Thank you for sharing your interesting experience in doing exactly what AOL is talking about. I hadn't thought that spammers would be using zombie PC's to host their web sites -- although AOL's new policy will certainly expand the use of that technique.
You, and others, mention the problem of people who "truly want to visit the spammer's sites." I think the key part of AOL's policy is that they provide absolutely no facility for that. It's the people who really want to visit the spammer's sites that are the problem. Letting them do this continues the vicious cycle of spam. It's a decision that only a paternalistic overbearing ISP like AOL will make, but it makes sense in that environment.
Finally, AOL gets so much spam that they would identify the zombie-host-of-the-day within a few minutes of its deployment. A small staff of spam-site identifiers could lock those down pretty fast.
Overall, this seems like a good attempt, and even more interesting, it appears to be working. In our experience, the amount of spam has not been flat as the article suggests, but still increasing fairly exponentially. A system that lowered the amount of spam sent to AOL is worth strong consideration.
AOL should realize that sharing this list of spamvertizing IP's would help lower the amount of spam they receive even more. Spammers would think twice about send spam to AOL customers if that might block the websites from the whole world. Think about it, AOL -- Share the list!
I wear my Bose QuietComfort II headphones at least 12 hours a day -- they make my noisy office a quiet contemplative place. Once you wear them for a while, you just can't take them off -- they're that good.
I had the previous model as well, and while they were great at noise cancelling, they had the brains in a separate box with a inconveniently short cable. I rigged up a power-supply to them, so I didn't have to keep changing the batteries.
The new ones have the battery and the brains in the headset. As I don't care to listen to music (just silence) they are self-contained and still pretty light.
I have to say that they are not particularly durable, however. The plastic pieces of both sides of the hoop have broken, and are currently held together with gaffer's tape. You'd think that something that cost $300 would be a little more sturdy.
Still, I love them. If they were stolen I'd buy a new pair tomorrow without thinking about it. Probably the gaffer's tape makes them less attractive to thieves:)
There was a use of the word 'morph' in Scientific American, in 1991 I believe, describing the work done in both T2 and Black or White.
And certainly the storyboards of T2, created in late 1989 or early 1990, were full of references to 2D and 3D morphs. We were bidding on things that we had no idea how were were going to accomplish -- but that is something we did on every job (and still do today.)
Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Interestingly, ILM was pushing hard for the alternative 'morf' spelling, and we spent considerable effort seeding our preferred 'morph' spelling into the trade press. Fortunately for us, we were working on music videos and television commercials that showed off the technique well, and ILM only used their tool for a few shots in a few movies.
I think that Black or White is still the most impressive morph ever done -- probably because we spent about six person-months refining it. Jamie Dixon and Amie Slate did the bulk of the work for that video.
While this applies to all digital cameras, almost all digital camera manufacturers pay royalties to Kodak for a license to a number of digital imaging patents. Kodak's labs in Rochester were way out in front of everybody on this, back in the late 80's and early 90's. Unlike Xerox PARC, though, with Xerox's mouse/window based PC's, Kodak filed patents on their innovations, and make a good sum of money licensing them.
The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin--one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
That was the incomparable "The Sirens of Titan". My attempt at a quote (although it's been 20 years).
"The spaceships were completely automated. Pressing the 'on' button caused the spaceship to take off, fly to it's prearranged landing point on Earth, and open the door. The 'off' button didn't do anything, but it was there to make people feel better."
It's a great book. *sigh* it's been more than 30 years, because I recall not understanding the part toward the end describing one of the statues made on Titan as having a "shocking erection". I had no idea what that meant...
There is a fairly large mountain, Mount Wilson, about 15 miles from the center of Los Angeles. It is a weird bit of topography to have such a high mountain right next to a city at sea level, and both the academic and telecommunications fields have taken advantage of it.
I went up there with my son to see the array of telescopes. They have some amazing, unique installlations, including a spectacular optical interferometer.
About a mile from the observatory there is the largest antenna farm you've ever seen. Antennas of every size, geometry, and description.
And -- the keyless entry on my Toyota Spyder didn't work. It was a little puzzling, I assumed that the remote's battery was dead -- but the little light worked just fine. If I put the remote right next to the car, it would work about one time out of 10. Very odd. I thought maybe it was the altitude...
