Why is this such a concern to the industry? It's debatable about whether DeCSS would be used for piracy, given how easy and cheap it is to rent movies with current technology. Are TV execs really that worried about bootleg copies of Will and Grace running amok on the 'net? Or even the next Superbowl? I simply can't see how the benefits outweigh the costs.
Just a wee bit OT, but the 8th circle, Malebolge, is for people who commit fraud. The 9th frozen level is for traitors - with Brutus, Cassius, and Judas being munched on by Satan in the middle.
To the best of my knowledge, Wal-Mart doesn't sell that issue in Iran. If they did, and Iranian courts ordered them to stop, I'm sure they would stop. Similarly for China and Linux (though I doubt that would happen, since the Chinese seem to like Linux).
Here's another perspective: suppose someone was selling kiddie porn through Yahoo!, Yahoo! knew about it, and decided to let the sale continue. Someone could say, "But that's legal in , and Yahoo! can reach." Yahoo! is an international company by default, so it has the burden of respecting the laws of the nations in which it does business.
I think the comment about whose decision it was is a bit strange. Are the only alternatives complete capitulation to the French (must...resist...urge...to make...joke) and complete altruism? Yahoo! is a business that wants to make money. Getting French eyeballs makes them money, probably moreso than selling Nazi propoganda. It also helps their public image. I don't know how well their filtering works, and whether they'll have humans to look at borderline cases, but I think they're at least trying to do the right thing.
If they don't get a clue they'll never figure out how to make it worth a damn- though frankly we're not likely ever to see this in the market now that nVidia controls the technology- I think they are going to suppress it and sue anyone else who tries to compete with them using the idea.
Prior art. SGI has been doing this for years. The T-buffer stuff is all well-documented OpenGL tricks with accumulation buffers.
All they needed to do was use the T-Buffer in line with the way they use FSAA, and keep the last rendered frame to average with the current one.
Ack! No! You're confusing motion blur with motion trails. Motion blurred objects shouldn't linger from past frames. It should only represent movement between frames. Anything from the previous frame should be gone from the present frame.
can't these people check with other professionals other than just computer programmers?
They can and they do. The problem is not with the motion blur technique. The problem is with the fact that they can't do it at an acceptable frame rate. Obviously, you haven't checked with either a programmer or a cinematographer.
Almost nothing moves through the frame enough to produce _that_ much blur.
At 9fps? You'd better believe things can move that much.
It's like hard drive space, memory, processor cycles, or any other machine resource. People will find a way to use all of them. At my last job, I ran dual 1600x1200 monitors, and still had to move windows around to see things. I filled one monitor with an IDE. On the second, I had just about everything else (an instance of the software I was building with the IDE, bug database, ICQ, stock quotes, Slashdot, whatever...). Believe me, it can be done.
UH, motion blur is a diffrent feature from 3dfx's FSAA, that site is using both.
That's a (I think good) design decision on the part of 3Dfx for the T-buffer. The cost is four samples per pixel. If you take the samples intelligently, they give you antialiasing, motion blur, depth of field, soft shadows, fuzzy reflections, and other things I may have forgotten, all for almost the same price as just the FSAA.
People use high speed film to eliminate motion blur in still images, not animations. If it can be done without sacrificing frame rate, you WANT motion blur. Done properly, it is not noticeable, except that motion seems to look less choppy.
Motion blur is antialiasing. Instead of in the spatial domain, as most people think of antialiasing, it's done in the time domain. A blurry monitor doesn't recreate the effect any more than a blurry monitor improves image quality by antialiasing edges of polygons.
Like the antialiasing that gets rid of jaggies, it can occasionally be a bad thing, but in general it's a good thing. At 9 fps, it's a bad thing; it's like rendering a picture at 1/4 resolution for the sake of removing jaggies. However, as hardware gets faster, and motion blur at 30fps becomes possible, it does improve the user experience. You don't really see the blurring, but the movement becomes smoother.
Is it really beneficial? Consider this. People start complaining about frame rates when they drop below 40fps or so for a first-person shooter (which I won't abbreviate to a TLA for obvious reasons). Movies, including the CG parts, are played at only 24fps, yet the motion looks smoother. This is because cameras naturally add motion blur (because of a finite shutter speed), and the folks who add CG elements take great pains to include motion blur effects.
A perspective on the latter days of 3dfx from the perspective of a disgruntled shareholder:
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=13929930&so rt=threaded
I think it's worth mentioning that coders are not the only ones who contribute to an open source project. The critical part of an application is not how it is coded; it is the final user experience. Released binaries means more eyeballs on the software, more bugs reported and more constructive suggestions on how to make the software easier to use. If you wait for software to be 'mature' before letting anybody play with it, you may find out that a helpful change is now very difficult to change because of all the dependent code piled on top of it.
