Furthermore, many (most) of the films in the libraries are dying slow deaths of decomposition. The studios have no real interest in saving them because many of the would cost more money to restore than they would make as a result of the restoration (imho, I have no physical evidence to support this claim, only my knowledge of past behaviours)
"My Fair Lady," for example was nearly unrecoverable when they restored it- It was saved in the nick of time.
If smaller firms had the ability to remarket these restored films, more of them might survive.
I worked at a PCB manufacturing plant in Atlanta Ga as an assembly line worker before I could get into college.
I pretty much deadened my sense of smell, and quit after noticing that the (few) women working there were (all) going bald.
If you are familiar with the toxicity/corrosivity/flammability danger scale, several of the chemicals used in that plant (when I was there) were 5/5/4 or the like...
I remember kicking the sulfuric acid barrels (and running away) to get the fumes out of the barrel so that we could insert the (hand) pump to refill a tank on some machine.. If you didn't kick the barrel, the fumes would overflow when you inserted the pipe, and you REALLY didn't want to mess with those fumes.
And then there was the acid-bath machine.. Oh, did I mention the chlorine-wash machine that we had to clean out every few hours or so because it kept getting blocked up with green&blue crystals?
Because Kids like to play games, and Apple made the "Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can aim for the head" mistake of deciding to actively discourage game-makers from making games for the platform.
What made computers fun? Games! Not WordPerfect or M$ Word! People didn't buy apply because they couldn't play doom on it.
But I can assure you that the TV studio's or tv compound's D1 will rarely or naver use a compressed (lossy) video stream if an uncompressed (lossless) video stream is available.
Just look at 10 bit vs 8 bit SDI! Then look at net return...
Speaking as somone in the industry, and being under the cloud of this problem...
When your pursuit is REAL TIME special effects/video manipulation, this problem has little to do with the disk, raid or no raid.
We just want to get the video out of the graphics accelerator and into a professional video IO card. Aside from the fact that this gretly stresses the PCI bus, the problem witht he AGP bus is worse..
The number of motherboards with both 64 bit PCI and AGP can be counted on one hand. While NTSC (uncompressed SDI) is around 270 Mb/s (a number which is certainly way below the peak bandwidth numbers), doing both in and out of the card as well as other IO (ethernet, serial, sound), pretty much ensures you'll have problems with latency.
Around 60% of our CPU usage is associated with blitting video out of the graphics accelerator.
It would be really nice if they got AGP to work.
At this point, we're just hoping that video cards will go over to PCI-X, whose hardware will have to work well for both input and output.
The (copyright) laws already apply to such devices when and if they exist now, or in the future.
What about laws such as the supercomputer-export restrictions? Why is a supercomputer _still_ defined as it was many years ago?
I'm not asking them to regulate such devices, I'm hoping that they would think about how current laws would effect such devices.
The other point- let our "wiser" selves regulate the issues then...?
I would argue that we seem to be getting less and less wise as a society as our congressmen get more and more bribes (monetary or otherwise) from Big Bussiness.
Is the internet today better or worse than it was 6 years ago? Is there more or less innovation on it today now that we have come up with such "enlightned","wise" laws that tell us that owning a pencil is illegal because it _might_ be used to break copyright!
What does it mean "to enter the brain"? Might it be so defined that the implant is considered a foriegn object and thus outside the brain?
My argument is that current copyright law would already cover these applications with the changed definition...
Does it matter that such devices would be a great boon for society ("perfect" memory storage, better vision, etc. etc.), no!
Look at copyright extension, patent law... We're lapsing back into the "greed is good" philosophy.
To a certain extent, yes I believe that to be true, however, it must be regulated to be productive. The current climate seems to be: If it makes a profit it MUST be good..
All of this (copyright extension, etc) is an example of how shifted definitions can extend the effect of the law...
What happens with copyright laws when people have these (types of) implants in them? If you can record, verbatim, (i.e. through the use of some static ram, etc) what you see as a "perfect" digital copy, then would that be copyright infringment? Is the implant going to be considered the same as other (external) hardware?
