Mount Rainier for Linux 87
Cpyder writes: "Seems like Philips is getting the "patents are bad"-picture, as they have decided to let Linux support the Mount Rainier next-generation file device system. Seems like the end of floppies+zips+cdrw+whatever is finally in sight. Check it out at The Reg."
IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IBM (Score:1)
Re:IBM (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, everyone keeps spelling it 'Phillips'. There is only one 'L'.
Promoters and supporters: (Score:1)
Wow, Linux is a supporter. Cool.
This might have very bad effects. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:1)
So after all, it's good for our economy
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:2, Insightful)
In which country do you live?
I never heared that patents make anything illegal anywhere
Likely in the US where a patent holder can force licensees to agree to absurd fees the situation is a bit different.
Most inventions are done BECAUSE the patents of related or basic works existed and are inspectable for the general public.
A patent is in the first instance a way to prevent espionage on industrial knowledge.
If I patent my stuff and you do just the same, I can say: I was first. And it does not matter whether you where to stupid to look first if prior art exists (saved you a lot of research money) or if you dared to break into my facilities and copy everything.
If I do not patent it and you take over my designes I have a hard stand in case you indeed robbed my stuff.
The main goal of patenst is to give industries an ability to share knowledge and to be sure they get revenues for distributing their knowledge. Its just a stock exchange for knowledge.
The fact that US patent offices regulary run mad in issuing dumb patents is of course a mayour drawback.
However renewing "How to grant a paten" and a more reliable "What will it cost me to license a patent" business habits or law regulations could realy lead to an open knowledge exchange via patent markets.
IMHO the idea of patents is one of the best ever in human history.
IMHO the practice of issuing and using patens, especialy in the US is one of the worst inventions ever in human history.
So try to understand what is good on it and emphasize its use and try to understand what is bad on it and emphasize to get rid of that.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.burnallgifs.org/
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:3, Insightful)
They will make their money. Opening up their standards will make them more money over time. Lets say they went the DVD route, the Linux community would just reverse enginner the specs and the law suits would flow like rain. Bad press for them and low adoption rates of Mt rainier.Make the software specs open then the licensing fees will get payed by the companys that make the hardware/disks, they then pass that cost onto the consumer. The consumer will be willing to pay for the drives and disks if they know that everybody can use the media. So development costs will be spread out over time into the cost of the drives and media.
Thus by opening up their specs everybody wins, being open makes the format popular which leads to a large user base, which leads to increased sales of the drives and media. This whole senario only works if the software specs are open to begin with.
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:2, Informative)
Whereas Apple maintained a stranglehold on their hardware to keep it out of the hands of cloners and now command an impression 5-10% of the computer market.
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:2)
Re:This might have very bad effects. (Score:2)
Oh yeah, $150 million [zdnet.com] meant a *whole lot* to a $6 BILLION dollar company with $1.2 BILLION CASH.
(Yeah, yeah, yeah -- IHBT TFP HAND...)
Get your head out of your ass (Score:1)
You're joking, right? Try boning up on your history, pal. IBM made (I don't know if they're still involved in all of these areas anymore) a number of business products, including typewriters (the Selectric being a computer-like typewriter that lots of people hacked), mainframes, punch card equipment, and even fire alarm systems. Their bread and butter were the mainframe computers, where the price was high, the margins were high, and the service costs (paid to IBM, of course) were high.
Some guy over at IBM saw the Apple II, saw the killer app for it (some spreadsheet app, maybe Visicalc? I don't recall right now), thought that maybe there was something there and had a few guys put together a prototype with off-the-shelf components, and marketed it to smaller businesses who couldn't afford any of the mainframes that IBM's bread-and-butter section created. IBM didn't bet the farm on the PC, you dolt. Apple bet the farm on the Mac, though. Maybe you've gotten your companies mixed up. I don't see how you COULD get the two confused, but I guess in some lesser minds it would be possible.
Yeah, it's a flame. Go ahead, flame back.
Ridiculous (Score:1)
so.. (Score:2, Funny)
I can't wait to tell people about this. "Theres this great new super easy cd format!" "oh yeah? whats it called?" "CD-MRW!" "CD-huh?"
heh
TuxPod (Score:1, Offtopic)
Of course, having Linux in just another file server is nice too, I guess.
