don't say how much it cost to rewrite all that software in Java, but the fact that it took 14 months during which time they were paying their own people, CapGemini, and "several smaller local boutiques" to do it means that it was probably a very costly exercise indeed, and you have to add the price of RedHat Enterprise (not cheap), JBoss Enterprise, and whatever database they're using (they don't say which one, but I reckon there's at least a 90% chance its name begins with "O", and it's produced by a company whose CEO is called Larry, and has a taste for antique Samurai swords and expensive sailing boats).
So the real story is this: for a total system cost that exceeds that of a modern mainframe, they've now got something with less performance and less features that takes up more space, uses more power, will become obsolete a lot sooner, but padded out CapGemini's pockets nicely, contributed to the local economy by putting money into the bank accounts of several local software boutiques, and allows them to use modern buzz-words such as "grid computing", albeit inappropriately.
"When Apple switched TO IBM FROM Motorola, Steve announced at the Macworld(or was it WWDC) keynote that IBM had promised 3.0GHz G5s within a year."
Just because Steve said it doesn't mean that IBM made such promises, only that Steve claimed they did, which given his penchant for spin, doesn't actually prove that IBM promised Apple anything at all.
"Perhaps IBM is trying to win back Apple with this announcement?"
I'm far from convinced that it was Apple who dropped PPC rather than IBM deciding that Apple's demanding and difficult nature together with their ownership of significant portions of PPC IP simply wasn't worth the hassle for the relatively small number of chips they consumed. Lest we forget, IBM pulled off a major coup by getting all three games console manufacturers to use their chips, including Microsoft, whose prior XBox offering was as solidly planted in the Intel world as their PC software offerings. This was announced shortly after Apple's change to Intel, but the fact that consoles are integrated consumer electronics items means that negotiations must have been going on for quite some time before-hand, because the choice of CPU has a radical effect on the design of the rest of the hardware, the system software and firmware, compatibility with existing stuff for prior consoles, and a host of other factors that mean it isn't something manufacturers do on the spur of the moment (well, except for Nintendo, whose use of a PPC in their GameCube made using one for the Wii pretty much a no-brainer). MS and Sony in particular must have been given some pretty convincing presentations fairly early in the design cycle for them to select that CPUs they eventually used, so it's pretty much a certainty that negotiations were going on quite a long time before Apple announced that they would now be selling what amount to PC-compatibles in pretty boxes after two decades of mocking them.
So despite the fact that Apple spun things to make it look like this was a choice they made, Apple's prior record on spin would suggest that we not blindly believe them, but instead consider what the situation looked like from IBMs' perspective:
1) Apple were constantly pushing for options that weren't necessarily in line with IBM's goals as a manufacturer of CPUs, the vast bulk if which were sold for embedded systems and large servers rather than desktops and laptops.
2) The presence of Apple IP in the PPC line meant that IBM couldn't sell them to others without Apple's permission, and would probably need to pay (perhaps significant) royalties if that permission could be obtained, which is far from being certain given Jobs' antagonism to anybody making what might turn out to be a potential Mac clone.
3) Despite Apple implying that IBM couldn't make chips with clocks above 2.X GHz, they seemed to have absolutely no problem producing ones with multiple cores that run at 3.2GHz for Microsoft and Sony in volumes and at prices that were attractive consumer electronics manufacturers who are hoping to sell hundreds of millions of units during a product's life-cycle. What then is more likely: that (as Apple claim) IBM couldn't manufacture chips at high clock rates despite amply demonstrating their ability to do so, or that IBM were not willing to dedicate large amounts of time and effort on a version of the Power architecture that they could only sell to a customer who accounted for at best 4% of their output (and that 4% was prior to the deals that made with MS and Sony, so it would have ended up being a lot less than 4% a couple of years down the line)?
4) Apple also wanted extremely low-power G5 chips for laptops, which wasn't something the other 96% of IBM's market were demanding. They would thus have to devote considerable amounts of R&D to a project that was only of interest to one minor (in overall production terms) customer instead of using those resources to improve products and the processes that manufacture them which were selling in far larger numbers.
With the above in mind, it is IMO far more likely that IBM told Apple to sod off rather than the other way around, just as any company would when faced with a choice between dedicating research, design, and manufacturing capacity to satisfy the whims of one small, difficult, and tempestuous customer, or using them to satisfy the requirements of others who are much larger, more profitable, and easier to work with.
