You are right about Wikipedia Media Foundation, I apologize. I suspect it is just a matter of time before WMF becomes flush with cash though, they just need to figure out an incremental strategy that allows them to place advertising of every page without the community crying foul. They are something like the 10th most popular site on the internet, putting even just Google AdSense up on every page would result easily in a hundreds million plus in revenue a year.
You do realize that this is formally a "libel case" as per the G&M story. This means that Crooke is alleging and will have to prove in court that the material in question is of an untrue nature. Thus from Crooke's perspective, this is not a case about "negative information" but about untrue information. Of course Crooke could be wrong, if he is, he sure will be wasting a lot of money on these suits.
You also claim that this lawsuit is a SLAPP. But typical SLAPPs lawsuits differ from this one though in an important way, Crooke has sued two very large firms that have more than enough money to defend themselves: Google and Wikipedia. SLAPPs, since they are based on intimating people who can't afford to defend themselves, usually are targeted only against small folk, not the big guys. Google and Wikipedia are unlikely to fold simply because the lawsuit was filed, and thus I do not believe this particular lawsuit of Crooke can be classified as your SLAPP.
It is true that libel suits always, by their nature, temporarily draw an increase in attention to the material in question, but if he is to win such a case, even if he doesn't win significant damages, it clears his name and damages the reputations of those who engaged in the libel against him. Having a clear cut ruling in his favor is better than leaving these rumors to fester, especially if they are being spread by individuals who have ulterior motives. This case could serve to right the wrong again him, if indeed he was wronged. (BTW, it's spelled "libel", "liable" is a different word with a differing meaning.)
I strongly suspect newtley expected to be named in the suit as his website had helped to distributed the allegedly libelous material in question. You'll notice in newtley's original posting he mentions that there are potentially others who are going to be named in the suit. I'm not at all involved in this internet spat, but I've seen these things before in all their nastiness (and these types of spats get really nasty when people start to hid behind anonymity) and this type of behavior on newtley's part fits the pattern of someone who is personally involved in the matter. I could be wrong, I'm just calling it as I see it.
This case could be about intimidation, but from that perspective it doesn't make sense to include in the suit companies like Google who have more than enough funds to defend themselves. If you simply wanted to engage in intimidation wouldn't you just sue the small guys?
The submitter is trying to "warn others" about what exactly? The case is about libel, the spreading of false information that is designed to cause harm to a person's reputation and their ability to conduct themselves in society. Being able to libel someone is not a right, it is not about freedom of speech, it is not about the truth. Whether this is in fact libel is not for me to decide, since I don't have the facts, but if it is this libel, Crookes is within his right to sue those that are purposefully trying to cause him harm for damages. I don't think he'll have much success with Google, but the individuals behind it should be held accountable if it is indeed libel, even if they are trying to be anonymous here or on Wikipedia.
Strange, my original comment was moderated as flamebait. First time one of my comments has been moderated as such, must be having an off day.
I still think the individual who submitted this story did so for self-interested PR reasons. The individual who submitted this story has published negative information on the individual who has now filed suit and has continued this pattern by misportraying/ridiculing the suit. This type of behavior is discoverable in court.
The submitter of this post is in a position of conflict of interest and appears to be using SlashDot as a means to denigrate the individual behind the lawsuit. As it is clear from newtley's post, newtley himself is highly been involved in whatever shenanigans that are going on here. It is unfortunate and dishonest that newtley is using this forum as a platform to smear his opponent. Just from newtley's egregious behavior here, I can imagine that aspects of this case have more merit that he is portraying.
AC wrote: "most Africans are struggling to find enough food to keep them alive for another day"
That is the case for some Africans, especially the ones you see on TV in those "sponsor a child" shows, but the whole continent isn't starving. AIDS right now is a much better deal that starvation I understand.
I noticed in Chris Harrison's website a lot of talk of "the rest of the world enters front and center stage" but while he discussed North America, Europe, Asia and South America, he didn't mention Africa at all. Any word on what's up with Africa and internet usage, let alone the most popular domains? I know little about this subject, but am curious now.
The fine folks at Wikibooks has begun work on a technical companion to Charles Stross's most recent novel. You can find the Accelerando Technical Companion here.
