Yes, but if you try to trick (and it is the only way) the DRM that prevents non-original content from loading you're violating the DMCA.
No. See SCC vs. Lexmark. This is the compatible ink cartridge case. You can't use the DMCA to prevent someone from making a compatible component.
From the Sixth Circuit decision,
"Generally speaking, "lock-out" codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression
side of the copyright line. Manufacturers of interoperable devices such as computers and software, game
consoles and video games, printers and toner cartridges, or automobiles and replacement parts may employ
a security system to bar the use of unauthorized components. To "unlock" and permit operation of the
primary device (i.e., the computer, the game console, the printer, the car), the component must contain either
a certain code sequence or be able to respond appropriately to an authentication process. To the extent
compatibility requires that a particular code sequence be included in the component device to permit its use,
the merger and scènes à faire doctrines generally preclude the code sequence from obtaining copyright protection."
This is the "piracy" hack. A way to cleanly boot non-Microsoft content would be more useful. Microsoft probably couldn't do much about that legally; if you own the unit, you have no obligation to play only approved content.
NASA announced today that NASA researchers were responsible for the creation of the universe. This adds to NASA's long history of innovations important to every American, including Teflon, Velcro, and Tang.
the company had asked Wal-Mart and other retailers to cancel online pre-orders for HD-DVD titles late last week,
A supplier cannot do that to Wal-Mart without serious suffering. Missing a delivery date is considered very serious by Wal-Mart. Warner execs will be summoned to Bentonville for a serious chewing out and will probably be forced to give discounts.
Wal-Mart does not suck up to the content industries. They not only sell online music at $0.88/song, undercutting Apple, they actually sign a few bands themselves and put their music on line and on CDs. Just to remind the music industry that it can be replaced.
There are a number of areas in which technology has stalled for years.
Aviation Aviation progressed rapidly from 1900 to 1970; each decade's planes were far better than those of ten years previous. Then, around 1970, it all stopped. The SR-71, the Concorde, the C-5, and the Boeing 747 were all designed in the 1960s. And that was it. Since then, there's been only incremental improvement. The C-5 and the Boeing 747 are still in active use, and nothing has replaced the SR-71 or the Concorde. Yes, controls are better today, fuel efficiency is better, the materials are a little better, and in-flight entertainment has improved. That's not like the difference between a DC-7 (four propellors, reciprocating engines) and a Boeing 707.
That's not what people in aviation expected back in the 1960s. There was serious talk of ballistic transports, hypersonic scramjets, and far bigger planes. The nuclear aircraft engine project got far enough along that some of its parts ended up in the 747's engine. Even antigravity was seriously looked into. But none of that worked. We never even got affordable jet engines for light planes.
Energy The nuclear future didn't happen, except in France.
Fusion was twenty years away in 1965, and now we hear that it's fifty years away. Solar cells have improved, but efficiencies are still very low. Megawatt-sized wind turbines date back to WWII, and after half a century, they now work reliably. With oil running out, we have some real problems ahead.
Artificial intelligence There's been progress, but not a whole lot for half a century of work. Chess has been brute-forced, simple vision sort of works, hill-climbing has improved, and statistical methods are better understood. But strong AI is still far off.
Space travel Any questions?
It does appear that areas of technology can be mined out.
Sometimes a breakthrough revives a stuck field. This happened to optics. Optics was a solved geometrical problem. Then came nonlinear optical materials, lasers, active optical components, and a new name, "photonics". Whole new industries emerged.
First, this seems to be HR 4777, the "Internet Gambling Prohibition Act".
There are some other bills related to Internet gambling, but this is the one that's in committee right now, and it has 130 cosponsors, so it's going to move forward, not be ignored. When posting a story about a bill, please list the bill number.
Second, the Congressional bill status system says that today's action so far is "Introductory remarks on measure" in the House Judiciary Committee. It's not shown as passed by that Committee yet. Nor is it shown as being referred to the House Financial Services Committee at all.
