The roots of this slashdot tag are in the juvenile site Bad Vista run by Stallman's FSF.
They were asking people(don't know if they still do) as part of a astroturfing campaign to help out by tagging all Vista stories as defectivebydesign. Thus, it has lost its meaning and is just mindless people doing off topic tagging.
I once attended a talk by Stallman, it was fun and all, and the hall was jampacked. But seriously, FSF needs to close that site, it's full of meaningless and mindless half-true FUD and the joke's on FSF for creating that site. Maybe it was just an attempt at spreading FUD on MS to counter(or complement?) MS's anti-Linux FUD, but to anyone with half a brain, the joke's on FSF.
This is hardly the first time Unsanity's stuff has caused problems with a new version of OS X Then Apple should've tested the install with APE installed on Tiger. Right?
The problem is not about the trolls, but about the moderators modding up the trolls. Why is the criticism of Apple not valid? They have failed to test the upgrade with a commonly used software.
What is the excuse for Apple not to test the upgrade with APE installed? They know it's a common application and likely to cause problems so they could atleast have warned users if not provide workarounds.
What blows my mind is that APE isn't smart enough to check the OS version and NOT LOAD. It is truly unbelievable. How hard is it to say if [ "$(sw_vers -productVersion | sed -E 's/([0-9]+\.[0-9]+)\..*/\1/')" != "10.4" ] ; then syslog -s "unknown OS version." ; exit 0; fi? Every OS release, APE causes some sort of major problem for a lot of users. Every OS release, people just keep coming back and reinstalling it even after seeing the fallout. I just don't get it. It's like Stockholm Syndrome or something.... So why doesn't Apple perform testing the upgrade install with APE installed and fix the issues or atleast warn people before releasing the OS if this breaking happens every time?
Your post is so full of inaccuracies and inconsistencies that I don't even know where to start.
To support his claim, he has mentioned a lot of technical details from Microsoft's documentation and pieced together an outline of how the enforcement mechanisms interact with the rest of the system. He has made some specific assertions based on the documentation of negative outcomes from the spec -- and to refute these assertions in detail would require knowledge beyond the published spec, i.e. to be able to fill in the missing details of how a specific interaction can behave differently from how the published spec infers it should. (The link you provided mentioned some specific claims here, but I did not see those claims in his latest slides.)
Gutmann's slides are intentionally misleading and are driven by an agenda. Slide 12 says: "But wait, this isnt commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users own content!"
That is plain bullshit. From Ars: "Gutmann also says that users are being punished by an overzealous system that misidentifies "premium" content. Users are supposedly finding that Vista is blocking them from showing their own home movies if they were shot in HD. I've worked with two HD cams on Vista (both from Sony) and haven't had a single problem"
He has also quoted many people with many use cases who have experienced problems with the content protection mechanisms. I'm only at slide 20 of 80 and I've seen half a dozen use cases that put the onus on the user to prove that their hardware is compliant and to block the content otherwise. That shows harm.
You have been FUD'ed. Plain and simple. He intentionally confuses the readers between DRM, HD and "Premium" content. There are no HD movies with the ICT flag enabled right now, and if it is ever enabled, there will be a notice on the box saying that. If you do not have HDCP enabled displays, don't buy that disk.
Then he has a large section about drivers and hardware designs that must be changed to be compliant, and that all of these will be passed on to the users. Both of these kinds of items continue to support his point, that the content protection is both harmful and costly to users.
You have refused to read the rebuttal and are instead rehashing the same misleading stuff that you read from Gutmann's paper/slides. I am forced to quote from the ZDNET articles because of your head-in-the-sand attitude.
If that isnt enough, Gutmann theorized that Windows Vista DRM and HDCP raises the cost of hardware for everyone and that even $1000 SLI dual video cards have a hard time dealing with the cost of implementing HDCP DRM. Again I ask: Where is the research? I did my research and found that a $69 AMD 690G-based integrated graphics motherboard with HDMI output has HDCP capability. hats less money than the cost of most motherboards without integrated graphics and less that the cost of some dedicated graphics cards yet it has HDCP capability. I checked with Intel and their G965, G33, upcoming G35 based motherboards that cost between $90 to $140 with integrated graphics all have HDCP capability. There are $49 video cards that implement HDCP. There are $230 22 LCD displays that implement HDCP.
