Following Valenti/MPAA's logic to conclusion, I don't believe they object to your playing the DVD through a licensed player, then capturing the analog output and resampling into your academic work as fair use. It seems their position is that they don't want you to be taking the perfect original bits verbatim.
I would personally prefer unfettered access to the bits that I bought. However, it is important to understand clearly the distinctions that they are trying to make.
It would suggest that the various programs that exist that have swiped the bits in the decode stream on the computer (having been decss-ed by a licensed player) are "more" legal than decss.
It may be in the future that this is irrelevant, even to the MPAA. There -will- be MPEG encoders available for capture streams, which, given digital frames, will make practically indistinguishable mpeg streams. But that day is a few years out, and they are trying to put their finger in the dike for now.
There were some pretty good clones made by Tyco. But they decided to get out of that business, and sold the tooling to... Lego.
Megablocks aren't as good in lego size, but make pretty good bulk blocks in the Duplo scale.
While Lego makes a good product, I think they are overpriced. That it is still a private company and doing things like building Legolands says something about the profit margins. The lack of discounting suggests something about their business practices. Has anybody got a regular source for robotics invention systems that is a penny less than $199?
The "bulk" packs are 25, 50, 100. Sorry, to me, "Bulk Packs" would be 1000, 2500 and 5000. And they are like $6.95 a crack, with a whopping 5% or 10% discount if you get 5 or 10 of each.
Let me put it this way. The roof of your lego house is gonna be in the vicinity of $28 a square foot. You can do real spanish tile for less than that.
It says int the article that linux only can have 2 to 4 nodes in a cluster how does Google.com have a 4,000 node cluster and thinking of upgrading to 6,000?
Google is closer in form to a beowulf cluster than a TruCluster or a Sysplex.
No one seems to be bringing out the utility of the DeCSS binary in producing VOB files that can be used as test data for development of the Linux player. Absent that functional use, it may appear the use of the binary is as a ripper to make pirate copies, rather than its role as part of the Linux DVD player effort.
btree? there's probably more data stored with that than any other structured approach. -dB
Re:Building Linux Clusters - O'Reilly
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 1
The sample chapter in the book is about compute clusters (ray tracing and mp3 encoding farms). The author, David HM Spector, doesn't seem to have any presence in the linux availability cluster community. His blurb on oreilly says he is interested in performance clusters. This suggests this book is not the one you should be waiting for if you are interested in availability.
What sort of storage solutions make sense for beowulf applications? Locally attached disks, with something like a network block device? Distributed file systems? NFS? AFS? Clusterized file systems (eg: GFS)? Fibre Channel?
What are you currently using, and do you think its OK, or just the best you can get for now? What would you want changed for improvements in usability, performance, and data integrity?
The precedents are that "fair use" gives you, the owner of the CD, the right to make a copies for yourself to protect against media failure by flood, fire and your 2 year-olds attempts to insert it into the floppy drive. Fair use entitles you to save these copies wherever you like, as long as no one else uses them.
MP3 takes the position that they are holding your copy for you. This would only be correct if you had ripped it yourself, encoded it to mp3, and uploaded it to your private storage area. However, the service doesn't start with your bits, it starts with -their- bits, off of their CD collection. So you aren't getting a copy of -your- CD, that only you can access. You are getting pirated copies of their CD, shared.
The distinction of where the bits came from makes all the difference, despite the fact that the bits are identical to the ones from your CD.
If they had made you do the rip, uploaded it, and then had s/w that did a bitwise compare to existing data and collapsed/compressed them to save space, they would be far closer to clearly legal.
As it is now, they are at the least guilty of statutory infringement, with set penalties, and the infringement is obviously willful. If you don't get the point that thinking what you did was fair use is no defense, check out CoS vs. Henson (search for scientology and henson in the engine of your choice).
I think MP3 may be morally and techno-evolutionarily correct, but they seem quite likely to get nailed to the wall and bankrupted on this one. IMO.
If chinet started on a compaq lunchbox, it was proably after 82, and almost certainly wasn't running Unix.
In 1983 and 1984, Les Kent was running a public unix system called "proper" on a Dual Systems 68000 in San Leandro CA. It ran one of the early Unisoft UNIX variants, and he gave accounts to anyone who heard about it and asked. If I recall correctly, about 15 of us came to a get-together at a Lyons in Hayward or Fremont. He had a Usenet feed, and one could read the entirety of the day's articles in about an hour on a 1200 baud connection. It was up at the time of the "hello from Chernenko" hoax on April 1st '94, with the message routed through "kgbvax!kremvax".
I suspect there were at most a handful of similar systems up in that timeframe world wide.
It has already outlived 16 bit minicomputers, 32 bit CISC minicomputers, 32 bit RISC bit slice minicomputers, and seems quite set to bury 32 bit microprocessors.
Because it is mutable, and hasn't promised binary compatibility, UNIX has survived all the architectural epochs that have killed its competitors.
It's also worth questioning the premise that the distributed world in any way changes the demand for UNIX systems. There will always be a need for big computers with high locality. For the forseeable future, except those running MVS/Sysplex clusters, -all- those big machines will be running UNIX. Someday, many of them might be running Linux instead of the current flavor, but it will still appear to be UNIX.