Then when I tried it at the parking garage the next day, it worked perfectly, with its normal range and exuberance. I now believe that it was interference from the antenna farm that was causing it not to work at Mount Wilson.
I'm sure that there was some kind of similar interference in Vegas yesterday. I wonder if Aviation Week will write it up.
The design in the movie is wonderfully rounded and sculptured, it's not just a standard swept flying wing with lots of dihedral.
The lower aspect ratio of the real plane in the movie will give it a little more pitch stability, but the lack of dihedral or any verticle surface will require sophisticated active controls to provide yaw and roll stability. If I recall the movie (and it's been >20 years since I've seen it) she isn't even lying on the wing, right? She's sort of flying above it, held up by the wind. And, sadly, the wing is just way too small to support even her light weight. Flying wings have relatively low coefficients of lift, because they are constrained to have positive moment coefficients. The lift of a wing is (approximately).5 *.0023 * Cl * A * V^2 where.0023 is the density of air, Cl is the coefficient of lift (1 would be an absolute maximum for a flying wing) A is the area of the wing in square feet, and V is the velocity in feet per second. If you do the math, if you want to take off and land at less than 50 mph, (and she does) then the wing has to be at least 30 ft long.
While the flying scale model is impressive, it is so unlike the glorious design in the movie that it doesn't work for me. Sorry.
I believe that it is possible to build an accurate flying version of the wing. It will unfortunately require as a prerequisite large pressurized indoor Disneylands on the Moon.
It's funny. We have fora such as Slashdot and Groklaw, where information gained from hundreds of dedicated people are put to the common good. We have systems like Linux and GCC that are similarly the result of large common effort.
What is lacking is a good system for tracking hardware failures. All we have are anecdotes, until somebody gets sued and we can see their internal documentation.
Imagine, though, that there was a system for tracking hardware. Whenever you would get a drive, you'd put it into the common database. Serial number, model number, date and place of manufacture. Granted, this would take a few minutes. When (not if, they all die eventually) a drive fails, you would call up the record and mark it, along with (perhaps) the symptoms associated with the failure.
But, if tens of thousands of people did this, you would quickly build up a spectacular database of hardware reliability. You would be able to instantly see what drives were better than others, or see if quality was slipping or improving for popular drive makes as time went on.
Soon, much like the moderation system of Slashdot has truly raised the level of discussion here, you would find that the reliabilty ratings driven by this database would force manufacturers to make higher quality drives -- they'd know that they could never force crappy drives on the market as IBM is alleged to have done here.
Now, I'm not volunteering -- yet. But I could be interested. There would be insane pressures from the manufacturers to influence the results, and there would no doubt be some attempts made to stuff the ballot box. But, it would be a good thing.
Only in very rare cases do we give awards to companies. We strive to identify the individuals most responsible for the innovation. That's why the technical awards are on Tom Duff's mantle and not in Pixar's boardroom.
So, while you can say that people working at ILM won 23 Sci-Tech awards -- you can't say that ILM won 23 Sci-Tech awards.
The only recent exceptions have been the Oscars (Awards of Merit) presented to Alias (for Maya) and to Avid. In these cases, it was impossible to reasonably assign credit to a very few key people, but the contribution was too large to be ignored.
Gates, of course, already has done this once. Microsoft bought SoftImage, which in my (widely-shared) opinion was the leading 3D animation software package of the day, back in 1995. Unfortunately for SoftImage users, development froze for the next froze years as they worked on an NT port. Microsoft eventually sold SoftImage to Avid in 1998, I believe for less than they paid for it. This slowed development further, and SoftImage lagged behind other packages.
SoftImage still has its hardcore fans, their current system XSI is really nice for a lot of things. Maya, though, dominates the high-end animation and effects field at this point.
While what you say makes sense intuitively, in practice it is impossible. You just can't build a case for killing programs that are producing interesting results. There will always be people pleading to extend things, and they will succeed.