Mr Ou would instead need to canvas some hardware manufacturers for quotes that they were able to deliver Vista's content protection without raising cost or lowering performance when compared to the devices they could have delivered in the same time frame that didn't have the content protection features; quotes from regular users who can verify that degraded mode happens more often than blocked content and that their own premium content is not adversely affected; quotes from EE's that the encryption requirements on the various buses can be achieved and draw the same power as non-encrypted buses.
He has already done that. Please read the articles. PLEASE. If you can't read, don't post. Do you want me to paste entire articles here to make sure tha
... requires a) knowledge of trade-secret implementation details of particular graphics drivers, b) knowledge of the Vista source code Gutmann has neither of these but that still doesn't stop him from making wild claims which you seem to blindly believe without any proof whatsoever. So debunking the claims requires that knowledge but actually making the claims doesn't?
I skimmed the Gutmann paper at one point and it looked pretty reasonable, in the sense that he had decent citations for what he claimed. Are you kidding me? Half of those citations are web forum posts of dubious origin and quality. They are the equivalent of citing Ubuntu forum posts for claiming that multimedia on Linux was broken by design. You can read more about this here.
Since I can't rely on the traditional industry "media" to report honestly on the issue, it would take way too much of my time to figure out on my own. It is one thing to be skeptic of the traditional media and another thing to believe that everything they write is wrong. You can sure read what they say and take it with a pinch of salt instead of relying on a authority figure who spouts accusations based on armchair shoddy research.
One of Gutmann's supporting claims is that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason), and it only takes one example to make that supporting claim stick. The problem with that approach is that many external factors affect playback. One of the forum posters he quoted was using a buggy sound driver plugin causing a spike in usage which was later fixed. If a HDMI cable that was half chewed on by a mouse causes problems with playback is that the one example that is enough to make the claim that that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason) stick? This is the equivalent of claiming that because one website causes Firefox to take 100% of the CPU and 1 GIG of RAM(read forum posts, I am sure you will find several examples of this behavior), it means that Firefox was intentionally designed to be a memory and CPU hog.
But Gutmann's fundamental thesis -- that this content protection stuff is costly and provides no genuine benefit to end-users -- is still true even if there exists a Vista computer that executes Microsoft's new spec flawlessly. Being able to watch Casino Royale at 1920x1080 legally on a HD monitor or a projector is no genuine benefit? What about using a PC as a HTPC to play Hollywood BluRay and HDDVD content? If you think end users don't need it, you are out of touch with 95% of end users out there.
Guttman's claims are easily verifiable and have found to be false. He says you cannot play HD content on Vista. That is bunk. Most of his claims have been debunked by actual research, whereas Guttman admits he didn't even use Vista. Just waving your hands saying ZDNET cannot be trusted is out of hand because you can verify their claims. As a Vista user (I dual boot Ubuntu) I can categorically state that Guttman's claims are total bunk. Why not criticize based on facts instead of claiming bias?
I think you've just given up because you can't really find any concrete examples to backup your assertion and are instead trying to act clever by being dumb.
From the article:
Apparently because I had upgraded the Intel Matrix Storage Manager application, this was reported as a major hardware change event. That bug won't affect 99.9% of the Vista users out there and it will be fixed via Windows Update soon. So tell me again, how does Vista DRM impede access to user's content?
If you care to read the sequence of articles on ZDNET, it's obvious that Guttman's spreading FUD and is being disingenous. The proof of this is that he tries to pass off DRM as a monster that will restrict the content that YOU create. This is complete FUD. DRM only comes into play when you play explicitly DRM'ed content like WMA music and BluRay/HDDVD. Any and all home videos or whatever will play just fine at whatever HD or beyond resolution they are encoded at without any restrictions whether you have HDCP monitor and graphics card or not. And if you don't like the restrictions that content providers(not MS) put on the content don't buy the content. Period.
