Of course, if it were possible to take control of a plane like this, the government would immediately ground all those planes until the security flaw could be fixed, right? Funny, haven't heard that they've done that.
I was hoping I could get the non-retina version and swap out the hard drive for a slightly more reasonably priced SSD, but it looks like that won't work.
There's nothing "mere" about the mathematics of music or the fractal beauty of the shape of landscapes or the sound of the great outdoors. Humans are wired to appreciate all that, and it's the patterns at their core that both make them appealing and tractable to generate artificially.
A computer program that can generate music doesn't scare me.
Trust me, anything like this has been carefully been gone over by quite a few lawyers. Disney uses software that comes under a variety of licenses and looks at each one carefully, and they're even more careful when it comes to releasing something.
In this case, they want the ptex file format to be used and support to become wider among apps. Releasing the libraries (especially under BSD) will make it easier for 3rd party applications to incorporate it.
First, you are asking for legal advice. Stop now and walk away from the website. Talk to a lawyer. Do not listen to a storm of layman opinions, all of which are almost certainly wrong.
Second, if you're still reading this, there is no such thing as "IP" in the law. There are copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and possibly a few other things. They are not the same, and disclosure has radically different effects on them. The laws vary from country to country.
Third, it sounds like you're talking about a patent. If so, whatever you do, do not disclose any of it or show work derived from your neato idea until you have talked to a lawyer. Timestamps are the least of your worries, what you really need to care about is killing your chance at the patent before you even get out of the gate. The rules vary by country, and the standards for disclosure vary by country.
Monckton has some citations, but I don't think they're especially solid. Especially the "scientists have been wrong before" tack he takes really isn't an honest argument against the current understanding. (For example, he says "Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling." Well, that's not exactly a lot to go on. How many?
Anyway, a few specific details he misuses. From his supplementary pdf:
"Sidelooking radar interferometry shows that the ice mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate 18 estimated at 26.8 gigatons per year, reversing a melting trend that has persisted for 6,000 years (Joughin et al., 2002)."
"The ice sheet has been retreating for the last few thousand years, but we think the end of this retreat has come," says Dr Joughin. But he said it would be a mistake to assume any threat of the ice sheet collapsing was completely removed.
"Some of the concern about the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is lessened, but I hesitate to say we can stop worrying about it."
He said the research only covered a relatively small area, over a short period of time and it was possible that what they were detecting was a minor fluctuation.
He pointed out that there were other areas in West Antarctica where the ice was thinning significantly, such as the Pine Island Glacier and the Thwaites Glacier.
Monckton isn't exactly being honest in the way he's citing that one, is he?
What software would "helpers" use?
on
Rendering Shrek@Home?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Most people don't have RenderMan or Maya licenses on their home PCs, let alone all the proprietary extensions and scripts that studios use. Plus, add in the shaders, texture maps, model files, etc, and you've got a few hundred MB or a few GB of data and software just to get started.
Now, it might make sense to go to some rental service that can set up the licenses and servers and just charges per CPU hour, license hour, and MB on the server. It wouldn't be a small thing to set up, though, and it would be a professional service with strict NDAs.
This isn't just a matter of Red Hat "doing what they should" in case of copyright infringement -- they're offering to be the ones to fix copyright violations in Linux even if they were never the ones who copied the code. This clears up the whole "who'll fix it?" issue for corporate customers. (Of course, every Linux developer under the sun has offered to do the same, but this is a legal deal that CIOs can sink their teeth into).
The problem SCO is facing is this: they want to sell Linux "licenses" because their intellectual property is supposedly in there. And let's be clear -- it's not patent, trade secret, or trademark IP but copyright IP. But as soon as they say "we own this", the code can get yanked within days or weeks and re-written. So the licenses are worthless, which is why they're being so coy about pointing to the code (aside from silly claims on the ABI headers)
Of couse, they're suing IBM, alleging contract violations for letting their Super Special (and mysteriously Secret) stuff into Linux and claiming AIX, etc is a derivative of UNIX system V. And maybe there is a thin legal thread that might encumber AIX.