Re:TuxPod (Score:1)
That's because the OSS community doesn't have millions of dollars from hardware sales to spend on R&D of such cool products. Apple wouldn't be able to do it without the steady income from their hardware line.
To be used for what ??? (Score:1)
(see subject)
Re:TuxPod (Score:2)
Why doesn't the Linux/OSS community come up with an embedded, tiny-ass Linux hard drive like the iPod
Yes, why don't you?
Don't forget that you (and I, and my buddy down the street...) are the "open source community". The way open source works is that when someone develops an itch for something, they build it and publish the code/plans/design for all.
Sorry for this mini-rant, but I get tired of people who sit around complaining about the things that the open source community hasn't done for them.
Re:TuxPod (Score:2)
He said "Linux/OSS community". Rather than chiding him for his laziness maybe you could have mentioned that the OSS community is Open Source SOFTWARE. Making devices strikes me as hardware. I am not aware of many consumer devices developed by the OSS community. Does Tivo count? Usually devices are developed by large companies like Apple or even IBM. Yet when the Linux Watch comes out would you say that the DEVICE was developed by the OSS community?
Ok, so maybe I am ranting too. If he had just said Linux community then I would have to shut up.
TiVo? (Score:2, Informative)
Patents aren't bad! (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that it's not patents themselves that are bad. They allow you to ensure that you'll get a return on the huge amount of money you spend doing research on algorithms, processes, etc. Then, unlike copyright, they ensure that your invention is released into the public domain before several generations of people have come and gone.
Patents are only bad when abused. By abuse I mean obtaining overly broad patents purposely, forming companies whose sole purpose is to sue everyone that does anything remotely related to patents they purchased from others, or similar. It's perfectly fine to use a patent to charge people to use your legitimate invention, however.
Also remember that Free Software, no matter how obscure, can cut into your profits if people use it instead of your own software. Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing just because you were too nice to demand a licensing fee from "free" projects?
Don't worry, if the technology is that good, someone will find a way around it. Look at Ogg Vorbis, for example, which implements an intelligent audio codec without anyone else's IP.
[OT] definition of capitalism (Score:1)
Capitalist n 1: an owner of wealth used in business 2: an upholder of capitalism 3: a wealthy person
(from Webster's New World Dictionary, 1996)
Mod parent up! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Patents aren't bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Why should someone pay lots of money for your product that implements an amazing new encoding algorithm that you payed a million dollars to develop when they could use Free Software that does the same thing
How many algorithms do you know of that someone spent a million dollars developing?
Most of the really important algorithms, just like mathematics, are coming out of public research institutions (aka "universities") and are published without patent encumbrance.
Unfortunately the PTO has succumbed to pressure from money interests and made lots of formerly unpatentable stuff patentable, opening up a gold rush.
No, not an innovation rush -- a gold rush.
Also, notice that (in the USA at least) patents are justified as a way to promote commerce. Commerce, like innovation, was absolutely booming in IT even without algorithm patents.
As Alan Cox said, patents are just a way for the big guys to keep the little guys out. The big guys all hold lots of patents, so they can pay each other off with funny money (or by swapping licenses for lawsuits), but the little guy has to pay real money if he wants to play.
The rich get richer by natural processes; patents are a government institution that serves primarily to speed the process up.
Just like with the DoJ's pact with Microsoft, the US government is more interested in floating the stock market than in supporting economic fair play, or even long-term economic well being.
US stock market bubble / patent office insanity (Score:4, Interesting)
With average Dow P/E ratios hovering at 23 and, a flood of cheap money coming out of the Fed (just *look* at M3 since 9/11!), and the Treasury's recent decision to end the 30 year long bond in an effort to push down long term interest and mortgage rates, it's pretty clear that the policy is to squeeze out real estate equity inflationary (and illusory) gains through refinancing in order to float consumer spending and stock market speculation. The frightening thing about this is that it doesn't in the least promote healthy economic activity through increased productivity, it's entirely speculative -- as evidenced by the stock market continuing to rise even with ridiculous P/E ratios making stocks such an obvious bad long term bet. Which makes your analogy of the patent office creating a new "gold rush" all the more relevant: patenting obvious mathematical algorithms doesn't increase productivity as much as it creates exclusive monopolies for the big players. Sure, they get to claim the gains on their balance sheet, but it's a net loss for the economy as a whole.
