This was posted to slashdot a couple of months ago, and I'm terribly frustrated that I can no longer find it.
Perhaps somebody else with better search chops than I have will find it. In any case, the previous commenter posted a list of attendees of two conferences that have been held to define and promote this standard.
Basically, everybody was there. The big computer manufacturers, the movie studios, all other content providers.
This is not a small, isolated effort. It is not just a government-sales only program. This will be everywhere.
For you people who say that you'll never upgrade -- well, perhaps you won't. But there will be more and more of the media unavailable to you. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It will be interesting to see what comes from this. After the DeCSS fiasco, the players will try to do a higher quality encryption. Sadly, all of the protocols that I can imagine to do this kind of player-encryption securely involve real-time transactions with secure servers -- which basically will give over your ability to view things to third parties, even after you've 'bought' the media. Obviously, it would be possible to monitor and cross-reference everybody's media habits as well -- completely destroying privacy.
I think that non-US people are in by far the best position to do something useful with respect to this issue.
The US DMCA is, for the time being, the only law in the world that would prevent you from accessing your own property. Other countries will be under fierce pressure from the MPAA to harmonize with the US; as probably the most important thing that DeCSS protects (besides the people who license players) is the inability to play disks from all regions.
It will be hard for us in the US to beat back the DMCA, but I think that it would be substantially easier to prevent similar laws from being enacted.
Call it sovereignty, call it fair, call it a way for the little people to fight back -- call it anything that works in your country -- but keep similar laws off the books.
If that is done, and free players are available throughout the world, then the good guys will have won most of the battle. And, as the internet is without boundaries; then no doubt some of those players will make it back into the US.
Thank you for quoting the law, but how can you say that this makes DeCSS legal?
It is completely clear that this section applies to computer programs; and computer programs only. The law is designed so that a company like Microsoft can't prevent you from making programs that interoperate with Word and Excel datafiles. As laws go, this one is remarkably clear. From Judge Kaplan's comments; apparently the debate that lead to these clauses in the law make it even more clear -- that this exception applies to computer programs only.
Unless you hold that movies are software programs (as Adobe tried to do with Type1 fonts, for instance) then this exception does not apply to this case.
The onlyencouraging part of this, and it's only the faintest encouragement, is that the DMCA is a purely American law; and that LiViD development can go on outside the US.
(f) Reverse Engineering. - (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. (2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. (3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section. (4) For purposes of this subsection, the term ''interoperability'' means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
If you read the ruling, it's clear the even if this was a case about LiViD, a pure-Linux player, Judge Kaplan would have ruled the same way. He holds that the interoperability exception only applies to software; and he consideres movies to be other-than-software. To quote the ruling: "Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.21 In consequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply."
It's clear that this judge believes that unauthorized DVD players are illegal under the DMCA, period.
First, let me agree with MrKai above, that Quicktime seems like a great solution. It works, is of reasonable quality, is from a company that should know by now that it can't be a monopoly; is reasonably open and free.
But it would pay to step back and think about what you are supporting when you are working on streaming video. To me, streaming video allows the same people who have run television to carry that tradition of poor programming to the 'net. Do we really want to do this?
Streaming video on Linux will take computers that might otherwise be used for creating new tools or solving real problems and turn them into TVs. Isn't that really a terrible waste? Should it be aided by your efforts?
When the ISPs are contacted by the MPAA's lawyers, invoking the DCMA, they have no choice but to pull the site immediately. The DCMA mandates a procedure for accusing someone of violating copyright on the 'net, and the first part of the procedure is that, upon accusation, to pull the site.
The sites will get pulled. Then the person whose site it is gets to ask for clarification, which must be supplied by the MPAA lawyers. Basically, proof of the copyright violation must be presented to the ISP. At that point, the ISP will either put the pages back up or keep them down permanently.
The DCMA is a draconian instrument; designed exactly for this kind of suppression of speech.
First, let me thank Schwab for his excellent summary of the day.
Second -- let me suggest another argument for the defense -- I know it's a day late and a dollar short and this long after the posting it will never be read on slashdot...
The major argument of the DVD CCA is that the reverse engineering was improper, and all future reverse engineerings are then tainted by that improper reverse engineering.
Would a company that then enlisted someone to 'improperly' reverse engineer their trade secret then get an unassailable secret; secret for all time with no possibility of use by anyone, anywhere? Because clearly any future revelation would have been tainted by the original one.
This would be a protection far stronger than patent protection.
This is a one-step reductio ad absurdum argument that I would think would get the judges attention. He wouldn't want to the be person responsible for superseding patent protection; for basically destroying patents and other so-called intellectual property law.