Asking Microsoft not to support Bluray playback due to the DRM in it is like asking hardware manufacturers in Asia etc. to take a stand against DRM and refuse to make BluRay DVD players and the PS3. Anyway do you think the studios care much about their disks being playable on PCs? The main market for them is standalone players just like normal DVD is 99% watched on dedicated players and not PCs. The loser if MS doesn't include support will be MS and the PC user.
Guttman's paper is so full of paranoid nonsense that it's not even funnny. What's very interesting is that most of Slashdot geeks who claim to be open minded and rational have fallen for pure lies and FUD as can be seen in the moderation on the DRM posts on every Vista story on here.
..ignoring the real issue of users being locked out of their content.. Can you back up that assertion with some examples and facts? Good job on the successful karma whoring of the groupthink though.
..ignoring the real issue of users being locked out of their content What? Can you back up this assertion with some examples? That paper is pure FUD. Good job on the successful karma whoring of the groupthink though.
You mean every other non-Microsoft OS/browser has a sandbox model to stop exploits from running over user files? Can you name a few or were you just karma whoring the groupthink?
Way to misrepresent his post. There is a difference between "few" and "a few".
Few and little mean not many/much-- they are negative in connotation. I am sad because I have few friends.
A few and a little mean some-- they are positive in connotation. I just moved here, but I am happy because I have a few friends.
You make me sick with your intelligent, well reasoned and above all, technically correct arguments.
It's amazing how revisionist history works on Slashdot. The GP pulled a nice(but totally false) strawman there and we already have people calling it intelligent, well reasoned and technically correct when in fact it's a hit piece, FUD, and a technically bullshit argument. And both of you get modded up to the max for being totally wrong. Sigh.
What really pisses me off as far as Colivas camp is concerned is that they equate 3D games smoothness to desktop performance and keep on quacking about "desktop linux performance". Their stuff has nothing to do with it.
Where did you get that impression? Do you have any references? That's not really true. 3D games were just one of the many benchmarks(as they should be). It was more about desktop responsiveness than about 3D games. Con Kolivas actually pointed out the problems and solved them. Even Linus was convinced and the new Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is based on Con Kolivas work and ideas(but not code).
Yet all it took was to start up an audio application and wonder why on earth if you breathed on it the audio would skip. Skip! Jigabazillion bagigamaherz of CPU and we couldn't play audio?
Or click on a window and drag it across the screen and it would spit and stutter in starts and bursts. Or write one large file to disk and find that the mouse cursor would move and everything else on the desktop would be dead without refreshing for a minute.
Most of what did end up going in were changes to the CPU scheduler to improve interactivity, fairness, SMP user fairness, making 'nice' behave itself, hyperthread fairness and so on. There were lots of other minor contributions in other areas, such as the virtual memory subsystem, software suspend, disk i/o scheduling and random bugfixes.
Some changes did come about as a result of these benchmarks, but mostly on the disk I/O front. So I was still left looking at this stuttering CPU scheduling performance.
I don't think that long interview even mentioned 3D games. Way to belittle someone's hard work who has actually done work towards improving the kernel by your armchair ignorance(and getting modded up for it).
The equivalent of GPL is the MS-CL(the other license submitted to the OSI) which gives guaranteed access to the source code. MS-PL is more like the BSD license.
As well as Use of the software under any circumstances, without being bound by the license.
What restriction is present in the MS-PL that encumbers "usage under any circumstances"? The restrictions seem to be aimed at distributors. How will will a normal end user be affected by them?
Sorry. I got confused between the two licenses they submitted to the OSI. The other is the Microsoft Community License.
This one does have a similar requirement to the one in the GPL that you mentioned.
(A) Reciprocal Grants- For any file you distribute that contains code from the software (in source code or binary format), you must provide recipients the source code to that file along with a copy of this license, which license will govern that file. You may license other files that are entirely your own work and do not contain code from the software under any terms you choose.
So, the MS-PL is like the BSDL and the MCL is like the GPL. The OP does not mention MS-PL. Maybe he was talking about the MCL?
