I was just thinking about it, and I suspect that I lack licenses for many of the programs I use, since I tend to delete the source trees eventually and the license doesn't generally get installed anywhere. Of course, the BSA probably doesn't have the necessary power-of-attorney to begin doing anything about it, but it would be somewhat awkward searching the web for licenses for all of the software you have.
"Yes, I want a CD with 300 copies of the GPL and a number of assorted other licenses. Wait, can I use the BSD option on this one? What changes have I made to it?"
In any case, I think Red Hat (or IBM?) should run a "Have you found you need more licenses? Come to our web site and download a couple." ad campaign.
As far as I can tell, porn webmasters make money primarily through subscriptions and also perhaps through advertizing. If a search produces a page with an obviously pornographic title or set of keywords, even people who find it aren't going to go to it unless they were searching for porn, in which case they wouldn't be searching with "not porn"; they're certainly not going to buy a subscription. So there's no benefit to the porn site in being listed in non-porn searches. If porn was blocked even from people who were looking for it, it would make sense to not mark your porn site as porn, but that seems not to be the case.
Furthermore, having your porn site pop up when congressmen search for "britney spears" is almost certain not to help the industry in general or you in particular.
You can't trust people to rate their own content on merit or accuracy or things like that, but the providers have no sensible motive to lie about pornographic content.
I think it would make more sense to have the pulleys on the kite; the major advantage of a kite over a ton of people is that the kite can pull upward, whereas people tend to be on the ground. This should be useful for avoiding the need for a taller existing structure capable of supporting the weight of your stone.
A lot of the problems people have with the wind method wouldn't be different with people pulling: the rope does have to be sufficiently strong to lift the stone without being too heavy to be lifted itself; you need some sort of pulley system to convert the horizontal force into vertical; you need pulleys to lower the necessary force (because you can't actually put ten thousand people on a really long rope and have them pull it and get a useful effect).
There are, of course, tons of examples of existing movies where there's a big difference between the what appears on the screen and the actor behind the character: animation, the same actor playing multiple characters, different actors doing the voice and the body for the same character, etc.
On the other hand, there's still the major problem of creating affect: it's very difficult to draw or paint or model a person displaying a certain emotion without working from a real person, and doing the voice is at least as hard (besides the fact that speech synthesis is not as good as rendering yet).
I suspect that, even for an entirely CG movie, the studio would want human actors for all of the parts, so that the animators could see how each character's face looks when they are doing what the script says.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to each character than what's in the script; the actor (and director) determine what the character is thinking and feeling while doing the predetermined actions. It's essentially the Turing Test: convince an audience that you really are a person in a certain situation. Neither a computer, nor even a group of graphics researchers are going to be able to get into the roles that way any time soon.
This could, of course, mean that an actor's appearence makes very little difference; a skillful actor could play a character with no physical resemblence if the task involved only showing a graphics team what the necessary emotions look like.
The self-assembling aspect of these things is how it builds the tubes out of rings. The rings are picked beforehand to be attracted to the bacteria and not any human cells, so even if the tubes broke down and reassembled differently, they'd still be targetted at bacteria.
This seems to indicate a major metadata problem with the system. If you're not looking for porn, you shouldn't find any, and it seems like people do. It shouldn't necessarily be *hard* to find porn, but it shouldn't be hard to not find it either, if you're trying to avoid.
Furthermore, people generally don't want to stick their porn in other people's faces; they want to let people get it, and may even care more about availablity than avoidability, but the only people who get anything out of unwilling parties seeing sex are flashers. So it follows that, so long as it is not blocked from people who should be able to see it, providers want porn marked as such, and consumers want to only get porn if they're looking for it.
Perhaps the standard clients should insert into the query "and not 'porn'" unless 'porn' is in the query, and porn should have that keyword.
I can't see any particular reason why the russian program is any more in violation of the DMCA than either Adobe's eBook reader or Acrobat.
Acrobat (or another implementation) enables people to pirate eBooks (given some additional tools), even if you don't have a valid right to look at them. In fact, if the three things you need in order to read an eBook are: something that XORs with 102, something that unzips archives, and something that reads PDF, the PDF reader is the only really complicated part. If anything is "breaking encryption", it's the PDF reader.
They hook people with the convenience aspect, and they do explain how it's more secure (everything going over the wire is only good for a single connection; the remote machine never sees the password at all).