I'm not sure how it is done in this SGI/nVidia/VA initiative; but the DRI from Precision Insight is designed to do exactly this.
It talks to the X server to set up a window to draw 3D objects in, and then allows the hardware to draw directly into that window at the full hardware performance without further communication with the X server.
There are numerous issues to deal with -- and of course you have to deal with the X server when rendering contexts change; but in general you get good performance in multiple 3D windows. It is true that "this doesn't integrate well with 2D operations" if by that you mean "you can't do X windows drawing in a 3D window". I believe that once you tell X windows that it is a 3D window X washes its hands of responsibility for what goes on inside of it; so you have to use OpenGL to do your text rendering and other 2D things.
The link that is provided in the previous message does indeed point out that NVidia's current drivers are available, in source as well as binary form, and are designed to work with the DRI and XFree86.
To me, this makes the current press release even more mysterious -- but perhaps I should take the advice "never attribute to malice what could be accounted for by stupidity" and assume that the press release isn't the full story.
In any case, I thank chauser for his comment above and take my hat off to NVidia.
SGI and Red Hat together funded a small company called Precision Insight to write the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, to allow users to directly access the OpenGL hardware on their graphics boards with minimal overhead. The DRI would allow the accelerated rendering in a X Windows environment. This DRI is part of XFree86 4.0 and is due out Real Soon Now.
Precision Insight is also working on drivers for a bunch of cards; with the cooperation of the card manufacturers. These should also be released soon.
With the release of XFree86 4.0, the DRI, and these drivers, everyone will be able to have workstation-class graphics on Linux. I believe that most of these drivers, and certainly XFree86 and the DRI are open source, too.
My question is; why is SGI persuing a different approach now? I am sure that their solution will be have spectacular performance (when it is finished...SGI has been notoriously late in many of its plans).
The press release says nothing about whether the announced systems will use XFree86, the DRI, and whether they will be open-source (although I'm certainly that the NVidia drivers will not be open). It's almost as if SGI was going to try to steal the thunder of the upcoming release of the free software; which, I believe, will be an earth-shattering explosion of interest in 3D.
It's not the same thing all over again; at least not legally. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act puts this into a whole different category.
Copyright law in the US is almost totally defined by a few Supreme Court decisions; but occasionally the Congress does act. They have created the abortion called the DCMA (my humble characterization). It prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection devices if they have been put in place by the lawful copyright owner in order to control access to a copyrighted work. It also prohibts the manufacture or making available of technologies, products, and services that are intended to be used primarily as a means of defeating access controls and anti-copying devices. While the first prohibition (on actually doing the circumvention) doesn't go into effect until later this year; the prohibition on manufacture went into effect on October 28, 1998.
So, unlike almost every other interesting copyright lawsuit, this one actually has a law that can be pointed to; that actually specifies pretty closely what is the case here. The decss program is almost certainly a device to break encryption.
On the other hand, it would be hard for the MPAA to hold that the production of a Linux DVD player would be a device to break copyright. It would be interesting to see what the response would be to simple players. It's interesting enough that I might try and see myself.
Short story first. I do computer animation. At my previous company, we made a short film, just for the fun of it. Then, we made a video describing in detail exactly how we did the various animation effects.
We were contacted quite quickly after that by Brigham Young University, because we said in the 'making of' film that we had used a particular technique published by a professor at BYU. He didn't mention in the paper, of course, that he'd patented the technique. Because we had been so candid and detailed in our 'making of' tape, we had no choice but admit infringment.
Since then, all 'making of' videos have been practically content free. And, frankly, people just want to see the pretty pictures anyway.
The offense in this case would have been remarkably hamstrung if the code had just appeared; with no description of how it happened. I know that the temptation is well-nigh irresistable; but the kernel that people really want is the code itself, not a description of the hacking process. I think that the people involved in this project are incredibly bright and insightful, and I marvel at their technique...but in 20:20 hindsight it would have been better not to know how it was done.
In the most similar case to date, source code for RC4 was published about 7 years ago. It was published anonymously, and to this day nobody knows who did it; or how they found it. This left RSA Inc (the keepers of the trade secret) with nothing to do at all to stop its spread. All they could do (and did do) was claim a trademark on the name RC4...so you couldn't call it that. RC4 remains a spectacularly useful, fast, unbreakable cipher -- and now anybody can use it.
What they are saying is that it *wasn't* reverse engineered, what happened was that Xing fucked up and didn't honor their contract
So, through no fault of the DVD copyright goons, they lost the trade secret. The trade secret was lost, not through hard work, but by fraud on the part of Xing.
That's their argument, anyway...it's full of holes, but it's the best they have.