Also, why is the OSI concerned about the "Permissive" in MS-PL's name when the license reads almost like the BSDL ?
You can do the same thing that you mention with the MS-PL too. Integrate Apache or BSDL code and relicense under MS-PL. So how is it incompatible but the GPL compatible again?
I think the problem is that the FSF and OSI mean compatible in different ways. FSF means that you can integrate code and relicense stuff under the GPL, whereas OSI takes that as incompatibility. Otherwise they would not have claimed that MS-PL is incompatible with the maximum number of open source licenses.
The GPL says You may USE the software under any circumstances, if you use the software the author is not liable for damages, loss of data etc.. If you DISTRIBUTE/CONVEY the software then you are bound by the conditions of the license That's exactly what the MS-PL seems to be saying. As a user of the software, what more rights do I get under the GPL than I do under the MS-PL?
That seems to be more a play on the words of the licenses than anything else. Let's say I am a end user(not developer or distributor) of a GPL'ed program A and MS-PL'ed program B. What more rights do I have with program A than I have with program B? What less rights do I have with program B than Program A?
Nice strawman argument. First of all, you claimed that MS-PL has no software licensed under it at all and that it's for lip service only and that MS would never release any source code under the MS-PL. That was a stupid claim. I gave you an example of exactly such software.
Also, your example of "abuse" of open source licenses makes no sense and confer no advantage on the so called abuser whatsoever. Trust me, if it was possible to abuse the BSD or GPL like you said, there are many evil companies(including MS) who would have done exactly that(look at how they exploited the patent loophole in the Novell case which was fixed in GPL v3). Please give a concrete example of how the MS-PL can be abused and how that example relates to abuse of GPL or BSDL.
Read it again. The keystone of the GPL is making source available. There is no guarantee of source availability with the MS-PL. It may be ordinary and simple, but it is not reomotely "GPL-ish."
Did you even read the license?
If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.
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They were asking people(don't know if they still do) as part of a astroturfing campaign to help out by tagging all Vista stories as defectivebydesign. Thus, it has lost its meaning and is just mindless people doing off topic tagging.
I once attended a talk by Stallman, it was fun and all, and the hall was jampacked. But seriously, FSF needs to close that site, it's full of meaningless and mindless half-true FUD and the joke's on FSF for creating that site. Maybe it was just an attempt at spreading FUD on MS to counter(or complement?) MS's anti-Linux FUD, but to anyone with half a brain, the joke's on FSF.
The problem is not about the trolls, but about the moderators modding up the trolls. Why is the criticism of Apple not valid? They have failed to test the upgrade with a commonly used software.
What is the excuse for Apple not to test the upgrade with APE installed? They know it's a common application and likely to cause problems so they could atleast have warned users if not provide workarounds.
To support his claim, he has mentioned a lot of technical details from Microsoft's documentation and pieced together an outline of how the enforcement mechanisms interact with the rest of the system. He has made some specific assertions based on the documentation of negative outcomes from the spec -- and to refute these assertions in detail would require knowledge beyond the published spec, i.e. to be able to fill in the missing details of how a specific interaction can behave differently from how the published spec infers it should. (The link you provided mentioned some specific claims here, but I did not see those claims in his latest slides.)
Gutmann's slides are intentionally misleading and are driven by an agenda. Slide 12 says: "But wait, this isnt commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users own content!" That is plain bullshit. From Ars: "Gutmann also says that users are being punished by an overzealous system that misidentifies "premium" content. Users are supposedly finding that Vista is blocking them from showing their own home movies if they were shot in HD. I've worked with two HD cams on Vista (both from Sony) and haven't had a single problem"
He has also quoted many people with many use cases who have experienced problems with the content protection mechanisms. I'm only at slide 20 of 80 and I've seen half a dozen use cases that put the onus on the user to prove that their hardware is compliant and to block the content otherwise. That shows harm.
You have been FUD'ed. Plain and simple. He intentionally confuses the readers between DRM, HD and "Premium" content. There are no HD movies with the ICT flag enabled right now, and if it is ever enabled, there will be a notice on the box saying that. If you do not have HDCP enabled displays, don't buy that disk.