I'm worried that the Fed won't be able to maintain and prop up the credit bubble as rising unemployment creates a certain rise in consumer bankruptcies. With increasing unemployment, huge consumer credit and mortgage debt (backed by unreasonably inflated property values) defaults, I fear an unraveling from the banking system through the stock market. Never mind all the crazy derivative hedging going on making many major banks and financial institutions leveraged beyond belief. I fear a recession like we haven't seen since 1929. It could get bad.
Of course, I could be wrong... (hope so -- I just bought a house!
Cheers,
--Maynard
ps - like your
Re:Patents aren't bad! (Score:1)
Unfortunately, and most disturbingly, this doesn't happen in a lot of cases.
Professor Joe Schmoe sits in his (publicly funded) university lab while collecting his (publicly funded) salary, and discusses his (publicly funded) research with his (publicly funded) research assistants. They come up with a revolutionary new technique, so Professor Schmoe immediately incorporates Schmoe Enterprises Inc. and begins to license "his" invention/research and put a bunch of money into his pocket.
Where is the re-payment to the taxpayers who funded his research in the first place? If this sort of thing is allowed to happen (and it is, apparently) then Schmoe Enterprises Inc. should be repaying the cost of the intial research to the university and the taxpaying public before they can make a private profit from their research in this manner. In fact, it should be "cost of research plus a hefty markup" to be repaid, to account for the amount spent on research that goes nowhere in particular. Don't like the terms? Don't accept public funding for your laboratory and research.
Same thing goes for patents and such that are "owned" by universities and such. As publicly funded institutions, any and all research and patents should be freely available for all to use, royalty-free. After all, who paid for the research? Why should the taxpayer who already paid for the research be expected to pay again if he actually wishes to use the ideas that his money have paid for?
Re:Patents aren't bad! (Score:1)
Actually, I believe the way this works around here is that the University aggressively patents things, and then licenses them to the startup companies (which they also fund). Remember that a good deal of the public research group's money comes from such things as licensing their IP, since they're not in a position to make products.
When not abused, this is actually a pretty decent system. Companies can use licensing to get the benefit of research without all of its costs. With the costs of research skyrocketing in many fields due to the need for high-tech equipment, this actually makes more sense than requiring many small companies trying to do little bits of research.
Unfortunately, the cases that you hear about are the abuses like Fraunhofer's rethinking of MP3 licensing after it became a standard--not the many examples of IP licensing working well.
The end result is simple: the people (via the government) grant a time-limited monopoly to a company or institution, and then that entity is responsible for using their right to benefit the people. Unfortunately, trusting corporations to remember that people _gave_ them all the rights they enjoy is asking entirely too much these days.
Finally someone has some sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
But I think its the only way that Phillips can hope to compete with DVD-R, DVD-RW or whatever
Re:Finally someone has some sense... (Score:1, Informative)
Which they already own for about 50%.
Interesting... (Score:1)
Software Burning Difficult? (or, YA Mac reference) (Score:4, Informative)
The Mount Rainier standard sounds nifty, even if the technology is still a couple of years out of wide consumer usage. But my only beef is this: does current CD-R(W) burning software for any platform have to be more complicated than the average computer user can handle?
Enter Apple's little-known Disc Burner software, and the Authoring Support software located under the hood in the system folder. The basic premise? Put a blank CD in and Disc Burner asks for a format (either hybrid ISO/HFS, Audio, or just plain vanilla ISO), and voila, on your desktop, is an icon of your CD. Drag-n-Drop to your heart's content, and then select "Burn CD" from the Special menu (or drag the CD to the trash, then asking you to burn the CD. Even I never have understood the user interface issues with dragging a disk to the trash to eject it). Done. Simple. My cat can even burn CDs now.
The moral of the story? Mount Rainier will be an easily applied standard across all platforms. But who said the current technology's software had to be difficult? Granted, Disc Burner is not Mount Rainier, but it definitely is a current and usable facsimile of the technology.
