While I believe that the framers knew what they were doing when they gave small states a disproportionate share of the electoral vote, and I agree with that -- they could not have anticipated the biggest result of the process. That is, of course, that neither candidate campaigned at all in the huge majority of the country, instead focusing all their efforts on a few key battleground states.
If you believe that campaigning informs the electorate; or that campaigning nationwide would force a candidate to be more candid with his views on all issues, then you have to ditch the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college.
Making it a proportionate representation, while still giving Wyoming 3 votes, would make the election more 'democratic', where everybody's vote would be sought relatively equally.
The Soviets, like the Americans, did similar extremely-high-altitude balloon flights with people jumping for recovery. They didn't use drogue chutes for stabilization, though; at least not at first.
They started spinning so fast that they broke apart. The air is so thin that there's no damping whatsoever.
This is another child of Paul McCready's genius. He is one of my all-time heroes. Here's a short history of his astonishing acheivements.
He was a competitive glider pilot, and won the national championship a few years in a row. After the last time, he showed everybody the little circular slide-rule he had developed to maximize speed and range (the McCready SpeedRing) which pretty much revolutionized the sport.
In the mid 70's, he was in debt to some friends for $50,000 -- and he heard about the Kramer Prize, $50,000 to the first person to fly a human powered aircraft through a 1-mile figure-eight course. McCready was building indoor duration models at the time (unbelieveably fragile creations of wire and film that would fly for 20 minutes on a few twists of a rubber band) and realized that that same technology could be used to make a plane that would win the prize. The result was the Gossamer Condor -- a externally-braced plane to make something as light and large-span as possible. It easily won the prize. Unfortunately, he went through about $100,000 to build it. Later, he won the next Kramer Prize for the first human-powered plane to fly the English Channel, and then build a few early solar powered planes (piloted by a very light young woman).
GM hired McCready to build a car to win a solar-car race across Australia. McCready's astonishing realization was that it was all about aerodynamics -- where other teams were trying to maximize the amount of energy they were getting from the sun, McCready was worried about going really fast. It won the race by several days!
McCready built a flying Pteradon for a Smithsonian movie. It flew, flapped its wings for power, and was successfully filmed for the IMAX film.
And then there are these flying wings. Truly astonishing machines. They currently hold the record for the highest-flying propeller-powered planes, and are just (to me) insanely beautiful.
Here is a gallery of photos of Helios. This picture in particular I find just sublime. What a machine. What a guy.
You all recall how the Pathfinder landed on Mars,
it inflated giant airbags aroung itself and just plummeted to the ground from a few hundred feet altitude.
It seems to me that this would be the only possible recovery from this air-scooter; as you would often not be high enough for a parachute to work; and the typical helicopter autorotation would clearly not work.
But, deflated airbags don't weigh much or take up much space, and can be deployed instantly. If you could get the terminal velocity down to 80fps or so with big enough airbags (no problem) then there'd have to be about 5ft of airbag between your bod and the ground to have a pretty survivable crash-landing.
Without that; these will not be practical. Having no recourse for engine failure absolutely not an option -- piston engines are *way* too unreliable for this.
You say It is impossible to add a non-audible watermark to music that can survive a well done perceptual encoding...
All watermarking need do, really, is hide 1 bit in a 3MB file. There are no encoding schemes that purport to squeeze every single bit of redundancy out of an audio file.
That said, I agree that once you publish the watermarking scheme (either by doing so explicitly or shipping products that can be reverse engineered [all products, really]) then it will be inevitably defeated.
'When a publication makes such a completely wrong, unfounded, anonymous slander, I think it deserves a very strong answer,' Chariglione told Inside.
And bluster like this deserves nothing. Janelle Brown and Salon put their individual and corporate necks on the line; and all Chariglione does is spew hot air. If they've published something inaccurate, then you know that they'd be sued in a hot minute -- we know just how fast the music industry sues anything that crosses their lawyers hair-trigger gunsights.
I am certain that it is possible to crack the SDMI watermarking, but I am surprised that it was done so easily.
More power to Brown and Salon for having the guts to publish this article. We need more of that kind of courage.
If Microsoft or Cisco ever paid divedends in their corporate histories, your argument might have a little more merit. As they haven't, I don't see the point.
thad
My company does visual effects for films, and we make our own films, too. It's surprising to me just how few of my colleagues consider the future of the industry, most of use are too busy on our current projects to worry much about what is going to happen in a few years, when the bandwidth and storage problems inherent in sharing movies go away completely.
I do worry about it, and am pretty pessimistic. The movie business has nowhere near the margins of the music business, the margins are on the order of 0-10% instead of 40% or so. This gives the movie business much less leeway, box-office profits for movies will be destroyed much more quickly when NapsterForMovies makes its debut. Another reason for the quicker demise of the current movie profit model is that Napster et. al. has taught the current generation of 14-24 year olds (who by 50% of the movie tickets) that copyright is obsolete.
Things are not quite so bleak, though, when you look at the big picture for where movies make their money. While the domestic movie box-office this year will be around $4 billion (of which the studios get half, sharing it with the theater owners), I've heard reasonable reports that movie merchandising, and other ancillary ways turning movies into money, brought in something like $100 billion last year. Last year was a good year for that, but it shows that things might not be so bleak, after all.