I am a little confused about what the legal justification is here. Generally, trademarks exist to prevent one business entity from posing as another. I don't think a reasonable person who downloads an Aqua theme is under the impression that they are getting something that Apple created. Maybe it's a copyright issue (I think the distinction is a bit blurred in this instance)?
I think it's safe to assume that the guys at MP3.com aren't completely out to lunch. The NYT article is not specific about when you would have to reinsert the CD, but I don't think it's likely to be completely random, requiring you to always make sure you have your CDs with you. A more logical approach which is consistent with what the article writes ("a small number of the CD's will have to be reinserted at certain intervals"), you might simply be given, say, a week to verify your ownership of a CD upon request.
I don't know if MP3.com has a workable business model or not, but I don't see a reason to assume that they would adopt a suicidal business model.
"Additionally, I wonder about being double-charged for the same CD; if you've already got the CD, you should already have free access to the mp3 of it, since you lose content (mind you, only at the extreme frequencies) and therefore there's no value added."
If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.
Applications that are typically being used today don't usually need that much memory. That doesn't mean that the demand doesn't exist; it just means that people find a way to balance the resources they have with what they want to do. As having more RAM becomes more practical, applications that use it will pop up. Servers for high-quality streaming video, for example. Or maybe virtual 3D environments with billions of triangles. Since computers first started showing up with a few dozen kilobytes of RAM, people have always wondered whether there would be any reason to have so much memory. If you make the memory available, people will find a way to fill it.
Assuming that your actions are legal because you are the copyright holder, could you extend this to DeCSS? Make a video clip of yourself talking about the benefits of raisins, encrypt it using CSS and one of the proprietary keys, and distribute the clip along with DeCSS, arguing that the DeCSS distribution is necessary to view the clip, of which you are the copyright holder, and give permission for others to access.
I would take any claims of computer mastery that ACC has with a grain of salt. This is the same guy that complained that ID4 stole his idea for uploading a computer virus into an alien computer. *sigh*
I'd say it's probably because making a dual-processor system is hard and takes time. The P4 is a new processor with a new core. I suppose they could have made the decision to release single- and dual-processor systems at the same time, but that would probably mean waiting until next year for both That doesn't help Intel or their customers. Or AMD's customers, for that matter.
Incidentally, how many years has it been before AMD's first dual-processor system? What are THEY smoking?
Coal and steel aren't the only assets in the world. In fact, the only value they have are in what you can do with them directly, and what price you can sell them for. Another way of looking at it is that human labor and ideas are also a 'natural asset', and they are not intrinsically limited in the same way that some physical commodities are (unless you feel like extending this all the way to the heat death of the universe). A good company is one that can sell something for more money than it costs to produce it, whether the actual product is cars, feather boas, or ad clicks. Just because the company makes money in the process does not mean that somebody else loses out. When a company makes more money than it spends, it grows in size and in its ability to sell products for more than it paid for them. A share of stock represents a portion of a company, so the share of stock tends to rise proportionately with the wealth of the company. This is not a zero-sum game. I personally get up every day and increase the total wealth of the world by producing source code where there was none before. That's eventually what makes stocks go up.
The stock market can be considered random as well. Or at least chaotic. The difference between a slot machine and stocks is that, on average, the odds are stacked in favor of the stock investor. Slot machines generally have a posted payout of, say, 97%. That means on average you lose 3% of your money every time you play. The stock market (specifically the S&P 500) has gained roughly 11% per year for most of the century. Casinos get rich despite the possibility of large payouts simply because they try to run as many machines as possible. This reduces the chance of the bank ever being broken. Similarly, if you hold several stocks for a long time, you reduce your chances of losing money.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment here, just how often did the censorware programs block a political site? We only see examples of ones that were blocked, but not how many were allowed through. It might be nice to see what percentage of sites were blocked.
"The violent protests in the streets of Seattle also reflect the Administration's failure to build a domestic consensus in favor of free trade."
Translation: Clinton and Gore were bad for not shoving large corporations down people's throats hard enough. Gawd, did he even catch the tone of the question?
The key word is 'relativity'. Velocities are can only be measured relative to a particular frame of reference, and no frame of reference is considered preferred. Hence, there is no such thing as a 'fixed reference point'. You may see a galaxy zipping along at 0.9c, but someone travelling along with the galaxy would perceive it as standing still. The laws of physics don't change just because somebody else thinks you're moving quickly. Formation of stars and planets would be unaffected because they're all in approximately the same frame of reference.
The question, as I understand it, relates to two galaxies coliding at 0.9c relative to each other (that is, my galaxy is standing still, but I think yours is about to run into me at 0.9c).