The convenience actually comes in the next part (or when you type "man ssh-agent"): you can have a local program remember your keys after you give it the passphrase once, and then you can authenticate multiple connections with a single use of the passphrase. Really nice for those cvs over ssh sessions (add, add, update, update, commit).
Also, it means you can have the authentication even closer than the local machine (an even more local machine, smart card, etc) without the remote machine having to know or do anything different.
It's certainly possible that, in 1998, the internet (or, more specifically, online conversation) was depressing, because so many of the people were new to it. Imagine: you are in a society where there are millions of people around, and you haven't met anyone yet. Many of them seem to know each other already. None of the people you know from elsewhere are around. If you were the only person in your state to have a phone, and you spent your time dialing random numbers, you'd probably be depressed.
Three years later, everyone you know from real life is online, you've met a bunch of people online and interacted with them enough to become friends. Now the internet is convenient and social, and not depressing.
The person seems to be promoting this as something that makes people involuntarily look in a certain direction. With your average siren, you hear it, and can react appropriately; it doesn't turn your head. If it sound actually is just really easy to locate, it would make a great siren addition, but if it works, like she seems to be saying, by having everyone who can hear it turn to face toward the sound (and then realize where they're looking), that would detract from drivers' abilities to ignore the siren for a moment while they avoid the pedestrian or look for a place to pull over.
I mean, she's suggesting that this will get people to look at security cameras. If it does that, it'll probably force people to look at the vehicle. It's probably pretty unlikely that people really just automatically turn and stare like she suggests, but if it did work that way, it wouldn't be good for a lot of situations.
It is in a for-profit organization's best interest to use Open Source software, if it is a better value; if it solves a sufficiently interesting problem to attact a lot of developers, it is likely to be a better value.
It is not in a for-profit organization's best interest to create any software, as a general rule. Ford, e.g., does better to use existing software than make their own.
If an organization is forces to create software, it is in their best interest to make it Open Source, because that way they stand a chance of spurring others to contribute development effort. If Ford creates a sales-tracking package, and Home Depot takes it and adds inventory-management functions, Ford doesn't have to write those functions.
If an organization sees as their competitive advantage the technology they have in the area applying to the software, it is not in their best interest to make it Open Source, because they would then lose their advantage. The task of writing that Open Source software will fall to others who wish to cooperate to overcome this advantage and who are inspired by the original software.
If an organization is in the software business (rather than just wanting to use software), it may or may not be in their best interest to create open source software, and is a matter of how their business model works. Giving away some things may better position other things, and market share may be positive even if it doesn't directly produce revenue.
Of course, it is not in a for-profit organization's best interests for other people to not use their products, whether the alternative be a competitor's product, an Open Source program, or just not needing the product at all, so MicroSoft can't admit to any of the above.
Okay, so you've got a fire engine going down the street, making a noise that makes everyone turn and look at it. As we know for driving school, when you look somewhere, you tend to drive that way. So we'd have all of these distracted drivers crashing into emergency vehicles. Great...
You might find a person or two who wants to play PS or PS2 games and also wants a linux box. That makes it more efficient than buying a PS2 for the games and a NIC for other stuff. Plus, people might want to try writing PS2 games, which is impossible on a PS2 without this or on a NIC.
What most people don't realize about Africa is exactly the climate. Basically, it's not too bad for people, but it really sucks for devices. What I know about is from Freetown, Sierra Leone (before the government fell).
For a month each year, dust blows off of the Sahara. It gets on everything. It's reddish and fine.
For a month each year, it rains. The soil is not very good, and it's hard to reach bedrock. You get mudslides. You get buildings washing away, not because they collapse, but because the ground underneath them goes.
It's otherwise hot and humid in general.
The utilities are rather flaky, because they're not the best equipment and the conditions are bad for them. Also, people don't depend on them enough to pay to keep them well maintained.
So setting up the tech is the least of your worries. The main issue is keeping the hardware working; you have to contend with hot weather, humidity, airborne particles, and power fluxuations. Sure, you can have A/C, but you have to keep that working, clean the filters, and you probably want to turn it off when the power fails, or you're likely to burn out your generator. About the only worse thing that could happen to a machine is throwing it off a cliff, which might happen, too, if you pick the wrong building.