This will dramatically change the ways that movies are made, and which movies are made; once the revolution happens. It might make sense to give movies away, it might even make sense to pay people to go to movies, if that increases the market for the merchandising.
Every other model I've thought about for continuing the movie business once it's trivial to download movies seems to fail immediately, but I'd love to hear other people's ideas! Gotta feed the kids, after all.
I read this book not long after its publication, and just loved it. I had heard that Brunner wrote the book as a dare, more or less -- that it's a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock, not merely inspired by it. Brunner can write about almost anything and make it interesting...I say almost because of his Squares of the City a novelization of a chess game as a Latin-American political thriller.
The characters in the book are black-and-white, it's true, but it's all the more fun because Brunner's palate of blacks and whites are somehow more intense than those of other writers. Nickie Halfinger is a great character, recreated several times throughout the book as he adopts and integrates different personas.
Thinking back on the book a few years after I read it, I notice parallels to events in my own life; and that made me wonder about those events. These are almost certainly coincidences...but -- all but fans of conspiracy theories can stop here.
When I was 12 (in 1972) the state of Maryland held a 'contest' where they took the top 2% of kids on the standardized tests of the day, and brought them to Johns Hopkins University to take the SATs. The top 2% of those were brought in for a huge battery of further tests, both academic and psychological. The top few percent of those kids were enrolled in something called the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Prococious Youth (SMSPY, later SMPY as they dropped the Scientifically part).
We were given special math courses on weekends in lieu of our middle- and high-school classes, basically to see how fast a bunch of kids could learn things. These classes were amazing; wonderfully taught by gifted instructors. We were encouraged to and given the opportunity to enroll in local community colleges for further math and science courses. Many of us then went to college at rediculously early ages (I was in the middle of the pack of SMPY kids at 15 when I started at JHU.)
All through this, we were monitored and profiled, but provided practically no guidance or counseling. Sadly, this was a disaster for many of us; we couldn't handle the pressure of Johns Hopkins (which was, and is, an incredibly competetive and cutthroat school.) I find this lack of guidance or even simple compassion unforgivable now.
The sinister part of this, though, is that a relatively large percentage of my SMPY-mates went on to work at the NSA, nearby in Fort Meade, MD. It just seems a little too convenient to me -- and reading Shockwave Rider a few years out of school (after getting kicked out myself, but fortuitously landing in the groundbreaking computer graphics facility of the day at NYIT [whew!]) made the parallels of TSR's Tarnower to SMPY clear and disturbing.
Anyway -- I now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
From what I have read in Aviation Week (which I read religiously), the hydrogen tank is not repaired, and in fact it is completely unclear what type of tank will be used if the X33 is ever going to be assembled. I don't think that the current tank was poorly manufactured, it was poorly designed.
I can't find any reference to the NP-19 on the web, nor to I recall see it in AvWeek. What is it?
And as for running out of money, the problem apparently is that NASA believes that they've given Lockheed enough money; and that Lockheed should pay for the most of the rest of the work themselves, and Lockheed couldn't be less interested in doing that.
I'd be quite interested, and even happy, to be proven wrong, if you can do it.
Everything about the X-33 project was decided by politics and not science. People all through the project, from the top to the bottom, knew that the projections were insanely optimistic at the most charitable, bald-face lies would be a better description.
SSTO systems are, in some ways, extremely simple to evaluate. To get a payload to orbit without staging, you have to have both an extraordinarily efficient engine and a remarkably high mass ratio (fuel:everything-else ratio). It was obvious that the X33 prototype wasn't going to get to orbit very early; the mass ratio just wasn't there; even with rediculously risky materials and structures were specified. So, there were two obvious things to do at that point:
1) Kill the project
2) Lower expectations to a technology demonstrator, and cut way back on the risk.
They, of course, chose the insane third option, maintain the (extremely expensive) exotic materials, but still give up on the the idea of going to orbit. So, they ended up with failed tanks, and nothing to demonstrate whatsoever.
The aerospike engines really are a great idea, it would have been extremely useful to see them fly. As it is, there is absolutely no question that the project will be killed. Lockheed even wants it dead. And why not? They got all the money that they could ever get from the program, and they didn't actually have to produce anything at all.
It's very likely that almost every part of the alleged rocket wouldn't have worked; the tanks were just the first thing to fail spectacularly. The engines had very serious problems too (the ramps that are the key to the aerospike concept were much harder to fabricate and cool than 'expected').
On the other hand, the Delta Clipper, funded by McD primarily; was a system that could be tested in stages, and in that testing they took some actual risks; but measured ones. The first test when they flew the rocket and landed it vertically was a big step -- but they managed the risk to the point where they made it happen. The engines, tanks, and almost everything else in those first tests were off-the-shelf items (the aeroshell was a unique thing, but contracted out to Scaled Composites, a company with a sterling record for this kind of thing.)
So what happens to the Delta Clipper approach. It's killed, of course.
In the end, I have no question that the next-generation launcher will be built by private industry either in the US or more likely overseas. Sad, but that's the way it is.
My officemate's roomate is one of the network administrators for UCLA. He says that the biggest reason that UCLA allows the use of Napster on its network is that schools are in cutthroat competition to attract the best students, and the ability to download songs over the 'net is one of the criteria that kids use in determining what school to go to.