"if you dig into the bug, they link to an in-depth analysis of the malloc system works and I could have really used that when I was porting some software from Linux to OS X"
I take it you're referring to nemo's article on using malloc() for stack smashing. It is indeed excellent, and as is the case with many hacking techniques, contains much that is useful for those writing legitimate code, and is both well explained and has illustrative examples. Note though that this is typical for Phrack, which tends to attract contributions from extremely knowledgeable (albeit amoral!) people, and is thus a valuable resource for anyone who needs to know the inner workings of current operating systems.
"The rtsp hole *does* exist on all Macs, MOAB just screwed up their demo of it."
I've already said as much in at least one of my posts, because the article by nemo that they cite is entirely PPC-based, but the exploit he wrote about uses a bug (well, not really a bug as such, but a design issue) in the malloc() routine that's part of OS X, and not therefore specific to any CPU architecture. Note though that as nemo's article says, you need to "trick" the system into allocating memory blocks that are contiguous with the one that the original application uses (which it doesn't normally do) otherwise the exploit will generate a SEG_FAULT, so that particular stack smashing technique is somewhat failure-prone in the real world, hence the fact that the MOAB example usually just crashes QuickTime even when run on the Intel-based Macs it targets. This is why, despite the fact that the Mac programming community (and therefore probably Apple) have known about the issue for quite a while (at least a year), the practical difficulties involved in using it to wreak any real mischief have meant that it's been regarded as an interesting curiosity rather than something to be overly concerned about, or at least that was the situation until Finisterre et al tried to publicise it with a bad single-architecture example that amply demonstrates why those who were already aware of it hadn't been either worrying or nefariously crafting cunning bits of malware for OS X.
Thanks for the link. However, I wonder why they didn't put this information in their source code instead of sticking it in an update to a blog, as like a growing number of people, I tend to steer clear of blogs due to the fact that they're usually full of self-serving crap. This one seems to be pretty typical of blogs, with a significant portion of the page space taken up by an exchange with someone on AOL, complete with them using emotive terms such as "Gestapo", and claims that the other person was seeking publicity despite the fact that AOL conversations don't magically publish themselves on someone else's blog, gleeful claims about publishing hate EMAILs (which will not of course include any valid criticisms, as these seem to disappear into the Great Bit Bucket In The Sky: apparently, they want us to believe they only receive hearty congratulations and hate mail), and other typcially bloggy rubbish.
NB: the quality of the bugs that they've published so far is extremely low: one only affects Intel Macs, and according to the Intarweb, has a minimal probability of executing correctly even on those, with the most common occurrence being that QuickTime crashes (severity is thus minimal); another is a bug in a cross-platform open source application that few Mac users know about let alone run, and also exists if said application is used on Windows or Linux (not an Apple bug, and again of minimal risk to the vast majority of Mac users); while today's little gem, if one follows the links rather than simply believing the rubbish in the blog, is actually an Internet Explorer 5 vulnerability that required an un-patched version of Windows-2000 to demonstrate it, and has in any case already been fixed by a QuickTime patch, so even those few who still insist on using IE5 on an un-patched vanilla Win2K system (which can't be installed under Boot Camp, and therefore has precisely zero probability of affecting _any_ Mac user) don't have to worry about it.
This initiative was announced a month ago, so I for one was expecting them to have some pretty impressive stuff lined up for at least the first days given the amount of publicity they were drumming up, so seeing the usual barrel bottom scraping that is so typical of Finisterre's attempts to gain fame and fortune for himself by trying to show that Macs are just as vulnerable to exploits as Windows (while usually ending up very effectively demonstrating that they aren't) is disappointing to say the least. Lest we forget, this is the man who wrote the first proof-of-concept worm for OS X that AV companies made a of of noise about until everyone discovered that the technique it used would only work if you had a network of systems connected to each-other by BlueTooth, and made a lot of noise about an OS X kernel vulnerability that turned out to be in deprecated AppleTalk code which requires a serial port that no Mac has shipped with for a decade. Now he's going to give a wake-up call to smug Apple fan boys everywhere with a bug that might work on an Intel Mac if the stars happen to be in the correct alignment, a bug in an open source application that _includes_ Macs in the list of things it runs on, and a bug in the version of IE5 that comes on the original installation media for Windows-2000, but was fixed long ago by Microsoft in patches to both IE and Windows, and Apple with a patch to QuickTime for those who apparently trust MS to write an OS and browser, but don't trust them to patch either. Way to go Kevin!!!
Where does it say that? The article linked to the original Slashdot topic (http://projects.info-pull.com/moab/MOAB-01-01-200 7.html) has nothing like what you're quoting anywhere in it -- the only thing that even points at an x86 Mac being used is a bit of disassembly that obviously uses x86 named registers rather than the numbered ones for PPC.