It's certainly possible on a first-world budget, but setting things up for local budgets or funded by donations is likely to be extremely challenging.
you have to have horses before you have cars, you know
Actually, I've been to Sierra Leone (shortly before the government fell), and they had plenty of cars and no horses, at least in Freetown. There's no particular reason not to skip levels of technology, if the higher tech is available from somewhere else.
Sierra Leone's government was, in fact, founded on law and democracy; as far as I could tell, they just couldn't withstand a concerted attack from the gang/robber rebel types when it happened. On the other hand, the neighboring countries did a pretty good job of helping. In that area, at least, the violence was primarily anti-government. Of course, the country was primarily made up of returned British slaves, which gives them a rather different culture from parts of Africa with uninterrupted traditions.
There's a certain amount of IT that is worth doing even at this point. IT will probably give you a better financial return on investment than, say, clean water; once you have some level of IT (and electricity to run it), you can get the money to get good clean water.
So configure Exchange to work with other clients than Outlook and have people use something more secure. And tell the voice mail vendor you want their next version to be more portable.
Actually, it's quite possible to write a program that makes automatic exploits for various sorts of crashes. It's somewhat easier to find a security hole in source code (because you can figure out where it does things which are somewhat dubious), but if you discover some behavior that crashes a program, it's easier to write an exploit for it than actually find the bug in the source.
Besides, unless a program really hasn't been looked at before or the bug is of a newly-popular class (e.g., format string vulnerabilities), someone has probably already found all of the obvious bugs. The more likely case is really someone testing a program with a lot of different weird situations, which is just as easy with a binary.
On a 747, they train you how to deal with an emergency before takeoff. In a spacecraft, I imagine the procedures are a bit more complicated. Even if everything goes well, the safety procedures are much more important (in a 747, you'll get a sore neck if you stare out the window during takeoff; doing the wrong thing during launch would certainly be much worse).
Assuming you're going to do much of anything when you're up there, you'll need to be trained for it. On a 747, you generally are just trying to get somewhere; if you're going to be in space for a bit, you're going to have to know how to move around without gravity without crashing into things, how to eat and drink, and so forth. On a 747, things behave much like they do on the ground.
I don't really think anyone would sign up for a trip into space where they'll spend the entire time strapped into their seat out of the way. Especially because that's a rather long time to not get to go to the bathroom.
The solution to that is, of course, don't have your admin run Exchange. Really, it should be the admins who tell you not to run Outlook, not slashdot, because it's their job to understand what people should be doing with their email and so forth. Users have better things to do than really understand what's going on with their generic programs. That is, of course, why they should not be trusted with anything as hazard-prone as Outlook. Sure, they can run it safely, but if they know how to do this, they're spending brain power they should be devoting to actual work.
It's certainly possible that, if they're not starting with someone who already has a clue, it will actually take 5 years to train them enough to put them on a spacecraft. So, just because this was announced now doesn't mean they won't put him on the ISS when it's done in 2006.
In any case, assuming someday space travel becomes a part of everyday life, it will be important to know how people who aren't specially selected to go into space have to be prepared, so this is, additionally, important research.
Adobe would probably do well to give these developers $2000 to pay off the lawyers; it's not like it's a lot of money for them, and it would be a great PR move.
They probably ought to be able the sue the law firm, too. If what the firm did (sending such a letter to a private citizen about a non-profit product) was kind of shady, and it soiled Adobe's good name, I'd expect them to be able to sue. If nothing else, they probably used Adobe's trademark to deny Adobe business while making a profit themselves.
On the middle day, at least for the submarine episode, they did a lot of safety testing and tuning. It would be extremely implausible for them to end up with neutral buoyancy by just figuring out the right volume for their weights without putting the things in water at all, and everything had to be checked out thoroughly.
They also radically changed the scoring system between what the teams were told and what the show had; I think they wanted to make the team with the sub that worked better win while making them worried. So it might actually be a bit fixed, but only by making the team which made the better device win, and probably even that can't happen in the ones with more qualitative tasks.
It mentioned them releasing the graphics compositing code and the wacon driver improvements they did.
It doesn't make sense for them to release their actual tools; these tools are only useful to people animating movies; such people are the competition. But it makes sense for them to release anything useful in other industries, because it is likely that it will get used and improved by someone who isn't competing with DreamWorks. Free software in business works because you only have to stay ahead of the competition, not all of the other people who might use the software.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just thinking about it, and I suspect that I lack licenses for many of the programs I use, since I tend to delete the source trees eventually and the license doesn't generally get installed anywhere. Of course, the BSA probably doesn't have the necessary power-of-attorney to begin doing anything about it, but it would be somewhat awkward searching the web for licenses for all of the software you have.
