Rumor is that the corresponding license to Sun is around $1/box, even if you implement your own JVM. And don't forget Blue-Ray, which mandates Java on *any* player, including the PS3.
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Rumor is that the corresponding license to Sun is around $1/box, even if you implement your own JVM. And don't forget Blue-Ray, which mandates Java on *any* player, including the PS3.
It's time to clarify what has been primarly a gut reaction to the passing of the DADVSI law in France. First, from a historical perspective:
a final DADVSI draft law has been approved by the French Parliament, but it's not legal to enforce it until it's been reviewed by the Senate, and a "décret d'application" has been published
the Senate has the power to modify the draft, though there are conditions that elude me at the moment. Which means things could change a bit
some deputies consider that some parts of this draft law are unconstitutional. The "Conseil Constitutionnel" (a group of sages used to examine new laws to check for compliance) might declare it so, which would require another round in front of the parliament, or a totally different law
There is a good wrap-up of the law on this page for the curious one. The most interesting or disturbing points are that:
it is very unclear wether the fines for illegal download and upload of copyrighted works will be applied on a case-by-case basis, or on a file-by-file one.
Also, there is little information regarding who's going to "monitor" the Internet and provide the legal proofs for such offences. E.g. the law doesn't force ISPs to provide all their IP logs to authorities for random checks, nor does it allow private parties (e.g. record labels) to do that.
The députés have taken care of restricting seriously what a "DRM" can be, and can do, and force DRM vendors to provide interoperability means. Moreover, breaking DRM for interoperability reasons is not a crime if you can prove that you didn't have any other way to read the data on your system (e.g. playing a DVD on Linux). The text is very vague though, but it might be a hint that VLC may not need to be modified then.
The Senate will begin reviewing the draft in May. This is going to be interesting.
There is a waste-recycling plant near my office that was stopped a few weeks ago. For some strange reasons, one of its two towers *burnt* severely this week-end. The situation is still critical so the authorities have forbidden any car & train traffic around the building. They fear the tower might collapse on a road or on the rails.
Luckily our offices are far enough to be safe, though I'd like to see this if it happened (I can stare at the tower right from my desk :-)
Papers
I finally finished my small paper on reliable C programming techniques. It's really an introduction to what I call "Cleanup Stack Exception Handling" (for lack of a better term), something that is already used by the Symbian OS, but doesn't seem to be well know outside it.
Now, I need to find time to complete my cool little runtime library designed around it. Hopefully the world isn't holding its breath for it :-).
Sad things on the French legal front: the appeal court has decided to confirm the first judgement, on the following grounds:
Guillermito did, and admitted to, use a warez copy of VIGUARD, since he was in the USA, and the program was only sold in France. This, however, is clearly copyright infringement.
Guillermito is accused of having disassembled the binary (even though he always denied it), which is only allowed under French law for purposes of interoperability, which wasn't the case here. He also replicated some parts of the original software (an 80 bytes very weak encryption key) which was distributed with his weakness analysis tool on the Internet. And this is considered as another copyright infringement by the judge !
A detailed explanation of the text is available here (French only).
I don't have any problem with the first point, but the second one is simply scary, because it is difficult to understand what kind of legal ramifications it could have in the future. I also don't know if the situation would have been different, would Guillermito had a valid VIGUARD license. I'll try do document myself on the details of our own IP laws before making more comments on the topic.
Apart from that, Guillermito has been sentenced to pay about 15.000, which is a lot, even if this is several order of magnitudes less than what TEGAM was asking for. Talk about chilling effects !!
If you want to cheer him up a bit, you can help him buy a new but expensive anti-virus though. I just donated 100.
Note that this software promises to protect your PC against voodo, black eye, and other bad lucks. I guess it's what they call truth-in-marketing.
My daughter recently scratched to death her second copy of Shrek 2 (the former one died 8 months ago, she had to wait until X-Mas to get it replaced), I decided that enough was enough, and that I wasn't going to buy it a third time.