Re:Software Burning Difficult? (or, XP reference) (Score:2, Informative)
Here is what happens when i insert a blank CDR in the disc drive.
Windows can perform the same action each time you insert a disk or connect a device with this kind of file:
blank CD
What do you want windows to do
1 Open writable CD folder using Windows explorer
2 take no action
Select if you want a default action to occur
Personally I dont use the built in software because I have other hapits but just to see if it could work I created a shortcut to the CDDRIVE and placed the shortcut on the desktop then dragged and dropped music files to the shortcut and lo and behold they were waiting to be burned. To do the actual burning I opened the shortcut and selected write these files to CD.
bobs your uncle
Now on to CDRW if the media costs come down and preformatted disks are cheap and they dont damage easily then I would probably use more of them. My own experience is they dont hold up as well to general everyday use...
ymmv
Re:Software Burning Difficult? (or, YA Mac referen (Score:1)
No, it's neither clear nor logical.
You have to know beforehand that dragging the icon to the trashcan is going to eject it.
The icon change when you get there just helps confirm what you already know. The change is useful for letting you know when the icon has reached its destination (see also
Re:Software Burning Difficult? (or, YA Mac referen (Score:2)
Re:Software Burning Difficult? (or, YA Mac referen (Score:1)
content, and then select "Burn CD" from the Special menu (or drag the CD to the trash, then asking you to burn the
CD. Even I never have understood the user interface issues with dragging a disk to the trash to eject it).
Dragging a disk icon to the trash for ejecting has historical reasons, from the time when a Mac had no hard drive or only very limited free spacce on a hard drive:
normaly you ejected a disk by hitting fan/command E (the sign looking like a fan left from space, the key may also have an apple as sign).
If you eject a disk like that, the disk comes out of the drive but the icon stays on the desktop, in dark grey.
If you now insert a nother disk you get a second disk icon, usable like usualy.
That means you can copy data with drag and drop from one disk to the other and the system asks you to insert the required disks at the appropriated times.
Basicly a Mac is able to mount a unlimited number of disks despite it only has ONE disk drive.
To get rid of a disk icon of a disk you allready have ejected(in unix speak: to unmount a disk), you drag the grey icon to the trash.
So dragging a mounted disk to the trash means: eject and unmount. Its only a shortcut for eject (apple menu bar, special menue eject or fan/E) and unmount later by droping the unused icon to trash.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
(In our days you realy never ever need to mount two disks so most people do not know that it is possible I guess)
Details on CD-MRW / Mt. Rainier (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Details on CD-MRW / Mt. Rainier (Score:1)
RE: Support. (Score:2)
No illegal code for people to wear on shirts...
No annoying hassels between Ac3 and dts...(why the hell doesn't sound work...why the hell can I get sound, but the video is only half decoded...)
Of course, this means that the chances of success are asimtonically close to n.
Where "n" is a low number.
-=fshalor
Nature (Score:3, Funny)
I, for one, am really glad to see that Linux is supporting our national parks. [nps.gov] Heaven knows that we geeks need to get outdoors once and a while.
Phillips supporting Linux - hah.. (Score:1)
Unless and until they openly support Linux on ALL of their computer based products, I will NOT be a believer. Case in point: the USB Webcams - they will only let a developer work on this through an NDA. Not very supportive as far as I can tell...
Sounds Great (Score:1)
So. Does anyone know if MR media is expected to be readable by standard CD-ROMs?
Re:Sounds Great (Score:1)
http://www.licensing.philips.com/information/mtr/
Will this work on those business card size CD-RW (Score:1, Interesting)
Why is this great? (Score:1)
Ok so you can have drag and drop support from the OS. Today you need an application for it, although in Win you can use DirectCD to make it more or less invisible to the user. Apparently that can be done in Mac OS as well.
It's true that a normal CD-RW disc doesn't work in all the old CD players, but if the alternative is to get a new burner it's pretty much moot if you ask me.
Why would I want to buy a new CDR unit just to avoid formatting the disk? What's the point of this?
Re:Why is this great? (Score:2, Informative)
Alex
Confused (Score:2)
Besides, how do writable DVDs fit into this picture?