While you will not find a stronger advocate of the Hubble Space Telescope or a more passionate hater of George Bush (43) than I, he was right in saying that it is time to turn off Hubble and invest in something new. Unfortunately, it's likely that the whining minons will prevail, and they'll find a way to keep Hubble going at the expense of everything else (like, say, the OWL. The OWL would be better in every respect than Hubble, and would cost not much more than the required Shuttle servicing mission)
You see other examples of this in government purchasing. When the US gov't was done buying F14's (still the best interceptor ever made by the US), they made absolutely sure to destroy all the tooling used to build them to insure that no more would ever be built. It seems insane to do that, wouldn't you want to keep the tooling around "just in case?" But Congress has learned that it is weak, and the only way to prevent something from being extended or re-started is to make it absolutely impossible to do so.
I have heard that it's really important that space probes -- especially ones that have large staff to run them like the MER-A and -B -- need to have some kind of life-limiting feature. Otherwise, you could never realistically budget them. Also, you have to consider the strain on the shared resources -- the Deep Space Network in particular. There are quite a few systems that depend on the Deep Space Network, which is monopolized to a large extent by Spirit and Opportunity today.
The other major life-limiting feature on Spirit and Opportunity are the batteries. They can't be cycled indefinitely. Opportunity, in particular, with its arm heater always on, is going to overtax its battery system relatively quickly. It will probably get to its 90-day design life, but not much further.
Spirit will likely go quite a bit longer. It's warmer there than expected, which means that they don't have to run the internal heater at night as much as they thought. They are seriously talking about an extended mission for Spirit -- maybe up to 180 days. This would give it time to drive quite a long ways, maybe even up to the nearby mountains about 1.5 km away.
The Goodmail "solution" is the worst of all possible worlds. What they want to do is convince people doing spam filtering that paid-for spam should still go through. They want to raise the quality of the spam, not get rid of it.
SCO has recently sent a series of increasingly threatening letters to various Unix and Linux customers. In these letters, SCO approaches, and perhaps puts its toe over the line, between legal browbeating and illegal extortion.
These letters threaten the companies over exactly this ABI issue. In the days before the internet and sites like Groklaw, people had to decide on their own, or with their lawyers, what to do about these letters. Each of the victims might attempt to do the kind of research done by Frank Sorenson and Pamely Jones here, but as the victims are probably not intellectual property experts and have their own businesses to run, they might be tempted to pay off the extortionists.
But, now they each one of the victims has the benefit of this research, and can make a much more informed decision. The Groklaw article also provides links to the original source for each of their assertions, so that the recipients of the letters can look at the actual underlying data.
All that said, the article is reminds me of the opening to Get Smart, where Maxwell Smart goes through an almost interminable series of doors to get to his destination. Sorenson and Jones, and their helpers, have found any number of different ways that the code in question is available for use. SCO is screwed on the basis of any one of those.
There's a company in Burbank called CyberFX which has been doing 3D scanning for years using Cyberware scanners. They did all the obvious things with the technology -- reverse engineering, prototyping, sculpture scaling (they did the massive baseball glove a PacBell park), porno (scanning and sculpting rich guys' girlfriends), scanning actors for CG doubles in movies.
What they really hit it big with, though, is dressmaking dummies. In the past, dummies were built by hand, and they were just not very good. They didn't match people very well, and each one was different. Now, (say) DKNY sends their size 4, 6, 8, 10 models to CyberFX, they get scanned, and perfect copies are sent to all the dressmaking facilities around the world. Actors have dummies made that match them perfectly, so wardrobe departments can make clothes that fit perfectly.
Dick Cavdek, who runs the company, has come up with significant mechanical advances on dummies, too, so that they are sturdy, light, and can be broken down to be shipped easily.
I went by there a few years ago, and was absolutely amazed by how one guy just revolutionized an industry.
Actually, with WIPO and WTO, patents are "harmonized" across national borders. Patents are now virtually international. How could you not notice?
Is it in India's interest to respect the patent on AIDS drugs? Of course not. The only problem is that if they don't respect them, they violate their agreement with the WTO, and they can't afford to do that.
Sorry. Patents are international now. Thanks for playing.
Mr Caridi will get a chance to explain what happened to the Academy -- but it's extremely unlikely there will be any criminal prosecution where the doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" applies. It's the rules of the Academy that were violated, and an orginzation like ours can do whatever we feel is appropriate.