It's more than a little ironic that in the same town that the RIAA and MPAA are based in, a state-sponsored school is refusing to kowtow to them.
I don't understand how anybody can miss the creative breakthrough in marketing that DC has made here. How many companies would pay millions of dollars for the kind of coverage and exposure that DC has gotten? There have been at least two big articles in Slashdot about a machine that should have been completely ignored.
And what was their cost? A couple of cease&desist letters that probably cost a couple of hundred bucks from their lawyers? Then, they let the hacker community provide acres of online coverage.
How many hackers, who otherwise never would have done so, have gone to Radio Shack to get one of these, just to spite DC?
As proof that this is a great marketing plan; just wait a couple of months. I guarantee that there will be several other examples. It just works too well to be ignored.
MMX was actually copied directly by AMD; and they even called it MMX (over Intel's objections.) These instructions are integer SIMD instructions, and are most useful in 2D operations like compositing 2D images. Even though MMX is now a well-supported universal part of the instruction set, only fairly specialized programs use them, in my experience (games, Photoshop, and a few others).
SSE (nee' KNI) is the Intel analogue to AMD's 3DNow! instruction set. These support floating point operations and high-level floating point functions (sqrt, trig). It is with these instructions that the AMD and Intel instruction sets have begin to diverge.
I'm going to quote a recent 'Dilbert' strip, where the PHB says over the PA
Due to the inclement weather, all non-essential people can leave early.
Then he picks up the binoculars, chuckling to himself "This is going to be the easiest layoff ever."
Similarly, Apple is going to make it very easy to tell which magazines are independent and which are shills for the corporation. I can't think of a better way to have done it.
The PC revolution that the cue:cat people have built their business model around absolutely depends on reverse engineering. There would not be the scores of millions of PCs in people's homes if Phoenix didn't reverse engineer the BIOS of the first PCs.
It is true that trade secret law requires that the company demonstrate that it tried to protect its secret. If they were found to be negligent in this, then the secret cannot be defended. Clearly here, the fact that the codes are almost plaintext demonstrates this negligence. The stockholders should sue.
It's not uncommon to award $1. The USFL, in it's antitrust suit against the NFL, won the case -- and was awarded $1. They promptly went out of business.
They jury decided the amount of actual damages. What the judge has added here are punitive damages; damages to make the guilty party think twice before doing it again.
That said, $1M means about as much to Microsoft as $1.
Console manufacturers have always insisted on contracts that prevented authors from porting their games to other consoles. It's going to a little more odd here; since the porting would clearly be easy -- but Microsoft will insist on it and the authors will agree to it; or they won't get the money from Microsoft to help with the develoment.
Microsoft holds all the cards, and can prevent anybody from writing games for the X-Box by any number of means. If one wants to write a game for the X-Box, one will not be able to have it run on PCs.
>Also, do understand that these sort of NDA's are somewhat common
>when dealing with potentially explosive matters like this.
>Certainly Sun is interested in keeping tight lips, but
>they also would prefer to announce a solution along
>with the problem.
I'm sorry, but this is total bullshit. This might have worked back in the pre-'net days, but fortunately those days are behind us. If my computer is crashing, one of the very first things I do is get on the 'net, check www.deja.com, and see if other people are having similar problems. It's good to know that other people are having similar problems! And, if anybody has gotten a satisfactory solution, you can demand that same solution. Keeping people in the dark is so neandertal I can't quite believe that anybody can defend it anymore.
I'm sure that Firestone would have preferred that nobody talk about their tire problems, or that the makers of Rezulin would have preferred people not talk about those annoying liver-failure deaths that occured, but it's just pigheaded of them. And, in these connected days, it will not stand.
I believe that almost every high-end visual effects company is using Intel/Linux rendering farms now. You can't avoid it.
One of the big reasons is that the rendering software is expensive, and it's priced 'per processor', so you really want to have the processors be as fast as they can be. Right now, that means Intel architecture (here at Hammerhead we use Athlons); and Linux is by far the nicest way to use the IA32 machines.
Interestingly, the only company I can think of that doesn't use primarily IA32 boxes for rendering is Pixar (who write and sell RenderMan, the most popular rendering package). They use mainly Sparcs. One reason, I suppose, is that they don't have to pay for RenderMan:) The other is that on a speed/cubic-foot (as opposed to speed/dollar) metric; I'm told that the Sparcs are a little better. I don't believe that, though.
I interviewed people at every effects house a couple of months ago for an slashdot article I never finished:( and every single one was building Linux render farms.
What is intelligence? I don't pretend that I have the answer, but an answer might be 'Information combined with a way of extracting patterns from that information'.
Projects like CYC invest a great deal of money, time, and effort into creating these patterns, these networks of information. Even so, you just cannot pay enough people enough money to do this.
Google, on the other hand, has a million people a day supplying them with precisely this information. If they watch what you search for, and then what pages you end up selecting; or how you refine your search to get to what you really are looking for -- then they can truly build patterns of knowledge for free -- it's likely that they'll find a way for people to pay for the priveledge, even.
I don't actually expect that they are archiving their search clickstreams that way and for that purpose, but if they were it might explain why they are not so hung up on this profitibility; and why they've worked so hard on making the system so damn fast. The more people use the system, the quicker they can tune and refine their searches, and the amount of times that the search finds the right page; the more useful information is available.