MUCH fewer moving parts? The TI projectors have over *three million* independently moving parts, there's a moving mirror for each pixel for each color. I'd wager that the TI projectors have more moving parts than any other machine ever made in human history.
OK, they're small parts...true. And the reliability is astounding. But still...
I've been working in 'digital film' for 22 years, from the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab until today, at Hammerhead Productions.
First, let me say that I agree with Roger Ebert that high-temporal-fidelity film is great. The comment that it looks '3D' is what everybody says; it's that different from normal 24 fps film. Douglass Trumbull, of early special effects (2001, Silent Running) fame has spent the last 15 years trying to get a technology called Showscan off the ground. Showscan used 60 fps film, and can be seen at a couple of Las Vegas 'ride films'.
Unfortunately for Trumbull, MaxiVision48, and other advocates of high-frame-rate film; people see high-frame-rate moving pictures every day; TV is 60 fps. Now, most people say think that TV is 30 frames per second, but each frame is made from two fields, each offset by 1/60th of a second, so the net result truly is 60 fields per second. The motion of TV is incredibly smooth compared to film. Anybody can tell this difference, although few people know what they are seeing. As an example, look at a daytime soap opera, compared to a prime-time show. One of the biggest differences that you see is the frame rate, as all prime-time shows are filmed on film, and then transfered to video. This distance from reality, filtering the time more coarsely, is what we see as 'film look', and is perceived as higher quality.
At my previous company, Pacific Data Images, I was a strong proponent of doing animation at 60 fps. We did mostly 'broadcast' animation, things like show titles. But when we started doing commercials, we found that we had to work at 24 or 30 fps; as that was what was expected. You could talk until you were blue in the face that 60 fps was 'better', and you couldn't sway anybody -- because it was perceived as worse by viewers.
I've seen the digital projections of both Star Wars and Toy Story. I went to Star Wars in a very dubious frame of mind, based on my previous experience that 'better' was seen as 'worse'. I thought that people would miss the flicker, and would even miss the grain and scratches. I left the theater completely convinced that this would succeed, though.
Digital projection mimics film in many ways; but it really does seem that just the annoying flaws are removed. Nobody really likes scratches or splices or even film-gate jitter. I did perceive the loss of flicker -- a film projection is completely black half the time; and the digital projection isn't. Not yet, anyway. This lack of flicker grabs your eyeballs in a different way; I'm not sure how to describe it...but it's a little more immediate; a little less separated from reality.
As for the other parts of Ebert's article -- he saw a prototype. The resolution will go up, soon to 1920x1024. The problem of transporting the date will go away with better technology (for instance, the transparent flourescent CD-size disks pointed at by Slashdot recently). The ability to 'color time' films is actually a huge win for digital projection; you will be able to do much more powerful color manipulation digitally than you ever could striking prints from analog film. The piracy issue can be avoided somewhat -- I agree with earlier posters that the decryption can happen in the light-modulator itself; so that you wouldn't have to ever have a decrypted signal.
Roger also claims that studio people don't care about technology. I completely disagree; we have a thriving technology-of-film community here in LA, and we have been discussing all of the issues that he has brought up here, in wretchedly thorough detail, for the last few years.
thad
Re:this may have already happened
on
Sex in Space
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· Score: 5
I tried to engineer some zero-g sex, but it didn't happen.
We at Hammerhead produced the upcoming film Supernova, and there was a call in the script for a zero-g sex shot.
Well, Novespace, a French company, has a big A300 fitted as a zero-g research vehicle. Much like the KC-135 that NASA uses, but without all of those pesky governmental interferences. We called Novespace, and they were willing to let us rent the plane and film our zero-g sequences.
Before we got to the point of having to reveal exactly what these sequences would be, though, the deal was scotched. While the rental price was quite reasonable (less than 200K/day) the shooting would have to be done in France. Flying the minimal movie crew to France, putting them up for a week in a style to which we'd all like to become accustomed, and flying them back raised the price to something untenable. They couldn't fly the plane to the US because the FAA hadn't given them a US type certificate.
Now, it would be hard to have sex 30 seconds at a time; and of course it wouldn't be honest to goodness sex for our movie; but it would have been fun. It would be like nothing anybody had ever seen before.
The reviewer's (and author's) ideas about using arrays of people as a computer has been done, during the Manhattan Project.
The astonishing Richard Feynman had at his disposal a hundred or so people with early mechanical calculators. He would arrange them in a room so that each could perform part of a computation, and hand the intermediate results off to other people.