But who signed that contract on behalf of Linux? No one. Linux might have a few lines of copied code, but with no contract with SCO, there's no legal reason SCO gets to "own" Linux by calling it a derivative -- you'd need a contract for that.
So even if they're right, they're hosed. And I have my doubts about how right they are.
My first commercial home computer (i.e. one my dad didn't have to assemble himself) was a Commodore PET with dual floppy drive. When we got the C64, we hooked the dual floppies up to it, and they worked fine.
It's funny being able to do a diskcopy and then get a prompt back right away as the hardware in the floppy case (a separate unit) starts kerchunking away autonomously.
Open source gives studios a headache
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yes, the larger animation studios are using open source/Linux, mainly because SGI is having problems and the cost/benefit on an SGI IRIX box is really slipping. You'd think that they'd love the idea of "free" software, but it really drives them up the wall. When you're working on a multi-million dollar project, the last thing you want is legal liablity because some Joe stuck some patented or copywritten code into the module you use on the movie. With proprietary code, the guy selling the software takes the legal heat for mistakes like that. With open source, you're on your own.
Not to say that it's all bad for the studios or open source. The place I work for shelled out money for an open source developer to finish some of his development work on a program they wanted to use. Cheaper than buying a commercial package, and everyone benefitted.
But the biggest reasons the studios go for Linux is the cheaper/faster hardware (despite all sorts of compatibility headaches -- getting reliable 24 frame per second playback for 1k images is a little touchy) plus reduced porting costs for their legacy IRIX software and avoiding the whole Microsoft headache. The sysadmins really don't want to go there, and the studio doesn't really want to start springing for license packs for a few hundred users and a few hundred renderfarm machines.
The only reason to use undocumented file formats instead of XML-marked or other, clearly documented formats is to lock users into your own products and to force upgrades. Plus, it obscures the sheer amount of junk and waste packed into those binary monsters.
I can just see it now. A three hour movie, and the first hour an argument about the agenda, the next hour is figuring out who should be there who isn't there, and the last hour is the sad realization that no one is going to use what you've come up with anyway.
I agree with 2600's decision. The worst thing that could happen here is for the Supreme Court to get the chance to put another nail in the coffin for our rights. The MPAA is doing everything it can to squeeze the consumer, from using anti-competitive region codes to strangling the signal coming out of the DVD player by prohibiting Firewire ports.
The thing is, while Linux itself doesn't cost, moving to it does. There's developer time, compiler madness (2.95 vs 2.96), third party vendors with DSOs using different compilers, Alias|Wavefront flirting with stlport in Maya, and so on.
Plus, Legal still has to go through all the licenses (not everything is GPL), and there's no vendor to take the legal responsibility if there's a patent or copyright violation.
Aside from a few test stations, Windows isn't used at Feature Animation, and only a few people are lobbying for it. The big savings with Linux is the cost of porting a few hundred (some very large) software packages to Windows -- that's a nightmare no one wants to face. Linux is a cakewalk in comparision (although still a pain).
Perhaps they're getting more mercenary in the UK, too. We just got a letter from Tivo that they're ending the 1-800 number soon. The closest local number is a toll call for us, and last time they encouraged us to use it, we ended up with a $60 bill for local toll from 100 minute long calls for programming updates.
Makes me wish we had a satellite dish PVR instead. At least then we wouldn't be dependent on phone calls to keep our PVR working.
Trying to push a change on the system without support from higher up is a sure road to pain. Microsoft and the BSA have been kind enough to start hitting schools up for software audits and so forth, so collecting news clippings from those stories should provide a large-dollar incentive for change.
The next step is get some policy together regarding appropriate usage, and throwing some carrots in there about privacy, etc. as long as resources aren't abused, court orders, etc. should help ease the pain, along with a few days for people to burn their warez onto CD and clean up their own mess.