Third, the bill is notable for what it doesn't have. It doesn't, for example, make credit card debts for gambling unenforceable, or prohibit banks from cooperating in money transfers for that purpose. That would actually work, but the banks wouldn't like it.
Be careful with that stuff. One "browser" game forces a Shockwave install (which tries to install a Yahoo toolbar), and then tries to install some little-known third-party Shockwave plugin.
The commercial leader in graphical content management revision control is Alienbrain. It was originally developed for video game development, where there are many types of unusual graphical assets, from motion capture data to level maps, all with multiple revisions. Now that Avid has purchased Alienbrain, it's also being used for TV and film animation projects.
As with most Avid products, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
America's suburban lifestyle requires oil. Getting that oil has a price in blood. America's robot armies will insure that less of that blood is American.
Now this is a real challenge. Write bots that have some intelligence. Not keyboard macros; ones that are watching the screen, replying to player messages, and showing behavior at least as good as that of the NPCs.
The PS3 needs another year of fab improvement to get the price down. They've got to launch below $300. If their manufacturing cost really is around $700, it's just not going to fly.
Besides, developers need another year to get programming techniques for the Cell processor figured out.
Eight out of the ten "new ideas" are Internet applications. And every one of those eight is in an area where someone else already has an entry. Web-based instant messaging. Call center outsourcing. Social networking for teenagers.
Yawn. Some of them are cool, but none of them are really needed.
The two new ones are a simulator for pharmaceutical development and a new approach to solid state light sources. Those may or may not work, but they're real developments.
The real problem with the upcoming generation of consoles is that they cost much more than the previous generation, and they're not that much better. No way can the PS3 launch successfully at some $700-$800 price point. The XBox 360 is encountering serious price resistance at $299.
Microsoft has been losing money in their game business since the original XBox launch. Their stock has been flat for five years, and the stockholders are starting to get annoyed with the money drain. Microsoft may at some point be pushed into "concentrating on their core business area". Losing money forever isn't a business.
Actually, this is real "broadband", rather than "baseband"; it's just another signal on the coax in some unused frequency band.
Baseband signals, like classic coax Ethernet, are a pain, because they go all the way down to DC, which means you can't filter out hum from power lines. Ethernet only worked because it used strong signals on really good coax. It's not going to work over the crap cable TV uses.
The National Association of Theater Owners has a position paper on acceptable technology for digital cinema. This is worth reading. The theater owners accept the need for DRM, but have very specific requirements on how restrictive, intrusive, and unreliable it can be. Those requirements are worth a look. IT managers should be insisting on similar requirements when they buy software with DRM.
Some highlights:
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.
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.
That's a nice contractual definition of a "no spyware" requirement. IT managers, put that in your purchase orders.
Equipment changes and possibly repairs will require the immediate delivery
of new Security Keys for all encrypted content in the complex within its
engagement window. New Security Keys shall be delivered within 15
minutes of the time of request.
Good performance requirement. If you have to do hardware replacement, this puts an upper limit on how fast the vendor has to authorize the new hardware.
If we have to have DRM, it needs contractual safeguards like that.
In the previous round of digital cinema, the theater owners hated it. One proposal was that the equipment would be leased, not sold, which basically put the exhibitors under the control of the equipment lessee.
The systems are designed to provide the "content owner" with total information about what the exhibitor is doing. The effect is to change the exhibitor from a retailer to a peripheral.
And this is a business where showing movies doesn't really make any money for exhibitors. Exhibitors are really in the popcorn business. To an exhibitor, movies are a marketing tool for popcorn.
DCI is only 24 FPS, like film. That's so lame. There's an option to go to 48FPS, but at half the resolution.
From the specification:
3.1.4.2. Frame Rates
The DCDM image structure is required to support a frame rate of 24.000 Hz. The DCDM
image structure can also support a frame rate of 48.000 Hz for 2K image content only.
The frame rate of any individual DCDM master is required to remain constant. Metadata
is carried in the image data file format to indicate the frame rate.