Then he has a large section about drivers and hardware designs that must be changed to be compliant, and that all of these will be passed on to the users. Both of these kinds of items continue to support his point, that the content protection is both harmful and costly to users.
You have refused to read the rebuttal and are instead rehashing the same misleading stuff that you read from Gutmann's paper/slides. I am forced to quote from the ZDNET articles because of your head-in-the-sand attitude.
If that isnt enough, Gutmann theorized that Windows Vista DRM and HDCP raises the cost of hardware for everyone and that even $1000 SLI dual video cards have a hard time dealing with the cost of implementing HDCP DRM. Again I ask: Where is the research? I did my research and found that a $69 AMD 690G-based integrated graphics motherboard with HDMI output has HDCP capability. hats less money than the cost of most motherboards without integrated graphics and less that the cost of some dedicated graphics cards yet it has HDCP capability. I checked with Intel and their G965, G33, upcoming G35 based motherboards that cost between $90 to $140 with integrated graphics all have HDCP capability. There are $49 video cards that implement HDCP. There are $230 22 LCD displays that implement HDCP.
Mr Ou would instead need to canvas some hardware manufacturers for quotes that they were able to deliver Vista's content protection without raising cost or lowering performance when compared to the devices they could have delivered in the same time frame that didn't have the content protection features; quotes from regular users who can verify that degraded mode happens more often than blocked content and that their own premium content is not adversely affected; quotes from EE's that the encryption requirements on the various buses can be achieved and draw the same power as non-encrypted buses.
He has already done that. Please read the articles. PLEASE. If you can't read, don't post. Do you want me to paste entire articles here to make sure tha
... requires a) knowledge of trade-secret implementation details of particular graphics drivers, b) knowledge of the Vista source code Gutmann has neither of these but that still doesn't stop him from making wild claims which you seem to blindly believe without any proof whatsoever. So debunking the claims requires that knowledge but actually making the claims doesn't? I skimmed the Gutmann paper at one point and it looked pretty reasonable, in the sense that he had decent citations for what he claimed. Are you kidding me? Half of those citations are web forum posts of dubious origin and quality. They are the equivalent of citing Ubuntu forum posts for claiming that multimedia on Linux was broken by design. You can read more about this here. Since I can't rely on the traditional industry "media" to report honestly on the issue, it would take way too much of my time to figure out on my own. It is one thing to be skeptic of the traditional media and another thing to believe that everything they write is wrong. You can sure read what they say and take it with a pinch of salt instead of relying on a authority figure who spouts accusations based on armchair shoddy research. One of Gutmann's supporting claims is that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason), and it only takes one example to make that supporting claim stick. The problem with that approach is that many external factors affect playback. One of the forum posters he quoted was using a buggy sound driver plugin causing a spike in usage which was later fixed. If a HDMI cable that was half chewed on by a mouse causes problems with playback is that the one example that is enough to make the claim that that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason) stick? This is the equivalent of claiming that because one website causes Firefox to take 100% of the CPU and 1 GIG of RAM(read forum posts, I am sure you will find several examples of this behavior), it means that Firefox was intentionally designed to be a memory and CPU hog. But Gutmann's fundamental thesis -- that this content protection stuff is costly and provides no genuine benefit to end-users -- is still true even if there exists a Vista computer that executes Microsoft's new spec flawlessly. Being able to watch Casino Royale at 1920x1080 legally on a HD monitor or a projector is no genuine benefit? What about using a PC as a HTPC to play Hollywood BluRay and HDDVD content? If you think end users don't need it, you are out of touch with 95% of end users out there.Guttman's claims are easily verifiable and have found to be false. He says you cannot play HD content on Vista. That is bunk. Most of his claims have been debunked by actual research, whereas Guttman admits he didn't even use Vista. Just waving your hands saying ZDNET cannot be trusted is out of hand because you can verify their claims. As a Vista user (I dual boot Ubuntu) I can categorically state that Guttman's claims are total bunk. Why not criticize based on facts instead of claiming bias?
