This isn't an RIAA issue. They sell recorded performances. It's the copyright in the composition that's involved here. That's licensed separately, in the US usually through the Harry Fox Agency.
From the command list, they're talking to the boot loader, not the operating system. That's nice, but rather low level. You can load another operating system image, so there's the potential of booting a different OS, if someone writes the appropriate drivers. Somebody will probably boot Linux eventually, but mostly as a curiosity.
Well, good for Gwyneth Paltrow. Is she a good enough actress to convince me she's in the freezing cold if she's being filmed in a climate-controlled studio in L.A.?
Yes. But in the scene where she's dodging the giant walking robots, her movements look wrong, because, of course, she's responding to something that isn't there during filming. That's a big hassle for actors doing blue screen work - weak cues.
Sometimes a live actor can be put in the scene to play some character that will be inserted as a CG character later. Action scenes where invisible CG stuff is flying around and live actors have to deal with it tend to look wrong. That's when you find out if the director is any good.
CG work is hard on directors. Traditionally, scenes are debugged with the director and the actors running through a scene and checking a playback to see how it looks. That's a tradition from live theater, and Hollywood worked that way for decades. Once in a while, something great happens, and a bit of cinematic history is created.
This doesn't work for CG-heavy productions, which have to be preplanned to death. The production process is more like animation - storyboarding comes first, every shot is designed and blocked before there's any principal photography, and the actors are just another layer to be composited in. The effect can be leaden acting. It's the director's job to get some life into the scene. Some directors are much better at this than others.
WMP and iTunes both run fine under Linux actually.
Reality check. Go to the Apple iTunes download page.. Note the available options: "Windows 2000, XP, or Vista", or "Mac OS X".
Yes, there are people who have been able to get iTunes to run on a Mac under some emulator. And there have been attempts at an iTunes clone. But Apple put a stop to that.
As for Windows Media Player, even for Firefox, it doesn't work on Linux. Linux support is listed as "unavailable". Some programs can play some formats of.AVI files on Linux, but not the ones that require codec or DRM downloads from Microsoft servers.
Maximum PC should stick to what they know - fans and heat sinks.
Linux missed the window for the desktop. Now that PCs are expected to play DRM-protected media encoded with proprietary codecs, the window for consumer open source systems has closed. Linux might have made it in 2002, but now it's too late.
I used an AT&T UNIX PC, made and sold by AT&T, in 1982. 25 years later, Unix/Linux on the desktop still isn't mainstream. Sorry, guys.
As Gwyneth Paltrow said while working on Sky Captain, an all blue screen job, "I get to go home at night and sleep in my own bed." This after filming the scene where they're in a blizzard on a mountain at night. The mountain is CG, the blizzard is CG, and the weather is LA. Beats having to go on location to Outer Nowhere.
A VAX is not a mainframe.
A VAX is a supermini.
And a rather slow supermini, at that.
DEC had a terrible time with VAX performance. The original VAX 11/780 delivered almost exactly 1 MIPS. It was years before they came out with a faster model. They tried, but the first attempt resulted in a machine with worse price/performance. They came out with several even slower models; the VAX 11/750, the MicroVAX I, and the MicroVAX II. Then they tried ECL to get the speed up, which helped but made for a bigger, hotter CPU. Price/performance was terrible compared to microprocessors of the same period. That's what created an opening for Sun, Apollo, etc. to take away DEC's scientific market.
We originally said the same thing about XP - that we would stick with 2000
I'm still running Windows 2000, with the latest service pack. We had an XP machine for a while, but got rid of it. The current versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL, Python, Dreamweaver, etc. are all installed, so everything important is current. Even obscure stuff like the development environment for Atmel embedded microcontrollers, the eMachineShop part design system, and the latest Nero CD/DVD burner work fine on Windows 2000.
Microsoft's OS is a mature technology.
Vista? Who needs it?
Amazon's one-click idea was non-obvious by patent standards. Before Amazon did it, nobody was doing it, even though others had the same problem of online ordering being too hard. So others actively working in the field tried and failed. That is considered strong evidence of non-obviousness.