A truly absurd amount of care has been taken to track and monitor these screeners this year, up to the point where the Academy itself has taken the role of managing the distribution of screeners, as opposed to having the studios do it themselves as in previous years.
Personally, I think that the war against piracy is unwinnable, and that piracy will destroy the business as it is today;. It has destroyed the Hong Kong film industry already. It's going to be a brutal process here.
Yes -- but while SCO quotes a particular passage from the contract, later on that contract specifically dis-includes the copyright to the Unix source code.
SCO is basing its claim to copyright on Amendment 2, but it is a tenuous claim at best.
The problem with your plan is that there's still no incentive for people to part with their money. Those companies didn't get to be in the Fortune 500 by being stupid.
I think it's far more likely that if SCO asks people for money they'll decline, and if SCO demands money they'll be sued.
The likeliest scenario by far is that SCO is involved in a stock scam, requiring a constant stream of messages in the press. They needn't prevail in court nor need they actually receive any revenue.
I am one of the older members of the Slashdot community, about to turn 44. One of the fun things about the community is the boundless enthusiasm, drive, and accomplishment of the mostly younger people who frequent the site.
I'm stunned, though, by the response of the younger people here to the real threat posed by global warming. After all, it really isn't going to affect me too badly, I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will. Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real. Especially in the higher latitudes, temperatures are many degrees higher in the winter than they have been even thirty years ago. Talk to anybody in Alaska or northern Canada about it -- there's absolutely no question about the fact of climate change.
The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
Your analysis is a reasonable first approximation, and it is probably what is driving the stock price. But, there are some modifications necessary, which make the stock price look truly unreasonably high.
1) The fact that SCO chose to sue for $1B, and then later decided it should be $3B, has almost nothing to do with how much they might win. A jury will decide the damages. Two things that would weigh heavily against SCO are:
One should work to mitigate the damages, if one is being damaged. It appears that SCO is not taking any steps toward mitigation of damages, on the other hand, they seem to be trying to maximize them.
The amount of code that SCO has explicitly identified in question is a tiny fraction of Linux, and the damages will probably be related to that small fraction.
SCO purchased their limited rights to Unix for around $30M, it's difficult to see how one could have damages of $1B for something that cost so little.
2) Any damage award is very likely years in the future. It's unlikely that the trial will begin as scheduled, and IBM is certain to appeal any verdict that isn't a complete vindication of IBM's position. These appeals could easily go on for many years, and SCO would see no money for that whole time. The present value of those future earnings should be discounted dramatically from the anticipated award.
3) The lawyers get 20% of the award.
4) SCO is authorized to issue 45 million shares of stock, of which only about 14 million or so have been issued so far. It's inconceivable that they would not issue that stock in the event that they win the case. This will dilute the stock by a factor of 3.
Anyway, taking all those factors into account, it seems that the current price of the stock cannot be justified based just on the chance of winning the IBM case.
I had found a page of the raw images from Spirit earlier today, and every picture from the rover was one of a pair -- it makes sense, because all the cameras are stereo cameras. It was really quite interesting to see the images in 3D as it showed that the ground has gently rolling hills (dune-like) and is not nearly as uniformly flat as it appears in the monocular images.
Note that the cameras are about a foot apart in most cases, about 5 times the spacing between your eyes, so the 3D is exaggerated by the same amount (alternatively, you can think that it makes the world look 5 times as small.) It's amazing what the third dimension gives you.
Sadly, the amount of JPEG compression on these early images adds a huge amount of noise, that isn't apparent in the single images but makes the stereo pair look very noisy indeed. One would hope that once the high-gain antenna is configured, they can start sending far less compressed images.
The other sad thing is that I lost the URL of the raw images page:(
In Vernor Vinge's exceptional 'A Deepness in the Sky', they are still using variants of Unix tens of thousands of years from now. They characters in the book think that the epoch was set the instant man set foot on the Moon, and they think that's pretty cool.
Anyway, off-topic, but it always brings a smile to my face.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for sharing your interesting experience in doing exactly what AOL is talking about. I hadn't thought that spammers would be using zombie PC's to host their web sites -- although AOL's new policy will certainly expand the use of that technique.