Think of it! Millions of people volunteering to increase the potential intelligence of your AI every day! For free!
Of course, I don't want to be around when the AI created at the end of this process finally understands the connection between Natalie Portman and hot grits -- it's likely to turn it's back on humanity forever at that point.
There was a nice article about these very odd projects recently, specifically with respect to the impact of the satellite that was orbiting the Moon. They crashed it into the Moon, and hoped to see water vapor kicked up by the event.
One of the points was to demonstrate to all adversaries just how sensitive and precise American sensing technologies were; to make them think twice about the ability to get away with tests. But, it's not done with the typical DoD bluster, it's done with a clever, cuddly, science experiment.
My guess is that that is what is going on here. This is a dual-use demonstration. There's the warm fuzzy "let's help those poor guys out on the space station" (which plays especially well against the Russians on the bottom of the ocean) on the one hand, and the obvious defense applications on the other.
You say 'The only way I can see this making any sense is if MS has resigned themselved to being split into MS/OS and MS/Applications as per the initial DOJ v. MS ruling."
My guess is that they have resigned themselves to the possibility that this may happen, and are girding themselves against this possibility. If they win, well, this can all be scuttled.
I'm sure that Mainsoft is at best a year, and probably more, from getting this done.
I worked with Rikk Carey and Paul Strauss, and the rest of the Inventor team from '92 through the release of Inventor 1.0. There were wholescale changes after I left, but I think that my experience is worth sharing here.
Synopsis
Ultimately, Open Inventor is useful as a 3D prototyping tool. It's a great way to get a simple, interactive 3D program running quickly.
Beyond that, I don't think that it's particularly useful. It falls into the classic trap of 'jack of all trades, master of none'. There is nothing that it does particlarly well except prototyping; so there are no rich Inventor applications.
My experience with Inventor
When I started at Silicon Graphics working on Inventor, (or Scenario as it was called at the time) I was filled with optimism and excitement. This tool was going to make 3D ubiquitous. I had thought that the reason that there were so few 3D applications was that they were too hard to write; and that by building a generic high-level toolkit we could solve that problem.
The big problem ended up being that by building a high-level toolkit; you end up taking over the application. If you want to provide high-level functionality, you necessarily have to circumscribe the possible applications. You have to adopt the Inventor scene graph, nodes, and traversal. These may not be appropriate for your particular application, in fact, they are almost guaranteed not to be. You can extend Inventor by creating your own nodes, and several users have done that to get more performance; and a closer match between their application and the Inventor infrastructure -- but that's only a step along the way to creating your complete independent application IMHO.
There were great things about the Inventor development experience. I have never worked with as bright or dedicated a team of programmers as Carey, Strauss, Paul Isaacs, Nik Thompson, Dave Mott, Dave Immel, Josie Wernecke, and Alain Dumesney. I was in charge of backups, and it was not uncommon that almost every of the hundreds of source modules was changed in a day -- we were making large scale changes at an incredibly rapid pace as we prototyped, learned, and experimented. ILM was one of our beta-sites, and they got more out of Inventor than I ever thought that they would.
Inventor also cured me of C++. It seemed at first that C++ would be perfect for something like Inventor; but it was a near disaster IMHO (not shared by everyone on the team, I should point out.) C++ gives you some extra rope; but it quickly becomes tangled around your neck.
The biggest problem by far was nodes and traversals. You can think about them as two different dimensions. Nodes are things like cubes, cylinders, materials, colors, lights, and so on; while traversals are for rendering, bounding box calculation, printing, and the like. Nodes are the nouns, and traversals are the verbs.
C++ works for one-dimensional extensions, but we had to resort to a traditional function table to do this two-dimensional extension. It works, but it's a mess; and the language only got in the way instead of helping. This is only one of the many examples were the promise of C++ was not only not fulfilled, but was shown to be the exact opposite of what was promised; it hindered rather than helped.
Going forward
At Siggraph this year, there were no less than four scene graphs for Linux discussed during the Linux/OpenGL BOF meeting. I wish them luck, and hope that they find something useful in the Inventor source.