So, I did:
grab my sister-in-law copy of the DVD
install the necessary software on my computer, and after several hours of frustration, get a new shiny CD-R with an XVID avi of the movie on it
Go to my local supermarket, and buy a "MPEG-4 compatible" DVD player for 30, including VAT.
Tada !! Here it goes, and it doesn't have these unskippable and annoying "warnings" and adverts. Plays like a charm in the new player, with superb quality, and the kids are happy. They can break the disk if they want, I have a backup of the AVI to burn new CDs when they'll do.
My mother saw it the other day and was very impressed. She's the kind of person that is really annoyed by any DVD menu, and she sees any way to get rid of them as progress :-)
cinamod, did you really mean it when you wrote that "adding two lines in my configure.ac for better win32 libtool support and add a re-implementation of mmap" is trivial ? Do you understand with how much sarcasm the usual Win32 developer is going to read this ?.
Also, I believe that you missed Raph's points regarding error messages. Did you ever tried to hack Auto* scripts seriously. These tools are so brittle that the simplest error is most of the time difficult to spot and understand from the tools' output. In my opinion, Automake holds the crown for cryptic puzzles. Some of this comes from the underlying languages being used and cannot be solved easily. Of course, when they work, these things are amazing; but maybe the fact that they're so hard to program explains why there are so many bad AC_WARN_* and AC_ERROR_* macros out-there; or that most development in these scripts is done by copy-pasting protions from other projects and crossing fingers that it does what it's expected to do.
note to rilian: unfortunately, you cannot progressively get rid of m4 in the Auto-tools, this task would be equivalent to trying to smoothly get rid of C++ in KDE, i.e. it's not going to be easy nor elegant.
Apart from that, I think we call all agree that the good thing about the Auto-tools is that they contain an enormous, though badly documented, amount of knowledge regarding various existing systems and their quircks. As a consequence, they do thing that no other system does at the moment. But the costs associated are also huge and make thing hard to use for too many people, which don't need the whole enchilada.
I hope is it possible to hope for tools that make simple things trivial, and complex one possible without a Ph.D and several dozens hours reading obscure documentation and m4 script files ? And without being the target by ad-hominen attacks too !! Oh well, life's too short I guess...
The phrase "computer literate user" really means the person has been hurt so many times that the scar tissue is thick enough -- Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum
How about a fridge with integrated beer dispenser !!
.
This is not a fake, you can buy this from several stores !!
I bet someone must have a patent on this thing :-)
iffe
created by some mad scientists at AT&T, this open-source script is capable of performing feature detections in a way that is much more simpler than Autoconf could ever dream of.
A really good document about it is there, and you can also read its man page here.
The IFFE interpreter itself is nothing more than a portable shell script known to work on all flavors of Unix. You can put it in your CVS because it will never change. You don't need to touch it at all because it will read small "probe" files containing instructions regarding the features you want to test. The output is trivial to include in a Make-based build system, and can work with pkg-config too.
One nice "feature" that IFFE doesn't have is the ability to select feature through switches in a "configure" script (e.g. --prefix=XXXX --disable-static --disable-debug, etc...)
pmk (a.k.a. Pre Make Kit)
this is something completely different, designed by some programmers that were completely fed-up with the Auto-tools. They designed a small language and interpreter to deal with most features they needed, with 10 times less complexity. They even have some nice partial Autoconf compatibility to make transition easier. Unfortunately, they don't even support Windows (even on Cygwin !!), which sadly makes them totally irrelevant for real-world usage (IMO).
While these are not perfect solutions, they prove that it is possible to make simpler tools to deal with these issues. My understanding is that people don't want to learn a new installation procedure. All they want is type "configure" with their usual parameters then launch make (and why are we still using Make in the 21st century eludes me :-).
If a viable alternative appears, it will need to provide similar commands.
Moreover, they're huge (often > 100KB) ugly beasts that can change considerably between autoconf invokations, especially when your developers are on distinct platforms. Why would you want to put that kind of poop into your CVS repository ?
you'd better rant that developers should document which versions of autoconf/automake/libtool is needed instead.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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