The defined image sizes are 2048
x 1080 (called "2K images") or 4096 x 2160 (called "4K images"), with 12-bit RGB color. The "2K" format is basically 1080p HDTV at the screen, but with better (or at least less) compression for transport.
Audio is uncompressed.
If you want to invent a disruptive technology, the last place to look is where everyone else is.
I tend to agree. What we're really seeing on the web today are frantic attempts at product differentiation. More ways to deliver advertising.
More ways to aggregate content from one place on the web into another place. Attempts to turn buy-once technologies into "ongoing revenue streams". Yawn.
If you want to do something "disruptive", look elsewhere than the Internet.
What we really need are some new energy sources. Or at least batteries good enough to make powerful, affordable electric cars.
Consider, say, ultracapacitors. Most electrical engineers would have said those were flatly impossible. 2600 farads at 2.7V in 166 x 58mm. Order now. These things are powerful enough to start an auto engine. We need a comparable breakthrough on batteries.
The big issue for the next fifty years is running out of resources. Most young people alive today will live to see the oil and natural gas run out. It's not speculative or alarmist any more. This time it is real. There hasn't been a big, new energy source that made a difference in the last fifty years. That's what's really scary. We're half a century or more into nuclear power, wind turbines, and solar cells.
(We're half a century into fusion power, too, and that's not going well.)
Here's a description of Larry Ellison's house. He likes big rocks. Lots of big rocks. He has a hot tub carved out of one big rock. A shower stall carved out of one big rock. A bridge built out of big rocks.
A driveway made out of big, precut rocks designed by a program written by CS270 students at Berkeley.
All this rock moving required years of heavy equipment operations. The construction site looked like a mall was going in. All this rock had to be not only placed, but anchored; the house is near the San Andreas fault.
The house is on Mountain Home Road in Woodside, recognizable by the gatehouse that looks like a Japanese teahouse. In the end, it looks rather modest; it just has a landscape that belongs to a rockier area.
So that's a real dream house, built for someone with a mania for big rocks.
Slashdot Mirror
No. See SCC vs. Lexmark. This is the compatible ink cartridge case. You can't use the DMCA to prevent someone from making a compatible component.
From the Sixth Circuit decision, "Generally speaking, "lock-out" codes fall on the functional-idea rather than the original-expression side of the copyright line. Manufacturers of interoperable devices such as computers and software, game consoles and video games, printers and toner cartridges, or automobiles and replacement parts may employ a security system to bar the use of unauthorized components. To "unlock" and permit operation of the primary device (i.e., the computer, the game console, the printer, the car), the component must contain either a certain code sequence or be able to respond appropriately to an authentication process. To the extent compatibility requires that a particular code sequence be included in the component device to permit its use, the merger and scènes à faire doctrines generally preclude the code sequence from obtaining copyright protection."
This is the "piracy" hack. A way to cleanly boot non-Microsoft content would be more useful. Microsoft probably couldn't do much about that legally; if you own the unit, you have no obligation to play only approved content.
Another indication that the congressional Republicans and the Bush administration are no longer getting along.
NASA will be adding a new "Universe Discovery Center" to the NASAquest Children's Activity Center at NASA centers.
A supplier cannot do that to Wal-Mart without serious suffering. Missing a delivery date is considered very serious by Wal-Mart. Warner execs will be summoned to Bentonville for a serious chewing out and will probably be forced to give discounts.
Wal-Mart does not suck up to the content industries. They not only sell online music at $0.88/song, undercutting Apple, they actually sign a few bands themselves and put their music on line and on CDs. Just to remind the music industry that it can be replaced.
It does appear that areas of technology can be mined out.
Sometimes a breakthrough revives a stuck field. This happened to optics. Optics was a solved geometrical problem. Then came nonlinear optical materials, lasers, active optical components, and a new name, "photonics". Whole new industries emerged.
Second, the Congressional bill status system says that today's action so far is "Introductory remarks on measure" in the House Judiciary Committee. It's not shown as passed by that Committee yet. Nor is it shown as being referred to the House Financial Services Committee at all.