Open source software development is a very democratic world. Anybody can start a project and throw it up on SourceForge, and anybody can e-mail a patch to the maintainer of a project. I don't think there are many barriers to participating in a project if a person has the necessary talent and inclination. For whatever reason, women as a group just seem less inclined to take an interest in geeky things, and BSD pushes the edge of the geek envelope. That doesn't mean it's the fault of the people who do take an active interest.
As far as the underlying reasons for the disparity, I don't have an answer. It may be cultural. It may be biological. I don't think I'm qualified to say one way or the other. I do think, at least in this case, that women have a great opportunity which they simply are not taking advantage of. It's a shame that more women choose not to explore the geek fringe, but I think the problem is much more one of women simply choosing not to take that path than men trying to hold them back.
Would you consider this a problem of supply or demand? I don't know what the BSD culture is like, but I don't know any male geeks offhand who don't like the idea of female geeks. Calling it an "old boys' network" kind of implies that men are somehow trying to exclude women from the game, but in my experience there just aren't that many female players.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this such a concern to the industry? It's debatable about whether DeCSS would be used for piracy, given how easy and cheap it is to rent movies with current technology. Are TV execs really that worried about bootleg copies of Will and Grace running amok on the 'net? Or even the next Superbowl? I simply can't see how the benefits outweigh the costs.
Disclaimer: IANAX, either.
Here's another perspective: suppose someone was selling kiddie porn through Yahoo!, Yahoo! knew about it, and decided to let the sale continue. Someone could say, "But that's legal in , and Yahoo! can reach ." Yahoo! is an international company by default, so it has the burden of respecting the laws of the nations in which it does business.
I think the comment about whose decision it was is a bit strange. Are the only alternatives complete capitulation to the French (must...resist...urge...to make...joke) and complete altruism? Yahoo! is a business that wants to make money. Getting French eyeballs makes them money, probably moreso than selling Nazi propoganda. It also helps their public image. I don't know how well their filtering works, and whether they'll have humans to look at borderline cases, but I think they're at least trying to do the right thing.
Prior art. SGI has been doing this for years. The T-buffer stuff is all well-documented OpenGL tricks with accumulation buffers.
All they needed to do was use the T-Buffer in line with the way they use FSAA, and keep the last rendered frame to average with the current one.
Ack! No! You're confusing motion blur with motion trails. Motion blurred objects shouldn't linger from past frames. It should only represent movement between frames. Anything from the previous frame should be gone from the present frame.
can't these people check with other professionals other than just computer programmers?
They can and they do. The problem is not with the motion blur technique. The problem is with the fact that they can't do it at an acceptable frame rate. Obviously, you haven't checked with either a programmer or a cinematographer.
Almost nothing moves through the frame enough to produce _that_ much blur.
At 9fps? You'd better believe things can move that much.
It's like hard drive space, memory, processor cycles, or any other machine resource. People will find a way to use all of them. At my last job, I ran dual 1600x1200 monitors, and still had to move windows around to see things. I filled one monitor with an IDE. On the second, I had just about everything else (an instance of the software I was building with the IDE, bug database, ICQ, stock quotes, Slashdot, whatever...). Believe me, it can be done.
That's a (I think good) design decision on the part of 3Dfx for the T-buffer. The cost is four samples per pixel. If you take the samples intelligently, they give you antialiasing, motion blur, depth of field, soft shadows, fuzzy reflections, and other things I may have forgotten, all for almost the same price as just the FSAA.
People use high speed film to eliminate motion blur in still images, not animations. If it can be done without sacrificing frame rate, you WANT motion blur. Done properly, it is not noticeable, except that motion seems to look less choppy.
Like the antialiasing that gets rid of jaggies, it can occasionally be a bad thing, but in general it's a good thing. At 9 fps, it's a bad thing; it's like rendering a picture at 1/4 resolution for the sake of removing jaggies. However, as hardware gets faster, and motion blur at 30fps becomes possible, it does improve the user experience. You don't really see the blurring, but the movement becomes smoother.
Is it really beneficial? Consider this. People start complaining about frame rates when they drop below 40fps or so for a first-person shooter (which I won't abbreviate to a TLA for obvious reasons). Movies, including the CG parts, are played at only 24fps, yet the motion looks smoother. This is because cameras naturally add motion blur (because of a finite shutter speed), and the folks who add CG elements take great pains to include motion blur effects.
A perspective on the latter days of 3dfx from the perspective of a disgruntled shareholder: http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=13929930&so rt=threaded
I think it's worth mentioning that coders are not the only ones who contribute to an open source project. The critical part of an application is not how it is coded; it is the final user experience. Released binaries means more eyeballs on the software, more bugs reported and more constructive suggestions on how to make the software easier to use. If you wait for software to be 'mature' before letting anybody play with it, you may find out that a helpful change is now very difficult to change because of all the dependent code piled on top of it.