The law in question on the worst of the cases isn't really about First Amendment, it's about copyright. "Fair use" exists in law, not in the constitution. When the DMCA was passed, we knew it stunk, but didn't realize how bad it was. Now we are finding out that, in plausible interpretations, the DMCA has eliminated the historical concept of fair use. This is not a constitutional issue, but a matter of statute.
That is, it was within congressional authority to remove the right of fair use by statute.
It may be that the only way to get it fixed is to amend/repeal the DMCA. I am not at all sure we can expect the courts to fix the legislation on their own. We may have to figure out how to convince legislators that the DMCA had serious unintended consequences that need to be fixed. That will take positive engagement and, unfortunately, financial support.
Compare to the CDA, where there -were- clear first amendment issues that could be ruled unconstitutional. With DMCA, we don't have prior-restraint on the code -- all these suits are actions after the fact for torts.
Where the DMCA may run into constitutional difficulty is in turning publication into a criminal act, I think. That would seem to have first amendment problems.
And there is jam , a paper from which has the bibliography:
Atria Software, "Building Software Systems with ClearMake", ClearCase Users Manual, Natick MA, May 1994.
Geoffrey M. Clemm, The Odin Reference Manual, available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.colorado.edu.
S. I. Feldman, "Make - A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs", BSD NET2 documentation, April 1986 (revision).
Glenn Fowler, "The Fourth Generation Make", Proceedings of the USENIX Summer Conference, June 1985.
Peter Miller, "Cook - A File Construction Tool", Volume 26, comp.sources.unix archives, 1993.
Christopher Seiwald, "Jam -- Make(1) Redux", Usenix UNIX Applications Development Symposium, Toronto, Canada April 1994.
Richard M. Stallman and Roland McGrath, "GNU Make - A Program for Directed Recompilation", Free Software Foundation, 1991.
Zoltan Somogyi, "Cake, a Fifth Generation Version of Make", Australian Unix System User Group Newsletter, April 1987.
Dennis Vadura, dmake(1) manual page, Volume 27, comp.sources.misc archives, 1990.
Which show some different approaches that have been taken, even though some of them don't qualify or are what are the things being replaced.
If there's a missing requirement in the rules of the contest, it's the lack of a migration path from make. Without that, you just have an interesting toy, because no one will move their existing significant system without it.
One is given to wonder whether this is going to work. There is fairly recent research suggesting attempts to save birds from oil exposure are not effective, no matter how heroic. For one example, see this article about a UC Davis study on cleanup of pelicans.
And to be even fairer to them, the cited article has links of its own to other coverage of the actual etoys/etoy situation, the first of which seems reasonably accurate.
Etoys still comes off as a bunch of jack-booted, well, whatever.
Yes, you can make a single 60, but you can't easily make a 3-d triangular equilateral polyhedron, with all the angles at all the vertices 60s. Knex makes it easy only to do 90s and 45s at those junctions. -dB
The main problem I have with Knex is that it only gives you 90 and 45 degree angles. To do a lot of interesting things (domes, frinstance), you need 60s and 30s at least.
One thing that would be great is a set of appropriate Lego Knex connector pieces, taking advantage of the strengths of each system. Lego is excellent for building solid-volume pieces of large mass. Knex is much better at building framed structures of low mass. It's easy to build a 6 foot Knex building, and a lot harder with Lego.
BTW, it is time to make plans for your Knex purchases. Every year, the day after Christmas, large Knex sets to on massive sale at Target. It is a great opportunity to stock up on big volumes of parts. The "hyperspace training tower" is a steal when it can be found for $49, as are the Ball Factory and the Roller Coaster.
Hint when building knex: sort out parts by color before commencing construction.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing; spreadsheet is the original killer app. If you aren't using a spreadsheet regularly, then you are, by definition, not a typical desktop user.
I use the spreadsheet in SO almost exclusively; it handles simple Excel a lot better than it does the Word attachments I try to read with it.
-dB
I would personally prefer unfettered access to the bits that I bought. However, it is important to understand clearly the distinctions that they are trying to make.
It would suggest that the various programs that exist that have swiped the bits in the decode stream on the computer (having been decss-ed by a licensed player) are "more" legal than decss.
It may be in the future that this is irrelevant, even to the MPAA. There -will- be MPEG encoders available for capture streams, which, given digital frames, will make practically indistinguishable mpeg streams. But that day is a few years out, and they are trying to put their finger in the dike for now.
-dB
Megablocks aren't as good in lego size, but make pretty good bulk blocks in the Duplo scale.
While Lego makes a good product, I think they are overpriced. That it is still a private company and doing things like building Legolands says something about the profit margins. The lack of discounting suggests something about their business practices. Has anybody got a regular source for robotics invention systems that is a penny less than $199?
-dB
Let me put it this way. The roof of your lego house is gonna be in the vicinity of $28 a square foot. You can do real spanish tile for less than that.
-dB
Google is closer in form to a beowulf cluster than a TruCluster or a Sysplex.