Its a sticky issue, imho- Will the copyright holder "rights" force us to unlearn what we have learned because they have a patent or copyright on the idea? What happens when the electronic thought ends up being the same as normal "human" thought because the devices are a part of us?
I imagine that "our" lawmakers havn't even considered considering such a thing. The lack of foresight isn't suprising, but it is disheartening.
If I download an application which I would otherwise buy for $500, I do NOT profit by that amount!
This assertion is ludicrous and false! Their "profit" is one of increased functionality or happiness. If they download software, they are going after increased functionality. Their "profit" is what they can do the aforementioned software. Same for music- Unless they are attempting to resell the things they download (which, I might add would be a larger market if people couldn't download them in the first place), in which case, yes, it is fair to state that they are making a profit.
What 10 bit medical cards? I'd love to get a list so that we could examine them for possible purchase... We need 10 bit framebuffers and hardware accelerated rendering...
It is unacceptable for broadcast because the Techs at the broadcast site have determined it is so, regardless of technical merit...
10 bit YCrCb IS different, and that was what I was stating! With 10 bit per channel RGB, we can cheat- render RGB, convert it by rerendering it (still on the video card), and then blending it with the YUV video without losing any precision, all in the framebuffer of the graphics accelerator...
I.e. We don't want to use a keyer and output key-fill because if we did that (since our application (the yellow line for football and others)) we'd have to buy video delays in order to maintain field-accurate rendering...
We do understand the sampling scheme- Its just unfortunate.
If the industry went component instead of composite, or went for RGB over SDI instead of 601, (which unfortunately requires a "dual link"), it would make me a much happier person...
Keep in mind that there is a difference in the frequency response of your monitor for luma and chroma!
We are much more attuned (visually of course) to difference in intensity (luminance) in comparison to difference in color. IT is possible for monitors to have a higher luma response than chroma response, so... Having 30 bits worth of intensity variation (ok, call it 10 bits if you will) can provide more distinct rendering, wven on monitors that don't support 1 billion "colors".
For those of you who don't already know, professional TV standards (specifically, D1, also known as SDI, though SDI is technically different) use 10-bit YCrCb video. This means that any particular pixel may have up to 30 bits of color (even though the maximum difference between colors of pixels is less than that.
Obviously, this is not something that is easily accomplished with standard 24 bit/32 bit rendering. If you convert the SDI into something that can be represented in the frame buffer of the video card, then you've lost precision. This is unacceptable for broadcast! (And no, overlay isn't generally good enough since you want to capture the pixels for output though SDI)
Admittedly, this card isn't perfect- It would be nice to have 8 bits of destination alpha (for a key channel). 4 shades of keying just isn't enough...
In any case, having a card (finally!) support 10 bit rendering (especially the 10 bit rendering in openGL) in hardware will be wonderful!
Distributing snipets of said material in a meaningful manner, or changing and redistributing (as long as such changes are substantial) falls under fair use.
Merely catalogueing the data in copyrighted material is completely legal and doesn't even fall under fair use doctrine because it doesn't break copyright at all.(IANAL!)
Tiny technicality: Copyright law DOES protect secret information if it is copyrighted- You can't copy it! It doesn't protect the information itself, but rather the statement of it.
Furthermore- If there can be only one way to state something (for example a recipe), then copyright doesn't apply. If it isn't a unique and creative statement, then it cannot be copyrighted.
(i.e. databases cannot be copyrighted, unless the law has changed in the past few years.)
Yup, at the very least, it is unlikely that the DVS drivers will be open sourced. We are big fans (ok, well I am) of [well written] open source drivers- it is a great thing. For us, however this is not the driving factor.
On the good side, I've just heard from LMA (as a result of my post), and they say that their card does colorspace conversion too, which would be a wonderful thing as far as we're concerned. Whether or not we as a company use LMA, we wish them the best of luck!