You, and others, mention the problem of people who "truly want to visit the spammer's sites." I think the key part of AOL's policy is that they provide absolutely no facility for that. It's the people who really want to visit the spammer's sites that are the problem. Letting them do this continues the vicious cycle of spam. It's a decision that only a paternalistic overbearing ISP like AOL will make, but it makes sense in that environment.
Finally, AOL gets so much spam that they would identify the zombie-host-of-the-day within a few minutes of its deployment. A small staff of spam-site identifiers could lock those down pretty fast.
Overall, this seems like a good attempt, and even more interesting, it appears to be working. In our experience, the amount of spam has not been flat as the article suggests, but still increasing fairly exponentially. A system that lowered the amount of spam sent to AOL is worth strong consideration.
AOL should realize that sharing this list of spamvertizing IP's would help lower the amount of spam they receive even more. Spammers would think twice about send spam to AOL customers if that might block the websites from the whole world. Think about it, AOL -- Share the list!
thad
I wear my Bose QuietComfort II headphones at least 12 hours a day -- they make my noisy office a quiet contemplative place. Once you wear them for a while, you just can't take them off -- they're that good.
:)
I had the previous model as well, and while they were great at noise cancelling, they had the brains in a separate box with a inconveniently short cable. I rigged up a power-supply to them, so I didn't have to keep changing the batteries.
The new ones have the battery and the brains in the headset. As I don't care to listen to music (just silence) they are self-contained and still pretty light.
I have to say that they are not particularly durable, however. The plastic pieces of both sides of the hoop have broken, and are currently held together with gaffer's tape. You'd think that something that cost $300 would be a little more sturdy.
Still, I love them. If they were stolen I'd buy a new pair tomorrow without thinking about it. Probably the gaffer's tape makes them less attractive to thieves
Thad
There was a use of the word 'morph' in Scientific American, in 1991 I believe, describing the work done in both T2 and Black or White.
And certainly the storyboards of T2, created in late 1989 or early 1990, were full of references to 2D and 3D morphs. We were bidding on things that we had no idea how were were going to accomplish -- but that is something we did on every job (and still do today.)
thad
Somebody at Stanford has done research into the word 'morph'. It came into widespread use with the debut of Michael Jackson's Black or White video of 1991. I wrote the software for that video at PDI (Pacific Data Images) in 1990, and presented it at Siggraph in 1992.
Interestingly, ILM was pushing hard for the alternative 'morf' spelling, and we spent considerable effort seeding our preferred 'morph' spelling into the trade press. Fortunately for us, we were working on music videos and television commercials that showed off the technique well, and ILM only used their tool for a few shots in a few movies.
I think that Black or White is still the most impressive morph ever done -- probably because we spent about six person-months refining it. Jamie Dixon and Amie Slate did the bulk of the work for that video.
Thad Beier
While this applies to all digital cameras, almost all digital camera manufacturers pay royalties to Kodak for a license to a number of digital imaging patents. Kodak's labs in Rochester were way out in front of everybody on this, back in the late 80's and early 90's. Unlike Xerox PARC, though, with Xerox's mouse/window based PC's, Kodak filed patents on their innovations, and make a good sum of money licensing them.
Actual quote:
The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin--one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
From T-Quote
thad
That was the incomparable "The Sirens of Titan". My attempt at a quote (although it's been 20 years).
"The spaceships were completely automated. Pressing the 'on' button caused the spaceship to take off, fly to it's prearranged landing point on Earth, and open the door. The 'off' button didn't do anything, but it was there to make people feel better."
It's a great book. *sigh* it's been more than 30 years, because I recall not understanding the part toward the end describing one of the statues made on Titan as having a "shocking erection". I had no idea what that meant...
thad
There is a fairly large mountain, Mount Wilson, about 15 miles from the center of Los Angeles. It is a weird bit of topography to have such a high mountain right next to a city at sea level, and both the academic and telecommunications fields have taken advantage of it.
I went up there with my son to see the array of telescopes. They have some amazing, unique installlations, including a spectacular optical interferometer.
About a mile from the observatory there is the largest antenna farm you've ever seen. Antennas of every size, geometry, and description.