-dB
-dB
btree? there's probably more data stored with that than any other structured approach. -dB
-dB
What are you currently using, and do you think its OK, or just the best you can get for now? What would you want changed for improvements in usability, performance, and data integrity?
thanks,
-dB
MP3 takes the position that they are holding your copy for you. This would only be correct if you had ripped it yourself, encoded it to mp3, and uploaded it to your private storage area. However, the service doesn't start with your bits, it starts with -their- bits, off of their CD collection. So you aren't getting a copy of -your- CD, that only you can access. You are getting pirated copies of their CD, shared.
The distinction of where the bits came from makes all the difference, despite the fact that the bits are identical to the ones from your CD.
If they had made you do the rip, uploaded it, and then had s/w that did a bitwise compare to existing data and collapsed/compressed them to save space, they would be far closer to clearly legal.
As it is now, they are at the least guilty of statutory infringement, with set penalties, and the infringement is obviously willful. If you don't get the point that thinking what you did was fair use is no defense, check out CoS vs. Henson (search for scientology and henson in the engine of your choice).
I think MP3 may be morally and techno-evolutionarily correct, but they seem quite likely to get nailed to the wall and bankrupted on this one. IMO.
-dB
In 1983 and 1984, Les Kent was running a public unix system called "proper" on a Dual Systems 68000 in San Leandro CA. It ran one of the early Unisoft UNIX variants, and he gave accounts to anyone who heard about it and asked. If I recall correctly, about 15 of us came to a get-together at a Lyons in Hayward or Fremont. He had a Usenet feed, and one could read the entirety of the day's articles in about an hour on a 1200 baud connection. It was up at the time of the "hello from Chernenko" hoax on April 1st '94, with the message routed through "kgbvax!kremvax".
I suspect there were at most a handful of similar systems up in that timeframe world wide.
-dB
Because it is mutable, and hasn't promised binary compatibility, UNIX has survived all the architectural epochs that have killed its competitors.
It's also worth questioning the premise that the distributed world in any way changes the demand for UNIX systems. There will always be a need for big computers with high locality. For the forseeable future, except those running MVS/Sysplex clusters, -all- those big machines will be running UNIX. Someday, many of them might be running Linux instead of the current flavor, but it will still appear to be UNIX.
-dB
That is, it was within congressional authority to remove the right of fair use by statute.
It may be that the only way to get it fixed is to amend/repeal the DMCA. I am not at all sure we can expect the courts to fix the legislation on their own. We may have to figure out how to convince legislators that the DMCA had serious unintended consequences that need to be fixed. That will take positive engagement and, unfortunately, financial support.
Compare to the CDA, where there -were- clear first amendment issues that could be ruled unconstitutional. With DMCA, we don't have prior-restraint on the code -- all these suits are actions after the fact for torts.
Where the DMCA may run into constitutional difficulty is in turning publication into a criminal act, I think. That would seem to have first amendment problems.
-dB
Atria Software, "Building Software Systems with ClearMake", ClearCase Users Manual, Natick MA, May 1994.
Geoffrey M. Clemm, The Odin Reference Manual, available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.colorado.edu.
S. I. Feldman, "Make - A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs", BSD NET2 documentation, April 1986 (revision).
Glenn Fowler, "The Fourth Generation Make", Proceedings of the USENIX Summer Conference, June 1985.
Peter Miller, "Cook - A File Construction Tool", Volume 26, comp.sources.unix archives, 1993.
Christopher Seiwald, "Jam -- Make(1) Redux", Usenix UNIX Applications Development Symposium, Toronto, Canada April 1994.
Richard M. Stallman and Roland McGrath, "GNU Make - A Program for Directed Recompilation", Free Software Foundation, 1991.
Zoltan Somogyi, "Cake, a Fifth Generation Version of Make", Australian Unix System User Group Newsletter, April 1987.
Dennis Vadura, dmake(1) manual page, Volume 27, comp.sources.misc archives, 1990.
Which show some different approaches that have been taken, even though some of them don't qualify or are what are the things being replaced.
If there's a missing requirement in the rules of the contest, it's the lack of a migration path from make. Without that, you just have an interesting toy, because no one will move their existing significant system without it.
-dB
-dB
Etoys still comes off as a bunch of jack-booted, well, whatever.
-dB
Yes, you can make a single 60, but you can't easily make a 3-d triangular equilateral polyhedron, with all the angles at all the vertices 60s. Knex makes it easy only to do 90s and 45s at those junctions. -dB
One thing that would be great is a set of appropriate Lego Knex connector pieces, taking advantage of the strengths of each system. Lego is excellent for building solid-volume pieces of large mass. Knex is much better at building framed structures of low mass. It's easy to build a 6 foot Knex building, and a lot harder with Lego.
BTW, it is time to make plans for your Knex purchases. Every year, the day after Christmas, large Knex sets to on massive sale at Target. It is a great opportunity to stock up on big volumes of parts. The "hyperspace training tower" is a steal when it can be found for $49, as are the Ball Factory and the Roller Coaster.
Hint when building knex: sort out parts by color before commencing construction.
-dB