...and while we currently use SGI O2s for our live insertion systems (I work for Sportvision, the people whoe brought you the virtual yellow 1st down line in football, etc), we're moving to a intel platform.
Sgi is dying- They tried to make systems and their product revision cycles were just too slow for hardware consting tens of thousands of dollars... (not to mention that SGIs stuff is just dog slow for the $$) So... we're moving to the PC, hopefully Linux.
For our stuff, we've found that the DVS card (out of Germany) works best- It does 66 Mhz, 64 bit PCI, simultaneous in and out, has up to a second of delay onboard (user selectable), and it has colorspace conversion on board. We've paired this board with an intel i860 chipset since it is one of only two boards (the other is AMD supplied) that does 4bit/66Mhz PCI and 4X AGP.
The colorspace conversion is really the killer feature for us on teh DVS card (well, that and the fast PCI)- It saves us from having to do it on the CPU (which takes up a lot of processor at 270 or 540 Mbit/second!!).
Our biggest wish right now is for someone to make good GL drivers for linux (glReadPixels has to be fast so that we can rendered video and blit it out of the AGP card at framerate) Currently the only one we've found to work well is NVidia's proprietary drivers..)
We havn't tried the LMA card as my attempt to reach anyone over there was met with 4 consecutive seemingly intentional hangups.
I'd love to use the LMA card, but at $3000 it just doesn't have all the features the the DVS card does for the price- ($600 more in quantity, and DVS hasn't ever hung up on us..).
Stereoscopic vision is a very VERY useful thing for all things which percieve their environment through visual apparatus.
Huh? What do you mean? Well, close one eye (or put an eyepatch on) and look at your flat world. How far away is that streetlight? Hmm. How tall is that man? Hmm..
Of course, we as people are much MUCH MUCH better at percieving (interpreting) our visual environment than computers are. Humans generally have little trouble correctively percieving things such even through partial occlusions, changes in scale, orientation, distortion (glasses might make you able to see, but straight lines become anything but..) and changes in intensity and color.
Being able to get 3d information about objects aids greatly in interpreting what they are.
An image (2d) of a hand is (almost always) full of occlusions. These occlusions are diffucult to interpret in 2d because the edges in 2d have less differentiation than a depth-map would. (The distance metric is less ambigious!)
Wouldn't you like your computer to interact with you as if it was (a very obedient) human? This helps.
This article by Moshe Mar talks about the linux kernel, and especially a recent split in the community in which/whose VM to use.
The "old" vm, the article says, had some relative impressive problems- swapoff with full memory and you could sit in front of a swap-crazy machine for 15 minutes, machines with small memory (40 MB or less) could experience sudden swap storms up to kernel 2.4.7, and the amount of swap available in the system depended on the amount of memory (as opposed to the system in 2.2 where the total memory was RAM+swap).
The VM used in 2.4 'till 2.4.10 was written (it seems from the article) in large part by Rik Van Riel. Later Andrea Arcangeli (in Sept) wrote a whole new VM, which was accepted into the kernel. Viola, new Vm in 2.4.10.
The article discusses that Alan Cox doesn't like the new VM as much, and has stuck with the old one. The author of the article seems to be in support of Andrea's new VM.
The article then goes on to discuss kernel preemption- pros (low latency), cons (lower throughput/power), and on which machines such things are important (servers, vs PCs).
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, many (most) of the films in the libraries are dying slow deaths of decomposition. The studios have no real interest in saving them because many of the would cost more money to restore than they would make as a result of the restoration (imho, I have no physical evidence to support this claim, only my knowledge of past behaviours)
"My Fair Lady," for example was nearly unrecoverable when they restored it- It was saved in the nick of time.
If smaller firms had the ability to remarket these restored films, more of them might survive.
I worked at a PCB manufacturing plant in Atlanta Ga as an assembly line worker before I could get into college.
I pretty much deadened my sense of smell, and quit after noticing that the (few) women working there were (all) going bald.