This is clearly what we would call 'programming' today. He claims in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' that this was much more efficient than the alternative, which was to have each of the people, in parallel, performing many different steps of the calculation.
thad
Re:Engineering achievment or espionage?
on
China Enters Space
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· Score: 2
Curiously, one of the leaders of the Chinese rocketry and space program is Tsien Hsue-shen; one of the founders of JPL. He was regarded as a peer of the legendeary Von Karman, and his probable successor at CalTech.
Unfortunately, the FBI revoked his security clearance, suspecting that he was a Communist, in 1949. Later, during a trip back to see his ailing father in Shanghai, his bags were searched, and his papers were held to be secrets.
In the end, he was 'exchanged' for US Korean war POWs. He went on to develop Chinese ICBMs, weather satellites, and the Silkworm missle.
This is oddly reminiscent of the Germans getting a lot of their ideas for rockets during the WWII from Goddard's patents (which were ignored by the US).
The US Army is looking to forge links to the entertainment industry, to do a better job at this. I worked with UCLA; in the attempt to entice them to build a center there. It turns out that they went to USC, instead.
It's amazing to see how many different fields are affected by PC games. Graphics hardware, CPU development, and home high-speed networks are driven primarily by games, and now the military is being driven by them too.
It's funny, you know. I love Linus, if I have another boy I'll name him Linus. But, both Tim and Linus are wrong about this not being a war -- it is a war.
The objective is the same as in any war, the conquest of territory and resources. In this case, the territory is the servers of the world.
I agree with several posters in this and other threads, that the devastating problem is the integration of Microsoft's applications into the fabric of the web. This is what MS calls 'the digital central nervous system', and if they do achieve hegemony over it; they will have won the war.
It astonishes me that O'Reilly finds it merely 'ironic' that Judge Jackson didn't respond to the IIS-bundling/server-prohibition fiasco that is referred to in this article. As as citizen, I'm tempted to sue the Justice Department for malpractice! It's absolutely central to the Government's argument. I believe that, unfortunately, there is no lobby behind Apache (like there is behind Netscape, Compaq, AOL et al) so there was less interest.
You can almost be complacent with operating systems. You'll always be able to run Linux. It will be a wonderful standalone operating system. But, if the battle for servers is lost; you won't be part of the internet-space.
I am betting my company that Linux is the operating system of the future for visual effects. We have been using SGI equipment since our founding 5 years ago; but now I believe that SGI will not be a viable company for our field in the not-too-distant future.
Fortunately, the new PCs are blisteringly fast, and Linux is a wonderful development environment. My company has a slight advantage, when moving to Linux, in that we write all of our own tools; and it's been quite easy to port them to Linux for the most part. SGI has some wonderful hardware and software integration (particularly for multimedia) that I can't match yet; but I'm sure it's coming. In house tools are a slight advantage because Side Effects is porting Houdini to Linux; and I'm sure that Alias and Softimage will follow soon.
I'm desparately trying to promote the use of Linux in the visual effects community -- to the point of giving away free year-long licenses of our in-house tools to anybody who wants them. So far, though, the penetration of Linux in the FX field is so small that I've had relatively few takers.
The next big thing, of course, is the release of the DRI/XFree86 4.0. This will give us hardware-accelerated OpenGL for everybody; and at that point I expect Linux to take off (or crash and burn with conviction:)) in the FX arena.
While it's true, as the previous AC posted, that much physical production has moved out of California, still by far the majority of visual effects (and post production in general) is done here.
There are a lot of good reasons that visual effects will remain here. The most important one is that the studios are here, and they want to keep control of the post production. We are located in Studio City, a few miles from the studios, and during post (when fx are done) we are always going over to Warner Bros. or Universal or Fox, and showing what we're working on -- or having the director come to our facility to work with us. This kind of one-on-one interaction is hard to acheive remotely.
The most successful company in FX by far, of course, is ILM, and they are located now in Northern California; quite a ways from the studios. They have advantages that most remote facilities will never have, though. Most important, they have such extraordinary artists that the studios are confident to let them work on their own; and trust that the work will be first-rate.
So -- I think that at least for the next five or ten years, California, and more specifically Los Angeles, is the place to be for FX. And hey, it's 75 degrees and sunny here today!
The greatest disappointment for visual effects in the New York area is the demise of The New York Institute ot Technology's Computer Graphics Lab; now dead 10 years or so.
In the late 70's and through much of the 80's, it was one of the premiere facilities in the world for computer graphics research, development, and production. At one time or another, we had Ed Catmull, Tom Duff, Alvy Ray Smith, (who went to Lucasfilm to found the computer division, and later became Pixar) Pat Hanrahan, Paul Heckbert, and Rebecca Allen (now leading professors) Lance WIlliams, me, and a whole bunch of other people now working in Visual FX, and Jim Clark (who needs no introduction).