Then you need to go through with the heavy duty broom and for heavens sake, get your license documentation in order before you get audited.
Re-read the articles. Lindows was forced to disclose the information during the discovery process because Microsoft thought that information would be of use to prove the case belongs in Washington.
Daniel's responses were well considered and reasonable, especially in the face of some of the sharp-and-pointy questions.
The one thing that never quite seemed to get asked was the basic issue that seems (from my interpretation of Daniel's answers) to be driving the whole RAND thing: what are patents doing to the whole standards process, and should W3C just give up when a patent surfaces, or do they work something out under a framework that may involve payments?
I definitely feel that the only hope for open source under a RAND scheme would be via percentage royalties, rather than fixed-unit or developer licensing.
If the price of digital broadcasts is increased restrictions over how I can record, leave me with analog. I occasionally dump my TiVO'd recordings off satellite onto tape to keep around. The last thing I need is some helpful box popping up saying that I'm copying too much.
Of course, once encryption schemes are in place, there's nothing to stop the NFL from deciding to make all their games only viewable by subscribers.
Anything goes over private bands, and pay-per-view can charge what it wants, but anything going over public airwaves should be free and unencumbered by small-minded paranoid schemes.
There's not much you can do about clients you've already bid for. If you bring up potential security problems with their new vendor, you just look like you're badmouthing in the competition after the bid. In any case, you may stir up resentment that may make it hard to do future business.
The thing to do is prepare a informative document during the bid process explaining the importance of security and what measures your company takes to insure it. By phrasing your presentation in the form of "whatever vendor you choose..." and recommending outside audits, attention to common security holes, good basic procedures, etc., you educate your customer. Even if they don't go with you, you've given them some things to think about, and you're being constructive and helpful. If they get hacked later at some other place, they may remember you and come back.
Rambus, after failing to deliver a superior product or a better price with their RDRAM, proceeded to go after every SDRAM maker under the sun. 3.5% royalty for DDR? That's a mighty big incentive for companies to fight back.
A slightly less predatory pricing scheme might have alienated less companies and given them a solid base of royalties for quite a while. Now, if other companies have contract clauses similar to Samsung, they stand to lose big money from companies they thought they had in the bag.
When I was a graduate graphics TA at UPenn, I would hand out the assignments with skeleton code to get them past the hump of having to deal with file parsing, etc. and just do the graphics part. I also gave them the list of requirements and some framework.
Especially with the scene graph assignment, some students had trouble grasping how to do a hierarchical scene traversal with a transformation stack. If they came to see me, I'd explain the theory, then explain in high-level pseudo-code, then get into heavy psuedo-code and eventually most of the coding approach.
I figured if they were spending that much time with me, they were learning. They still had to understand it enough to code it up.
Not only does Microsoft have forking in their own code, but they develop mutually incompatible products, and the very fact that their file formats are closed and proprietary make it much harder to create compatibility. An open source program has a wide open data format, which is inimical to Microsoft's own "viral" model of creeping data formats.
I agree, the assertion that the GPL undermines IP is disingenious. The GPL simply asserts that if someone wants to use some IP for free, they in turn must not charge for source to the resulting IP. They can still charge big bucks for the development work involved.
What's more, if some company doesn't want to take the software under those terms, nothing prevents them from going to the copyright holder and paying for a separate license that doesn't fall under the GPL. But if the license can't be bought for reasonable terms, there's always the GPL option. It's up to the companies involved to decide what's best for them.
It's ironic that Microsoft sings the praises of the WWW, lambastes open source, and totally ignores the fact that Apache is one of the main engines of the web. Or perhaps not ignore. Wishes it didn't exist is more accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if it were possible to take control of a plane like this, the government would immediately ground all those planes until the security flaw could be fixed, right? Funny, haven't heard that they've done that.