The test for obviousness is prospective, not retrospective. If it's only obvious in hindsight, that's not a bar to patentability.
Yes, those are the CALTRANS cameras. You can look at what CALTRANS centers are looking at, but the camera system, which is mostly analog, has a limited number of video paths and switching, so only some of the cameras are live at any time. They're for zooming in on trouble, not for constant surveillance.
Getting past the ad-heavy blogodreck, the company's actual web site is Steorn. There is a critical
Wikipedia article on Steorn. The company has been making noises about this since last year.
Steorn says they can't patent the thing, and that's why they're so secretive, but the USPTO takes the position that perpetual motion machines are patentable. All they ask is a working model. Their official position is: "With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device."
There have been some good fake perpetual motion machines. David Jones, who wrote as "Daedalus", for New Scientist, had a bicycle wheel on a stand which rotated endlessly with no visible source of power back in the 1990s. This was a really good demo. It was stolen from its display by some students, who returned it embarrassed that they couldn't figure out how it worked. It continued to rotate while they had it. One of his machines is at the Vienna Science Museum, still turning.
I'm surprised. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't have serious legal problems. They need an intellectual property lawyer on tap, but most of their stuff is routine.
They may need a tax guy. With Jimbo Wales involved in both the profit-making Wikia and the nonprofit Wikimedia, there are issues with IRS nonprofit status for Wikimedia. (See Instructions for IRS form 1023, line 5A).
Wikia is turning into a popular culture/fan system; they have the Star Wars wiki and various other fan sites. One could argue that it would be to the advantage of Wikipedia to export all the popular culture stuff to Wikia, and focus Wikipedia on more encyclopedic subjects. But that's an asset of Wikipedia; if sold off to Wikia, money should flow the other way. Without an arms-length relationship between the two, there are serious tax issues.
Some years ago, when morphing was new, I was over at Pacific Data Images. An unhappy young woman was seated at a display, with a picture of a car's front in one window and a tiger's face in another. She was trying to come up with a set of control points for the morph. It just wasn't working.
You can morph anything to anything; no matter what points you pick, the start and end states will be the input images. Keeping it from looking stupid is the hard part.
The trend today is to do the tough morphs behind the scenes; the parts in front are moving around without too much distortion, while the stuff that's changing in blatantly unrealistic ways is obscured. This is a cheat, but that's how Hollywood works.
Right now, effects technology is ahead of screenwriting. With a big enough budget, you really can do anything on screen. But look at the action movies coming out: Spiderman 3. Pirates 3. Shrek 3. Die Hard 4. Harry Potter 5. And last year's Rocky 6.
Not much originality there.
The Burning Man crowd likes stuff like that. It's too late for this year's Department of Mutant Vehicles registration, though.
By playa standards, this is unambitious. Check out the Neverwas Haul, a steam-powered 3-story Victorian house on wheels that moves under its own power.
The detector loops on the freeways report speed and traffic density data ("70 MPH, 14 veh/30 seconds"). A map display at the local CALTRANS control center shows spots where there's an unexpected discontinuity with the previous section. The control center then
turns on the appropriate traffic cameras, which have pan, tilt, and zoom, so they can get a close look at the problem. They they can send tow trucks, ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, road repair crews, cleanup crews, or whatever's needed.
You can watch much of the camera output, alhough, being an old system, it's RealPlayer.
Most of the cameras are pointed in somewhat random directions, because they're usually just left pointing at whatever incident needed to be looked at last.
You can see the incident log at the CHP incident log site. The control center sometimes initiates entries, but the guys who actually go to the site finish them.
Typical entries:
Incident: 1662 Type: Traffic Hazard Location: SB I110 JSO W ADAMS BLVD
1:09PM VEH STALLED IN LANES, PTY UNDER VEH WORKING ON IT
1:13PM CHP Unit Enroute
Ultracapacitors are really impressive. They exceed the limits of what was considered physically possible twenty years ago. The newer ones can be charged fast and discharged fast; it's not like the older ones that could only deliver tiny currents. People have used ultracapacitors to start auto engines.