We were located in the most serene environment you can imagine, an old mansion on acres of gardens, in the hills of Old Westbury, Long Island. We were all working our hearts out, but having a great time, exploring a field that didn't yet exist.
The Big Project that we had was something called The Works, a story written by Lance Williams. It was to be the first fully CG film. Sadly, while we knew quite a bit of computer graphics theory, we knew very little about the process and structure of moviemaking. When the story of the not-making of the works is written, it will be a tragedy of unrealized hope and expectations.
Anyway, the Lab finally foundered for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that once the research had proved itself, people left to found companies to actually make money in the field. A former employee went by the facility many years ago; and saw the entire library of 2 inch videotapes we had made in the trash bin...
No help now, but it's interesting to know that NY was once the center of the field.
E-mail spam will stop once it gets completely out of hand. What the DMA people don't realize is that as there are absolutely no restrictions on spam, it will grow without bound.
What the DMA folks really want, and what they have de facto right now, is a monopoly on email spam; or near enough to one not to matter. When everybody is getting 100 email spam messages a day, though, every single ISP will find a way to filter it out; and email spam will not work anymore.
We're probably a year away from this now; but we will inevitably get there. If the DMA was really smart, they'd lobby for tremendously tough spam regulation, because that's the only way to preserve the utility of spam.
What they don't realize is that junk snail-mail is self regulating, in that it's pretty darn expensive to send out junk snail-mail. The fact that e-mail spam is free is what, paradoxically, will kill it.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps somebody else with better search chops than I have will find it. In any case, the previous commenter posted a list of attendees of two conferences that have been held to define and promote this standard.
Basically, everybody was there. The big computer manufacturers, the movie studios, all other content providers.
This is not a small, isolated effort. It is not just a government-sales only program. This will be everywhere.
For you people who say that you'll never upgrade -- well, perhaps you won't. But there will be more and more of the media unavailable to you. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
It will be interesting to see what comes from this. After the DeCSS fiasco, the players will try to do a higher quality encryption. Sadly, all of the protocols that I can imagine to do this kind of player-encryption securely involve real-time transactions with secure servers -- which basically will give over your ability to view things to third parties, even after you've 'bought' the media. Obviously, it would be possible to monitor and cross-reference everybody's media habits as well -- completely destroying privacy.
thad
The US DMCA is, for the time being, the only law in the world that would prevent you from accessing your own property. Other countries will be under fierce pressure from the MPAA to harmonize with the US; as probably the most important thing that DeCSS protects (besides the people who license players) is the inability to play disks from all regions.
It will be hard for us in the US to beat back the DMCA, but I think that it would be substantially easier to prevent similar laws from being enacted.
Call it sovereignty, call it fair, call it a way for the little people to fight back -- call it anything that works in your country -- but keep similar laws off the books.
If that is done, and free players are available throughout the world, then the good guys will have won most of the battle. And, as the internet is without boundaries; then no doubt some of those players will make it back into the US.
thad
It is completely clear that this section applies to computer programs; and computer programs only. The law is designed so that a company like Microsoft can't prevent you from making programs that interoperate with Word and Excel datafiles. As laws go, this one is remarkably clear. From Judge Kaplan's comments; apparently the debate that lead to these clauses in the law make it even more clear -- that this exception applies to computer programs only.
Unless you hold that movies are software programs (as Adobe tried to do with Type1 fonts, for instance) then this exception does not apply to this case.
The onlyencouraging part of this, and it's only the faintest encouragement, is that the DMCA is a purely American law; and that LiViD development can go on outside the US.
(f) Reverse Engineering. - (1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. (2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. (3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section. (4) For purposes of this subsection, the term ''interoperability'' means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
It's clear that this judge believes that unauthorized DVD players are illegal under the DMCA, period.
thad
But it would pay to step back and think about what you are supporting when you are working on streaming video. To me, streaming video allows the same people who have run television to carry that tradition of poor programming to the 'net. Do we really want to do this?
Streaming video on Linux will take computers that might otherwise be used for creating new tools or solving real problems and turn them into TVs. Isn't that really a terrible waste? Should it be aided by your efforts?
thad
The sites will get pulled. Then the person whose site it is gets to ask for clarification, which must be supplied by the MPAA lawyers. Basically, proof of the copyright violation must be presented to the ISP. At that point, the ISP will either put the pages back up or keep them down permanently.
The DCMA is a draconian instrument; designed exactly for this kind of suppression of speech.
thad
Second -- let me suggest another argument for the defense -- I know it's a day late and a dollar short and this long after the posting it will never be read on slashdot...
The major argument of the DVD CCA is that the reverse engineering was improper, and all future reverse engineerings are then tainted by that improper reverse engineering.