The Slashdot article has a typo: .org should be .com
I was hoping I could get the non-retina version and swap out the hard drive for a slightly more reasonably priced SSD, but it looks like that won't work.
There's nothing "mere" about the mathematics of music or the fractal beauty of the shape of landscapes or the sound of the great outdoors. Humans are wired to appreciate all that, and it's the patterns at their core that both make them appealing and tractable to generate artificially.
A computer program that can generate music doesn't scare me.
A program that can enjoy music ...
Trust me, anything like this has been carefully been gone over by quite a few lawyers. Disney uses software that comes under a variety of licenses and looks at each one carefully, and they're even more careful when it comes to releasing something.
In this case, they want the ptex file format to be used and support to become wider among apps. Releasing the libraries (especially under BSD) will make it easier for 3rd party applications to incorporate it.
From fox.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: * /*?exid=
Allow: /
Disallow:
First, you are asking for legal advice. Stop now and walk away from the website. Talk to a lawyer. Do not listen to a storm of layman opinions, all of which are almost certainly wrong.
Second, if you're still reading this, there is no such thing as "IP" in the law. There are copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and possibly a few other things. They are not the same, and disclosure has radically different effects on them. The laws vary from country to country.
Third, it sounds like you're talking about a patent. If so, whatever you do, do not disclose any of it or show work derived from your neato idea until you have talked to a lawyer. Timestamps are the least of your worries, what you really need to care about is killing your chance at the patent before you even get out of the gate. The rules vary by country, and the standards for disclosure vary by country.
Anyway, a few specific details he misuses. From his supplementary pdf:
"Sidelooking radar interferometry shows that the ice mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate 18 estimated at 26.8 gigatons per year, reversing a melting trend that has persisted for 6,000 years (Joughin et al., 2002)."
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1766064.stm:
Monckton isn't exactly being honest in the way he's citing that one, is he?
And to refute his argument that the mass of ice in Antarctica is increasing, there's this item from NASA (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=200 6-028) that says the overall mass of ice is decreasing.
Now, it might make sense to go to some rental service that can set up the licenses and servers and just charges per CPU hour, license hour, and MB on the server. It wouldn't be a small thing to set up, though, and it would be a professional service with strict NDAs.
The problem SCO is facing is this: they want to sell Linux "licenses" because their intellectual property is supposedly in there. And let's be clear -- it's not patent, trade secret, or trademark IP but copyright IP. But as soon as they say "we own this", the code can get yanked within days or weeks and re-written. So the licenses are worthless, which is why they're being so coy about pointing to the code (aside from silly claims on the ABI headers)
Of couse, they're suing IBM, alleging contract violations for letting their Super Special (and mysteriously Secret) stuff into Linux and claiming AIX, etc is a derivative of UNIX system V. And maybe there is a thin legal thread that might encumber AIX.
But who signed that contract on behalf of Linux? No one. Linux might have a few lines of copied code, but with no contract with SCO, there's no legal reason SCO gets to "own" Linux by calling it a derivative -- you'd need a contract for that.
So even if they're right, they're hosed. And I have my doubts about how right they are.
It's funny being able to do a diskcopy and then get a prompt back right away as the hardware in the floppy case (a separate unit) starts kerchunking away autonomously.
Not to say that it's all bad for the studios or open source. The place I work for shelled out money for an open source developer to finish some of his development work on a program they wanted to use. Cheaper than buying a commercial package, and everyone benefitted.
But the biggest reasons the studios go for Linux is the cheaper/faster hardware (despite all sorts of compatibility headaches -- getting reliable 24 frame per second playback for 1k images is a little touchy) plus reduced porting costs for their legacy IRIX software and avoiding the whole Microsoft headache. The sysadmins really don't want to go there, and the studio doesn't really want to start springing for license packs for a few hundred users and a few hundred renderfarm machines.