"Yes, I want a CD with 300 copies of the GPL and a number of assorted other licenses. Wait, can I use the BSD option on this one? What changes have I made to it?"
In any case, I think Red Hat (or IBM?) should run a "Have you found you need more licenses? Come to our web site and download a couple." ad campaign.
As far as I can tell, porn webmasters make money primarily through subscriptions and also perhaps through advertizing. If a search produces a page with an obviously pornographic title or set of keywords, even people who find it aren't going to go to it unless they were searching for porn, in which case they wouldn't be searching with "not porn"; they're certainly not going to buy a subscription. So there's no benefit to the porn site in being listed in non-porn searches. If porn was blocked even from people who were looking for it, it would make sense to not mark your porn site as porn, but that seems not to be the case.
Furthermore, having your porn site pop up when congressmen search for "britney spears" is almost certain not to help the industry in general or you in particular.
You can't trust people to rate their own content on merit or accuracy or things like that, but the providers have no sensible motive to lie about pornographic content.
I think it would make more sense to have the pulleys on the kite; the major advantage of a kite over a ton of people is that the kite can pull upward, whereas people tend to be on the ground. This should be useful for avoiding the need for a taller existing structure capable of supporting the weight of your stone.
A lot of the problems people have with the wind method wouldn't be different with people pulling: the rope does have to be sufficiently strong to lift the stone without being too heavy to be lifted itself; you need some sort of pulley system to convert the horizontal force into vertical; you need pulleys to lower the necessary force (because you can't actually put ten thousand people on a really long rope and have them pull it and get a useful effect).
There are, of course, tons of examples of existing movies where there's a big difference between the what appears on the screen and the actor behind the character: animation, the same actor playing multiple characters, different actors doing the voice and the body for the same character, etc.
On the other hand, there's still the major problem of creating affect: it's very difficult to draw or paint or model a person displaying a certain emotion without working from a real person, and doing the voice is at least as hard (besides the fact that speech synthesis is not as good as rendering yet).
I suspect that, even for an entirely CG movie, the studio would want human actors for all of the parts, so that the animators could see how each character's face looks when they are doing what the script says.
Furthermore, there's a lot more to each character than what's in the script; the actor (and director) determine what the character is thinking and feeling while doing the predetermined actions. It's essentially the Turing Test: convince an audience that you really are a person in a certain situation. Neither a computer, nor even a group of graphics researchers are going to be able to get into the roles that way any time soon.
This could, of course, mean that an actor's appearence makes very little difference; a skillful actor could play a character with no physical resemblence if the task involved only showing a graphics team what the necessary emotions look like.
The self-assembling aspect of these things is how it builds the tubes out of rings. The rings are picked beforehand to be attracted to the bacteria and not any human cells, so even if the tubes broke down and reassembled differently, they'd still be targetted at bacteria.
This seems to indicate a major metadata problem with the system. If you're not looking for porn, you shouldn't find any, and it seems like people do. It shouldn't necessarily be *hard* to find porn, but it shouldn't be hard to not find it either, if you're trying to avoid.
Furthermore, people generally don't want to stick their porn in other people's faces; they want to let people get it, and may even care more about availablity than avoidability, but the only people who get anything out of unwilling parties seeing sex are flashers. So it follows that, so long as it is not blocked from people who should be able to see it, providers want porn marked as such, and consumers want to only get porn if they're looking for it.
Perhaps the standard clients should insert into the query "and not 'porn'" unless 'porn' is in the query, and porn should have that keyword.
I can't see any particular reason why the russian program is any more in violation of the DMCA than either Adobe's eBook reader or Acrobat.
Acrobat (or another implementation) enables people to pirate eBooks (given some additional tools), even if you don't have a valid right to look at them. In fact, if the three things you need in order to read an eBook are: something that XORs with 102, something that unzips archives, and something that reads PDF, the PDF reader is the only really complicated part. If anything is "breaking encryption", it's the PDF reader.
They hook people with the convenience aspect, and they do explain how it's more secure (everything going over the wire is only good for a single connection; the remote machine never sees the password at all).