And -- the keyless entry on my Toyota Spyder didn't work. It was a little puzzling, I assumed that the remote's battery was dead -- but the little light worked just fine. If I put the remote right next to the car, it would work about one time out of 10. Very odd. I thought maybe it was the altitude...
Then when I tried it at the parking garage the next day, it worked perfectly, with its normal range and exuberance. I now believe that it was interference from the antenna farm that was causing it not to work at Mount Wilson.
I'm sure that there was some kind of similar interference in Vegas yesterday. I wonder if Aviation Week will write it up.
Thad
The design in the movie is wonderfully rounded and sculptured, it's not just a standard swept flying wing with lots of dihedral.
.5 * .0023 * Cl * A * V^2 where .0023 is the density of air, Cl is the coefficient of lift (1 would be an absolute maximum for a flying wing) A is the area of the wing in square feet, and V is the velocity in feet per second. If you do the math, if you want to take off and land at less than 50 mph, (and she does) then the wing has to be at least 30 ft long.
The lower aspect ratio of the real plane in the movie will give it a little more pitch stability, but the lack of dihedral or any verticle surface will require sophisticated active controls to provide yaw and roll stability. If I recall the movie (and it's been >20 years since I've seen it) she isn't even lying on the wing, right? She's sort of flying above it, held up by the wind. And, sadly, the wing is just way too small to support even her light weight. Flying wings have relatively low coefficients of lift, because they are constrained to have positive moment coefficients. The lift of a wing is (approximately)
While the flying scale model is impressive, it is so unlike the glorious design in the movie that it doesn't work for me. Sorry.
I believe that it is possible to build an accurate flying version of the wing. It will unfortunately require as a prerequisite large pressurized indoor Disneylands on the Moon.
Thad
It's funny. We have fora such as Slashdot and Groklaw, where information gained from hundreds of dedicated people are put to the common good. We have systems like Linux and GCC that are similarly the result of large common effort.
What is lacking is a good system for tracking hardware failures. All we have are anecdotes, until somebody gets sued and we can see their internal documentation.
Imagine, though, that there was a system for tracking hardware. Whenever you would get a drive, you'd put it into the common database. Serial number, model number, date and place of manufacture. Granted, this would take a few minutes. When (not if, they all die eventually) a drive fails, you would call up the record and mark it, along with (perhaps) the symptoms associated with the failure.
But, if tens of thousands of people did this, you would quickly build up a spectacular database of hardware reliability. You would be able to instantly see what drives were better than others, or see if quality was slipping or improving for popular drive makes as time went on.
Soon, much like the moderation system of Slashdot has truly raised the level of discussion here, you would find that the reliabilty ratings driven by this database would force manufacturers to make higher quality drives -- they'd know that they could never force crappy drives on the market as IBM is alleged to have done here.
Now, I'm not volunteering -- yet. But I could be interested. There would be insane pressures from the manufacturers to influence the results, and there would no doubt be some attempts made to stuff the ballot box. But, it would be a good thing.
Thad
Only in very rare cases do we give awards to companies. We strive to identify the individuals most responsible for the innovation. That's why the technical awards are on Tom Duff's mantle and not in Pixar's boardroom.
So, while you can say that people working at ILM won 23 Sci-Tech awards -- you can't say that ILM won 23 Sci-Tech awards.
The only recent exceptions have been the Oscars (Awards of Merit) presented to Alias (for Maya) and to Avid. In these cases, it was impossible to reasonably assign credit to a very few key people, but the contribution was too large to be ignored.
Thad Beier
Gates, of course, already has done this once. Microsoft bought SoftImage, which in my (widely-shared) opinion was the leading 3D animation software package of the day, back in 1995. Unfortunately for SoftImage users, development froze for the next froze years as they worked on an NT port. Microsoft eventually sold SoftImage to Avid in 1998, I believe for less than they paid for it. This slowed development further, and SoftImage lagged behind other packages.
SoftImage still has its hardcore fans, their current system XSI is really nice for a lot of things. Maya, though, dominates the high-end animation and effects field at this point.
thad
Gorimek,
While what you say makes sense intuitively, in practice it is impossible. You just can't build a case for killing programs that are producing interesting results. There will always be people pleading to extend things, and they will succeed.