The problem, though, is that all the energy can come out at once if they're shorted or damaged. Lithium-ion battery thermal runaway is a problem, and laptop fires have resulted. Ultracapacitor failures will be worse. You don't really want to have a fuel tank's worth of energy stored in a capacitor. But saving the energy from braking a car is probably OK.
The problem with music DRM, from the music distributor perspective, is that it's too closely tied to player vendors. There's the iPod and the Zume, and in both cases the player manufacturer takes a cut of the revenue. UMG, reasonably enough, wants to cut the player manufacturer out of the revenue stream.
Microsoft has orphaned "PlaysForSure", which, for a while, looked like an option.
Or at least Microsoft tried. WalMart went with PlaysForSure, and they might insist that Microsoft keep supporting it.
What really matters is what WalMart does. If the music industry doesn't come up with a good solution, Bentonville may dictate one. Their site currently says The Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune digital media players do not currently support protected WMA-format files, and will not play Wal-Mart Music Downloads.
Walmart.com has a large selection of WMA-/DRM-compatible digital music players available at great prices.
WalMart, remember, sells online music at $0.88/song, below Apple and Microsoft. And they're not going to raise their prices.
Mod parent up. Article really is almost content-free. Also has annoying pop-up ads that make it through Firefox's filters.
The way it ought to work - user push and audit
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 1
The National Association of Theater Owners, the businesses that run movie theaters, faced demands for DRM from the movie studios. They agreed, but on their terms,
which limit the intrusiveness of the DRM system. Here are some of the terms:
The System shall not compromise the security of the theatre's in-house network, including the security of digital cinema systems, point-of-sale systems, and other data systems owned and/or operated by the exhibitor.
(In other words, Sony can't pull on theater operators what they pulled on consumers last year.)
The system shall be designed to push data to outside business entities per the needs of the exhibitor, and shall not allow outside business entities to pull data from the exhibitor's equipment or from the premises without the express written permission of the exhibitor on a case-by-case basis. All such communications shall be recorded and shall be auditable by the Exhibitor. (This is the key provision. If it phones home, it does so only under the control of the end user, and the user can easily check the data being sent. The XML formats for this are defined.)
Systems shall employ the standard interchange method for security log reports prescribed by DCI's Digital Cinema Specification v1.0. Systems shall employ tools that allow the exhibitor to filter security log reports logs prior to sharing. (So when the movie projector sends DRM usage info to the studio, it's in a standard format the exhibitor can read, and even filter.)
Any software that phones home in an enterprise environment ought to be held to standards like these.
This idea goes back a long way. I think it was first tried in the 1970s, using the input end of a remote manipulator arm intended for handling radioactive material. It's been done dozens of times since then. The problem is doing it well.
We have enough compute power now to get the lag down to a few milliseconds, which was a big problem ten years ago. Then it's mostly a mechanical design problem. Most of the devices so far were too clunky. Is this one better?
Lesson: do not launch product that requires extensive customer service at the beginning of a weekend.
The general observation seems to be that activation from a cold start works OK, but anything that requires "number portability" from a previous account may be troublesome. That's no surprise; number portability is usually a mess, because the carriers don't want you to use that Government-mandated feature.
It's still not clear why activation should require a separate computer. Activation via iTunes might be a nice option if you already use iTunes, but it shouldn't be the main route. After all, the iPhone has its very own Internet connection.
Clearly, the only way we're going to get to the bottom of this is have the FAA do a full inspection on the flight-worthiness of egg-shaped saucers.
Back in the 1980s, when the Transcendental Meditation people were claiming to teach levitation, someone asked the FAA to investigate TM as an "unlicensed flight school". The FAA actually replied, stating that FAA jurisdiction begins at 50 feet above ground level (hovercraft are thus regulated as ground vehicles), and that the TM people appeared unable to achieve sufficient altitude.