1. There was a tremendous number of innovative 3D display technologies. For still images, there was a beautiful system for printing shockingly hi-res 3D images; on a normal inkjet printer. They use special inks that polarize light; and print on one side of a transparency, then flip it over, and print the other side. You need polarizing glasses and a backlight, but the result is astoundingly clear 3D photos. There was another system for 3D posters, that was an extension of the strip holograms that people have been doing for years, this was an array hologram. The image is composed of tens to hundreds of thousands of hologram pixels, giving true 3D from a very wide range of viewing angles. They had a display from Starbucks, say, where you could walk around the coffeecup, look down into it, look underneath it, in perfect color and reasonable (not perfect, but reasonable) resolution. Very cool. No glasses necessary, and unlike other similar holograms the stereo affect worked vertically and horizontally. Really an amazing advance on the state of the art. Ken Perlin (an astonishingly prolific guy from NYU, most recently in slashdot for inventing an alternative to Graffiti for Palm computers) had an autostereoptic display that is astounding. The paper from the proceedings described it; but I didn't fight through the crowds surrounding the display to see it in person. Basically, the idea is that you draw the right and left images at the same time on the screen, in alternate vertical stripes, then put a screen quite a ways in front of the display with vertical opaque stripes to block the image meant for the other eye. Sort of like looking through venitian blinds. What is astonishing is that he tracks your eyeballs, so that the stripes and image can be correctly computed as you move your head around. By doing this, you get a true 3D image with no glasses or other headgear to wear. Amazing. 2) The rendering papers were pretty good. Noteworthy for me was a paper from Pixar on z buffer shadows for partially transparent surfaces or volumes. This technique has been in use at various CG houses for years, but it's never been published -- and Pixar did a truly spectacular job exploring the field. The paper on splatting textures, to cover 3D models with no seams, was very cool. The gaming applications are obvious; this could make the texture mapping of complex 3D objects many times simpler than it is today. 3) The Sony GsCube has gotten lots of press already, but it is as cool as people say. 4) The Linux/OpenGL meeting was pretty good. Forty or so people got up and described what they were doing, and it was all an amazing advance over the past year. There were rumblings of a dangerous split in X-servers-with-3D-rendering-hooks that could be a major obstacle to 3D in Linux, but hopefully it will end up ok. Every board manufacturer on the floor was working with Linux; either the had a shipping product or they were demoing something that was not quite ready; but Linux is everywhere. This is an astonishing change from just a year ago, where hardly anybody was acknowledging Linux. 5) The art/technology show was amazing. There were a huge number of beautiful, innovative art projects that were just thrilling to see. The 'wooden mirror' was awe-inspirinig -- a TV camera hooked to a computer drove 8000-or-so little wooden squares up and down to 'reflect' the image in the TV screen. It worked perfectly, and was a tour-de-force of meticulous engineering as well as a beautiful machine to look at. 6) Finally, Ray Kurzweil (sp?) gave a rousing keynote speech on the future of technology, which I sadly missed. I note it, though, because everybody I talked to who had seen it was completely enchanted by the guy. In general, a great Siggraph. The non-LA ones are a little smaller, but seem to be more diverse.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe that campaigning informs the electorate; or that campaigning nationwide would force a candidate to be more candid with his views on all issues, then you have to ditch the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college.
Making it a proportionate representation, while still giving Wyoming 3 votes, would make the election more 'democratic', where everybody's vote would be sought relatively equally.
thad
They started spinning so fast that they broke apart. The air is so thin that there's no damping whatsoever.
thad
He was a competitive glider pilot, and won the national championship a few years in a row. After the last time, he showed everybody the little circular slide-rule he had developed to maximize speed and range (the McCready SpeedRing) which pretty much revolutionized the sport.
In the mid 70's, he was in debt to some friends for $50,000 -- and he heard about the Kramer Prize, $50,000 to the first person to fly a human powered aircraft through a 1-mile figure-eight course. McCready was building indoor duration models at the time (unbelieveably fragile creations of wire and film that would fly for 20 minutes on a few twists of a rubber band) and realized that that same technology could be used to make a plane that would win the prize. The result was the Gossamer Condor -- a externally-braced plane to make something as light and large-span as possible. It easily won the prize. Unfortunately, he went through about $100,000 to build it. Later, he won the next Kramer Prize for the first human-powered plane to fly the English Channel, and then build a few early solar powered planes (piloted by a very light young woman).
GM hired McCready to build a car to win a solar-car race across Australia. McCready's astonishing realization was that it was all about aerodynamics -- where other teams were trying to maximize the amount of energy they were getting from the sun, McCready was worried about going really fast. It won the race by several days!
McCready built a flying Pteradon for a Smithsonian movie. It flew, flapped its wings for power, and was successfully filmed for the IMAX film.
And then there are these flying wings. Truly astonishing machines. They currently hold the record for the highest-flying propeller-powered planes, and are just (to me) insanely beautiful. Here is a gallery of photos of Helios. This picture in particular I find just sublime. What a machine. What a guy.
Thad
It seems to me that this would be the only possible recovery from this air-scooter; as you would often not be high enough for a parachute to work; and the typical helicopter autorotation would clearly not work.
But, deflated airbags don't weigh much or take up much space, and can be deployed instantly. If you could get the terminal velocity down to 80fps or so with big enough airbags (no problem) then there'd have to be about 5ft of airbag between your bod and the ground to have a pretty survivable crash-landing.
Without that; these will not be practical. Having no recourse for engine failure absolutely not an option -- piston engines are *way* too unreliable for this.
thad
All watermarking need do, really, is hide 1 bit in a 3MB file. There are no encoding schemes that purport to squeeze every single bit of redundancy out of an audio file.
That said, I agree that once you publish the watermarking scheme (either by doing so explicitly or shipping products that can be reverse engineered [all products, really]) then it will be inevitably defeated.
thad
And bluster like this deserves nothing. Janelle Brown and Salon put their individual and corporate necks on the line; and all Chariglione does is spew hot air. If they've published something inaccurate, then you know that they'd be sued in a hot minute -- we know just how fast the music industry sues anything that crosses their lawyers hair-trigger gunsights.
I am certain that it is possible to crack the SDMI watermarking, but I am surprised that it was done so easily.