The convenience actually comes in the next part (or when you type "man ssh-agent"): you can have a local program remember your keys after you give it the passphrase once, and then you can authenticate multiple connections with a single use of the passphrase. Really nice for those cvs over ssh sessions (add, add, update, update, commit).
Also, it means you can have the authentication even closer than the local machine (an even more local machine, smart card, etc) without the remote machine having to know or do anything different.
We don't need = (except in initializers, of course)...
Hmm... I have better things to do than figuring out an algorithm for this, really I do...
It's certainly possible that, in 1998, the internet (or, more specifically, online conversation) was depressing, because so many of the people were new to it. Imagine: you are in a society where there are millions of people around, and you haven't met anyone yet. Many of them seem to know each other already. None of the people you know from elsewhere are around. If you were the only person in your state to have a phone, and you spent your time dialing random numbers, you'd probably be depressed.
Three years later, everyone you know from real life is online, you've met a bunch of people online and interacted with them enough to become friends. Now the internet is convenient and social, and not depressing.
The person seems to be promoting this as something that makes people involuntarily look in a certain direction. With your average siren, you hear it, and can react appropriately; it doesn't turn your head. If it sound actually is just really easy to locate, it would make a great siren addition, but if it works, like she seems to be saying, by having everyone who can hear it turn to face toward the sound (and then realize where they're looking), that would detract from drivers' abilities to ignore the siren for a moment while they avoid the pedestrian or look for a place to pull over.
I mean, she's suggesting that this will get people to look at security cameras. If it does that, it'll probably force people to look at the vehicle. It's probably pretty unlikely that people really just automatically turn and stare like she suggests, but if it did work that way, it wouldn't be good for a lot of situations.
It is in a for-profit organization's best interest to use Open Source software, if it is a better value; if it solves a sufficiently interesting problem to attact a lot of developers, it is likely to be a better value.
It is not in a for-profit organization's best interest to create any software, as a general rule. Ford, e.g., does better to use existing software than make their own.
If an organization is forces to create software, it is in their best interest to make it Open Source, because that way they stand a chance of spurring others to contribute development effort. If Ford creates a sales-tracking package, and Home Depot takes it and adds inventory-management functions, Ford doesn't have to write those functions.
If an organization sees as their competitive advantage the technology they have in the area applying to the software, it is not in their best interest to make it Open Source, because they would then lose their advantage. The task of writing that Open Source software will fall to others who wish to cooperate to overcome this advantage and who are inspired by the original software.
If an organization is in the software business (rather than just wanting to use software), it may or may not be in their best interest to create open source software, and is a matter of how their business model works. Giving away some things may better position other things, and market share may be positive even if it doesn't directly produce revenue.
Of course, it is not in a for-profit organization's best interests for other people to not use their products, whether the alternative be a competitor's product, an Open Source program, or just not needing the product at all, so MicroSoft can't admit to any of the above.
Okay, so you've got a fire engine going down the street, making a noise that makes everyone turn and look at it. As we know for driving school, when you look somewhere, you tend to drive that way. So we'd have all of these distracted drivers crashing into emergency vehicles. Great...
You might find a person or two who wants to play PS or PS2 games and also wants a linux box. That makes it more efficient than buying a PS2 for the games and a NIC for other stuff. Plus, people might want to try writing PS2 games, which is impossible on a PS2 without this or on a NIC.
What most people don't realize about Africa is exactly the climate. Basically, it's not too bad for people, but it really sucks for devices. What I know about is from Freetown, Sierra Leone (before the government fell).
For a month each year, dust blows off of the Sahara. It gets on everything. It's reddish and fine.
For a month each year, it rains. The soil is not very good, and it's hard to reach bedrock. You get mudslides. You get buildings washing away, not because they collapse, but because the ground underneath them goes.
It's otherwise hot and humid in general.
The utilities are rather flaky, because they're not the best equipment and the conditions are bad for them. Also, people don't depend on them enough to pay to keep them well maintained.
So setting up the tech is the least of your worries. The main issue is keeping the hardware working; you have to contend with hot weather, humidity, airborne particles, and power fluxuations. Sure, you can have A/C, but you have to keep that working, clean the filters, and you probably want to turn it off when the power fails, or you're likely to burn out your generator. About the only worse thing that could happen to a machine is throwing it off a cliff, which might happen, too, if you pick the wrong building.
It's certainly possible on a first-world budget, but setting things up for local budgets or funded by donations is likely to be extremely challenging.