Re:Confused (Score:5, Informative)
The big point here really is: This would have created a lucrative business for Mount Rainier licensees in selling preformatted MR media
So in any case, any OS could have operated on MT CD-RW (as far as I understood that), but it was the formatting that was blocked.
Hope that helps,
Alex
Re:Confused (Score:2)
I guess I can see how it might make it easier for OS writers, but UDF solutions already exist for the major OSes. . .
How is this different than packet writing? (Score:2)
Reinventing the wheel? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I'm not sure I even like the idea of this becoming the "default" behavior for CD writers. I strongly dislike the overhead involved in formatting. I find that a packet writing CD-R/RW hold about 100MB less. I'd rather have the full capacity. I mean, if you are using this thing for business backup (which seems to be the primary argument for needing Linux support) then you are only going to be burning once a day, so why not just burn a full 650/700MB worth of data as a single data track?
- JoeShmoe
Sounds a lot like FTL... (Score:3, Informative)
Funny how this idea comes around - FTL, LVM, and now Mt. Rainier. Similar concepts, different applications.
Advantage vs. UDF packet? (Score:2)
I just set up my Linux boxes to do UDF packet writing on my CD-RW drives. It seems to work great, and is a truly handy storage format.
Could somebody clarify for me why I would replace my apparently perfectly good CD-RW drives with CD-MRW capable ones? I guess there must be some technical advantage to the MRW format. Speed? Reliability? Certainly can't be portability: one of the reasons I chose CD-RW packet is that I can read it on most boxes these days.
I'm obviously missing something here...
Not a Zip replacement (Score:2)
Mount Rainer can't be Patented (Score:2, Insightful)
And since the main purpose of this format appears to be the functional benefits of treating CD-Rs and CD-RWs as regular removable media (floppies, JAZ disks, etc.), the only thing left to patent would be the physical disk. But, that's not possible because there's nothing special or different about "MRW" disks: they are just regular CD-RWs. The real support for MRW comes from the OS and software, not from hardware.
So don't get your hopes up that Philips decided to forego the royalties in favor of widespread adoption. It's entirely possible that someone who works for Philips actually has a Mac OS X system and discovered that the project they've been working on for two years was just shown up by Apple.
In my opinion, however, Philips is more interested in making money by selling lots of disks marked "MRW" at a premium instead of selling CD-RWs. Having support for MRW everywhere then makes more sense than charging developers for support for the format. I doubt Philips ever intended to close off access to the specification despite what Andre Hendrick says. Perhaps they were just keeping it closed until it was finalized.
Re:Mount Rainer can't be Patented (Score:1)
Re:patents are not necessarily bad (Score:1)
In the old days, Edison would spend years to come up with a lightbulb whose filament would last longer than a few hours. The stuff that really has people in an anti-patent mood is where a lawyer writes several pages of mumbo-jumbo, *WITH NO PHYSICAL DEVICE MANUFACTURED*, files it, and comes back several years later to sue everybody in site. Examples...
- The "one-click" patent
- The GIF algorithm patent
- BT (British Telecomm) filed some mumbo-jumbo in the late 1970's about data referencing other data, and claimed that HTTP urls infringed on that patent, and sued Prodigy for their website.
- check out this ZD item [zdnet.com] about a 1985 patent on downloading software. Like, how many years has FTP been around fer-cryin-outloud ?
CD-MRW vs current Packet Writing tools... (Score:2)
For example, Nero comes with a Packet-Writer program, and the Sony Spressa drives all come with AbCD. These utilities allow the CD to be mounted as a large removable media, and used in a simple drag and drop fashion. As far as I know, AbCD and the Nero one (I can't remember it's name -- help -- someone?) aren't compatible so there is of course this whole compatibility issue that CD-MRW does fix up for us, but my question is this:
If packeting writing DOES the same thing for us already -- then what is preventing CURRENT drives from supporting Mount Rainier?
Logically, if the drives can DO Packet Writing in other formats, then it's only a driver issue that prevents them from doing it Mount Rainier format, right? If not, why not?
By the looks of it -- everyone is going to need whole new drives and media, something I'm not too terribly keen on considering that I've been using a Sony Spressa for a while now and I ALREADY HAVE packeting writing.
Slashdot quote amusingly appropriate: (Score:1)
Apt, no?