More power to Brown and Salon for having the guts to publish this article. We need more of that kind of courage.
thad
If Microsoft or Cisco ever paid divedends in their corporate histories, your argument might have a little more merit. As they haven't, I don't see the point. thad
I do worry about it, and am pretty pessimistic. The movie business has nowhere near the margins of the music business, the margins are on the order of 0-10% instead of 40% or so. This gives the movie business much less leeway, box-office profits for movies will be destroyed much more quickly when NapsterForMovies makes its debut. Another reason for the quicker demise of the current movie profit model is that Napster et. al. has taught the current generation of 14-24 year olds (who by 50% of the movie tickets) that copyright is obsolete.
Things are not quite so bleak, though, when you look at the big picture for where movies make their money. While the domestic movie box-office this year will be around $4 billion (of which the studios get half, sharing it with the theater owners), I've heard reasonable reports that movie merchandising, and other ancillary ways turning movies into money, brought in something like $100 billion last year. Last year was a good year for that, but it shows that things might not be so bleak, after all.
This will dramatically change the ways that movies are made, and which movies are made; once the revolution happens. It might make sense to give movies away, it might even make sense to pay people to go to movies, if that increases the market for the merchandising.
Every other model I've thought about for continuing the movie business once it's trivial to download movies seems to fail immediately, but I'd love to hear other people's ideas! Gotta feed the kids, after all.
thad
The characters in the book are black-and-white, it's true, but it's all the more fun because Brunner's palate of blacks and whites are somehow more intense than those of other writers. Nickie Halfinger is a great character, recreated several times throughout the book as he adopts and integrates different personas.
Thinking back on the book a few years after I read it, I notice parallels to events in my own life; and that made me wonder about those events. These are almost certainly coincidences...but -- all but fans of conspiracy theories can stop here.
When I was 12 (in 1972) the state of Maryland held a 'contest' where they took the top 2% of kids on the standardized tests of the day, and brought them to Johns Hopkins University to take the SATs. The top 2% of those were brought in for a huge battery of further tests, both academic and psychological. The top few percent of those kids were enrolled in something called the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Prococious Youth (SMSPY, later SMPY as they dropped the Scientifically part).
We were given special math courses on weekends in lieu of our middle- and high-school classes, basically to see how fast a bunch of kids could learn things. These classes were amazing; wonderfully taught by gifted instructors. We were encouraged to and given the opportunity to enroll in local community colleges for further math and science courses. Many of us then went to college at rediculously early ages (I was in the middle of the pack of SMPY kids at 15 when I started at JHU.)
All through this, we were monitored and profiled, but provided practically no guidance or counseling. Sadly, this was a disaster for many of us; we couldn't handle the pressure of Johns Hopkins (which was, and is, an incredibly competetive and cutthroat school.) I find this lack of guidance or even simple compassion unforgivable now.
The sinister part of this, though, is that a relatively large percentage of my SMPY-mates went on to work at the NSA, nearby in Fort Meade, MD. It just seems a little too convenient to me -- and reading Shockwave Rider a few years out of school (after getting kicked out myself, but fortuitously landing in the groundbreaking computer graphics facility of the day at NYIT [whew!]) made the parallels of TSR's Tarnower to SMPY clear and disturbing.
Anyway -- I now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot.
thad
I can't find any reference to the NP-19 on the web, nor to I recall see it in AvWeek. What is it?
And as for running out of money, the problem apparently is that NASA believes that they've given Lockheed enough money; and that Lockheed should pay for the most of the rest of the work themselves, and Lockheed couldn't be less interested in doing that.
I'd be quite interested, and even happy, to be proven wrong, if you can do it.
thad
SSTO systems are, in some ways, extremely simple to evaluate. To get a payload to orbit without staging, you have to have both an extraordinarily efficient engine and a remarkably high mass ratio (fuel:everything-else ratio). It was obvious that the X33 prototype wasn't going to get to orbit very early; the mass ratio just wasn't there; even with rediculously risky materials and structures were specified. So, there were two obvious things to do at that point:
1) Kill the project
2) Lower expectations to a technology demonstrator, and cut way back on the risk.
They, of course, chose the insane third option, maintain the (extremely expensive) exotic materials, but still give up on the the idea of going to orbit. So, they ended up with failed tanks, and nothing to demonstrate whatsoever.
The aerospike engines really are a great idea, it would have been extremely useful to see them fly. As it is, there is absolutely no question that the project will be killed. Lockheed even wants it dead. And why not? They got all the money that they could ever get from the program, and they didn't actually have to produce anything at all.
It's very likely that almost every part of the alleged rocket wouldn't have worked; the tanks were just the first thing to fail spectacularly. The engines had very serious problems too (the ramps that are the key to the aerospike concept were much harder to fabricate and cool than 'expected').
On the other hand, the Delta Clipper, funded by McD primarily; was a system that could be tested in stages, and in that testing they took some actual risks; but measured ones. The first test when they flew the rocket and landed it vertically was a big step -- but they managed the risk to the point where they made it happen. The engines, tanks, and almost everything else in those first tests were off-the-shelf items (the aeroshell was a unique thing, but contracted out to Scaled Composites, a company with a sterling record for this kind of thing.)
So what happens to the Delta Clipper approach. It's killed, of course.
