Bill Ward - All - Computers - Linux

Picn*x14

On August 14, 2005 we had the annual Linux Picnic, Picn*x14, at the Sunnyvale Baylands Park.

Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos.

Victory in Broadcast Flag Case!

As I reported a while ago, the FCC wants to limit our ability to install digital TV tuners in our computers, and thus to build our own digital video recorders. The proposal would have made it illegal to make or sell tuner cards that would decode digital signals where a "broadcast flag" was set. This was supposed to protect the intellectual property rights of Hollywood but at the cost of making it impossible for us to watch such shows on anything but a commercially produced decoder box or TV.

So now with this ruling, it will take an act of Congress for the FCC to get its way. The deadline of July 1 for buying broadcast-flag-free HDTV tuner cards is now gone!

You can read more about the victory on the EFF Web site or read the court opinion (PDF file).

Buy your HDTV card now before it's too late!

Join the Television Digital Liberation Front!

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) it will soon be illegal to "sell or distribute in interstate commerce a Covered Demodulator Product that does not comply with the Demodulator Compliance Requirements and Demodulator Robustness Requirements." This takes effect on July 1, 2005.

This means that if you have been thinking of using MythTV to create your own digital video recorder (in other words, a homebrew TiVo), and you want it to be able to handle HDTV signals, you have six months to buy the hardware.

Surprisingly, this technology is even crappier than the CSS encryption on DVD's. It's just a flag that indicates whether or not digital rights need to be enforced on the media. And since they've stated that legacy hardware needs to still work, regardless of the flag, all you have to do is use old hardware and it's fine. But unlike the CSS encryption, all hardware capable of accessing the signal is required by FCC ruling to enforce it. So you won't be able to get around this with a simple piece of software like you can with CSS.

Linux Holiday Dinner

Last Wednesday night, December 15, 2004, was our first ever (hopefully annual) Linux Holiday Dinner which I organized. It was held by Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group (where I was recently elected Vice President) and Peninsula Linux Users' Group (of which I am the founder and President).

We held the the party at my favorite Chinese restaurant, Chef Wang's. If you are in the area I strongly recommend you check it out. My wife and I have dinner there frequently with our friend Jeff Komori - the food there is absolutely delicious! They are located at 5100 El Camino Real, Los Altos, CA 94022; telephone (650) 965-2689.

Here are the pictures from the dinner:

Picn*x13

On August 7, 2004 we had the annual Linux Picnic, Picn*x13, at the Sunnyvale Baylands Park. Here are my pictures from the event:

Linux

On August 25, 1991, the world changed. A college student in Finland by the name of Linus (LEE-noos) Torvalds announced his latest project, a new operating system for the 386 PC that uses the Minix filesystem and various GNU utilities. He named it Linux (LIN-ucks).

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