The only reason to use undocumented file formats instead of XML-marked or other, clearly documented formats is to lock users into your own products and to force upgrades. Plus, it obscures the sheer amount of junk and waste packed into those binary monsters.
I can just see it now. A three hour movie, and the first hour an argument about the agenda, the next hour is figuring out who should be there who isn't there, and the last hour is the sad realization that no one is going to use what you've come up with anyway.
I agree with 2600's decision. The worst thing that could happen here is for the Supreme Court to get the chance to put another nail in the coffin for our rights. The MPAA is doing everything it can to squeeze the consumer, from using anti-competitive region codes to strangling the signal coming out of the DVD player by prohibiting Firewire ports.
Plus, Legal still has to go through all the licenses (not everything is GPL), and there's no vendor to take the legal responsibility if there's a patent or copyright violation.
Aside from a few test stations, Windows isn't used at Feature Animation, and only a few people are lobbying for it. The big savings with Linux is the cost of porting a few hundred (some very large) software packages to Windows -- that's a nightmare no one wants to face. Linux is a cakewalk in comparision (although still a pain).
Two months salary to get one yes/no answer. DeBeers is the king of costly bandwidth.
Makes me wish we had a satellite dish PVR instead. At least then we wouldn't be dependent on phone calls to keep our PVR working.
The next step is get some policy together regarding appropriate usage, and throwing some carrots in there about privacy, etc. as long as resources aren't abused, court orders, etc. should help ease the pain, along with a few days for people to burn their warez onto CD and clean up their own mess.
Then you need to go through with the heavy duty broom and for heavens sake, get your license documentation in order before you get audited.
Re-read the articles. Lindows was forced to disclose the information during the discovery process because Microsoft thought that information would be of use to prove the case belongs in Washington.
The one thing that never quite seemed to get asked was the basic issue that seems (from my interpretation of Daniel's answers) to be driving the whole RAND thing: what are patents doing to the whole standards process, and should W3C just give up when a patent surfaces, or do they work something out under a framework that may involve payments?
I definitely feel that the only hope for open source under a RAND scheme would be via percentage royalties, rather than fixed-unit or developer licensing.
Of course, once encryption schemes are in place, there's nothing to stop the NFL from deciding to make all their games only viewable by subscribers.
Anything goes over private bands, and pay-per-view can charge what it wants, but anything going over public airwaves should be free and unencumbered by small-minded paranoid schemes.
The thing to do is prepare a informative document during the bid process explaining the importance of security and what measures your company takes to insure it. By phrasing your presentation in the form of "whatever vendor you choose..." and recommending outside audits, attention to common security holes, good basic procedures, etc., you educate your customer. Even if they don't go with you, you've given them some things to think about, and you're being constructive and helpful. If they get hacked later at some other place, they may remember you and come back.
A slightly less predatory pricing scheme might have alienated less companies and given them a solid base of royalties for quite a while. Now, if other companies have contract clauses similar to Samsung, they stand to lose big money from companies they thought they had in the bag.
Especially with the scene graph assignment, some students had trouble grasping how to do a hierarchical scene traversal with a transformation stack. If they came to see me, I'd explain the theory, then explain in high-level pseudo-code, then get into heavy psuedo-code and eventually most of the coding approach.
I figured if they were spending that much time with me, they were learning. They still had to understand it enough to code it up.
I agree, the assertion that the GPL undermines IP is disingenious. The GPL simply asserts that if someone wants to use some IP for free, they in turn must not charge for source to the resulting IP. They can still charge big bucks for the development work involved.
What's more, if some company doesn't want to take the software under those terms, nothing prevents them from going to the copyright holder and paying for a separate license that doesn't fall under the GPL. But if the license can't be bought for reasonable terms, there's always the GPL option. It's up to the companies involved to decide what's best for them.
It's ironic that Microsoft sings the praises of the WWW, lambastes open source, and totally ignores the fact that Apache is one of the main engines of the web. Or perhaps not ignore. Wishes it didn't exist is more accurate.