Would a company that then enlisted someone to 'improperly' reverse engineer their trade secret then get an unassailable secret; secret for all time with no possibility of use by anyone, anywhere? Because clearly any future revelation would have been tainted by the original one.
This would be a protection far stronger than patent protection.
This is a one-step reductio ad absurdum argument that I would think would get the judges attention. He wouldn't want to the be person responsible for superseding patent protection; for basically destroying patents and other so-called intellectual property law.
thad
It talks to the X server to set up a window to draw 3D objects in, and then allows the hardware to draw directly into that window at the full hardware performance without further communication with the X server.
There are numerous issues to deal with -- and of course you have to deal with the X server when rendering contexts change; but in general you get good performance in multiple 3D windows. It is true that "this doesn't integrate well with 2D operations" if by that you mean "you can't do X windows drawing in a 3D window". I believe that once you tell X windows that it is a 3D window X washes its hands of responsibility for what goes on inside of it; so you have to use OpenGL to do your text rendering and other 2D things.
thad
To me, this makes the current press release even more mysterious -- but perhaps I should take the advice "never attribute to malice what could be accounted for by stupidity" and assume that the press release isn't the full story.
In any case, I thank chauser for his comment above and take my hat off to NVidia.
thad
Precision Insight is also working on drivers for a bunch of cards; with the cooperation of the card manufacturers. These should also be released soon.
With the release of XFree86 4.0, the DRI, and these drivers, everyone will be able to have workstation-class graphics on Linux. I believe that most of these drivers, and certainly XFree86 and the DRI are open source, too.
My question is; why is SGI persuing a different approach now? I am sure that their solution will be have spectacular performance (when it is finished...SGI has been notoriously late in many of its plans).
The press release says nothing about whether the announced systems will use XFree86, the DRI, and whether they will be open-source (although I'm certainly that the NVidia drivers will not be open). It's almost as if SGI was going to try to steal the thunder of the upcoming release of the free software; which, I believe, will be an earth-shattering explosion of interest in 3D.
thad
Copyright law in the US is almost totally defined by a few Supreme Court decisions; but occasionally the Congress does act. They have created the abortion called the DCMA (my humble characterization). It prohibits the circumvention of copyright protection devices if they have been put in place by the lawful copyright owner in order to control access to a copyrighted work. It also prohibts the manufacture or making available of technologies, products, and services that are intended to be used primarily as a means of defeating access controls and anti-copying devices. While the first prohibition (on actually doing the circumvention) doesn't go into effect until later this year; the prohibition on manufacture went into effect on October 28, 1998.
So, unlike almost every other interesting copyright lawsuit, this one actually has a law that can be pointed to; that actually specifies pretty closely what is the case here. The decss program is almost certainly a device to break encryption.
On the other hand, it would be hard for the MPAA to hold that the production of a Linux DVD player would be a device to break copyright. It would be interesting to see what the response would be to simple players. It's interesting enough that I might try and see myself.
thad
We were contacted quite quickly after that by Brigham Young University, because we said in the 'making of' film that we had used a particular technique published by a professor at BYU. He didn't mention in the paper, of course, that he'd patented the technique. Because we had been so candid and detailed in our 'making of' tape, we had no choice but admit infringment.
Since then, all 'making of' videos have been practically content free. And, frankly, people just want to see the pretty pictures anyway.
The offense in this case would have been remarkably hamstrung if the code had just appeared; with no description of how it happened. I know that the temptation is well-nigh irresistable; but the kernel that people really want is the code itself, not a description of the hacking process. I think that the people involved in this project are incredibly bright and insightful, and I marvel at their technique...but in 20:20 hindsight it would have been better not to know how it was done.
In the most similar case to date, source code for RC4 was published about 7 years ago. It was published anonymously, and to this day nobody knows who did it; or how they found it. This left RSA Inc (the keepers of the trade secret) with nothing to do at all to stop its spread. All they could do (and did do) was claim a trademark on the name RC4...so you couldn't call it that. RC4 remains a spectacularly useful, fast, unbreakable cipher -- and now anybody can use it.
So -- next time -- maybe a little discretion.
thad
What they are saying is that it *wasn't* reverse engineered, what happened was that Xing fucked up and didn't honor their contract
So, through no fault of the DVD copyright goons, they lost the trade secret. The trade secret was lost, not through hard work, but by fraud on the part of Xing.
That's their argument, anyway...it's full of holes, but it's the best they have.
thad
OK, they're small parts...true. And the reliability is astounding. But still...
thad
First, let me say that I agree with Roger Ebert that high-temporal-fidelity film is great. The comment that it looks '3D' is what everybody says; it's that different from normal 24 fps film. Douglass Trumbull, of early special effects (2001, Silent Running) fame has spent the last 15 years trying to get a technology called Showscan off the ground. Showscan used 60 fps film, and can be seen at a couple of Las Vegas 'ride films'.