On the USPTO webpage for this application (here) it says that its status is "Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney." Anyone can file any trademark -- I could file one for the term "Microsoft" -- and it would get to this stage.
The key is getting your trademark application approved. The main impediment is from either already registed trademarks that are similar in name or from people that file oppositions. The process of filing an opposition is described on this USTPO page.
As someone who knows a little bit about trademarks I can say that the individual who filed this is really wasting their time -- the only way he could get and keep this trademark is if no one noticed he filed for it.
I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.
Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.
Cool stuff. We will be posting a new beta on the site later today -- with a couple enhancements.
I just loaded up Deadline Monitor here and it shows that we have 98 machines current rendering, 3 idle, 41 offline (user workstations) and 5 machines disabled. Overnight during really heavy production loads (i.e. back in February with Scooby Doo 2) we would have all possibly machines rendering except for the 5 or so disabled ones (which are file servers or underpowered machines.) Thus from a pragmatic standpoint it scales at least to 150 machines without any trouble.
How big is the blur render farm?
We did this because we primarily use Discreet's 3dsmax (with Brazil and V-Ray) and Eyeon's Digital Fusion. We have found that most existing render farm solutions do not support these two packages very well -- thus we decided to develop our own custom solution.
We also support
After Effects, Alias|Maya, AIR
and other RenderMan compliant
rendering packages.
Of interest to the general Slashdot crowd may be that this Deadline Render
Management Solution is based on the open source (BSD License) Exocortex C#
library originally released with this
C# 3D Engine. Deadline is
built with C# in the hopes that using Mono
we will be able to start supporting Linux with minimal extra effort.
I'll be reading all the posts on this Slashdot thread but I would also appreciate any direct feedback on our current beta product.
We also found solutions such as Rush and Smedge to be less than user friendly in many respects. Thus we have tried as best as we could to increase a 3D package that is not well supported by most render farm management solutions -- except for Discreet's Backburner (which we found not that that scalable.)
Slashdot Mirror
You are right about Wikipedia Media Foundation, I apologize. I suspect it is just a matter of time before WMF becomes flush with cash though, they just need to figure out an incremental strategy that allows them to place advertising of every page without the community crying foul. They are something like the 10th most popular site on the internet, putting even just Google AdSense up on every page would result easily in a hundreds million plus in revenue a year.
You do realize that this is formally a "libel case" as per the G&M story. This means that Crooke is alleging and will have to prove in court that the material in question is of an untrue nature. Thus from Crooke's perspective, this is not a case about "negative information" but about untrue information. Of course Crooke could be wrong, if he is, he sure will be wasting a lot of money on these suits.
You also claim that this lawsuit is a SLAPP. But typical SLAPPs lawsuits differ from this one though in an important way, Crooke has sued two very large firms that have more than enough money to defend themselves: Google and Wikipedia. SLAPPs, since they are based on intimating people who can't afford to defend themselves, usually are targeted only against small folk, not the big guys. Google and Wikipedia are unlikely to fold simply because the lawsuit was filed, and thus I do not believe this particular lawsuit of Crooke can be classified as your SLAPP.
It is true that libel suits always, by their nature, temporarily draw an increase in attention to the material in question, but if he is to win such a case, even if he doesn't win significant damages, it clears his name and damages the reputations of those who engaged in the libel against him. Having a clear cut ruling in his favor is better than leaving these rumors to fester, especially if they are being spread by individuals who have ulterior motives. This case could serve to right the wrong again him, if indeed he was wronged. (BTW, it's spelled "libel", "liable" is a different word with a differing meaning.)
I strongly suspect newtley expected to be named in the suit as his website had helped to distributed the allegedly libelous material in question. You'll notice in newtley's original posting he mentions that there are potentially others who are going to be named in the suit.
I'm not at all involved in this internet spat, but I've seen these things before in all their nastiness (and these types of spats get really nasty when people start to hid behind anonymity) and this type of behavior on newtley's part fits the pattern of someone who is personally involved in the matter. I could be wrong, I'm just calling it as I see it.