This got some publicity, and embarrassed the TM people, who stopped selling "levitation seminars". Especially after someone established that their pictures of people levitating in lotus position were achieved by bouncing on a trampoline.
Apple didn't have any legacy IA-32 machines when they switched from PowerPC. They could have gone directly to 64-bit. They might have had to use some AMD CPUs, though.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't an RIAA issue. They sell recorded performances. It's the copyright in the composition that's involved here. That's licensed separately, in the US usually through the Harry Fox Agency.
From the command list, they're talking to the boot loader, not the operating system. That's nice, but rather low level. You can load another operating system image, so there's the potential of booting a different OS, if someone writes the appropriate drivers. Somebody will probably boot Linux eventually, but mostly as a curiosity.
Well, good for Gwyneth Paltrow. Is she a good enough actress to convince me she's in the freezing cold if she's being filmed in a climate-controlled studio in L.A.?
Yes. But in the scene where she's dodging the giant walking robots, her movements look wrong, because, of course, she's responding to something that isn't there during filming. That's a big hassle for actors doing blue screen work - weak cues.
Sometimes a live actor can be put in the scene to play some character that will be inserted as a CG character later. Action scenes where invisible CG stuff is flying around and live actors have to deal with it tend to look wrong. That's when you find out if the director is any good.
CG work is hard on directors. Traditionally, scenes are debugged with the director and the actors running through a scene and checking a playback to see how it looks. That's a tradition from live theater, and Hollywood worked that way for decades. Once in a while, something great happens, and a bit of cinematic history is created.
This doesn't work for CG-heavy productions, which have to be preplanned to death. The production process is more like animation - storyboarding comes first, every shot is designed and blocked before there's any principal photography, and the actors are just another layer to be composited in. The effect can be leaden acting. It's the director's job to get some life into the scene. Some directors are much better at this than others.
WMP and iTunes both run fine under Linux actually.
Reality check. Go to the Apple iTunes download page.. Note the available options: "Windows 2000, XP, or Vista", or "Mac OS X". Yes, there are people who have been able to get iTunes to run on a Mac under some emulator. And there have been attempts at an iTunes clone. But Apple put a stop to that.
As for Windows Media Player, even for Firefox, it doesn't work on Linux. Linux support is listed as "unavailable". Some programs can play some formats of .AVI files on Linux, but not the ones that require codec or DRM downloads from Microsoft servers.
Maximum PC should stick to what they know - fans and heat sinks.
Linux missed the window for the desktop. Now that PCs are expected to play DRM-protected media encoded with proprietary codecs, the window for consumer open source systems has closed. Linux might have made it in 2002, but now it's too late.
I used an AT&T UNIX PC, made and sold by AT&T, in 1982. 25 years later, Unix/Linux on the desktop still isn't mainstream. Sorry, guys.
As Gwyneth Paltrow said while working on Sky Captain, an all blue screen job, "I get to go home at night and sleep in my own bed." This after filming the scene where they're in a blizzard on a mountain at night. The mountain is CG, the blizzard is CG, and the weather is LA. Beats having to go on location to Outer Nowhere.
The iPhone currently requires a two-year AT&T service commitment, but only has a one-year warranty. So if it dies during year two, you're really stuck. Apple is promising to announce an extra-cost extended warranty.
The out of warranty service fee is $199 to $249.
A VAX is not a mainframe. A VAX is a supermini. And a rather slow supermini, at that.
DEC had a terrible time with VAX performance. The original VAX 11/780 delivered almost exactly 1 MIPS. It was years before they came out with a faster model. They tried, but the first attempt resulted in a machine with worse price/performance. They came out with several even slower models; the VAX 11/750, the MicroVAX I, and the MicroVAX II. Then they tried ECL to get the speed up, which helped but made for a bigger, hotter CPU. Price/performance was terrible compared to microprocessors of the same period. That's what created an opening for Sun, Apollo, etc. to take away DEC's scientific market.