In the end, I have no question that the next-generation launcher will be built by private industry either in the US or more likely overseas. Sad, but that's the way it is.
thad
It's more than a little ironic that in the same town that the RIAA and MPAA are based in, a state-sponsored school is refusing to kowtow to them.
thad
And what was their cost? A couple of cease&desist letters that probably cost a couple of hundred bucks from their lawyers? Then, they let the hacker community provide acres of online coverage.
How many hackers, who otherwise never would have done so, have gone to Radio Shack to get one of these, just to spite DC?
As proof that this is a great marketing plan; just wait a couple of months. I guarantee that there will be several other examples. It just works too well to be ignored.
They're laughing all the way to the bank.
thad
SSE (nee' KNI) is the Intel analogue to AMD's 3DNow! instruction set. These support floating point operations and high-level floating point functions (sqrt, trig). It is with these instructions that the AMD and Intel instruction sets have begin to diverge.
Due to the inclement weather, all non-essential people can leave early.
Then he picks up the binoculars, chuckling to himself "This is going to be the easiest layoff ever."
Similarly, Apple is going to make it very easy to tell which magazines are independent and which are shills for the corporation. I can't think of a better way to have done it.
thad
It is true that trade secret law requires that the company demonstrate that it tried to protect its secret. If they were found to be negligent in this, then the secret cannot be defended. Clearly here, the fact that the codes are almost plaintext demonstrates this negligence. The stockholders should sue.
thad
They jury decided the amount of actual damages. What the judge has added here are punitive damages; damages to make the guilty party think twice before doing it again.
That said, $1M means about as much to Microsoft as $1.
thad
Microsoft holds all the cards, and can prevent anybody from writing games for the X-Box by any number of means. If one wants to write a game for the X-Box, one will not be able to have it run on PCs.
thad
>when dealing with potentially explosive matters like this.
>Certainly Sun is interested in keeping tight lips, but
>they also would prefer to announce a solution along
>with the problem. I'm sorry, but this is total bullshit. This might have worked back in the pre-'net days, but fortunately those days are behind us. If my computer is crashing, one of the very first things I do is get on the 'net, check www.deja.com, and see if other people are having similar problems. It's good to know that other people are having similar problems! And, if anybody has gotten a satisfactory solution, you can demand that same solution. Keeping people in the dark is so neandertal I can't quite believe that anybody can defend it anymore.
I'm sure that Firestone would have preferred that nobody talk about their tire problems, or that the makers of Rezulin would have preferred people not talk about those annoying liver-failure deaths that occured, but it's just pigheaded of them. And, in these connected days, it will not stand.
thad
One of the big reasons is that the rendering software is expensive, and it's priced 'per processor', so you really want to have the processors be as fast as they can be. Right now, that means Intel architecture (here at Hammerhead we use Athlons); and Linux is by far the nicest way to use the IA32 machines.
Interestingly, the only company I can think of that doesn't use primarily IA32 boxes for rendering is Pixar (who write and sell RenderMan, the most popular rendering package). They use mainly Sparcs. One reason, I suppose, is that they don't have to pay for RenderMan :) The other is that on a speed/cubic-foot (as opposed to speed/dollar) metric; I'm told that the Sparcs are a little better. I don't believe that, though.
I interviewed people at every effects house a couple of months ago for an slashdot article I never finished :( and every single one was building Linux render farms.
thad
Projects like CYC invest a great deal of money, time, and effort into creating these patterns, these networks of information. Even so, you just cannot pay enough people enough money to do this.
Google, on the other hand, has a million people a day supplying them with precisely this information. If they watch what you search for, and then what pages you end up selecting; or how you refine your search to get to what you really are looking for -- then they can truly build patterns of knowledge for free -- it's likely that they'll find a way for people to pay for the priveledge, even.
I don't actually expect that they are archiving their search clickstreams that way and for that purpose, but if they were it might explain why they are not so hung up on this profitibility; and why they've worked so hard on making the system so damn fast. The more people use the system, the quicker they can tune and refine their searches, and the amount of times that the search finds the right page; the more useful information is available.
Think of it! Millions of people volunteering to increase the potential intelligence of your AI every day! For free!
Of course, I don't want to be around when the AI created at the end of this process finally understands the connection between Natalie Portman and hot grits -- it's likely to turn it's back on humanity forever at that point.
thad
One of the points was to demonstrate to all adversaries just how sensitive and precise American sensing technologies were; to make them think twice about the ability to get away with tests. But, it's not done with the typical DoD bluster, it's done with a clever, cuddly, science experiment.
My guess is that that is what is going on here. This is a dual-use demonstration. There's the warm fuzzy "let's help those poor guys out on the space station" (which plays especially well against the Russians on the bottom of the ocean) on the one hand, and the obvious defense applications on the other.
thad
My guess is that they have resigned themselves to the possibility that this may happen, and are girding themselves against this possibility. If they win, well, this can all be scuttled.
I'm sure that Mainsoft is at best a year, and probably more, from getting this done.
thad
Synopsis
Ultimately, Open Inventor is useful as a 3D prototyping tool. It's a great way to get a simple, interactive 3D program running quickly.
Beyond that, I don't think that it's particularly useful. It falls into the classic trap of 'jack of all trades, master of none'. There is nothing that it does particlarly well except prototyping; so there are no rich Inventor applications.
