TLLTS 110 - Steve's Predictions - What do you think?

Post by **dann** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 11:01 pm

Talking with Steve on 110 has cast a whole different perspective on a lot of what has been reported with regards to the direction the powers that be are driving the electronic transfer of audio and video. He spectulates that in a year we will see a 180 degree turn around where playback will no longer be a concern for Linux users and focus will shift to distribution.

I really want to subscribe to his vision but thus far I have not seen too many Linux friendly distribution services and even more, the content distributed is not in a format that is "legal" for Linux users to partake of.

I hope he is seeing something that I am missing.

Jza · Post by **Jza** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 6:28 pm

I have seen the OGG friendliness with manufacturing increase. You can also live your MAC experience with Linspire. If you get off your old gripes of running shit as root and actually look on other things you can see how similar it is.

You got Mp3tunes with LTunes and have exactly the same model with no issues. You also have Linspire mini and also stuff like that.

The key is the acceptance of bittorrent, the issue of codecs specifically I dont see yahoo embracing Theora, I do see proprietary video format on the rse like Flash Video for example.

The issue here is recognition, mpeg and avi (divx) are pretty standard and they are OS-friendly.

I wonder which formats do you see as proprietary since I always tend to install everything on my mplayer I still have to see a video I cant play.... .well only real media I cant run on my mplayer but sure I can run it on my helix-player.

Post by **dann** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 8:34 pm

Jza wrote:I have seen the OGG friendliness with manufacturing increase. You can also live your MAC experience with Linspire. If you get off your old gripes of running shat as root and actually look on other things you can see how similar it is.

To be honest, I have never run Linspire. I do believe they have rectified a lot of the securty issues with regards to the complaints of "running as root." If I am not mistaken, are they not running like Ubuntu is now, main user is in wheel group and for installation/admin tasks you are asked to supply your password. I personally thing that is a great system.

uote="Jza"]I wonder which formats do you see as proprietary since I always tend to install everything on my mplayer I still have to see a video I cant play.... .well only real media I cant run on my mplayer but sure I can run it on my helix-player.[/quote]

Aside from bleeding edge Apple/windows media codecs; I too do not have a problem with viewing most media. The issue I bring to the table is that the use of some of these codecs is not legal. The Mplayer/Xine/Totem/(Insert your media player here) have done an outstanding job with making this possible. The only thing they cannot do is make it legal. That is up to Apple and MS and other developers to permit the use of these codecs in non-proprietary media players.

Now I would like to get a second opinion or further clarification on this, but in speaking with an Apple Rep a few years back as to why they do not have a port of Quicktime to Linux , he said the specs are out there and that the community should be able to develop their own Quicktime Player. That being said, perhaps it is not illegal to use the quicktime codecs.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 2:40 pm

Dann, if you ask me, Linspire is a lousy distribution when it comes to security. I know Kevin Carmony says that they don't wanna force people to do anything, but to quote ESR in your interview with him: "The point is that the end user DOESN'T CARE"

Every UNIX book I've seen, every UNIX manual I've seen has always said: NEVER RUN AS ROOT!

And then these Linspire guys comes up and plays mister wise-ass, are they any wiser than say Red Hat's, SUSE's (The ones that remain

), FreeBSD's or OpenBSD's developers and engineers? NO!!!!!!!!!

When I tried Linspire a week or two ago, I got the warning of running as root after I had finished the install and logged in as root and get presented with a further configuration of the system.

To me, it's plain dumb! Why is Windows plauged with spyware? Because that shitty OS runs as root for christ's sake!!!

When it comes to security you need an iron fist to say: THIS IS SECURITY AND THIS IS NOT!!

And UNIX people has been telling people to not run as root for over 20 years even when there were no automated threats!! It's like some junior school kid trying to play smarter than a Ph.D. student from MIT.

I say that Linspire should do the root thing like PC-BSD does: http://www.pcbsd.org/images/PC9.jpg

You ask the user for a root password and then a user password, actually the Windows installation program looks this way too, but does something different.

I will admit that Linspire does do some wonderful things like sponsoring some of KDE's projects, Mozilla stuff and such, but I will N E V E R recommend them a distribution for inexperienced users until they get the root account thing right.

The thing Ubuntu does is OK, but it still annoys the heck out of me, I like having both a root user and a non-root user because I feel a little more comfortable using two different passwords for two different things.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sun Nov 20, 2005 1:27 am

I still haven't finished that episode, but I have heard, at least in part, that part of the discussion. All I can say is that while I highly doubt what he's predicting will ever come to pass, let alone in the next year, I'll be happy as hell if it does. What I *can* say is that he's way, way off base in his estimation that p2p is eating more backbone bandwidth than spam. I'm not sure where he's getting that particular information from, but it's straight up wrong -- there's not even a comparison.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 12:22 pm

Snarkout wrote: What I *can* say is that he's way, way off base in his estimation that p2p is eating more backbone bandwidth than spam. I'm not sure where he's getting that particular information from, but it's straight up wrong -- there's not even a comparison.

I'd have to agree. I don't have figures, but I'm sure porn and SPAM probably eat more bandwidth than p2p.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:02 pm

Gomer_X wrote:
Snarkout wrote: What I *can* say is that he's way, way off base in his estimation that p2p is eating more backbone bandwidth than spam. I'm not sure where he's getting that particular information from, but it's straight up wrong -- there's not even a comparison.
I'd have to agree. I don't have figures, but I'm sure porn and SPAM probably eat more bandwidth than p2p.

I download most of my pr0n on P2P, I recently downloaded a nice bundle of hentai movies, which is basicly anime porn movies, they're damn funny sometimes.

Post by **dann** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:18 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote: I download most of my pr0n on P2P, I recently downloaded a nice bundle of hentai movies, which is basicly anime porn movies, they're damn funny sometimes.

And pretty damn perverted too.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Nov 21, 2005 1:45 pm

dann wrote:
Tsuroerusu wrote: I download most of my pr0n on P2P, I recently downloaded a nice bundle of hentai movies, which is basicly anime porn movies, they're damn funny sometimes.
And pretty damn perverted too.

Hehe yeah, I personally prefer the ones WITHOUT all the tentacle sex crab, violence, rape and bondage and disgusting crab, there are stuff which is more like a "love story"