We originally said the same thing about XP - that we would stick with 2000
I'm still running Windows 2000, with the latest service pack. We had an XP machine for a while, but got rid of it. The current versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL, Python, Dreamweaver, etc. are all installed, so everything important is current. Even obscure stuff like the development environment for Atmel embedded microcontrollers, the eMachineShop part design system, and the latest Nero CD/DVD burner work fine on Windows 2000.
Microsoft's OS is a mature technology. Vista? Who needs it?
Amazon's one-click idea was non-obvious by patent standards. Before Amazon did it, nobody was doing it, even though others had the same problem of online ordering being too hard. So others actively working in the field tried and failed. That is considered strong evidence of non-obviousness.
The test for obviousness is prospective, not retrospective. If it's only obvious in hindsight, that's not a bar to patentability.
Yes, those are the CALTRANS cameras. You can look at what CALTRANS centers are looking at, but the camera system, which is mostly analog, has a limited number of video paths and switching, so only some of the cameras are live at any time. They're for zooming in on trouble, not for constant surveillance.
Getting past the ad-heavy blogodreck, the company's actual web site is Steorn. There is a critical Wikipedia article on Steorn. The company has been making noises about this since last year.
Steorn says they can't patent the thing, and that's why they're so secretive, but the USPTO takes the position that perpetual motion machines are patentable. All they ask is a working model. Their official position is: "With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device."
There have been some good fake perpetual motion machines. David Jones, who wrote as "Daedalus", for New Scientist, had a bicycle wheel on a stand which rotated endlessly with no visible source of power back in the 1990s. This was a really good demo. It was stolen from its display by some students, who returned it embarrassed that they couldn't figure out how it worked. It continued to rotate while they had it. One of his machines is at the Vienna Science Museum, still turning.
I'm surprised. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't have serious legal problems. They need an intellectual property lawyer on tap, but most of their stuff is routine.
They may need a tax guy. With Jimbo Wales involved in both the profit-making Wikia and the nonprofit Wikimedia, there are issues with IRS nonprofit status for Wikimedia. (See Instructions for IRS form 1023, line 5A).
Wikia is turning into a popular culture/fan system; they have the Star Wars wiki and various other fan sites. One could argue that it would be to the advantage of Wikipedia to export all the popular culture stuff to Wikia, and focus Wikipedia on more encyclopedic subjects. But that's an asset of Wikipedia; if sold off to Wikia, money should flow the other way. Without an arms-length relationship between the two, there are serious tax issues.
Some years ago, when morphing was new, I was over at Pacific Data Images. An unhappy young woman was seated at a display, with a picture of a car's front in one window and a tiger's face in another. She was trying to come up with a set of control points for the morph. It just wasn't working.
You can morph anything to anything; no matter what points you pick, the start and end states will be the input images. Keeping it from looking stupid is the hard part.
The trend today is to do the tough morphs behind the scenes; the parts in front are moving around without too much distortion, while the stuff that's changing in blatantly unrealistic ways is obscured. This is a cheat, but that's how Hollywood works.
Right now, effects technology is ahead of screenwriting. With a big enough budget, you really can do anything on screen. But look at the action movies coming out: Spiderman 3. Pirates 3. Shrek 3. Die Hard 4. Harry Potter 5. And last year's Rocky 6. Not much originality there.
The Burning Man crowd likes stuff like that. It's too late for this year's Department of Mutant Vehicles registration, though.
By playa standards, this is unambitious. Check out the Neverwas Haul, a steam-powered 3-story Victorian house on wheels that moves under its own power.
CALTRANS has had that operational on Bay Area and LA freeways for the last ten years.
Here's the current status for the SF Bay Area.
The detector loops on the freeways report speed and traffic density data ("70 MPH, 14 veh/30 seconds"). A map display at the local CALTRANS control center shows spots where there's an unexpected discontinuity with the previous section. The control center then turns on the appropriate traffic cameras, which have pan, tilt, and zoom, so they can get a close look at the problem. They they can send tow trucks, ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, road repair crews, cleanup crews, or whatever's needed.