While you will not find a stronger advocate of the Hubble Space Telescope or a more passionate hater of George Bush (43) than I, he was right in saying that it is time to turn off Hubble and invest in something new. Unfortunately, it's likely that the whining minons will prevail, and they'll find a way to keep Hubble going at the expense of everything else (like, say, the OWL. The OWL would be better in every respect than Hubble, and would cost not much more than the required Shuttle servicing mission)
You see other examples of this in government purchasing. When the US gov't was done buying F14's (still the best interceptor ever made by the US), they made absolutely sure to destroy all the tooling used to build them to insure that no more would ever be built. It seems insane to do that, wouldn't you want to keep the tooling around "just in case?" But Congress has learned that it is weak, and the only way to prevent something from being extended or re-started is to make it absolutely impossible to do so.
It's the only way.
thad
I have heard that it's really important that space probes -- especially ones that have large staff to run them like the MER-A and -B -- need to have some kind of life-limiting feature. Otherwise, you could never realistically budget them. Also, you have to consider the strain on the shared resources -- the Deep Space Network in particular. There are quite a few systems that depend on the Deep Space Network, which is monopolized to a large extent by Spirit and Opportunity today.
The other major life-limiting feature on Spirit and Opportunity are the batteries. They can't be cycled indefinitely. Opportunity, in particular, with its arm heater always on, is going to overtax its battery system relatively quickly. It will probably get to its 90-day design life, but not much further.
Spirit will likely go quite a bit longer. It's warmer there than expected, which means that they don't have to run the internal heater at night as much as they thought. They are seriously talking about an extended mission for Spirit -- maybe up to 180 days. This would give it time to drive quite a long ways, maybe even up to the nearby mountains about 1.5 km away.
thad
The Goodmail "solution" is the worst of all possible worlds. What they want to do is convince people doing spam filtering that paid-for spam should still go through. They want to raise the quality of the spam, not get rid of it.
Please. That's not the answer.
thad
SCO has recently sent a series of increasingly threatening letters to various Unix and Linux customers. In these letters, SCO approaches, and perhaps puts its toe over the line, between legal browbeating and illegal extortion.
These letters threaten the companies over exactly this ABI issue. In the days before the internet and sites like Groklaw, people had to decide on their own, or with their lawyers, what to do about these letters. Each of the victims might attempt to do the kind of research done by Frank Sorenson and Pamely Jones here, but as the victims are probably not intellectual property experts and have their own businesses to run, they might be tempted to pay off the extortionists.
But, now they each one of the victims has the benefit of this research, and can make a much more informed decision. The Groklaw article also provides links to the original source for each of their assertions, so that the recipients of the letters can look at the actual underlying data.
All that said, the article is reminds me of the opening to Get Smart, where Maxwell Smart goes through an almost interminable series of doors to get to his destination. Sorenson and Jones, and their helpers, have found any number of different ways that the code in question is available for use. SCO is screwed on the basis of any one of those.
Thad Beier
There's a company in Burbank called CyberFX which has been doing 3D scanning for years using Cyberware scanners. They did all the obvious things with the technology -- reverse engineering, prototyping, sculpture scaling (they did the massive baseball glove a PacBell park), porno (scanning and sculpting rich guys' girlfriends), scanning actors for CG doubles in movies.
What they really hit it big with, though, is dressmaking dummies. In the past, dummies were built by hand, and they were just not very good. They didn't match people very well, and each one was different. Now, (say) DKNY sends their size 4, 6, 8, 10 models to CyberFX, they get scanned, and perfect copies are sent to all the dressmaking facilities around the world. Actors have dummies made that match them perfectly, so wardrobe departments can make clothes that fit perfectly.
Dick Cavdek, who runs the company, has come up with significant mechanical advances on dummies, too, so that they are sturdy, light, and can be broken down to be shipped easily.
I went by there a few years ago, and was absolutely amazed by how one guy just revolutionized an industry.
thad
Actually, with WIPO and WTO, patents are "harmonized" across national borders. Patents are now virtually international. How could you not notice?
Is it in India's interest to respect the patent on AIDS drugs? Of course not. The only problem is that if they don't respect them, they violate their agreement with the WTO, and they can't afford to do that.