This case could be about intimidation, but from that perspective it doesn't make sense to include in the suit companies like Google who have more than enough funds to defend themselves. If you simply wanted to engage in intimidation wouldn't you just sue the small guys?
The submitter is trying to "warn others" about what exactly? The case is about libel, the spreading of false information that is designed to cause harm to a person's reputation and their ability to conduct themselves in society. Being able to libel someone is not a right, it is not about freedom of speech, it is not about the truth. Whether this is in fact libel is not for me to decide, since I don't have the facts, but if it is this libel, Crookes is within his right to sue those that are purposefully trying to cause him harm for damages. I don't think he'll have much success with Google, but the individuals behind it should be held accountable if it is indeed libel, even if they are trying to be anonymous here or on Wikipedia.
Strange, my original comment was moderated as flamebait. First time one of my comments has been moderated as such, must be having an off day. I still think the individual who submitted this story did so for self-interested PR reasons. The individual who submitted this story has published negative information on the individual who has now filed suit and has continued this pattern by misportraying/ridiculing the suit. This type of behavior is discoverable in court.
The submitter of this post is in a position of conflict of interest and appears to be using SlashDot as a means to denigrate the individual behind the lawsuit. As it is clear from newtley's post, newtley himself is highly been involved in whatever shenanigans that are going on here. It is unfortunate and dishonest that newtley is using this forum as a platform to smear his opponent. Just from newtley's egregious behavior here, I can imagine that aspects of this case have more merit that he is portraying.
AC wrote: "most Africans are struggling to find enough food to keep them alive for another day" That is the case for some Africans, especially the ones you see on TV in those "sponsor a child" shows, but the whole continent isn't starving. AIDS right now is a much better deal that starvation I understand.
I noticed in Chris Harrison's website a lot of talk of "the rest of the world enters front and center stage" but while he discussed North America, Europe, Asia and South America, he didn't mention Africa at all. Any word on what's up with Africa and internet usage, let alone the most popular domains? I know little about this subject, but am curious now.
It's been posted for 40 minutes and no comments. Something has to be wrong.
The fine folks at Wikibooks has begun work on a technical companion to Charles Stross's most recent novel. You can find the Accelerando Technical Companion here.
On the USPTO webpage for this application (here) it says that its status is "Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney." Anyone can file any trademark -- I could file one for the term "Microsoft" -- and it would get to this stage.
The key is getting your trademark application approved. The main impediment is from either already registed trademarks that are similar in name or from people that file oppositions. The process of filing an opposition is described on this USTPO page.
As someone who knows a little bit about trademarks I can say that the individual who filed this is really wasting their time -- the only way he could get and keep this trademark is if no one noticed he filed for it.
-ben houston
http://www.exocortex.org/ben
A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.
I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.
Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.
-ben
Cool stuff. We will be posting a new beta on the site later today -- with a couple enhancements. I just loaded up Deadline Monitor here and it shows that we have 98 machines current rendering, 3 idle, 41 offline (user workstations) and 5 machines disabled. Overnight during really heavy production loads (i.e. back in February with Scooby Doo 2) we would have all possibly machines rendering except for the 5 or so disabled ones (which are file servers or underpowered machines.) Thus from a pragmatic standpoint it scales at least to 150 machines without any trouble. How big is the blur render farm?
We did this because we primarily use Discreet's 3dsmax (with Brazil and V-Ray) and Eyeon's Digital Fusion. We have found that most existing render farm solutions do not support these two packages very well -- thus we decided to develop our own custom solution. We also support After Effects, Alias|Maya, AIR and other RenderMan compliant rendering packages.
Of interest to the general Slashdot crowd may be that this Deadline Render Management Solution is based on the open source (BSD License) Exocortex C# library originally released with this C# 3D Engine. Deadline is built with C# in the hopes that using Mono we will be able to start supporting Linux with minimal extra effort.
I'll be reading all the posts on this Slashdot thread but I would also appreciate any direct feedback on our current beta product. We also found solutions such as Rush and Smedge to be less than user friendly in many respects. Thus we have tried as best as we could to increase a 3D package that is not well supported by most render farm management solutions -- except for Discreet's Backburner (which we found not that that scalable.)