You can watch much of the camera output, alhough, being an old system, it's RealPlayer. Most of the cameras are pointed in somewhat random directions, because they're usually just left pointing at whatever incident needed to be looked at last.
You can see the incident log at the CHP incident log site. The control center sometimes initiates entries, but the guys who actually go to the site finish them.
Typical entries:
1:09PM VEH STALLED IN LANES, PTY UNDER VEH WORKING ON IT
1:13PM CHP Unit Enroute
Ultracapacitors are really impressive. They exceed the limits of what was considered physically possible twenty years ago. The newer ones can be charged fast and discharged fast; it's not like the older ones that could only deliver tiny currents. People have used ultracapacitors to start auto engines.
The problem, though, is that all the energy can come out at once if they're shorted or damaged. Lithium-ion battery thermal runaway is a problem, and laptop fires have resulted. Ultracapacitor failures will be worse. You don't really want to have a fuel tank's worth of energy stored in a capacitor. But saving the energy from braking a car is probably OK.
The problem with music DRM, from the music distributor perspective, is that it's too closely tied to player vendors. There's the iPod and the Zume, and in both cases the player manufacturer takes a cut of the revenue. UMG, reasonably enough, wants to cut the player manufacturer out of the revenue stream.
Microsoft has orphaned "PlaysForSure", which, for a while, looked like an option. Or at least Microsoft tried. WalMart went with PlaysForSure, and they might insist that Microsoft keep supporting it.
What really matters is what WalMart does. If the music industry doesn't come up with a good solution, Bentonville may dictate one. Their site currently says The Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune digital media players do not currently support protected WMA-format files, and will not play Wal-Mart Music Downloads. Walmart.com has a large selection of WMA-/DRM-compatible digital music players available at great prices.
WalMart, remember, sells online music at $0.88/song, below Apple and Microsoft. And they're not going to raise their prices.
Mod parent up. Article really is almost content-free. Also has annoying pop-up ads that make it through Firefox's filters.
The National Association of Theater Owners, the businesses that run movie theaters, faced demands for DRM from the movie studios. They agreed, but on their terms, which limit the intrusiveness of the DRM system. Here are some of the terms:
Any software that phones home in an enterprise environment ought to be held to standards like these.
This idea goes back a long way. I think it was first tried in the 1970s, using the input end of a remote manipulator arm intended for handling radioactive material. It's been done dozens of times since then. The problem is doing it well.
We have enough compute power now to get the lag down to a few milliseconds, which was a big problem ten years ago. Then it's mostly a mechanical design problem. Most of the devices so far were too clunky. Is this one better?
Lesson: do not launch product that requires extensive customer service at the beginning of a weekend.
The general observation seems to be that activation from a cold start works OK, but anything that requires "number portability" from a previous account may be troublesome. That's no surprise; number portability is usually a mess, because the carriers don't want you to use that Government-mandated feature.
It's still not clear why activation should require a separate computer. Activation via iTunes might be a nice option if you already use iTunes, but it shouldn't be the main route. After all, the iPhone has its very own Internet connection.
Clearly, the only way we're going to get to the bottom of this is have the FAA do a full inspection on the flight-worthiness of egg-shaped saucers.
Back in the 1980s, when the Transcendental Meditation people were claiming to teach levitation, someone asked the FAA to investigate TM as an "unlicensed flight school". The FAA actually replied, stating that FAA jurisdiction begins at 50 feet above ground level (hovercraft are thus regulated as ground vehicles), and that the TM people appeared unable to achieve sufficient altitude.
This got some publicity, and embarrassed the TM people, who stopped selling "levitation seminars". Especially after someone established that their pictures of people levitating in lotus position were achieved by bouncing on a trampoline.
Apple didn't have any legacy IA-32 machines when they switched from PowerPC. They could have gone directly to 64-bit. They might have had to use some AMD CPUs, though.
It's a shopping cart. Do you expect a cryptographic handshake on the security system?
A more serious low-end security problem is dumb garage door opener systems. Too many of those can be opened by cycling through all the codes quickly.