If you are familiar with the toxicity/corrosivity/flammability danger scale, several of the chemicals used in that plant (when I was there) were 5/5/4 or the like...
I remember kicking the sulfuric acid barrels (and running away) to get the fumes out of the barrel so that we could insert the (hand) pump to refill a tank on some machine.. If you didn't kick the barrel, the fumes would overflow when you inserted the pipe, and you REALLY didn't want to mess with those fumes.
And then there was the acid-bath machine..
Oh, did I mention the chlorine-wash machine that we had to clean out every few hours or so because it kept getting blocked up with green&blue crystals?
Ever so fun!
Its not a nice place to work.
Why bother with a nail when you can just glue it effectively?
And with a heatb gun, its easy enough to just melt the suckers together...
I betcha your BSD box doesn't have enough memory/address space to start up 1 million threads... (since I'm guessing its running on x86 hardware...)...
So you're telling me that apple came out with the apple-II sometime after Doom was released?
Because Kids like to play games, and Apple made the "Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can aim for the head" mistake of deciding to actively discourage game-makers from making games for the platform.
What made computers fun? Games! Not WordPerfect or M$ Word! People didn't buy apply because they couldn't play doom on it.
As always, IMHO.
But I can assure you that the TV studio's or tv compound's D1 will rarely or naver use a compressed (lossy) video stream if an uncompressed (lossless) video stream is available.
Just look at 10 bit vs 8 bit SDI! Then look at net return...
Speaking as somone in the industry, and being under the cloud of this problem...
When your pursuit is REAL TIME special effects/video manipulation, this problem has little to do with the disk, raid or no raid.
We just want to get the video out of the graphics accelerator and into a professional video IO card. Aside from the fact that this gretly stresses the PCI bus, the problem witht he AGP bus is worse..
The number of motherboards with both 64 bit PCI and AGP can be counted on one hand. While NTSC (uncompressed SDI) is around 270 Mb/s (a number which is certainly way below the peak bandwidth numbers), doing both in and out of the card as well as other IO (ethernet, serial, sound), pretty much ensures you'll have problems with latency.
Around 60% of our CPU usage is associated with blitting video out of the graphics accelerator.
It would be really nice if they got AGP to work.
At this point, we're just hoping that video cards will go over to PCI-X, whose hardware will have to work well for both input and output.
The (copyright) laws already apply to such devices when and if they exist now, or in the future.
What about laws such as the supercomputer-export restrictions?
Why is a supercomputer _still_ defined as it was many years ago?
I'm not asking them to regulate such devices, I'm hoping that they would think about how current laws would effect such devices.
The other point- let our "wiser" selves regulate the issues then...?
I would argue that we seem to be getting less and less wise as a society as our congressmen get more and more bribes (monetary or otherwise) from Big Bussiness.
Is the internet today better or worse than it was 6 years ago? Is there more or less innovation on it today now that we have come up with such "enlightned","wise" laws that tell us that owning a pencil is illegal because it _might_ be used to break copyright!
The law is all about definitions...
...
What does it mean "to enter the brain"? Might it be so defined that the implant is considered a foriegn object and thus outside the brain?
My argument is that current copyright law would already cover these applications with the changed definition...
Does it matter that such devices would be a great boon for society ("perfect" memory storage, better vision, etc. etc.), no!
Look at copyright extension, patent law
We're lapsing back into the "greed is good" philosophy.
To a certain extent, yes I believe that to be true, however, it must be regulated to be productive. The current climate seems to be: If it makes a profit it MUST be good..
All of this (copyright extension, etc) is an example of how shifted definitions can extend the effect of the law...
ok,
Now the question that would be interesting...
What happens with copyright laws when people have these (types of) implants in them?
If you can record, verbatim, (i.e. through the use of some static ram, etc) what you see as a "perfect" digital copy, then would that be copyright infringment? Is the implant going to be considered the same as other (external) hardware?