Actually, I've been to Sierra Leone (shortly before the government fell), and they had plenty of cars and no horses, at least in Freetown. There's no particular reason not to skip levels of technology, if the higher tech is available from somewhere else.
Sierra Leone's government was, in fact, founded on law and democracy; as far as I could tell, they just couldn't withstand a concerted attack from the gang/robber rebel types when it happened. On the other hand, the neighboring countries did a pretty good job of helping. In that area, at least, the violence was primarily anti-government. Of course, the country was primarily made up of returned British slaves, which gives them a rather different culture from parts of Africa with uninterrupted traditions.
There's a certain amount of IT that is worth doing even at this point. IT will probably give you a better financial return on investment than, say, clean water; once you have some level of IT (and electricity to run it), you can get the money to get good clean water.
So configure Exchange to work with other clients than Outlook and have people use something more secure. And tell the voice mail vendor you want their next version to be more portable.
Actually, it's quite possible to write a program that makes automatic exploits for various sorts of crashes. It's somewhat easier to find a security hole in source code (because you can figure out where it does things which are somewhat dubious), but if you discover some behavior that crashes a program, it's easier to write an exploit for it than actually find the bug in the source.
Besides, unless a program really hasn't been looked at before or the bug is of a newly-popular class (e.g., format string vulnerabilities), someone has probably already found all of the obvious bugs. The more likely case is really someone testing a program with a lot of different weird situations, which is just as easy with a binary.
On a 747, they train you how to deal with an emergency before takeoff. In a spacecraft, I imagine the procedures are a bit more complicated. Even if everything goes well, the safety procedures are much more important (in a 747, you'll get a sore neck if you stare out the window during takeoff; doing the wrong thing during launch would certainly be much worse).
Assuming you're going to do much of anything when you're up there, you'll need to be trained for it. On a 747, you generally are just trying to get somewhere; if you're going to be in space for a bit, you're going to have to know how to move around without gravity without crashing into things, how to eat and drink, and so forth. On a 747, things behave much like they do on the ground.
I don't really think anyone would sign up for a trip into space where they'll spend the entire time strapped into their seat out of the way. Especially because that's a rather long time to not get to go to the bathroom.
The solution to that is, of course, don't have your admin run Exchange. Really, it should be the admins who tell you not to run Outlook, not slashdot, because it's their job to understand what people should be doing with their email and so forth. Users have better things to do than really understand what's going on with their generic programs. That is, of course, why they should not be trusted with anything as hazard-prone as Outlook. Sure, they can run it safely, but if they know how to do this, they're spending brain power they should be devoting to actual work.
It's certainly possible that, if they're not starting with someone who already has a clue, it will actually take 5 years to train them enough to put them on a spacecraft. So, just because this was announced now doesn't mean they won't put him on the ISS when it's done in 2006.
In any case, assuming someday space travel becomes a part of everyday life, it will be important to know how people who aren't specially selected to go into space have to be prepared, so this is, additionally, important research.
Adobe would probably do well to give these developers $2000 to pay off the lawyers; it's not like it's a lot of money for them, and it would be a great PR move.
They probably ought to be able the sue the law firm, too. If what the firm did (sending such a letter to a private citizen about a non-profit product) was kind of shady, and it soiled Adobe's good name, I'd expect them to be able to sue. If nothing else, they probably used Adobe's trademark to deny Adobe business while making a profit themselves.
On the middle day, at least for the submarine episode, they did a lot of safety testing and tuning. It would be extremely implausible for them to end up with neutral buoyancy by just figuring out the right volume for their weights without putting the things in water at all, and everything had to be checked out thoroughly.
They also radically changed the scoring system between what the teams were told and what the show had; I think they wanted to make the team with the sub that worked better win while making them worried. So it might actually be a bit fixed, but only by making the team which made the better device win, and probably even that can't happen in the ones with more qualitative tasks.
Personally, I'm going to wait for either EDU or GOV.
It mentioned them releasing the graphics compositing code and the wacon driver improvements they did.
It doesn't make sense for them to release their actual tools; these tools are only useful to people animating movies; such people are the competition. But it makes sense for them to release anything useful in other industries, because it is likely that it will get used and improved by someone who isn't competing with DreamWorks. Free software in business works because you only have to stay ahead of the competition, not all of the other people who might use the software.