Unfortunately for Trumbull, MaxiVision48, and other advocates of high-frame-rate film; people see high-frame-rate moving pictures every day; TV is 60 fps. Now, most people say think that TV is 30 frames per second, but each frame is made from two fields, each offset by 1/60th of a second, so the net result truly is 60 fields per second. The motion of TV is incredibly smooth compared to film. Anybody can tell this difference, although few people know what they are seeing. As an example, look at a daytime soap opera, compared to a prime-time show. One of the biggest differences that you see is the frame rate, as all prime-time shows are filmed on film, and then transfered to video. This distance from reality, filtering the time more coarsely, is what we see as 'film look', and is perceived as higher quality.
At my previous company, Pacific Data Images, I was a strong proponent of doing animation at 60 fps. We did mostly 'broadcast' animation, things like show titles. But when we started doing commercials, we found that we had to work at 24 or 30 fps; as that was what was expected. You could talk until you were blue in the face that 60 fps was 'better', and you couldn't sway anybody -- because it was perceived as worse by viewers.
I've seen the digital projections of both Star Wars and Toy Story. I went to Star Wars in a very dubious frame of mind, based on my previous experience that 'better' was seen as 'worse'. I thought that people would miss the flicker, and would even miss the grain and scratches. I left the theater completely convinced that this would succeed, though.
Digital projection mimics film in many ways; but it really does seem that just the annoying flaws are removed. Nobody really likes scratches or splices or even film-gate jitter. I did perceive the loss of flicker -- a film projection is completely black half the time; and the digital projection isn't. Not yet, anyway. This lack of flicker grabs your eyeballs in a different way; I'm not sure how to describe it...but it's a little more immediate; a little less separated from reality.
As for the other parts of Ebert's article -- he saw a prototype. The resolution will go up, soon to 1920x1024. The problem of transporting the date will go away with better technology (for instance, the transparent flourescent CD-size disks pointed at by Slashdot recently). The ability to 'color time' films is actually a huge win for digital projection; you will be able to do much more powerful color manipulation digitally than you ever could striking prints from analog film. The piracy issue can be avoided somewhat -- I agree with earlier posters that the decryption can happen in the light-modulator itself; so that you wouldn't have to ever have a decrypted signal.
Roger also claims that studio people don't care about technology. I completely disagree; we have a thriving technology-of-film community here in LA, and we have been discussing all of the issues that he has brought up here, in wretchedly thorough detail, for the last few years.
thad
We at Hammerhead produced the upcoming film Supernova, and there was a call in the script for a zero-g sex shot.
Well, Novespace, a French company, has a big A300 fitted as a zero-g research vehicle. Much like the KC-135 that NASA uses, but without all of those pesky governmental interferences. We called Novespace, and they were willing to let us rent the plane and film our zero-g sequences.
Before we got to the point of having to reveal exactly what these sequences would be, though, the deal was scotched. While the rental price was quite reasonable (less than 200K/day) the shooting would have to be done in France. Flying the minimal movie crew to France, putting them up for a week in a style to which we'd all like to become accustomed, and flying them back raised the price to something untenable. They couldn't fly the plane to the US because the FAA hadn't given them a US type certificate.
Now, it would be hard to have sex 30 seconds at a time; and of course it wouldn't be honest to goodness sex for our movie; but it would have been fun. It would be like nothing anybody had ever seen before.
thad
The astonishing Richard Feynman had at his disposal a hundred or so people with early mechanical calculators. He would arrange them in a room so that each could perform part of a computation, and hand the intermediate results off to other people.
This is clearly what we would call 'programming' today. He claims in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' that this was much more efficient than the alternative, which was to have each of the people, in parallel, performing many different steps of the calculation.
thad
Unfortunately, the FBI revoked his security clearance, suspecting that he was a Communist, in 1949. Later, during a trip back to see his ailing father in Shanghai, his bags were searched, and his papers were held to be secrets.
In the end, he was 'exchanged' for US Korean war POWs. He went on to develop Chinese ICBMs, weather satellites, and the Silkworm missle.
This is oddly reminiscent of the Germans getting a lot of their ideas for rockets during the WWII from Goddard's patents (which were ignored by the US).
thad
The US Army is looking to forge links to the entertainment industry, to do a better job at this. I worked with UCLA; in the attempt to entice them to build a center there. It turns out that they went to USC, instead.