My experience with Inventor
When I started at Silicon Graphics working on Inventor, (or Scenario as it was called at the time) I was filled with optimism and excitement. This tool was going to make 3D ubiquitous. I had thought that the reason that there were so few 3D applications was that they were too hard to write; and that by building a generic high-level toolkit we could solve that problem.
The big problem ended up being that by building a high-level toolkit; you end up taking over the application. If you want to provide high-level functionality, you necessarily have to circumscribe the possible applications. You have to adopt the Inventor scene graph, nodes, and traversal. These may not be appropriate for your particular application, in fact, they are almost guaranteed not to be. You can extend Inventor by creating your own nodes, and several users have done that to get more performance; and a closer match between their application and the Inventor infrastructure -- but that's only a step along the way to creating your complete independent application IMHO.
There were great things about the Inventor development experience. I have never worked with as bright or dedicated a team of programmers as Carey, Strauss, Paul Isaacs, Nik Thompson, Dave Mott, Dave Immel, Josie Wernecke, and Alain Dumesney. I was in charge of backups, and it was not uncommon that almost every of the hundreds of source modules was changed in a day -- we were making large scale changes at an incredibly rapid pace as we prototyped, learned, and experimented. ILM was one of our beta-sites, and they got more out of Inventor than I ever thought that they would.
Inventor also cured me of C++. It seemed at first that C++ would be perfect for something like Inventor; but it was a near disaster IMHO (not shared by everyone on the team, I should point out.) C++ gives you some extra rope; but it quickly becomes tangled around your neck.
The biggest problem by far was nodes and traversals. You can think about them as two different dimensions. Nodes are things like cubes, cylinders, materials, colors, lights, and so on; while traversals are for rendering, bounding box calculation, printing, and the like. Nodes are the nouns, and traversals are the verbs.
C++ works for one-dimensional extensions, but we had to resort to a traditional function table to do this two-dimensional extension. It works, but it's a mess; and the language only got in the way instead of helping. This is only one of the many examples were the promise of C++ was not only not fulfilled, but was shown to be the exact opposite of what was promised; it hindered rather than helped.
Going forward
At Siggraph this year, there were no less than four scene graphs for Linux discussed during the Linux/OpenGL BOF meeting. I wish them luck, and hope that they find something useful in the Inventor source.
1. There was a tremendous number of innovative 3D display technologies. For still images, there was a beautiful system for printing shockingly hi-res 3D images; on a normal inkjet printer. They use special inks that polarize light; and print on one side of a transparency, then flip it over, and print the other side. You need polarizing glasses and a backlight, but the result is astoundingly clear 3D photos. There was another system for 3D posters, that was an extension of the strip holograms that people have been doing for years, this was an array hologram. The image is composed of tens to hundreds of thousands of hologram pixels, giving true 3D from a very wide range of viewing angles. They had a display from Starbucks, say, where you could walk around the coffeecup, look down into it, look underneath it, in perfect color and reasonable (not perfect, but reasonable) resolution. Very cool. No glasses necessary, and unlike other similar holograms the stereo affect worked vertically and horizontally. Really an amazing advance on the state of the art. Ken Perlin (an astonishingly prolific guy from NYU, most recently in slashdot for inventing an alternative to Graffiti for Palm computers) had an autostereoptic display that is astounding. The paper from the proceedings described it; but I didn't fight through the crowds surrounding the display to see it in person. Basically, the idea is that you draw the right and left images at the same time on the screen, in alternate vertical stripes, then put a screen quite a ways in front of the display with vertical opaque stripes to block the image meant for the other eye. Sort of like looking through venitian blinds. What is astonishing is that he tracks your eyeballs, so that the stripes and image can be correctly computed as you move your head around. By doing this, you get a true 3D image with no glasses or other headgear to wear. Amazing. 2) The rendering papers were pretty good. Noteworthy for me was a paper from Pixar on z buffer shadows for partially transparent surfaces or volumes. This technique has been in use at various CG houses for years, but it's never been published -- and Pixar did a truly spectacular job exploring the field. The paper on splatting textures, to cover 3D models with no seams, was very cool. The gaming applications are obvious; this could make the texture mapping of complex 3D objects many times simpler than it is today. 3) The Sony GsCube has gotten lots of press already, but it is as cool as people say. 4) The Linux/OpenGL meeting was pretty good. Forty or so people got up and described what they were doing, and it was all an amazing advance over the past year. There were rumblings of a dangerous split in X-servers-with-3D-rendering-hooks that could be a major obstacle to 3D in Linux, but hopefully it will end up ok. Every board manufacturer on the floor was working with Linux; either the had a shipping product or they were demoing something that was not quite ready; but Linux is everywhere. This is an astonishing change from just a year ago, where hardly anybody was acknowledging Linux. 5) The art/technology show was amazing. There were a huge number of beautiful, innovative art projects that were just thrilling to see. The 'wooden mirror' was awe-inspirinig -- a TV camera hooked to a computer drove 8000-or-so little wooden squares up and down to 'reflect' the image in the TV screen. It worked perfectly, and was a tour-de-force of meticulous engineering as well as a beautiful machine to look at. 6) Finally, Ray Kurzweil (sp?) gave a rousing keynote speech on the future of technology, which I sadly missed. I note it, though, because everybody I talked to who had seen it was completely enchanted by the guy. In general, a great Siggraph. The non-LA ones are a little smaller, but seem to be more diverse.