Sorry. Patents are international now. Thanks for playing.
thad
Mr Caridi will get a chance to explain what happened to the Academy -- but it's extremely unlikely there will be any criminal prosecution where the doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" applies. It's the rules of the Academy that were violated, and an orginzation like ours can do whatever we feel is appropriate.
A truly absurd amount of care has been taken to track and monitor these screeners this year, up to the point where the Academy itself has taken the role of managing the distribution of screeners, as opposed to having the studios do it themselves as in previous years.
Personally, I think that the war against piracy is unwinnable, and that piracy will destroy the business as it is today;. It has destroyed the Hong Kong film industry already. It's going to be a brutal process here.
thad
Yes -- but while SCO quotes a particular passage from the contract, later on that contract specifically dis-includes the copyright to the Unix source code.
SCO is basing its claim to copyright on Amendment 2, but it is a tenuous claim at best.
thad
The problem with your plan is that there's still no incentive for people to part with their money. Those companies didn't get to be in the Fortune 500 by being stupid.
I think it's far more likely that if SCO asks people for money they'll decline, and if SCO demands money they'll be sued.
The likeliest scenario by far is that SCO is involved in a stock scam, requiring a constant stream of messages in the press. They needn't prevail in court nor need they actually receive any revenue.
thad
I am one of the older members of the Slashdot community, about to turn 44. One of the fun things about the community is the boundless enthusiasm, drive, and accomplishment of the mostly younger people who frequent the site.
I'm stunned, though, by the response of the younger people here to the real threat posed by global warming. After all, it really isn't going to affect me too badly, I won't be here in 2050 -- but you will. Global warming, for whatever reason, is undeniably real. Especially in the higher latitudes, temperatures are many degrees higher in the winter than they have been even thirty years ago. Talk to anybody in Alaska or northern Canada about it -- there's absolutely no question about the fact of climate change.
The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
thad
1) The fact that SCO chose to sue for $1B, and then later decided it should be $3B, has almost nothing to do with how much they might win. A jury will decide the damages. Two things that would weigh heavily against SCO are:
One should work to mitigate the damages, if one is being damaged. It appears that SCO is not taking any steps toward mitigation of damages, on the other hand, they seem to be trying to maximize them.
The amount of code that SCO has explicitly identified in question is a tiny fraction of Linux, and the damages will probably be related to that small fraction.
SCO purchased their limited rights to Unix for around $30M, it's difficult to see how one could have damages of $1B for something that cost so little.
2) Any damage award is very likely years in the future. It's unlikely that the trial will begin as scheduled, and IBM is certain to appeal any verdict that isn't a complete vindication of IBM's position. These appeals could easily go on for many years, and SCO would see no money for that whole time. The present value of those future earnings should be discounted dramatically from the anticipated award.
3) The lawyers get 20% of the award.
4) SCO is authorized to issue 45 million shares of stock, of which only about 14 million or so have been issued so far. It's inconceivable that they would not issue that stock in the event that they win the case. This will dilute the stock by a factor of 3.
Anyway, taking all those factors into account, it seems that the current price of the stock cannot be justified based just on the chance of winning the IBM case.
thad
I had found a page of the raw images from Spirit earlier today, and every picture from the rover was one of a pair -- it makes sense, because all the cameras are stereo cameras. It was really quite interesting to see the images in 3D as it showed that the ground has gently rolling hills (dune-like) and is not nearly as uniformly flat as it appears in the monocular images.
:(
Note that the cameras are about a foot apart in most cases, about 5 times the spacing between your eyes, so the 3D is exaggerated by the same amount (alternatively, you can think that it makes the world look 5 times as small.) It's amazing what the third dimension gives you.
Sadly, the amount of JPEG compression on these early images adds a huge amount of noise, that isn't apparent in the single images but makes the stereo pair look very noisy indeed. One would hope that once the high-gain antenna is configured, they can start sending far less compressed images.
The other sad thing is that I lost the URL of the raw images page
thad
In Vernor Vinge's exceptional 'A Deepness in the Sky', they are still using variants of Unix tens of thousands of years from now. They characters in the book think that the epoch was set the instant man set foot on the Moon, and they think that's pretty cool.
Anyway, off-topic, but it always brings a smile to my face.
thad