It's amazing to see how many different fields are affected by PC games. Graphics hardware, CPU development, and home high-speed networks are driven primarily by games, and now the military is being driven by them too.
We live in interesting times.
thad
The objective is the same as in any war, the conquest of territory and resources. In this case, the territory is the servers of the world.
I agree with several posters in this and other threads, that the devastating problem is the integration of Microsoft's applications into the fabric of the web. This is what MS calls 'the digital central nervous system', and if they do achieve hegemony over it; they will have won the war.
It astonishes me that O'Reilly finds it merely 'ironic' that Judge Jackson didn't respond to the IIS-bundling/server-prohibition fiasco that is referred to in this article. As as citizen, I'm tempted to sue the Justice Department for malpractice! It's absolutely central to the Government's argument. I believe that, unfortunately, there is no lobby behind Apache (like there is behind Netscape, Compaq, AOL et al) so there was less interest.
You can almost be complacent with operating systems. You'll always be able to run Linux. It will be a wonderful standalone operating system. But, if the battle for servers is lost; you won't be part of the internet-space.
thad
My guess is that the idea is that the chip supports just-in-time compiling, that it more-or-less runs source code, rather than object code.
Now let's see if this "No Score +1 Bonus" really works for KFM :)
thad
Fortunately, the new PCs are blisteringly fast, and Linux is a wonderful development environment. My company has a slight advantage, when moving to Linux, in that we write all of our own tools; and it's been quite easy to port them to Linux for the most part. SGI has some wonderful hardware and software integration (particularly for multimedia) that I can't match yet; but I'm sure it's coming. In house tools are a slight advantage because Side Effects is porting Houdini to Linux; and I'm sure that Alias and Softimage will follow soon.
I'm desparately trying to promote the use of Linux in the visual effects community -- to the point of giving away free year-long licenses of our in-house tools to anybody who wants them. So far, though, the penetration of Linux in the FX field is so small that I've had relatively few takers.
The next big thing, of course, is the release of the DRI/XFree86 4.0. This will give us hardware-accelerated OpenGL for everybody; and at that point I expect Linux to take off (or crash and burn with conviction :)) in the FX arena.
thad
There are a lot of good reasons that visual effects will remain here. The most important one is that the studios are here, and they want to keep control of the post production. We are located in Studio City, a few miles from the studios, and during post (when fx are done) we are always going over to Warner Bros. or Universal or Fox, and showing what we're working on -- or having the director come to our facility to work with us. This kind of one-on-one interaction is hard to acheive remotely.
The most successful company in FX by far, of course, is ILM, and they are located now in Northern California; quite a ways from the studios. They have advantages that most remote facilities will never have, though. Most important, they have such extraordinary artists that the studios are confident to let them work on their own; and trust that the work will be first-rate.
So -- I think that at least for the next five or ten years, California, and more specifically Los Angeles, is the place to be for FX. And hey, it's 75 degrees and sunny here today!
thad
In the late 70's and through much of the 80's, it was one of the premiere facilities in the world for computer graphics research, development, and production. At one time or another, we had Ed Catmull, Tom Duff, Alvy Ray Smith, (who went to Lucasfilm to found the computer division, and later became Pixar) Pat Hanrahan, Paul Heckbert, and Rebecca Allen (now leading professors) Lance WIlliams, me, and a whole bunch of other people now working in Visual FX, and Jim Clark (who needs no introduction).
We were located in the most serene environment you can imagine, an old mansion on acres of gardens, in the hills of Old Westbury, Long Island. We were all working our hearts out, but having a great time, exploring a field that didn't yet exist.
The Big Project that we had was something called The Works, a story written by Lance Williams. It was to be the first fully CG film. Sadly, while we knew quite a bit of computer graphics theory, we knew very little about the process and structure of moviemaking. When the story of the not-making of the works is written, it will be a tragedy of unrealized hope and expectations.
Anyway, the Lab finally foundered for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that once the research had proved itself, people left to found companies to actually make money in the field. A former employee went by the facility many years ago; and saw the entire library of 2 inch videotapes we had made in the trash bin...
No help now, but it's interesting to know that NY was once the center of the field.
thad
What the DMA folks really want, and what they have de facto right now, is a monopoly on email spam; or near enough to one not to matter. When everybody is getting 100 email spam messages a day, though, every single ISP will find a way to filter it out; and email spam will not work anymore.
We're probably a year away from this now; but we will inevitably get there. If the DMA was really smart, they'd lobby for tremendously tough spam regulation, because that's the only way to preserve the utility of spam.
What they don't realize is that junk snail-mail is self regulating, in that it's pretty darn expensive to send out junk snail-mail. The fact that e-mail spam is free is what, paradoxically, will kill it.
thad