I am a little confused about what the legal justification is here. Generally, trademarks exist to prevent one business entity from posing as another. I don't think a reasonable person who downloads an Aqua theme is under the impression that they are getting something that Apple created. Maybe it's a copyright issue (I think the distinction is a bit blurred in this instance)?
I don't know if MP3.com has a workable business model or not, but I don't see a reason to assume that they would adopt a suicidal business model.
If there were no value added, there would be no reason to use my.mp3.com, even if it were free. You're not paying for the right to listen to your music. You're paying MP3.com for the service of streaming your music to you. If you don't like it, bring the CD with you. Just because you bought the music doesn't mean that companies should be falling all over themselves to make it easy for you to listen to it whenever and wherever you want.
Applications that are typically being used today don't usually need that much memory. That doesn't mean that the demand doesn't exist; it just means that people find a way to balance the resources they have with what they want to do. As having more RAM becomes more practical, applications that use it will pop up. Servers for high-quality streaming video, for example. Or maybe virtual 3D environments with billions of triangles. Since computers first started showing up with a few dozen kilobytes of RAM, people have always wondered whether there would be any reason to have so much memory. If you make the memory available, people will find a way to fill it.
Assuming that your actions are legal because you are the copyright holder, could you extend this to DeCSS? Make a video clip of yourself talking about the benefits of raisins, encrypt it using CSS and one of the proprietary keys, and distribute the clip along with DeCSS, arguing that the DeCSS distribution is necessary to view the clip, of which you are the copyright holder, and give permission for others to access.
I would take any claims of computer mastery that ACC has with a grain of salt. This is the same guy that complained that ID4 stole his idea for uploading a computer virus into an alien computer. *sigh*
I'd say it's probably because making a dual-processor system is hard and takes time. The P4 is a new processor with a new core. I suppose they could have made the decision to release single- and dual-processor systems at the same time, but that would probably mean waiting until next year for both That doesn't help Intel or their customers. Or AMD's customers, for that matter. Incidentally, how many years has it been before AMD's first dual-processor system? What are THEY smoking?
Coal and steel aren't the only assets in the world. In fact, the only value they have are in what you can do with them directly, and what price you can sell them for. Another way of looking at it is that human labor and ideas are also a 'natural asset', and they are not intrinsically limited in the same way that some physical commodities are (unless you feel like extending this all the way to the heat death of the universe). A good company is one that can sell something for more money than it costs to produce it, whether the actual product is cars, feather boas, or ad clicks. Just because the company makes money in the process does not mean that somebody else loses out. When a company makes more money than it spends, it grows in size and in its ability to sell products for more than it paid for them. A share of stock represents a portion of a company, so the share of stock tends to rise proportionately with the wealth of the company. This is not a zero-sum game. I personally get up every day and increase the total wealth of the world by producing source code where there was none before. That's eventually what makes stocks go up.
The stock market can be considered random as well. Or at least chaotic. The difference between a slot machine and stocks is that, on average, the odds are stacked in favor of the stock investor. Slot machines generally have a posted payout of, say, 97%. That means on average you lose 3% of your money every time you play. The stock market (specifically the S&P 500) has gained roughly 11% per year for most of the century. Casinos get rich despite the possibility of large payouts simply because they try to run as many machines as possible. This reduces the chance of the bank ever being broken. Similarly, if you hold several stocks for a long time, you reduce your chances of losing money.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment here, just how often did the censorware programs block a political site? We only see examples of ones that were blocked, but not how many were allowed through. It might be nice to see what percentage of sites were blocked.
Translation: Clinton and Gore were bad for not shoving large corporations down people's throats hard enough. Gawd, did he even catch the tone of the question?
The question, as I understand it, relates to two galaxies coliding at 0.9c relative to each other (that is, my galaxy is standing still, but I think yours is about to run into me at 0.9c).
And what, exactly, would they do if confronted by an FBI agent with a Carnivore system in one hand and a court order in the other?
As far as the underlying reasons for the disparity, I don't have an answer. It may be cultural. It may be biological. I don't think I'm qualified to say one way or the other. I do think, at least in this case, that women have a great opportunity which they simply are not taking advantage of. It's a shame that more women choose not to explore the geek fringe, but I think the problem is much more one of women simply choosing not to take that path than men trying to hold them back.
Would you consider this a problem of supply or demand? I don't know what the BSD culture is like, but I don't know any male geeks offhand who don't like the idea of female geeks. Calling it an "old boys' network" kind of implies that men are somehow trying to exclude women from the game, but in my experience there just aren't that many female players.