Its a sticky issue, imho- Will the copyright holder "rights" force us to unlearn what we have learned because they have a patent or copyright on the idea? What happens when the electronic thought ends up being the same as normal "human" thought because the devices are a part of us?
I imagine that "our" lawmakers havn't even considered considering such a thing. The lack of foresight isn't suprising, but it is disheartening.
-R
The more people threatened by the DMCA and laws of its ilk the better!
What are you talking about? If few people feel threatened by the law then it remains on the books until some entity decides that can REALLY roast you.
Teddy Roosevely did this in NYC over prohibition
And they (maliciously it seems) broke spec.
This is known as embrace and extend.. otherwise known as trying to own the technology body and soul.
Microsoft is well known for breaking standards by doing what they did- It wasn't java because it WASN'T JAVA!
If I download an application which I would otherwise buy for $500, I do NOT profit by that amount!
This assertion is ludicrous and false! Their "profit" is one of increased functionality or happiness. If they download software, they are going after increased functionality. Their "profit" is what they can do the aforementioned software.
Same for music- Unless they are attempting to resell the things they download (which, I might add would be a larger market if people couldn't download them in the first place), in which case, yes, it is fair to state that they are making a profit.
You should restate your analogy.
The article basically states that it is a QoS attack
(Quality of service) instead of a DoS attack.
As far as I can tell, and IANAL this is perfectly legal in the first place.
What 10 bit medical cards?
I'd love to get a list so that we could examine them for possible purchase...
We need 10 bit framebuffers and hardware accelerated rendering...
It is unacceptable for broadcast because the Techs at the broadcast site have determined it is so, regardless of technical merit...
10 bit YCrCb IS different, and that was what I was stating!
With 10 bit per channel RGB, we can cheat- render RGB, convert it by rerendering it (still on the video card), and then blending it with the YUV video without losing any precision, all in the framebuffer of the graphics accelerator...
I.e. We don't want to use a keyer and output key-fill because if we did that (since our application (the yellow line for football and others)) we'd have to buy video delays in order to maintain field-accurate rendering...
We do understand the sampling scheme- Its just unfortunate.
If the industry went component instead of composite, or went for RGB over SDI instead of 601, (which unfortunately requires a "dual link"), it would make me a much happier person...
Keep in mind that there is a difference in the frequency response of your monitor for luma and chroma!
We are much more attuned (visually of course) to difference in intensity (luminance) in comparison to difference in color. IT is possible for monitors to have a higher luma response than chroma response, so...
Having 30 bits worth of intensity variation (ok, call it 10 bits if you will) can provide more distinct rendering, wven on monitors that don't support 1 billion "colors".
For those of you who don't already know, professional TV standards (specifically, D1, also known as SDI, though SDI is technically different) use 10-bit YCrCb video.
This means that any particular pixel may have up to 30 bits of color (even though the maximum difference between colors of pixels is less than that.
Obviously, this is not something that is easily accomplished with standard 24 bit/32 bit rendering. If you convert the SDI into something that can be represented in the frame buffer of the video card, then you've lost precision. This is unacceptable for broadcast! (And no, overlay isn't generally good enough since you want to capture the pixels for output though SDI)
Admittedly, this card isn't perfect- It would be nice to have 8 bits of destination alpha (for a key channel). 4 shades of keying just isn't enough...
In any case, having a card (finally!) support 10 bit rendering (especially the 10 bit rendering in openGL) in hardware will be wonderful!
Distributing snipets of said material in a meaningful manner, or changing and redistributing (as long as such changes are substantial) falls under fair use.
Merely catalogueing the data in copyrighted material is completely legal and doesn't even fall under fair use doctrine because it doesn't break copyright at all.(IANAL!)
Tiny technicality: Copyright law DOES protect secret information if it is copyrighted- You can't copy it! It doesn't protect the information itself, but rather the statement of it.
Furthermore- If there can be only one way to state something (for example a recipe), then copyright doesn't apply. If it isn't a unique and creative statement, then it cannot be copyrighted.