Asking Microsoft not to support Bluray playback due to the DRM in it is like asking hardware manufacturers in Asia etc. to take a stand against DRM and refuse to make BluRay DVD players and the PS3. Anyway do you think the studios care much about their disks being playable on PCs? The main market for them is standalone players just like normal DVD is 99% watched on dedicated players and not PCs. The loser if MS doesn't include support will be MS and the PC user.
Guttman's paper is so full of paranoid nonsense that it's not even funnny. What's very interesting is that most of Slashdot geeks who claim to be open minded and rational have fallen for pure lies and FUD as can be seen in the moderation on the DRM posts on every Vista story on here.
..ignoring the real issue of users being locked out of their content What? Can you back up this assertion with some examples? That paper is pure FUD. Good job on the successful karma whoring of the groupthink though.You mean every other non-Microsoft OS/browser has a sandbox model to stop exploits from running over user files? Can you name a few or were you just karma whoring the groupthink?
Way to misrepresent his post. There is a difference between "few" and "a few". Few and little mean not many/much-- they are negative in connotation. I am sad because I have few friends. A few and a little mean some-- they are positive in connotation. I just moved here, but I am happy because I have a few friends.
The files must include extended attributes to trigger this bug. I guess your's did not have those.
It's amazing how revisionist history works on Slashdot. The GP pulled a nice(but totally false) strawman there and we already have people calling it intelligent, well reasoned and technically correct when in fact it's a hit piece, FUD, and a technically bullshit argument. And both of you get modded up to the max for being totally wrong. Sigh.
Where did you get that impression? Do you have any references? That's not really true. 3D games were just one of the many benchmarks(as they should be). It was more about desktop responsiveness than about 3D games. Con Kolivas actually pointed out the problems and solved them. Even Linus was convinced and the new Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) is based on Con Kolivas work and ideas(but not code).
Some relevant quotes from Con Kolivas' interview:I don't think that long interview even mentioned 3D games. Way to belittle someone's hard work who has actually done work towards improving the kernel by your armchair ignorance(and getting modded up for it).
Sorry. I got confused between the two licenses they submitted to the OSI. The other is the Microsoft Community License.
This one does have a similar requirement to the one in the GPL that you mentioned.
(A) Reciprocal Grants- For any file you distribute that contains code from the software (in source code or binary format), you must provide recipients the source code to that file along with a copy of this license, which license will govern that file. You may license other files that are entirely your own work and do not contain code from the software under any terms you choose.So, the MS-PL is like the BSDL and the MCL is like the GPL. The OP does not mention MS-PL. Maybe he was talking about the MCL?
Also, why is the OSI concerned about the "Permissive" in MS-PL's name when the license reads almost like the BSDL ?
You can do the same thing that you mention with the MS-PL too. Integrate Apache or BSDL code and relicense under MS-PL. So how is it incompatible but the GPL compatible again?
I think the problem is that the FSF and OSI mean compatible in different ways. FSF means that you can integrate code and relicense stuff under the GPL, whereas OSI takes that as incompatibility. Otherwise they would not have claimed that MS-PL is incompatible with the maximum number of open source licenses.
That seems to be more a play on the words of the licenses than anything else. Let's say I am a end user(not developer or distributor) of a GPL'ed program A and MS-PL'ed program B. What more rights do I have with program A than I have with program B? What less rights do I have with program B than Program A?
Also, your example of "abuse" of open source licenses makes no sense and confer no advantage on the so called abuser whatsoever. Trust me, if it was possible to abuse the BSD or GPL like you said, there are many evil companies(including MS) who would have done exactly that(look at how they exploited the patent loophole in the Novell case which was fixed in GPL v3). Please give a concrete example of how the MS-PL can be abused and how that example relates to abuse of GPL or BSDL.
Read it again. The keystone of the GPL is making source available. There is no guarantee of source availability with the MS-PL. It may be ordinary and simple, but it is not reomotely "GPL-ish."
Did you even read the license? If you distribute any portion of the software in source code form, you may do so only under this license by including a complete copy of this license with your distribution. If you distribute any portion of the software in compiled or object code form, you may only do so under a license that complies with this license.