Third, the bill is notable for what it doesn't have. It doesn't, for example, make credit card debts for gambling unenforceable, or prohibit banks from cooperating in money transfers for that purpose. That would actually work, but the banks wouldn't like it.
Be careful with that stuff. One "browser" game forces a Shockwave install (which tries to install a Yahoo toolbar), and then tries to install some little-known third-party Shockwave plugin.
As with most Avid products, if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
That's the reality.
This is the point where Sony has to make it clear to developers exactly what's coming out and when, or there will be very few games ready at launch.
So wait a week.
A good paper to read is "Pengi: an implementation of a theory of activity", an AI program from the 1980s that played Pengo by actually looking at the screen. It can be done.
The page source looks like a botched instance of some "Web 2.0" template.
Besides, developers need another year to get programming techniques for the Cell processor figured out.
Since xmas, xBox systems have been easily available on eBay.
Manual gold farming is inefficient. We need to build better bots to compete with offshore low-wage countries.
The two new ones are a simulator for pharmaceutical development and a new approach to solid state light sources. Those may or may not work, but they're real developments.
Microsoft has been losing money in their game business since the original XBox launch. Their stock has been flat for five years, and the stockholders are starting to get annoyed with the money drain. Microsoft may at some point be pushed into "concentrating on their core business area". Losing money forever isn't a business.
Baseband signals, like classic coax Ethernet, are a pain, because they go all the way down to DC, which means you can't filter out hum from power lines. Ethernet only worked because it used strong signals on really good coax. It's not going to work over the crap cable TV uses.
Some highlights:
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.
That's a nice contractual definition of a "no spyware" requirement. IT managers, put that in your purchase orders.
Good performance requirement. If you have to do hardware replacement, this puts an upper limit on how fast the vendor has to authorize the new hardware.
If we have to have DRM, it needs contractual safeguards like that.
And this is a business where showing movies doesn't really make any money for exhibitors. Exhibitors are really in the popcorn business. To an exhibitor, movies are a marketing tool for popcorn.
So what's exhibitor thinking on all this?
3.1.4.2. Frame Rates The DCDM image structure is required to support a frame rate of 24.000 Hz. The DCDM image structure can also support a frame rate of 48.000 Hz for 2K image content only. The frame rate of any individual DCDM master is required to remain constant. Metadata is carried in the image data file format to indicate the frame rate.
The defined image sizes are 2048 x 1080 (called "2K images") or 4096 x 2160 (called "4K images"), with 12-bit RGB color. The "2K" format is basically 1080p HDTV at the screen, but with better (or at least less) compression for transport. Audio is uncompressed.
I tend to agree. What we're really seeing on the web today are frantic attempts at product differentiation. More ways to deliver advertising. More ways to aggregate content from one place on the web into another place. Attempts to turn buy-once technologies into "ongoing revenue streams". Yawn.
If you want to do something "disruptive", look elsewhere than the Internet.
What we really need are some new energy sources. Or at least batteries good enough to make powerful, affordable electric cars.
Consider, say, ultracapacitors. Most electrical engineers would have said those were flatly impossible. 2600 farads at 2.7V in 166 x 58mm. Order now. These things are powerful enough to start an auto engine. We need a comparable breakthrough on batteries.
The big issue for the next fifty years is running out of resources. Most young people alive today will live to see the oil and natural gas run out. It's not speculative or alarmist any more. This time it is real. There hasn't been a big, new energy source that made a difference in the last fifty years. That's what's really scary. We're half a century or more into nuclear power, wind turbines, and solar cells. (We're half a century into fusion power, too, and that's not going well.)
They fixed it! Until today, the WalMart music site did a browser check and told you to download Internet Explorer.
All this rock moving required years of heavy equipment operations. The construction site looked like a mall was going in. All this rock had to be not only placed, but anchored; the house is near the San Andreas fault.
The house is on Mountain Home Road in Woodside, recognizable by the gatehouse that looks like a Japanese teahouse. In the end, it looks rather modest; it just has a landscape that belongs to a rockier area.
So that's a real dream house, built for someone with a mania for big rocks.