"I still have a couple of shelves of VHS tapes, and no (serious) reason to rebuy them."
Same here, but I have to keep a VHS machine around to play them, and what happens when it finally breaks down (as it will do eventually)? How long will VHS machines be generally available now that DVD recorders cost the same or less, and what will we have to pay for them when they cease to become mass-market items? None of these are issues for people with DVD libraries if they decide to opt for a high-definition system at some point because they can not only play DVDs, but also have very capable up-scalers that will make those DVDs look better on large-screen HD-capable TVs than the DVD player they're replacing (unless said DVD player is both modern and expensive).
"Why would I need to rebuy my DVDs if I got an HD-DVD player without the ability to play DVDs? TVs have more than one input - not to mention that I'm European so I can daisy-chain SCART devices and have any number of different format players hooked up"
You may like having an ever-growing number of legacy devices daisy-chained together, but most people don't (I know this may come as a shock to Slashdotters, but the term "Home Entertainment System" actually refers to something you put in your home to entertain you, not the process of converting a home into a data format museum).
"VHS players are still easily available and cheap"
Are they? Try walking into any major UK electronics retailer and looking for one -- they're getting pretty thin on the ground nowadays, and you're likely to pay more for them than a DVD recorder if you can find one (most retailers don't have them in stock, but have to order them, as is the case with machines for that other dying format, audio cassettes).
"Finally, my PC has a DVD writer and VIVO (video in - video out) graphics cards are much cheaper than rebuying a shelf of videos: I could format-shift them myself if I really needed too."
And you are of course a typical man-in-the-street, nearly all of whom (a) know what a VIVO graphics card is, (b) can find one and install it in their computer, and (c) will of course have a desktop system that can accept such cards rather than a laptop because nobody buys laptops (and this desktop system will of course store all multimedia files in one of the overwhelmingly popular Ogg formats that all personal music / video players must support or be doomed to commercial oblivion).
Meanwhile, back in the real world of _consumer_ electronics, ordinary mortals with existing VHS libraries are faced with two realistic possibilities: (1) buy the old content they actually watch on DVD for a couple of quid each second-hand or in bargain bins, or a fiver otherwise, or (2) spend 120 spondoolicks on a combo DVD/VHS recorder that requires 1 cable, 1 electrical outlet, needs no graphics cards, computers, or other devices, will transfer their old content at the touch of a button, and record new stuff with far better image and sound quality than their VHS system. Option (2) is worthwhile if a person has a large library of personal content or some commercial stuff that isn't available on DVD, otherwise the fact that the DVD copies can't be better than the tapes they come from means that buying the content on DVDs is probably preferable, and for most people, cheaper, than spending money on equipment / media and a considerable amount of time copying tapes to DVD.
Which brings me back to the point I was originally making, i.e. that none of the above will be necessary for people with DVD libraries if one of the HD formats becomes popular because they can both play DVDs rather better than most dedicated CD players.
"DVD has some other benefits too, of course, but rebuying a film to avoid rewinding would be crazy"
The primary benefit for those of us with wives / live-in girlfriends is storage space. Commercial media tend to use one bulky tape / movie, and while one can squeeze eight hours recording time out of an E-240 using the long-play feature most video rec
The description of the bug says nothing of the sort. A quote from MOAB website says:
"Affected versions
This issue has been successfully exploited in QuickTime(TM) Version 7.1.3, Player Version 7.1.3. Previous versions should be vulnerable as well. Both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X versions are affected."
Now where, O wise and insightful Coward, does it say anything about Intel chips there? Or for that matter, here:
"Proof of concept, exploit or instructions to reproduce
Requires a working Ruby interpreter. The exploit provided will create a QTL file, which can be locally opened or served remotely via web server. The exploit source code includes notes and other comments about the different options available."
Does "a working Ruby interpreter", and the creation of a QTL file now require an an Intel-compatible CPU? No, I thought not.
Furthermore, they say the following:
"Exploitation conditions
For further information about OS X heap implementation, we encourage to read nemo's excellent write-up for Phrack magazine: OS X heap exploitation techniques."
Nemo's article is filled with PPC code, and has no Intel code whatsoever, but anything based on his techniques would work on both PPC and Intel Macs because it uses a bug in a malloc() routine that's part of the _OS X runtime library_. Or rather, it would work on both systems if the exploit had been written by somebody with a fraction of nemo's abilities, and not the publicity-seeking pair of arseholes behind MOAB.
So where in the bug description does it say that it is Intel-specific, as you claim, astonishingly brilliant AC that you are, claim?