(i.e. databases cannot be copyrighted, unless the law has changed in the past few years.)
you forgot the od- ...
Crystal MethOD
=)
Yup, at the very least, it is unlikely that the DVS drivers will be open sourced. We are big fans (ok, well I am) of [well written] open source drivers- it is a great thing. For us, however this is not the driving factor.
On the good side, I've just heard from LMA (as a result of my post), and they say that their card does colorspace conversion too, which would be a wonderful thing as far as we're concerned.
Whether or not we as a company use LMA, we wish them the best of luck!
...and while we currently use SGI O2s for our live insertion systems (I work for Sportvision, the people whoe brought you the virtual yellow 1st down line in football, etc), we're moving to a intel platform.
Sgi is dying- They tried to make systems and their product revision cycles were just too slow for hardware consting tens of thousands of dollars... (not to mention that SGIs stuff is just dog slow for the $$) So... we're moving to the PC, hopefully Linux.
For our stuff, we've found that the DVS card (out of Germany) works best- It does 66 Mhz, 64 bit PCI, simultaneous in and out, has up to a second of delay onboard (user selectable), and it has colorspace conversion on board. We've paired this board with an intel i860 chipset since it is one of only two boards (the other is AMD supplied) that does 4bit/66Mhz PCI and 4X AGP.
The colorspace conversion is really the killer feature for us on teh DVS card (well, that and the fast PCI)- It saves us from having to do it on the CPU (which takes up a lot of processor at 270 or 540 Mbit/second!!).
Our biggest wish right now is for someone to make good GL drivers for linux (glReadPixels has to be fast so that we can rendered video and blit it out of the AGP card at framerate) Currently the only one we've found to work well is NVidia's proprietary drivers..)
We havn't tried the LMA card as my attempt to reach anyone over there was met with 4 consecutive seemingly intentional hangups.
I'd love to use the LMA card, but at $3000 it just doesn't have all the features the the DVS card does for the price- ($600 more in quantity, and DVS hasn't ever hung up on us..).
Stereoscopic vision is a very VERY useful thing for all things which percieve their environment through visual apparatus.
Huh? What do you mean? Well, close one eye (or put an eyepatch on) and look at your flat world. How far away is that streetlight? Hmm. How tall is that man? Hmm..
Of course, we as people are much MUCH MUCH better at percieving (interpreting) our visual environment than computers are. Humans generally have little trouble correctively percieving things such even through partial occlusions, changes in scale, orientation, distortion (glasses might make you able to see, but straight lines become anything but..) and changes in intensity and color.
Being able to get 3d information about objects aids greatly in interpreting what they are.
An image (2d) of a hand is (almost always) full of occlusions. These occlusions are diffucult to interpret in 2d because the edges in 2d have less differentiation than a depth-map would. (The distance metric is less ambigious!)
Wouldn't you like your computer to interact with you as if it was (a very obedient) human? This helps.
This article by Moshe Mar talks about the linux kernel, and especially a recent split in the community in which/whose VM to use.
The "old" vm, the article says, had some relative impressive problems- swapoff with full memory and you could sit in front of a swap-crazy machine for 15 minutes, machines with small memory (40 MB or less) could experience sudden swap storms up to kernel 2.4.7, and the amount of swap available in the system depended on the amount of memory (as opposed to the system in 2.2 where the total memory was RAM+swap).
The VM used in 2.4 'till 2.4.10 was written (it seems from the article) in large part by Rik Van Riel. Later Andrea Arcangeli (in Sept) wrote a whole new VM, which was accepted into the kernel. Viola, new Vm in 2.4.10.
The article discusses that Alan Cox doesn't like the new VM as much, and has stuck with the old one. The author of the article seems to be in support of Andrea's new VM.
The article then goes on to discuss kernel preemption- pros (low latency), cons (lower throughput/power), and on which machines such things are important (servers, vs PCs).