Libre vs Non-Libre: It All Comes Down To Trust

I also love the smell of freedom in the morning -- actually, all day long! :-)

How true how true - and thanks for the good article, dcp!

It's just amazing how soon people realize the freedom they got after changing to a free system. I have seen that so often now.

But still, we all should become more public about Digital Restrictions Management. The ones who buy new home theater systems and HDTV stuff now just seem to think that one of these nice guys will go and reverse-engineer all that stuff (which might happen), and then publish it just to become famous (which also might happen). What we mostly forget is that it could have been prevented right from the start.

I'm not talking about theft here. Whenever we see a really nice movie, we go and buy it on DVD. But would I buy it on one of the higher resolution, but "protected" media? Never ever. They can keep their crap, including all the shiny new players. I want to be able to decide whether I watch that movie on our DVD player, or on my computer - that is *my* decision.

We are free of proprietary systems at our household since 7 years or so, and since then each morning is a good and productive one. We would never look back to anything else than free and open source software, and more important even, free file formats.

Quoting:"The upshot is that a longstanding procedure in Windows Update requires it to self-update before it is able to recognize that new updates are available," noted Nick White, a Microsoft product manager, on the Microsoft Windows Vista Blog.

From the LinuxInsider article

The question is why does it need to update itself, why is this necessary? The Linux updater, or at least the one on my Mandriva machine doesn't have to update itself, before performing updates. So what does this new code do?

wjl: I am quite convinced that the "HD Ready" DRM crap won't go on for much longer. I think HD Ready, together wil Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are heading for a spectacular failure. I'll wait for the generation after that, which will hopefully be DRM free.

HD Ready is like laserdisc with DRM added: only interesting for videophiles with surplus cash.

Hm - I don't know, Sander...

People are buying these 42" or 50" big screens as their new TVs now - and standard PAL (720x576) just doesn't look too good on them. And because HDTV is far from being a new broadcasting standard - it should become the new standard sometime in between 2008 and 2010 - they are buying cheap Blu-Ray players.

If more and more people go that route, the future of normal DVDs isn't very bright - and we may have to deal with that copy-protection chain.

But then again: if I can buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive for the computer and use it for backup, then everything is ok for me. Having some 30GB on one disk is certainly better than 4,7 or 8,5... - and no, I wouldn't consider tape backups for at home.

Quoting:But then again: if I can buy a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive for the computer and use it for backup, then everything is ok for me.

I'm anxiously waiting for that to happen, my stack of DVD-R's is getting out of control :)

But this would be even better: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33582/135/

Wow - 1TB of WORM would indeed make a cool backup solution.

Or even better: Gigabit network speed to the homes - and Terabytes distributed globally. Like Linus said: "Real men..." - and I'm sure he meant women, too ;-)

wjl: True, but it's the chain you mention that is the problem. You'll only get HD if your entire chain of appliances is HD ready. If you don't, you will get image quality that's even far lower than normal DVD. Somehow I don't think people will be anxious to replace the bulk of their equipment at once, and on the other hand won't stand for *lower* image quality when buying new equipment.

Quoting:It's true that there's a spectrum between fully open and fully proprietary; Microsoft deems it judicious to offer a few open-source projects, while companies at the other end such as Red Hat try to be as purely open-source as possible. Some are in the middle: Adobe has made some significant open-source moves, as with its Flex tool for Flash animation creation, while keeping its cash-cow Creative Suite firmly proprietary. Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, is in the process of moving its entire software suite into the open-source realm, with major portions such as Solaris and Java already moved.

But Matt Asay, vice president of business development at open-source document management company Alfresco (disclosure: Asay also is a blogger for CNET Networks), sees things differently from Patterson.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9780445-39.html